Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2007-11-26 · 1:55:58 · 16,702 words
ideologypsychoanalysisethicsreligion-theologyliberalism-political-correctnessrace-antisemitismhegel-dialecticseveryday-lifeecology-climatefascism-populismcinema-art-culture
Delivered at Boston University (hosted by the Institute for Human Sciences), this talk titled 'Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason' argues that the liberal-multicultural discourse of tolerance is a pseudo-concept that ideologically displaces genuine political struggle. Žižek draws on Lacan's concept of the neighbor-as-Thing, Freudian psychoanalysis, and examples ranging from Frankenstein and Hitchcock's Vertigo to the Stalinist Soviet Union and anti-semitism to show that the radical otherness of the neighbor cannot be neutralized by empathy or understanding. He proposes an ethics without morality, illustrated through Agota Kristof's novel, and closes by connecting collective belief, the big Other, and ecology as further domains where ideology functions through disavowal.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The liberal-multiculturalist operation whereby political and economic differences (inequality, exploitation) are recast as cultural differences, ways of life, that can only be tolerated rather than overcome.
as “tolerance as post-political ersatz”
Tolerance is the substitute offered by liberalism for genuinely political solutions (welfare state, socialist projects) once those solutions have retreated or failed.
as “the real event”
Following Lacan, the real dimension of a historical event resides not in what empirically occurred but in the enthusiastic response it generates in observers, illustrated by Kant on the French Revolution.
as “the neighbor as Thing”
Following Lacan's use of Freud's das Ding, Žižek holds that beneath the neighbor who resembles us lies an impenetrable abyss of radical otherness, a traumatic intruder whose proximity disturbs our way of enjoyment.
as “jouissance / way of enjoyment”
The neighbor disturbs 'our way of enjoyment', excess enjoyment attributed to the other that makes them threatening; the libidinal dimension underlying xenophobia and tolerance ideology.
Freud's term for the ultimate, unreachable object of desire in its intensity and impenetrability, repurposed by Lacan and Žižek to name the horrifying dimension of the neighbor.
as “new code of discretion”
Against the multicultural injunction to understand and empathize with the other, Žižek (following Sloterdijk) calls for a new social norm of mutual indifference, more alienation, not less.
The fourth category absent from Rumsfeld's epistemological grid: things we don't know that we know, the Freudian unconscious, the ideological prejudices that govern action without awareness.
as “fetishism”
Structure of 'I know very well but nevertheless' that sustains ideological illusion in both individual subjects and collectives (Cold War leftists, ecological inaction).
Habits are not simple rule-following but embody meta-rules, including prohibitions on announcing the prohibition itself, they constitute the invisible operative matrix of social life.
as “empty gestures”
Offers or apologies made to be refused; symbolic acts whose very superfluity is what makes them socially necessary, illustrating the paradoxical logic of habit and symbolic exchange.
as “the obscene underside”
The implicit, publicly disavowed set of rules and transgressions that are the real operative code of an institution (e.g., army homosexual innuendo, Catholic Church pedophilia), and whose announcement is itself prohibited.
Žižek's term for anti-semitism as the irreducible baseline form of ideology to which no compromise is possible: it is, metaphysically, always wrong.
Žižek's term for the paradox by which hardline Zionist attacks on 'self-hating Jews' reproduce the classical anti-semitic clichés of rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, and commercial obsession.
as “ethics without morality”
An ethics stripped of narcissistic self-satisfaction: one does what is needed because the other needs it, not because it feels good, exemplified by the amoral twins in Agota Kristof's The Notebook.
Žižek's label for the liberal-Fukuyamist trust that market mechanisms, once freed, will do all needed work, the true, unacknowledged fundamentalism of our era, which elides the extra-market violence markets require.
as “transposed belief”
The modern structure whereby subjects do not believe directly but need a 'chicken', a child, a naive figure, to believe for them, so that the appearance of belief is maintained in the big Other.
The structure 'I know very well, but nonetheless I believe/act otherwise', deployed to explain both Cold War leftist devotion to the USSR and contemporary inaction on ecological crisis.
The symbolic order, guarantee of meaning, or imputed collective witness before whose imagined gaze appearances must be maintained, as illustrated by Stalinist censorship and Hitchcock's Vertigo.
as “universality (truth is partisan)”
Against Rorty's post-truth pluralism, Žižek insists on universal truth but with the Leninist proviso that truth is partial and divides rather than unites.
Stories he reaches for 16
Bohr had a horseshoe above his door; when asked if he believed in it, he said 'of course not, but I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' This is the structure of modern displaced belief, cynical distance that nonetheless maintains the superstitious act.
“I don't believe in it...but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
The great Zen popularizer Suzuki justified Japanese war crimes: the Chinese enemy's body 'stumbles upon' the bullet (an abstract ballet), and military obedience replaces meditation as path to satori. Authentic spiritual experience coexists with moral monstrosity.
“Absolute obedience to military discipline it's the only practical way to achieve satori, the Zen Buddhist enlightenment.”
Žižek takes Rumsfeld's known-knowns/known-unknowns/unknown-unknowns framework and adds the missing fourth term, unknown knowns (things we don't know we know), identifying it as the Freudian unconscious and explaining the failure in Iraq.
“Things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious. And that's why you are in trouble in Iraq I claim.”
Žižek invites listeners to search King's speeches online and find that the word 'tolerance' is practically absent, King fought racism as emancipatory political struggle, not as a tolerance problem.
“For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance, but with what? Emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle.”
In Moscow 1937, the man who publicly names the prohibition against criticizing Stalin disappears faster than the man who criticized Stalin, because the prohibition on announcing the prohibition is the deeper operative rule.
“It wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”
The army was explicitly homophobic (discovered homosexuals beaten), yet daily life was saturated with homosexual innuendo, 'I'll smoke yours' as morning greeting. The explicit prohibition was sustained by pervasive implicit reference to what it prohibited.
“The explicit prohibition was sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a thwarted implicit homosexuality.”
The panning shot in Vertigo shows abstract cloth above the sink that viewers read as underwear under the Hays Code; like the Beria encyclopedia, the big Other is maintained for no actual person, viewers automatically complete the illusion.
“We viewers, we all automatically assume that we see underwear. There is a big Other here.”
Cardinal Richelieu's grey eminence was the most ruthless realpolitiker of the Thirty Years War, and simultaneously a practicing mystic whose letters equal Saint Teresa. Žižek argues the split is not Western but universal.
“How is it possible that the same person who was ruthless, lying, poisoning, brutality itself, at the same time demonstrates a breathtakingly deep spiritual strength?”
A psychiatric patient cured of believing he is a grain of seed returns immediately, terrified of a chicken. When told 'you know you're not a seed,' he replies 'I know, but does the chicken?' Žižek uses this to theorize the big Other as structural placeholder for collective appearance-maintenance.
“Okay, I know it, but does the chicken know it? That I'm no longer...”
After calling Butler an 'unnatural bitch' and apologizing, she said 'you don't owe me an apology', which only worked because he had already offered one. Taking back the apology after being told it wasn't needed would have been impolite: the superfluous gesture is precisely what is necessary.
“I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary, but in this very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary. That's a symbolic gesture at its purest.”
Marcel hears his grandmother's voice detached from her body on the telephone, it strikes him as the voice of a frail old woman, coloring all subsequent direct perception of her as strange. Isolating one partial object reveals truth that holistic empathy conceals.
“This is how voice as autonomous partial object can affect our entire perception of the body to which it belongs.”
The absurd narrative frame of hardcore pornography (plumber fixing 'another hole') functions as a structural screen preventing total identification with the neighbor's proximity; Gonzo porn's ironic direct-address camera performs the same censoring function.
“You see it all but the story should be openly ridiculous.”
Workers formally have 30 days' holiday but are expected to use only 15. Žižek asked why not just write 15, was told he didn't understand. The empty form of 30 days is what makes the actual 15 meaningful as symbolic exchange.
“Why this type of exchange?...that's the mystery of rules.”
An Apartheid torturer comes, confesses everything with a cynical smile, and walks free, having followed the rules perfectly. The procedure fails because it presupposes a minimum ethical dignity in the torturer that may be absent.
“He came there, confronted his black victims, and with a cynical smile said: 'Yes, don't you remember? I tortured you...Okay, haha, now I'm over.'”
The father in The Shining, a modest failed writer who gradually becomes a murderous beast, exemplifies the neighbor: the familiar face that conceals an evil Thing underneath.
“The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face.”
Inner-circle nomenclature knew in the early 1970s that Yugoslavia was in deep trouble but accumulated $15B+ in debt to keep Tito happy until his death, a real-world instantiation of the chicken-joke logic: we know, but the big Other must not.
“A whole country fell apart so that in order to protect the chicken's ignorance. It's Yugoslavia.”
Works invoked 16
Vertigo film
Hitchcock's film analyzed for the kitchen-sink/underwear scene, which illustrates the big Other maintaining appearances for no actual person under Hays Code censorship.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book referenced in the Q&A when discussing fundamentalism.
Psycho film
Mentioned playfully, Žižek refers to his time-keeper as 'Miss Bates from Psycho', indexing the neighbor-as-Thing horror scenario.
Žižek's forthcoming book at the time of the talk; briefly mentioned in the introduction.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's account of Japanese Zen community support for wartime imperialism; central source for the Suzuki example and the East/West parallel on inner authenticity.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's study of Père Joseph; used as source material for the meditation on the gap between authentic mysticism and political monstrosity.
The Shock Doctrine book
Naomi Klein's book on shock therapy / disaster capitalism; Žižek finds it touches an important point about extra-market violence despite reservations about its theoretical status.
Frankenstein book
Mary Shelley's novel used as the paradigm case of liberal subjectivization of the Other (letting the monster speak); deployed to illustrate the limits of empathy as political strategy.
Romance film
Catherine Breillat's film cited as an attempt to combine engaged melodrama with hardcore pornography, representing the failed move that prompted 'Gonzo' as a censoring counter-reaction.
Proust's Recherche provides the telephone/grandmother scene used to argue that partial-object isolation reveals deeper truth than holistic empathetic understanding.
What is Enlightenment? essay
Kant's essay invoked in the Rorty discussion for its inversion of public/private reason: Kant makes state work 'private' and free rational discourse 'public', the opposite of Rorty's usage.
Kant's late text on Revolutionary enthusiasm; key source for the thesis that the real event resides in the observers' response, not the empirical occurrence.
Tim Morton's book, whose title Žižek calls 'wonderful'; its rejection of the homeostatic paradigm in ecology aligns with Žižek's anti-naturalist ecological politics.
Žižek's edited volume mentioned in the introduction by Mehlman as exemplifying the 'Žižek effect.'
The Notebook book
Agota Kristof's trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie) is Žižek's key literary model for 'ethics without morality', non-narcissistic action done because it is needed.
The Shining (novel) book
Stephen King's novel cited to illustrate the neighbor as evil Thing lurking beneath the familiar face.
People invoked 43
Mentioned as appearing on the Zionist masada2000.org list of 'self-hating Jews', evidence for Žižek's argument about Zionist anti-semitism.
Marcel Proust positive
The Recherche's grandmother-on-the-telephone scene is used to illustrate how isolating a partial feature (voice) reveals truth more deeply than holistic empathetic understanding.
Mary Shelley positive
Frankenstein is used to exemplify the liberal move of subjectivizing the other (the monster as victim); Žižek uses it critically but the literary gesture is presented as paradigmatic liberal good will.
Historical example: the grey eminence of Richelieu who combined extreme political brutality with authentic mystical practice, illustrating the gap between inner authenticity and ethical monstrosity.
Udi Aloni positive
Described as a friend and filmmaker; his experience of being attacked by hardline Zionists in Israel prompted Žižek's analysis of Zionist anti-semitism.
Host at Boston University; addressed warmly and playfully cast as Žižek's super-ego regulating his time.
Ágota Kristóf positive
Hungarian emigre novelist; her trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie) is Žižek's key literary example for 'ethics without morality', he calls it 'one of the defining novels for me.'
Paired with Heidegger in Rorty's framing as exemplars of private philosophical fantasy; not directly analyzed by Žižek.
His arrest in 1953 and the subsequent Soviet Encyclopedia erasure is used to illustrate appearances maintained for the big Other alone.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout; Žižek deploys his concepts of das Ding, the big Other, the Real, and the neighbor at every turn.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited as a radical Darwinian whose work shows there is no inherent natural balance, supporting Žižek's anti-homeostatic ecology.
Brian Victoria positive
His book Zen at War is the primary source for the analysis of Japanese Zen and wartime militarism; cited approvingly as a scholarly resource.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called Žižek's 'favorite theologist'; his formulation that God in Job becomes 'a blasphemer and an atheist' is used to frame the Book of Job as the first ideology critique.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Pseudo-Deleuzian celebration of nomadic existence is criticized for blurring the crucial distinction between privileged cosmopolitan travel and refugee displacement.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
His known/unknown epistemology is taken seriously as an occasion for philosophical analysis; Žižek credits the schema while adding the missing fourth term (unknown knowns) to expose its ideological blindspot.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' thesis is the target of the market fundamentalism critique; but Žižek notes that even his leftist friends are de facto Fukuyamaists.
Richard Rorty negative
Appreciated as a 'good person' and authentic academic, but Žižek totally disagrees with his postmodernist pluralism (no universal truth, just competing stories) and his public/private reason distinction, contrasted with Kant's.
Judith Butler negative
Described as a 'good theoretical enemy, personal friend'; the anecdote about the apology illustrates empty gestures and symbolic exchange, and she appears on the masada2000.org list of 'self-hating Jews.'
Naomi Klein positive
Her Shock Doctrine is said to touch an important point about how market mechanisms require extra-market violence; described as not a great theoretician but touching something important.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak positive
Her joke about a rich woman dieting being equated to a starving third-world woman is cited with approval to illustrate the falsity of pseudo-Deleuzian nomadism.
The great Black singer's steadfast defense of the Soviet Union is cited as an example of tragic sublime subjective sincerity sustained by fetishist disavowal.
Cited as an example of someone who maintained a morally pure self-image (sincere prison letters) while actually being a spy, illustrating the inauthenticity of inner self-experience.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited alongside Agamben as a thinker focused on Saint Paul as model for a new non-traditional form of community, aligned with Žižek's own interest in universality.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Grouped with Badiou as thinkers working on Saint Paul as political model for non-traditional collective form.
Terry Eagleton positive
Called a friend; cited for developing the logic of Christ as carnival king, supporting Žižek's reading of Christianity as self-blasphemous and non-narcissistic.
Wolf Biermann positive
German dissident poet cited for his poem inverting the religious question ('is there life before death?'), used to endorse authentic ethical engagement.
Ruhollah Khomeini positive
His claim that the Revolution killed no one, because those killed 'were not men but criminal dogs', is the paradigm case of how every ethical universalism generates a violent constitutive exclusion.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
His proposition 'more communication means at first above all more conflict' and his call for a 'new code of discretion' are endorsed, despite personal political disagreement with him.
D. T. Suzuki positive
His Zen writings justifying Japanese militarism are the Eastern counterpart to Père Joseph; Žižek does not deny his authentic spirituality but exposes the gap between that and his moral complicity.
Mentioned in the Rorty discussion as having 'private fantasies' Rorty wishes to keep out of politics; not directly analyzed by Žižek.
Timothy Morton positive
His book Ecology Without Nature is praised; its title is called 'wonderful' and its argument, that the homeostatic paradigm of ecology is itself the problem, is endorsed.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Žižek criticizes the Millerian Lacanian position that psychoanalytic insight into the non-existence of the big Other is merely momentary, after which one must return to necessary illusion.
Hannah Arendt positive
Her 'banality of evil' thesis, that perpetrators of great evil are not demonic but ordinary and even kind, is cited to support the claim about the gap between inner life and ethical monstrosity.
Jeffrey Mehlman positive
Introduces Žižek and is thanked; Žižek especially endorses Mehlman's point about 'dogmatics in the theological sense.'
Niels Bohr positive
The story of his horseshoe above the door is used as the paradigmatic formulation of modern displaced belief: 'it works even if you don't believe in it.'
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo is cited for the underwear/kitchen-sink scene as illustration of the big Other maintaining appearances for no real person under Hays Code censorship.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Briefly mentioned in the Rorty discussion as exemplifying the opposite error to Derrida/Heidegger: objective public rules without private depth.
Ralf Dahrendorf negative
His 'valley of tears' argument, that democracy requires prior authoritarianism (Pinochet, South Korea), is cited and then questioned via the China example.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited as the great exemplar of anti-racist struggle whose near-total avoidance of the word 'tolerance' proves that emancipatory politics, not multiculturalist empathy, is the correct response to racism.
Aldous Huxley positive
His book Grey Eminence on Père Joseph is admired for identifying the problem (mystic and realpolitiker in one person); but his solution, turn to Eastern spirituality, is rejected because the same split occurs there.
His impending death is the occasion for Yugoslavia's leadership to accumulate ruinous debt to maintain appearances, the archetypal chicken-joke scenario.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked for the concepts of the unconscious, interpretation en détail vs en masse, and the problematic of the neighbor; the Freudian unconscious is the 'unknown known' Rumsfeld omitted.
Immanuel Kant positive
Kant's account of Revolutionary enthusiasm in Conflict of Faculties is used to articulate how the real event resides in appearance/observation; his public/private reason distinction is opposed to Rorty's inversion of it.
What it argues
critique of tolerance as ideological pseudo-conceptthe neighbor as traumatic, impenetrable Thinginner authenticity versus ethical monstrositythe big Other and collective belief through disavowalhabits, implicit rules, and the obscene underside of social orderethics without morality / non-narcissistic ethicsculturalization of politics and the retreat of direct political solutions
Dialectical moves 13
“Tolerance means its exact opposite: I am intolerant towards your over-proximity to me.”
The word 'tolerance' in liberal usage actually designates the demand to keep distance, it is the ideological inversion of what it names.
“The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is fundamentally a lie—that is not the point of truth.”
Inner authenticity, far from being the ground of ethical truth, is the site of ideological self-mystification.
“The more universal our ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion.”
Universalist inclusion (Christian 'all men are brothers') necessarily produces a violent exclusion of those who refuse inclusion, universality is constitutively particular.
“We don't need to understand each other better; we need more alienation.”
The multicultural injunction to understand the neighbor intensifies guilt and conflict; productive coexistence requires the right to mutual indifference.
“For truly radical crimes: I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you.”
The standard liberal formula (forgive but remember) is reversed: when trauma is too extreme, the psychologically sane position is to forget the content but refuse forgiveness.
“The most interesting category is not the unknown unknowns but the unknown knowns—things we don't know that we know.”
Rumsfeld's fourth omitted term names the Freudian unconscious: the ideological prejudices that operate unknown to the agent, explaining political failures.
“The real event of the French Revolution did not reside in what went on in Paris but in the enthusiastic response of observers.”
Following Kant, empirical violence belongs to temporal history; the sublime image that arouses enthusiasm belongs to eternity, the Real is on the side of the spectator.
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”
The second-order prohibition, the prohibition of the prohibition, is the deeper operative level of Stalinist (and all institutional) power.
“The chicken was the big Other: every empirical person knew it, but they still maintained appearances for an audience that existed only as symbolic fiction.”
Appearances are sustained not for any real person but for the virtual gaze of the big Other, which shows that culture is itself this maintenance of fiction for a non-existent witness.
“Anti-Darwinian fundamentalists are not a threat to science; they are a threat to authentic religious belief.”
By treating religious claims as positive empirical statements, fundamentalists destroy the existential wager that constitutes genuine faith, they are the enemy of religion, not of science.
“Christianity is already its own blasphemy.”
The figure of Christ as mocked king makes blasphemy internal to Christianity; there is no external position from which to blaspheme it that it hasn't already occupied.
“Truth is not what unites us; truth is division.”
Against Rorty and liberal consensus, universal truth is necessarily partisan, it cuts and divides rather than gathering everyone into agreement.
“I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary, but in this very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary.”
The logic of the empty gesture: symbolic exchange requires the offer and refusal, its very superfluity is what makes it work as social glue.
Claims 23
asserts
The ideological perception of racism as a problem of tolerance rather than political inequality or economic exploitation mystifies the real problem and blocks genuine emancipatory struggle.tolerance ideology / culturalization of politics
asserts
Liberal tolerance, in practice, means intolerance of the other's over-proximity—'don't come too close'—so the word tolerance factually means its exact opposite.tolerance / ideology
asserts
The story we tell ourselves about ourselves, our inner authentic self-experience, is fundamentally a lie and not the point of truth—psychoanalysis teaches us to abandon this premise.inner authenticity / self-experience
asserts
Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity—the gap between intimate life-experience and the horror of one's acts can be immense (Hitler, Père Joseph, Suzuki).inner authenticity / ethics
rejects
The liberal motto 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' is false: humanizing the other by entering their inner experience does not dissolve the threat they pose.liberal empathy / subjectivization of the other
asserts
Every universal ethics relies on a constitutive exclusion—the more universal the ethical claim, the more brutal the underlying exclusion of those who refuse inclusion.ethical universality / exclusion
asserts
The radical lesson of Lacan's ethics is that the neighbor, beneath their familiar surface, is a traumatic Thing—an abyss of radical otherness that resists empathy and domestication.the neighbor / das Ding / Lacanian ethics
asserts
We do not need more understanding of each other; we need more alienation, a new code of discretion, and the right to simply ignore each other.multicultural injunction to understand the Other
rejects
The Truth and Reconciliation model ('we forgive but will not forget') is limited and sometimes false; for truly radical crimes, the more honest formula is 'we can forget but will never forgive.'South African Truth and Reconciliation / forgiveness
asserts
Rumsfeld's epistemological grid of known/unknown knowns/unknowns omits the crucial fourth term—unknown knowns (the Freudian unconscious)—which explains the failure of US Iraq policy.Rumsfeld's epistemology / Iraq War / ideology
asserts
Habits encode not only rules but also the prohibition on publicly announcing certain rules—the true operative level of social control is this doubly disavowed structure.habits / implicit social rules / big Other
reframes
What we call fundamentalism should be distinguished into authentic fundamentalism (non-envious, peaceful, as with Amish or Tibetan Buddhists) and fake fundamentalism (secretly fascinated by the sinful other).religious fundamentalism
asserts
The true fundamentalism of our era is liberal market fundamentalism—the utopian belief that clearing space for market mechanisms will solve problems—not religious extremism.market fundamentalism / Fukuyamism
asserts
China's capitalism-without-democracy refutes the liberal hope that capitalism automatically generates democracy—capitalism is entering a phase where formal democracy is no longer needed.capitalism and democracy / Asian values capitalism
asserts
Modern belief operates through a displaced structure: we don't believe directly but need a 'chicken' (a child, a naive Other) to believe for us—this is where ideology resides today.belief / big Other / ideology
asserts
The Book of Job is the first critique of ideology: God's answer validates Job's claim that suffering has no deeper meaning, prefiguring the death of the meaning-guaranteeing God on the Cross.Book of Job / theology / ideology critique
asserts
The death of Christ marks the death of the God who guarantees meaning; what remains is the Holy Spirit as community of believers—a radically materialist theological message.Christian theology / the big Other / materialism
asserts
Ecology is one of the biggest fields of ideological investment today; the paradigm of a natural homeostasis disturbed by human hubris must be abandoned—nature itself is crazy and without inherent balance.ecology / ideology / nature
asserts
Inaction on ecological crisis is a perfect example of fetishist disavowal: we know very well, but our embeddedness in nature prevents us from truly accepting the threat.ecological inaction / fetishist disavowal
rejects
Žižek rejects Rorty's post-truth pluralism (no positive universal values, just competing stories) in favor of a commitment to universal truth that is nonetheless partial and divisive.Rorty's ethics / postmodernism / universality
asserts
Hardcore pornography's stupid narrative frame is a structural necessity—it blocks over-identification with the neighbor's proximity; Gonzo porn's ironic direct-address camera performs the same censoring function.pornography / the neighbor / protective screen
asserts
Zionist attacks on self-hating Jews reproduce the exact clichés of Western anti-semitism (rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, mercenary interests), constituting a form of Zionist anti-semitism.Zionism / anti-semitism / the neighbor
asserts
So-called fundamentalists who treat religious statements as positive empirical knowledge claims are a threat not to science but to authentic religious belief, which is always an existential wager, not a factual assertion.religious fundamentalism / authentic belief
Quotes 23
“For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance, but with what? Emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of tolerance ideology
“Tolerance means: don't harass me. Don't harass me means: don't come too close to me...tolerance means I am intolerant towards your over-proximity to me.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance as its own opposite
“Ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem, blurs a crucial line of separation.”Slavoj Žižek · definition of ideology
“The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves...is fundamentally a lie. That's not the point of truth.”Slavoj Žižek · inner authenticity as ideological mystification
“Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity.”Slavoj Žižek · the gap between inner life and ethical action
“The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face.”Slavoj Žižek · the neighbor as Thing
“More communication means at first above all more conflict.”Slavoj Žižek · Sloterdijk on alienation vs. communication
“I don't want to understand everybody. I don't care about majority of the people...We need more alienation. We need to learn to ignore each other.”Slavoj Žižek · against multicultural injunction to understand
“I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you.”Slavoj Žižek · alternative to the forgive-but-remember formula
“The most interesting category...is the unknown knowns. Not things that we know that we don't know, but things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns / Freudian unconscious
“It wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”Slavoj Žižek · double prohibition / obscene underside of power
“God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · Book of Job / God's answer as ideology critique
“The meaning of the death of Christ for me is: there is no big Other, I throw myself into the universe, it's up to you.”Slavoj Žižek · death of Christ as death of the big Other
“A whole country fell apart so that in order to protect the chicken's ignorance. It's Yugoslavia.”Slavoj Žižek · big Other / transposed belief / Yugoslavia
“Whom were they trying to deceive?...Not for any empirical person. The chicken was the big Other.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist appearance-maintenance / the big Other
“'We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all.'”Slavoj Žižek · ethics without morality / non-narcissistic ethics
“An ethical monster without empathy, doing simply the duty to help others with blind spontaneity but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction.”Slavoj Žižek · ideal of ethics without morality
“The true question is not: is there life after death, but is there life before death?”Slavoj Žižek · authentic life / Wolf Biermann
“I don't believe in it...but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · structure of modern displaced belief
“Truth is not what unites us, truth is division.”Slavoj Žižek · Leninist / partisan truth against Rorty
“Christianity is already its own blasphemy.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity's self-subverting, non-narcissistic logic
“Anti-semitism is for me the zero-level ideology. You don't make compromises there. To put it quite metaphysically: it's always bad.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-semitism as zero-level ideology
“I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary, but in this very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary. That's a symbolic gesture at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · the logic of empty gestures / symbolic exchange
Transcript 25 turns
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Good evening. Good evening and welcome everybody. My name is Irena Grudzińska-Gross and I welcome you on behalf of the Institute for Human Sciences at the Boston University. We are, as many of you who come to our events know, we are very much interested among other things in presenting European issues and European thinkers, and Slavoj Žižek is definitely a European thinker but also a global thinker or international thinker or kind of a flying public intellectual. So, we are very, very happy and very lucky to have him this evening with us. I am not going to introduce him. Professor Jeffrey Mehlman is going to introduce him. Professor Jeffrey Mehlman, as also many of you know, is university professor and professor of French at Boston University. His list of publications is very long. Among his many interests, he is also interested in philosophy and in Lacan, and many of his interests are shared with Slavoj Žižek. We are going to have this introduction, then Slavoj Žižek is going to talk, after that we will have a discussion and I will ask everybody to queue here—we have a microphone—and to ask questions. And after that discussion, so that the conversation is not interrupted and it continues, we are going to have a very warm and wonderful reception outside the doors here to which everybody is very cordially invited. So, let's start and Professor Mehlman.
Good evening. Good evening and welcome everybody. My name is Irena Grudzińska-Gross and I welcome you on behalf of the Institute for Human Sciences at the Boston University. We are, as many of you who come to our events know, we are very much interested among other things in presenting European issues and European thinkers, and Slavoj Žižek is definitely a European thinker but also a global thinker or international thinker or kind of a flying public intellectual. So, we are very, very happy and very lucky to have him this evening with us. I am not going to introduce him. Professor Jeffrey Mehlman is going to introduce him. Professor Jeffrey Mehlman, as also many of you know, is university professor and professor of French at Boston University. His list of publications is very long. Among his many interests, he is also interested in philosophy and in Lacan, and many of his interests are shared with Slavoj Žižek. We are going to have this introduction, then Slavoj Žižek is going to talk, after that we will have a discussion and I will ask everybody to queue here—we have a microphone—and to ask questions. And after that discussion, so that the conversation is not interrupted and it continues, we are going to have a very warm and wonderful reception outside the doors here to which everybody is very cordially invited. So, let's start and Professor Mehlman.
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Well, it's a great pleasure for me to welcome our speaker Slavoj Žižek back to Boston this evening. Where to begin? Well, when in the year the editors of a volume entitled in French *Les écrits techniques de Freud* by the arcane French psychoanalyst Lacan, when they chose as their cover illustration a photo of a giant elephant poised to rampage through the Savannah, the message to many of us was clear: when it comes to the unconscious, be prepared for absolutely anything. Or perhaps that implausibility or preposterousness themselves are the touchstones of the unconscious. Now, be that as it may, I am not sure that any of us were prepared for anything so implausible, so engagingly traumatic as the revelation some fifteen years later that the future of Lacanian thought would lie with a Slovenian, Slovenian enough to have run for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia and prepared to argue convincingly that the royal road to the Lacanian interpretation of the unconscious was via American popular culture. Just savor the title of his volume, *Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)* and you'll have a sense of the irresistibility of the Žižek effect. Slavoj Žižek is the world's premier virtuoso of Lacanian dogmatics. Lest that term dogmatics throw you, I would suggest that you think of it as an invitation to bracket the truth claims of his premises in all of their systematicity until you are in a position to judge the rollicking richness of the results they can deliver. With Žižek, psychoanalysis so often decried for failing to meet the test of falsifiability, psychoanalysis frequently ends up yielding results which in their paradoxical charge might be described as better than true. He is the thinker who has dealt most ingeniously with the joker in the Lacanian pack, the category of the real. He's also the thinker who has delivered us a super-ego drenched in its obscenely libidinal sources as it originally was in Freud's *The Rat Man*, that is the super-ego not as venerable patriarch if you will, but as dirty old man replete with the stained underwear of Hermann Kafka—that's Franz's dad. He has also made use of Lacan, as he has somewhere written, as a privileged intellectual tool to re-actualize German Idealism. So Lacan, whose inspiration was in part the legendary seminar on Hegel of Kojève in the 1930s, seems headed via Žižek through a series of altogether unexpected turns back to Hegel and company. Well, I could go on listing the tens of provocatively titled volumes he has written. The next is to be, I believe, called *In Defense of Lost Causes*. I could go on mentioning his current position as director of
Well, it's a great pleasure for me to welcome our speaker Slavoj Žižek back to Boston this evening. Where to begin? Well, when in the year the editors of a volume entitled in French *Les écrits techniques de Freud* by the arcane French psychoanalyst Lacan, when they chose as their cover illustration a photo of a giant elephant poised to rampage through the Savannah, the message to many of us was clear: when it comes to the unconscious, be prepared for absolutely anything. Or perhaps that implausibility or preposterousness themselves are the touchstones of the unconscious. Now, be that as it may, I am not sure that any of us were prepared for anything so implausible, so engagingly traumatic as the revelation some fifteen years later that the future of Lacanian thought would lie with a Slovenian, Slovenian enough to have run for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia and prepared to argue convincingly that the royal road to the Lacanian interpretation of the unconscious was via American popular culture. Just savor the title of his volume, *Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)* and you'll have a sense of the irresistibility of the Žižek effect. Slavoj Žižek is the world's premier virtuoso of Lacanian dogmatics. Lest that term dogmatics throw you, I would suggest that you think of it as an invitation to bracket the truth claims of his premises in all of their systematicity until you are in a position to judge the rollicking richness of the results they can deliver. With Žižek, psychoanalysis so often decried for failing to meet the test of falsifiability, psychoanalysis frequently ends up yielding results which in their paradoxical charge might be described as better than true. He is the thinker who has dealt most ingeniously with the joker in the Lacanian pack, the category of the real. He's also the thinker who has delivered us a super-ego drenched in its obscenely libidinal sources as it originally was in Freud's *The Rat Man*, that is the super-ego not as venerable patriarch if you will, but as dirty old man replete with the stained underwear of Hermann Kafka—that's Franz's dad. He has also made use of Lacan, as he has somewhere written, as a privileged intellectual tool to re-actualize German Idealism. So Lacan, whose inspiration was in part the legendary seminar on Hegel of Kojève in the 1930s, seems headed via Žižek through a series of altogether unexpected turns back to Hegel and company. Well, I could go on listing the tens of provocatively titled volumes he has written. The next is to be, I believe, called *In Defense of Lost Causes*. I could go on mentioning his current position as director of
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the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. I could go on letting you know of the recently founded online International Journal of Žižek Studies or of the documentary film *Žižek!*, that's right, with an exclamation mark. I leave you instead with one piquant detail: my sources tell me that there is currently a chic nightclub in a tony section of Buenos Aires named, you guessed it, Žižek. Please welcome our speaker whose subject this evening is "Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason." Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for Irena to inviting me, for Jeffrey for this wonderful introduction. I especially agree, without any irony, with that very precise point about dogmatics. I think that, and especially I would even go a step further and say dogmatics in the theological sense in the word. Why, maybe it will become clear from what I will be saying. So, let me go to the point and nonetheless, I hope you will not be too disappointed because there will it will not be only jokes in what I will be saying. Okay. Let me begin in a very traditional way with the big question: what can philosophy do today? What can it tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, racism, religious conflicts and so on? I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology. When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real problem, the ideological designation or perception introduces its inevitable mystification. So again, when people ask me ecology or war, what can we do? Well, I don't know. What I can do as a philosopher is just to analyze how we perceive the problem. Let me take the example of tolerance. I'm opposed to this notion. I think it's a pseudo-notion. Now, of course, the immediate reaction of well-meaning liberals is: but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners? How can you be for anti-feminism, for homophobia and so on and so on? But this is the catch. Of course I'm not for intolerance towards foreigners, for anti-feminism and so on. What I am against is the perception which is today
the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. I could go on letting you know of the recently founded online International Journal of Žižek Studies or of the documentary film *Žižek!*, that's right, with an exclamation mark. I leave you instead with one piquant detail: my sources tell me that there is currently a chic nightclub in a tony section of Buenos Aires named, you guessed it, Žižek. Please welcome our speaker whose subject this evening is "Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason." Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for Irena to inviting me, for Jeffrey for this wonderful introduction. I especially agree, without any irony, with that very precise point about dogmatics. I think that, and especially I would even go a step further and say dogmatics in the theological sense in the word. Why, maybe it will become clear from what I will be saying. So, let me go to the point and nonetheless, I hope you will not be too disappointed because there will it will not be only jokes in what I will be saying. Okay. Let me begin in a very traditional way with the big question: what can philosophy do today? What can it tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, racism, religious conflicts and so on? I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology. When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real problem, the ideological designation or perception introduces its inevitable mystification. So again, when people ask me ecology or war, what can we do? Well, I don't know. What I can do as a philosopher is just to analyze how we perceive the problem. Let me take the example of tolerance. I'm opposed to this notion. I think it's a pseudo-notion. Now, of course, the immediate reaction of well-meaning liberals is: but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners? How can you be for anti-feminism, for homophobia and so on and so on? But this is the catch. Of course I'm not for intolerance towards foreigners, for anti-feminism and so on. What I am against is the perception which is today
Slavoj Žižek
more or less automatic of racism as a problem of tolerance. Make a simple experiment, I did make it. Go and check on the web Martin Luther King's speeches. If there is a great figure of anti-racist fight, of course it's Martin Luther King. You will see that the word tolerance is practically absent there. For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance, but with what? Emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle. So, why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance rather than problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice and so on? You see my point? That's for me the problem. Racism is a problem, but to perceive racism as problem of tolerance, it's not automatic. In this innocent shift of perspective there is ideology. Why? I claim the reason is the liberal multiculturalist basic ideological operation, the let's call it culturalization of politics. Political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation are naturalized, neutralized into cultural differences. That is, into different ways of life which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, so they can only be tolerated. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as welfare state or various socialist projects. Tolerance is their post-political ersatz. And I think the same goes for harassment, another heavily connoted ideological term. Again, of course, I am very much against brutal harassments like rape, bigotry and so on and so on. The problem is that in today's ideological space real harassments, their perception, is irreducibly intertwined with the narcissistic notion of an individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his or her private space. So I claim that the way we in the so-called highly developed Western countries, if you look closely how we effectively use the word tolerance, I claim it de facto as a rule means its exact opposite. Tolerance means: don't harass me. Don't harass me means: don't come too close to me. You know, like, are you washed, deodorants, don't smoke. And in other words, tolerance means I am intolerant towards your over-proximity to me. Tolerance means: don't come too close, stay stay at the proper distance. So ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem, blurs a crucial line of separation. Okay, another of such classical ideological notions today I think is this celebration pseudo-Deleuzian of nomadic existence and so on and so on. Why? Because instead of enabling us to draw the crucial distinction, it blurs it. It brings together under the same cover, nomadic existence, two totally different phenomena. One is the nomadic existence of, well, to be frank somebody like me, an probably upper-middle class intellectual travelling nicely, sometimes with upgrades and so on, even business class. But then you know, to put me together with, let's say to be a little bit pathetic, a third-world person, refugee from a war-torn or starved country or starved population, and claim we are both nomadic. It's a little bit like to quote Gayatri Spivak to take a rich fat lady who is dieting and a starving third-world woman and say they are basically doing the same thing, eating less than. This ideology of tolerance can be reduced to the motto: love your neighbor as yourself. However, as we learned from Freud, neighbor is not simply another person with a rich inner life filled with stories she or he is telling himself herself. This is the counter-revolution attacks or what? Enemy never... You see? I told... Okay. This is what in Lacan we call intervention of the real and so on. Okay, let's go on. It's so usually when we say neighbor, multiculturalist ideology tells us: yes, we should know the other from within, we should not objectivize the other. The premise of liberal tolerance is thus that such a person whom we know from within cannot ultimately be an enemy. Or to quote a well-known motto, which I totally oppose incidentally, and but it sounds so sublime, so deep: "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." Okay, there is a nice literary example known to all of us. Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*. It is true, Mary Shelley does something that a conservative would never have done. In the central part of her novel she allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective. Her choice expresses the liberal attitude towards the freedom of speech at its most radical. Everyone's point of view should be heard. In *Frankenstein*, the monster is not a thing, a horrible object no one dares to confront. He is fully subjectivized. Mary Shelley moves inside his mind and asks: what is it like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted by society? The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself as a deeply hurt, desperate individual yearning for company and love. Now along these lines, practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, the authorities in Iceland, Ísland, Reykjavík capital, but also now I heard in some other European countries, maybe even here in the United States, I don't know about it, they are recently imposing a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the other. In order to fight the growing xenophobia, the result of the greater and greater number of immigrant workers in Western Europe as well as sexual intolerance, they are organizing what is called living libraries. Members of ethnic or sexual minorities, gays, immigrant East Europeans or blacks are paid to visit an Iceland or British or German family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams and so on. In this way, the exotic stranger who was perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of his or her own. So this sounds very nice. What's the problem? The problem is let's take this noble motto, "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard," and do something very vulgar in the sense of British empiricism. Let's just replace the general name with a concrete example. Would you also say: Hitler was our enemy because we did not really try to hear his story? And the problem is deeper here than it may appear. Namely, the automatic presupposition which we should abandon is that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, our inner authentic self-experience, is the point of truth. As if if you humanize the other, if you get him at his or her or their innermost, then you can say this is what they truly are. But I think that this precisely, if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, is that this precisely is what we should radically abandon. If from what we know about Hitler, if we take again the worst example, one of the worst, Hitler, I think that even for him probably the same as Hannah Arendt claimed for Eichmann would have held. Probably he was, as we know from the memoirs of his secretary who died only two years ago or when, he was he could have been quite kind, compassionate, he liked to serve cakes to small children and so on, gentle vegetarian and so on. And I am even quite sure that he was absolutely sincere in this. This is the important lesson of Hannah Arendt, that people who cause great evil we should not elevate them into sublime Byronesque demoniac figures of evil. The gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their acts is always immense. So again, the experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie. That's not the point of truth. So let me give you two extreme examples which I already developed in some of my earlier books. One Western, one Eastern. The West: Père Joseph. You maybe know who he was, the grey eminence of Cardinal Richelieu. And you should maybe read the book Aldous Huxley, *Grey Eminence* about Père Joseph. What fascinated Aldous Huxley so much about Père Joseph? It's that he was, well, the most brutal realpolitiker, real politician that you can imagine, organizing kidnappings, torture, dark plotting. He is basically the guy, if we simplify history, who is responsible for Hitler, you know, in one sense. In the Years War, in Europe, he was the one who made a pact between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against okay, Catholic Austria, in order to weaken Germany, to prevent the reunification of Germany. He succeeded. The result was the German delay, deferral of reunification which was the structural condition for Hitler. Okay, the worst guy you can imagine. But there is something quite fascinating. After he did this dirty work every evening, metaphorically, almost every evening, he was in permanent conversation, exchange of letters with some French convent with nuns, and the exchange of letter demonstrates that he was a practicing mystic, this same Père Joseph, and you cannot escape the conclusion: his mystical meditations are how should I put it simply, top of the top, absolutely at the level of Saint Teresa of whatever you want. And this is what fascinated Huxley. How is it possible that the same person who was ruthless, lying, poisoning, brutality itself, at the same time demonstrates a breathtakingly deep spiritual strength? Huxley's solution was a very simple one: was that there must be something in Western Christianity which enables this, opens up the possibility of this deviation. He thinks it's too much fixation on pain, fascination with the figure of Christ on the cross. So Huxley's solution: let's turn to Eastern spirituality. But there, I think the story is the same. I read a book which I often quote, Brian Victoria, he himself is a Zen Buddhist, *Zen at War*. Where you learn again, this is a book about how the Japanese Zen community related towards the Japanese war effort in the 30s and 40s. And you learn in this book that with really a couple, like five, six minor exceptions, millions of them not only totally supported Japanese war effort but even provided the justification of it. Let me mention a figure which I'm sure is well-known to many of you: Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, popular in the 60s here in the States and in all Europe as the great popularizer of Zen Buddhism. Maybe we should also read his text from the 30s and 40s where, for example, in justifying Japanese invasion of China, he said that the Chinese should learn that from the cosmic perspective the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love. Then he advises the attitude of a true warrior: that you should as it were overcome your ego and objectivize yourself, which makes killing much easier. He says like: when you kill a man, you shouldn't think I am pulling the trigger to hit him. You should say: I'm observing how my hand triggers a gun and when the bullet flows through the air, the enemy body stumbles upon it, so that instead of a substantial confrontation of me hurting another human being, you get some kind of an abstract, abstract ballet. So even more, Suzuki and others, if you want detailed proofs, read the book, demonstrate how he demonstrates how Suzuki even went a step further and claimed a very direct claim: that for the majority of ordinary people who don't have time for big meditations and so on and so on, to spend days on them or years, absolute obedience to military discipline it's the only practical way to achieve satori, the Zen Buddhist enlightenment. The idea is: when the commander shouts "shoot" and you shoot without thinking, you have overcome your false ego and so on and so on. So again, my point is not: look, Suzuki was a dirty militarist in reality. No, this would have been easy. My point is you got my point, to to accept this gap. That at the same time, he could have justified terrible crimes and at the same time he was absolutely authentic, authentic purveyor of spiritual experiences. So the lesson is clear. It concerns the difficulty to fully accept the gap between the inner authenticity of one's life and the ethics one practices. Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity. Let me engage now with a much more problematic maybe to some of you example, which I mean in with whole respect towards the victims, of course. When the United plane flight on September and other three planes were kidnapped, it is significant that that the focus of the phone calls to their closest relatives from the passengers when who knew they were about to die was always something like "I love you". However, a suspicion remains here. Is this desperate confession of love also not something of a sham? The same kind of fakery as the sudden turn to God and prayer of someone who suddenly faces the danger or proximity of death? In other words, you know I'm talking now about a very desperate moment. They knew they were dying, you make the last call to your wife, beloved, whatever, I love you. But I claim: why should this be authentic? There is no reason to think to think this is authentic. Another example came to my mind which is known to every old United States leftist. I remember when I was young, we were all taught the horror about the Rosenberg trial, you know, against the two of them, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of spying for Soviet Union. And we were fascinated by when their prison letters were translated, this sincerity, this purity. Even their advocates have to admit today, we know that maybe not both of them but he, Julius, I'm sorry we have to concede here to the devil the right when they are right, he was a spy. He was a spy. So this makes all the more crazy this as it were moral, as it were moral naivety, purity, how he was able to insist in his lie to the end. So I think that even when we are in this kind of a desperate situation, "now I know I'm going to die," I don't think we are authentic at that point. At that point we desperately construct a lie, the way we would like to be remembered and so on and so on. You know what would have been a truly radical ethical act here for me? Please don't take it in an obscene way, I mean it deadly seriously. Let's say I'm on a plane, of course this only holds if it's true, the implication. The the true act would have been, okay, I am on a plane, I have a chance to call my wife, I know in two minutes I will be dead. To call my wife and to say: "Listen darling, in in half a minute I will die but frankly, our marriage was hell, I'm glad," and so on. That would have been an act! That would have been something! Do you know to avoid this search, "oh my god now I must patch things up" and so on? At that point to assert, that would have been something. And incidentally I'm thinking, maybe even it would have been humanly the best thing, certainly for the wife it would have been easier to forget you in this way. Recall another tragic figure which really fascinated me from the Cold War era. Those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-communist hysteria in their own countries with the utmost sincerity. They were even ready to go to prison for their communist conviction and defense of Soviet Union, like I now read a biography of you know, the great black singer Paul Robeson, who was up to the end total defender of Soviet Union. Isn't it the very illusory nature of their belief which makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union makes the inner fragile beauty of their conviction all the more sublime. This leads us to an unexpected radical conclusion. It is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable terrifying reality of its point of reference. What if on the contrary such a blindness, such a violent gesture of exclusion, of refusing to see, such a disavowal of reality, such a fetishist attitude of "I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union, but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism" is an innermost constituent of every ethical stance? Immanuel Kant was already aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm propos the French Revolution in his late writing *Conflict of Faculties*. According to Kant, the Revolution's, French Revolution's true significance does not reside in what actually went on in Paris, much of which Kant was the first to concede was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion, but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe. A quote from Kant: "The recent revolution of a people which is rich in spirit may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity; it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators a taking of sides according to desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race." End of quote. So to translate this into Lacanian language: the real event, the dimension of the real, did not reside in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity. And mutatis mutandis I claim, does the same not apply to the Western admirers of the Soviet Union? The Soviet experience of building socialism in one country certainly did, to quote Kant, accumulate misery and atrocity, but it nevertheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators who were not themselves caught up in it. The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishist disavowal, of such a "I don't want to see something" as a condition of my sublime ethical enthusiasm? I think yes, every ethics with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis. To wonder at this fact is not a proper philosophical attitude. That is to say: what if that which appears as an inconsistency, as the failure to draw all the consequences from one's ethical attitude, what if this is on the contrary the positive condition of possibility of ethics? What if such an exclusion of some form of otherness from the scope of our ethical concerns is co-substantial with the very founding gesture of ethical universality? So that the more universal our ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion is. What the Christian all-inclusive attitude, Saint Paul's famous "there are no men or women, no Jew or Greek for me," what this attitude involves is a radical exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other particularistic religions, even in Islam, there is a place for others, they are tolerated even if they are looked upon with condescension. The Christian motto, "All men are brothers," however also means that those who do not accept to be my brothers are not men. In the early years of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini played on the same paradox when he claimed, I remember it plastically even now, in an interview for the Western press that the Iranian revolution is the most human in the entire history. Not one person was killed, he claimed in the Iranian revolution. When the surprised journalist asked him about the death penalties publicized in the very Iranian media, Khomeini calmly replied: "Those that we killed were not men but criminal dogs." I think this logic is somehow implied by every ethical universalism. So what then does ethical universality exclude? Which dimension? There is a wonderful passage in Marcel Proust's *Recherche*, *In Search of Lost Time*, in which Marcel, the figure in the novel, uses phone for the first time, speaking to his grandmother. Her voice heard alone apart from her body surprises, surprises Marcel. It is a voice of a frail old woman, not the gentle voice of the grandmother he remembers. And the point is that this experience then colors his entire perception of the grandmother. When later he visits her in person, he perceives her in a new way, as a strange mad old woman drowsing over her book, overburdened with age, flushed, coarse, vulgar, no longer the charming caring grandmother he remembered. This is how voice as autonomous partial object can affect our entire perception of the body to which it belongs. The lesson of this is that precisely the direct experience of the unity of a person, where voice seems to fit its organic whole, involves a necessary mystification. In order to penetrate to the truth of the person, one has to tear this unity apart, to focus on one of its aspects in its isolation, and then to allow this element to color our entire perception. This is what Freud I think meant when he opposed hermeneutics, when he wrote that one should interpret en détail, not en masse. To locate every feature of a human being into the totality of the person is to miss not only the meaning of this detail, but the true meaning of the whole itself. This is the very radical lesson of psychoanalysis I think that if I want really to understand you, no, I shouldn't see you as an whole person. I should do something like what Marcel experiences there, isolate one feature where when I isolate this feature I see the vulgarity, the whatever, and then let this feature color all of it. And to put it in back to Lacan, Lacanian terms, or even theological terms, in this way I pass from neighbor in the simple sense of semblant, of one who is like me, to the neighbor in this more radical dimension. This would be maybe for psychoanalysis the the expression of a neighbor. There is some someone whom you think you know him or her perfectly, person with whom you spent decades and so on. But doesn't it often happen that at a certain point this person does something, you catch an evil gaze, a nervous gesture, a some vulgarity, unexpected brutality, and all of a sudden you ask herself, "My God, is this really the person that I knew?" At that point you encounter the neighbor. So when Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the Judeo-Christian injunction to love your neighbor, they refer precisely to the dark impenetrable abyss which is a neighbor. Beneath the neighbor as my mirror image, the one who is like me, with whom I can empathize, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness, of someone about whom I ultimately do not know anything. Can I really know who he is? How can I be sure that his words are not a mere pretense? This is why Lacan applies to the neighbor the term "Thing". The thing, das Ding, used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction. The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's *The Shining* in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who with an evil grin goes on to slaughter his entire family. This is a neighbor. Since a neighbor is primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life or rather way of enjoyment disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when the neighbor comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. As Peter Sloterdijk, with whom politically I disagree but from time to time he says something penetrating, as Sloterdijk put it: more communication means at first above all more conflict. This is why, that's another thing problem that I have with this, we should hear everybody's his or there's story from within and so on. This is why I don't think I think this is a typical super-ego injunction. "No, you should understand everybody." It's not possible, so then you feel guilty, you are never up to the level. No, I think that how to put it very brutally but I think this is the only honest position, I don't want to understand everybody. I don't care about majority of the people. I think what we need today when we are different cultures violently thrown together, I think we need as Sloterdijk put it, a new code of discretion. We need more alienation. We need to learn to ignore each other. I don't think we need more to understand each other. This is again an impossible task which makes us forever guilty, "but did you really understand how did you know what I meant with that smile" and so on. We should this is typical liberal blackmail which we should which we should reject. Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this neighbor... sorry, the status of this neighbor would have been, and this is I think there you see clearly politically the limit of this. Let's understand the neighbor would be the deadlock of that Truth and Reconciliation procedure in South Africa. Of course I sympathize with it. But again, it has its limits. You know the wager was very honorable human one. Instead of engaging in revenge and so on, why don't we just offer to all Apartheid torturers the chance of confronting their victims, openly describing what they did, and in this way we guarantee them, if they come and confess they will be pardoned. The catch is that this procedure implies, or rather only works, when we can count how to put it on a minimum minimum ethical responsibility and dignity of the torturer. What if what happens is what according to my sources did happen, at least a couple of times, that you got an Apartheid murderer who torturer who came there, confronted his black victims, and with a cynical smile said: "Yes, don't you remember? I tortured you in this way, in that way, I confess everything. Okay, haha, now I'm over." And he perfectly followed the rules. The problem was that this implication was not met. Which is why based on this because the motto there in South Africa was "We forgive, we don't" sorry "We forgive but we will not forget it." I think this is a very limited motto. I'm opposed to it, it's a fake. First, again, it has limits. It works only at a certain level. Would you be ready to say this for Hitler or Stalin? "We forgive you dear Hitler, tell us the story of Holocaust, we will not forget it, but we forgive." No, I think that when we are dealing with really radical crimes, I'm almost tempted to propose the opposite motto: "I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you." This is I was told in in Korea, South Korea, how the people there spontaneously, a friend told me this, relate to Japanese crimes. I mean they are still traumatized by what the Japanese did to Koreans under the occupation in World War II and before. The treatment was so brutal, you know, tens of thousands of women forced into prostitution, not to speak about other things. The idea is: it's so horrible that for our psychological sanity we cannot afford to remember it, to think about it. So let's forget it, but we will never forgive you. I think this is a much more correct attitude when you are dealing when you are dealing with a neighbor. So again, the first conclusion is that neighbor, in this sense of the abyss of otherness which is simply the core of subjectivity, is the limit to ethical universality. Which is why all these formulas of love your neighbor as yourself are an impossible demand. Underlying this love is always fear. The predominant way to maintain a distance towards this inhuman neighbors' intruding proximity are customs, habits. What are habits? I would like here to repeat an old joke and maybe known to some of you and refer to the very important here in the United States philosophical debate which took place some four years ago in March The philosopher in question was Donald Rumsfeld, you remember, when he engaged in that amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. You remember, I quote him: "There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know." The it means very simply like: I don't know, I am now in Boston and I know that I know this, clear. Then he went on: "There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we know we don't know." Also it's clear, like: I know there are probably some cars in front of this building, but I don't know how many cars are there, but I know that I don't know this. Then Rumsfeld went on: "But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we don't know we don't know." It's clear what he meant, that was his argument. It's not only weapons of mass destruction which we at least know that we don't know. What if Saddam even has some weapons about the existence of which we don't even absolutely know, so we don't even know what we don't know? There may be something totally unexpected there. But did you notice the what's problematic here in his reasoning? That there is a fourth term which is missing. Known knowns, things we know that we know. Known unknowns, things we know that we don't know. Unknown unknowns, things we don't know that we don't know even. And something is missing, which is the most interesting category. Not the not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things that we know that we don't know, but things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious. And that's why you are in trouble in Iraq I claim. Because what the American politics didn't take into account is not some mystery there in Iraq or whatever, but the to use this inappropriate name, the the unconscious prejudices and so on, all these ideological prejudices, habits and so on, which determined the American politics and military activity without American soldiers and politicians even being aware of it. The problem was here I think, the problem was not that you missed something, the CIA didn't do well the analysis up there. The problem were all these prejudices, usually racist, cultural prejudices, political miscalculations and so on and so on, which then brought the result in which we are. And this unknown knowns are located in habits. What are habits? I'm more and more convinced that habits are an extremely interesting dialectical category. They are not as simple as it appears. Okay, we know that every community in order to function from a philosopher from a university department to whole nations needs some rules. People obey rules. However, I think these rules are never simple. It's never "these are the rules, if you obey them you are in, otherwise you are out." The catch is that every rules, for structural reasons which in Lacanian terms can be nicely explained as the inconsistency of the big other and so on, every rules need meta-rules, higher level rules, which tell you how to relate to explicit rules. The problem is that rules are never simply rules. We have often rules which explicitly prohibit something, but the message between the lines is solicitation. Like most of the sexual prohibitions work in this way. When father tells a son "don't mess with girls," it's basically "do it but discreetly, prove me that you are a man" or whatever. And also many social rules are like this. I don't know when I was in the army and so on. It was always that often a prohibition was a direct call: "violate the rule in a discreet way." But then, an even more interesting reversal is the opposite one, the opposite gap, when you don't have an explicit prohibition which between the lines you are called to violate, but you are explicitly allowed to do something but the message between the lines is "you shouldn't do it." Like you are given a certain freedom on condition that you do not use it. And I think this category is very useful in, for example, I will not be too long, my god, time is running. Let me give you a nice example. Soviet ex-Soviet Union, Russia was in deep crisis in the 90s in the Yeltsin era. From what friends told me, the main problem was precisely the collapse of these implicit unspoken rules. Like in old Soviet Union, you knew where you stand. You knew what do you have to do when a policeman stops you, how much how can you bribe him. You know when you should take authority seriously. You know when something was offered to you like "we live in free society, there is freedom of speech," you knew what this means, that you shouldn't do it, it was clear. And then in the Yeltsin years, it simply wasn't clear. This is what fascinated me in old socialist regimes, how these implicit rules covered everything. For example in my country, ex-Yugoslavia. You wanted a free medical service, you wanted a quality operation done fast? It was exactly codified for what type of operation, how much money, bribery to what doctor, how much to the nurse, how much to the top doctor and so on. The implicit rules were clear. The most elementary level of these habits is made, and this I think are rules at its purest, is made of so-called empty gestures, offers made or meant to be rejected. For example, a friend from Japan told me that in Japan workers have the right to days holiday every year. However, you are expected to use maximum half of this amount. So I, stupid as I am, I asked them "okay, why don't you simply put days?" They told me "you are an idiot, you don't understand it." And of course they were right. They were... what do you... that's the mystery of rules. Why this type of exchange? Let me give you another example which we have in our country, in my country, or in Europe, I don't know if you have it here. Let's say I compete with my friend for a job. I lose, he wins. It's considered polite for a friend to tell me: "Listen, I know you deserved it really, so I will step down and you get the job." But of course I'm expected to say "no," like "no, no, you have it" and so on. And that's the mystery of it. Although it's clear to both of us that he doesn't really mean it. It's in a way a sincere lie. We both know it's a fake, but it works. Sometimes you can even save a friendship. And I think that every procedure of of exchange, especially like apology, works like this. Let me in the American style of talk shows give you a confession. This happened to me with my good theoretical enemy, personal friend, I hope I'm allowed to say this, Judith Butler. When we were last summer together in some summer seminar, I, vulgar person as I am, I did something brutal. I used referring to her and to lesbians, unnatural bitches—I even prefer to forget what kind of name. Then I noticed she was a little bit hurt. Okay. So, life is full of surprises. So I called her immediately afterwards and told her, "Listen, I'm very sorry, you know," blah blah whatever. And she was very kind of course, she said: "Listen Slavoj, I know what person you are," now this was so nice kind of you know, "and of course I know you didn't mean it in any evil way, so please forget about it, you don't owe me an apology." Now what's the catch here? You got the catch. The catch is that she was able to say "you don't owe me an apology" only after I did offer an apology. And only in this way it worked. If I were to do what would have been logical and the way my evil mind works, I immediately wanted to do it, my idea was then to tell her "Okay, if it's not needed, I take it back the apology," no? No, it would have been impolite. On the other hand, if she were to say "Oh finally you did apologize! Yeah, yeah, you were nasty, you should apologize," it would also not be correct. You get it how something which logically if you analyze it it's meaningless. I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary, but in this very very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary. That's a symbolic gesture at its purest. This is what habits are about. But habits can be more complicated. The true mystery of habits is that it's not only that something is prohibited, but that prohibition itself is prohibited. In the sense that it's prohibited to how should I put it, to announce it publicly. I read this the description of this scene in some book on on Stalinism. It's a wonderful simple example. Imagine a dream for me, we are now in Moscow '36, '37. Central committee, okay, I am Stalin. I give a speech. Then one of you stands up and criticizes me, attacks me. Okay, everybody knows that the next day the question would be who saw that guy the last who... No? Okay. But then imagine that another guy would stand up and attack the first guy who attacked me, Stalin, and would say "Are you crazy? We don't attack comrade Stalin in Soviet Union! Why are you doing this?" I claim that this second guy would disappear even faster than the first guy. That is to say, it wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. This is the level at which customs function. And it interests it interests me more and more the way all this functions, namely this implicit, let's call it the implicit obscene underside of prohibitions which one shouldn't announce publicly, of transgressions which remain implicit. For example, a very touchy example, problematic: the Catholic Church pedophilia. I claim it's it's definitely this kind of inherent transgression of the Catholic Church. You cannot say the way the church is saying, "Okay, priests are humans like everybody else, of course some of them are pedophiliac, we we cannot control it," and so on. No, I even know some examples from a journalist who did research in my own country in Slovenia, that of priests who when they joined church were how should I put it, straight heterosexuals, and it was the institution itself which made them pedophiliac. So this is something, this is what interests me, how institutions have this kind of a secret collective unconscious, not in the Jungian sense, but in sense of an implicit symbolic structure which is publicly disavowed but nonetheless constitute a a disavowed constituent of their identity. Which is why typically the church reacts to these cases in this ultra-protective way. Okay, so and I think that these implicit rules, these unwritten prohibited habits which control us but they are prohibited to mention publicly, this is where change is the most difficult. For example, from my experience of the army when I served in '75, '76 in the Yugoslav army, this was my basic experience there, how on the one hand explicitly the military community was extremely homophobic. If somebody was discovered to be homosexual he was beaten every night, totally ignored and so on and so on. But that's only one side of the story. The other side of the story is that unbelievable to what extent the entire army life was penetrated with homosexual innuendos. Like for example, even to say hello in the morning we didn't say hello, we said "I'll smoke yours" or something like this like, vulgarly. It was unbelievable how again the explicit prohibition was sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a thwarted implicit homosexuality. The difficult thing is to do to change things here. That is to say, to change things at the level of what Lacan called the big Other. And now I'm coming, if you allow me, I'm a little bit more please, I you are my super-ego Irena. The problem is the big Other. That's the tragedy today. We conservatives are telling us we live in a godless era, blah blah blah. No, I think if anything we believe more than ever, but we objectivize onto habits onto the big Other our beliefs. What do I mean by this? What is the Lacanian big Other? Of course, the most obvious figure of the big Other is the big Other in the sense of God, the guarantee of meaning, some big symbolic institution. Here, so that I will not say only bad things about Christianity, here I think precisely every leftist materialist should fully appreciate the what in bombastic terms we call Judeo-Christian legacy, whose message I think is precisely basically there is no big Other. In what sense do I mean this? I think the text, the first criticism of ideology, okay is the book of how do you call the guy who was screwed up by God? Job. The book of Job. What's so interesting? Why is this the first criticism of ideology? Remember what happens. Things look really bad for Job, he loses his wife, his goats, whatever, everything. And what happens then? Okay, it's a traumatic situation, loss. Then, do you remember, three, I think there are three or four, three theological friends came, each of them explaining, trying to convince Job that his suffering, his misfortunes have a deeper meaning. That's the point. It's not so much that he is guilty, that's only the first theological friend says "God is just so if you are suffering even if you don't know what you must have done something." Then others give more refined accounts, like maybe God is testing you, but the message is clear: "You must this has a meaning. It's not just a contingent misfortune." And then comes the beauty. When at the end you remember God comes, his message is "No, all that the three theological friend says is lie, everything that you said is true." That is to say God's answer is unbelievable, it's truly as my favorite theologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: "God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist." God's defense is not "No, it looks to you that it's meaningless catastrophe but it has a deeper meaning." No, God, you know when God then goes into this crazy rhetorics of "but what about did you see how the sun rises? Did you see how when it rains it can rain on a desert where nobody needs it?" and so on. God's message is: "You are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like this." It's as if God concedes that his own creation is somehow meaningless, doesn't have a cover in meaning. Which is why I think we should effectively read Job as prefiguring Christ. Because I think, to be brutal and to read the Bible, now I'm giving you a very condensed version of a longer theological argument, what dies on the cross is precisely this God which is the guarantee of a deeper meaning. Here I think Christianity has still a very radical message. What do I mean by this? You know that disgusting for me at least metaphor of evil as a stain. Like, if you look at a picture, if you look too close at the picture you see only the stain. But if you look from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as a stain is effectively just an element which contributes to the global harmony. So the idea is what to our finite perspective appears as a stain, evil, really from the omnipotent all-seeing divine gaze, for that gaze is part of a global harmony. Of course now the problem is, can we really then say Holocaust, Gulag or not just the usual suspects for example, and this always shocks me, here you can see the falsity of all this humanitarianism and so on. My God, everybody knows what is going on now. According to Time Magazine cover story last summer, in the last ten years at least five million people died unnatural death in Congo. But they are not in, so nobody cares. So okay, Congo, Holocaust, Gulag and so on. Is it are we ready to say "No, this appears only in our perspective because of our over-proximity as a stain, but really it contributes to global meaning, beauty of the universe" and so on? I think that Christ marks the moment when you no longer can say this. The death of Christ means precisely the death of that God up there which guarantees meaning. Because what comes after Christ is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is simply the community of believers. The meaning of the death of Christ for me is: there is no big Other, I throw myself into the universe, it's up to you. As every deep theologist knows, the message of Christ is not: "trust God," but "God trusts you, it's up to you, up to your freedom." It's a very materialist message if you want. Okay, that's one aspect. But then there is the opposite aspect of the big Other which is much more interesting. The aspect of appearances. You know the classical joke, I used it three-four times, but now I will give a different twist to it. That famous joke about you know, a man who thinks he is a grain, a seed, and okay is cured but then goes out of is dismissed from the psychiatric ward and then immediately comes back and says: "I encountered a a chicken." And the doctor tells him: "But why are you afraid? You know now that you are not the seed and the chicken will not eat you." He says: "Okay, I know it, but does the chicken know it? That I'm no longer..." Okay. Now what I want to do now is to claim how this is a joke, but it depicts a very real a mechanism. A whole country fell apart so that the in order to protect the chicken's ignorance. It's Yugoslavia. Namely, what it's clear now from some memoirs that they published is that already in the early mid-70s it was clear to the inner circle nomenclature that the country is in deep economic trouble. But Tito, lifelong president, was old and dying. So they made a collective decision that Tito should die happy. So they prolonged the false the false welfare by by collecting incredible debts in a couple of years, fifteen for Yugoslavia fifteen more than fifteen billions of dollars, so that the 70s went so-so relatively well. When Tito died economic crisis did strike and so on. So you see it's literally this logic: we know it, the chicken should not the chicken should not get it. And I claim this is ultimately what culture is. It's not "we don't know," it is as if for a gaze of some big Other there is always a chicken which shouldn't know it. This chicken can be a children. For example, how do you let's say you are one of the parents, you are fighting with your partner, blah blah blah. How do you measure the amount of your civilization? It's if you are still able to say: "But the child shouldn't know it. No, let's cover it, let's keep it secret from from the child." Of course the tragedy is that usually the child does know it, but pretends not to notice, not to hurt you and so on. But the mystery is then that it works. I mean, appearances are a big mystery here. Again, sorry for my old communist obsessions, an incredible story about appearances from Soviet Union again, it's here you can see the theological dimension of Stalinism. In '53 in the summer, Beria, the secret police boss, was arrested. At that very point the first volume of the new edition of Soviet Encyclopedia appeared, where ABC... Beria. There was a page on Beria in it. What happened? This was printed just before Beria's arrest, so Beria was celebrated as a great leader. What then happened after Beria's arrest was that every subscriber, and we are talking about over two million subscribers, he got one leaf of paper which fitted exactly that page and he was ordered to cut out that page and put in the new page, which re-established perfect continuity. The previous entry went on, then instead of Beria which was almost two pages, they replaced it with Bering Strait, you know, between Alaska and so on, with some photos and so on. So ask yourself a simple question. Whom were they trying to deceive? For whom were they trying to re-establish this continuity? As if you know nothing should be the the appearances should not be disturbed. Not for any empirical person. There was no empirical chicken who shouldn't know. The chicken was the big Other, because every empirical person knew it because he had to do it, to cut it out, put it in and so on. Now that you will not say that I'm just making fun of Eastern Europe, you in United States had the same, I know at least one wonderful example. You know of course Hitchcock's *Vertigo*. Remember the scene after Scotty saves Madeleine from when she jumps into the the Golden Gate bay there beneath the bridge and takes her home, okay, undresses her, puts her into his bed? Then you have in his living room a long panning shot showing him, then the camera passes the kitchen sink above which her underwear is drying up. And then the camera passes on, shows the door of the bedroom where she is. There is only one problem with this scene. Put if you don't believe me rent or if you have the video, put the freeze on that very moment when you see the underwear above the kitchen sink. It's not underwear. There's just abstract pieces of cloth like like towels and so on, no underwear. You know why? I read in a book about *Vertigo*. The reason is that these were the last years of Hays Code censorship. They insisted that it shouldn't be underwear. Because if it's really underwear, it would have been a proof that Scotty saw her naked. This is not allowed, so it shouldn't be underwear. But it's the same mystery as with Stalin and Beria. Now whom were they trying to protect? Because we viewers, we all automatically assume that we see underwear. There is so in other words there is there is a big Other here. So, if you allow me a little bit more please, I yeah, yeah, yeah. I would like now to give you three examples, okay I will try to condense it a little bit, a couple of examples of how this defense against the traumatic what happens when this protective screen of habits disintegrates, how do you protect yourself of the over-proximity of the of the neighbor? One interesting example here would have been pornography. I claim that the role of this stupid protective screen is there played by the stupidity of the story. Because the problem of pornography would have been of course hardcore pornography, the over-proximity of the neighbor, intrusive. Which is why I think to block too much of identification, they do something which did always surprise me as incredibly vulgar, but I think there is a necessity in it. Did you notice if you watch hardcore pornography how incredibly stupid the story, the narrative is which introduces the as if as if somehow it's the choice: you see it all but the story should be openly ridiculous? Like I don't know, I remember when I was young I saw one which you know, a plumber comes, fixes a hole in the sink and then the housewife said, "I have another hole to be fixed" and it's indescribable. Now people are telling me: but today this is falling apart. You have this, especially French Catherine Breillat, *Romance* and so on, films which try to combine really engaged melodrama with hardcore pornography. No, I think censorship did strike back with even stronger oppression. The latest fashion I was told is so-called Gonzo, Gonzo hardcore. Which is what? Which is kind of like we talk about embedded journalism, embedded hardcore, which means that actors don't even pretend that they are part of the story, they with their comments, ironic grimaces and so on, they directly address the camera. They don't pretend. And I think that this precisely is censorship. They fear that the proximity of the neighbor would have been too direct and so on and so on. Okay, the next example but I will skip it I wanted to use here is is torture. The way to deal in order to deal with torture, we are now in the middle of the process where torture is being rehabilitated, how there the dimension of the neighbor should disappear. And finally, my royal example as it were would be that of anti-semitism. Because if there is in our Western tradition one epitome of the disturbing neighbor who is always too close and so on, it is the Jew. So let me make my position very clear here. Of course I totally reject those leftists who think that because of the international situation, all the suffering of the Palestinians and so on, one should make compromises and tolerate a little bit of anti-semitism. Like, one should understand them, you know, they... No, I think that anti-semitism is for me the zero-level ideology. You don't make compromises there. To put it quite metaphysically: it's always bad. But something very strange is happening later, sorry, is happening recently. I think that we are witnessing a strange new mode of anti-semitism, and before you start shouting I will give you a proof at least wait to the end of my argument, Zionist anti-semitism. Why? This idea came to me when I was in Israel with my friends, like my film maker Udi Aloni. We had a debate and then he was ferociously attacked by hardline Zionists there. What did strike me is how the the criticism reproduced all the usual clichés against the Jews in the West. The reproach was: you just pretend to be one of us, but you are really uprooted, you don't you are not solidary enough with the with the State of Israel, you are really too cosmopolitan, you don't have roots, you are not identified with your community, you think only about only about commercial success and so on and so on. In other words, what did shock me is how the the Zionist critique of those Jews who do not solidarize fully with the State of Israel takes over precisely all the standard clichés, main clichés in the West against against the Jews. If you don't believe me, do something. Go on the internet and look under www.masada2000.org/list_a. It's a Zionist website where you get the list of what they call self-hating Jews. It's a shocking document. Why? Because first the term they use is something like "Self-hating internal terrorist shit," like they call them shit. Point two, and you find there many of our friends Judith Butler is there of course, Avital Ronell, four thousand. What shocked me is that every person is described in an extremely aggressive way, the photo chosen is usually one that makes you look like a freak, ridiculous, and on the top of it, wherever they have wherever they could have got it, you have email address, a solicitation to hate mail, of course. But the impression is really "My God, we are back at the like anti-semitism, you know, the list of shitty Jews." It's precisely the same the same logic. So again, here we have the problem with the neighbor and so on. So if you allow me just three minutes more, I would like to conclude with a question which maybe bothers you. So does this mean we should just in a kind of a Levinasian way respect our neighbors, no universality, just let's keep a distance and so on? No, there is a positive universal ethics which does take into account this. What kind of ethics? Ethics I would say without morality. But this I don't mean the Nietzschean point when morality means how you relate to others and ethics means are you faithful to yourself, to your existential choice and so on. I mean something else. For me, to use Schiller's opposition of naive and sentimental, morality is sentimental. You do something but you feel good doing it, no? Like, you know, when you pay for charity for the African kid you think isn't it nice, there is a happy kid there because I sent him ten dollars a month whatever. Ethics is much more ruthless. And I would like just to finish to give you a brief example. You find it in the bookstores, one of the defining novels for me by a Hungarian writer, now an old lady who emigrated from Switzerland... from Hungary in '56, Agota Kristof, Agota Kristof. I like the name, it looks as if some stupid Eastern European mispronounced Agatha Christie, no? She wrote a trilogy *The Notebook*, *The Proof*, *The Third Lie*. It tells the story of two young boys, twins, living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian border town during the last years of the World War II and the early years of communism. These twins are absolutely immoral. They lie, blackmail, kill. But I think they stand for absolute ethics. Let me give you a couple of examples. One day they meet in a forest a starved deserter and bring him some things he asked them for. Then that's their narration: "When we come back with the food and blanket, he (the deserter) says: 'You are very kind.' We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all.'" I think this is a wonderful truly Christian ethical stance. You just do what is needed, you don't do it because it's good, you do it because the other needs it, because it has to be done. And no matter what the other asks you. For example one night the twins find themselves sleeping in the same bed with a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning the twins awake and want to leave bed. But the officer holds them back. Dialogue: "Don't move, keep sleeping," says the officer. The boys said: "We want to urinate. We have to go." "Don't go, do it here," we ask "where?" He says: "On me, yes, don't be afraid, piss on my face." We do it. Then we go out into the garden because the bed is all wet. Like, totally cold normal, the guy wants to piss on his face, what's the problem? Why not? This is the true work of love, I think. Then the twins' closest friend is the priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them and their clothes and plays erotic games with them and so on. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp. One of the Jews asks them "Please, bread." The housekeeper, the young girl, shows a little bit of bread, then smiles and eats herself the bread. The boys decide to punish her. They stole from the German officer a little bit of ammunition and put her put into the kitchen stove so that her face explodes and disfigures her. It's considered simple ethical act, I would have done absolutely the same. Then the two brothers blackmail the good priest. Because they have a young girl who is harassed by the whole village, poor girl, and the girl needs help to survive. So what do they do? They go to the priest and said: "We heard a story that you were once playing with a small girl." The priest said it's not true. And the boys said: "We don't care, but the girl needs money so if you don't give us so much money every week, we will tell this to the whole village." Then the priest said, I quote it: "It's monstrous! Have you any idea what you are doing?" The boys' answer: "Yes sir, we are blackmailing you." "At your age it's deplorable!" The boys' answer: "Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to do this. But Harelip (the girl) and her mother absolutely need money." I would do the same. There is nothing personal in this blackmail. Later they even become close friends with the priest, and when the girl can survive on her own, learns to work and so on, they go to the priest and said "thanks very much now we no longer need any money." They tell the priest, quote: "Keep it, you have given enough. We took your money when it was necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip, to the girl, we have also taught her taught her to work." And the same when the mother the grandmother asked them to to ask them to kill her, they killed her and so on. That's where I stand. If you would ask me what kind of ethics I would like to follow, it's precisely this: an ethical monster without empathy, doing simply the duty the duty to help others with blind spontaneity but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction. I claim that with more people like these two monstrous children, the world would have been a pleasant place to stay. It is only in such a world that we would be really alive. You know the old religious question: is there life after death? Wolf Biermann, the German in the old days dissident poet, has a wonderful poem where he asks the true question. He says: "The true question is not: is there life after death, but is there life before death?" And his answer is: "Okay, only with certain attitude" and so on. And I think these two children with their ruthless, brutal ethics: you do it, it's needed, you blackmail the priest, it's needed, you kill, friend asks you to piss on his face, what's the problem, you do it. That's what I would like to be. Thanks very much. Now we can pretend now we can pretend that we are in a democracy for for some time. So we have approximately half an hour for questions. So I would like to ask everybody to make them as short as possible so that we can have as many people as possible asking the questions. Okay? Thank you. Very enjoyable. But, go to but directly, yeah. No, I don't have a but. I have a question. Um, how um, when you think about fundamentalism as a big Other, or? No, almost the opposite. Opposite. Okay. Is this the question? Or you want to elaborate it? No, I want you to elaborate it because if you look at... By fundamentalism you mean what we usually mean by fundamentalism, so-called religious fundamentalism or what? That's only one of many so I don't know, I'll leave it up to you. No I just want to get the location of your question. Um well, there's fundamentalisms, I mean, there's a kind of a secular fundamentalism that you saw in the 50s, maybe in Eastern Europe... Ah yes! Yeah. So, I mean there's different ones. But I think people think about religious fundamentalism. Um do you do you have a theory or an account of the rise of it in the 70s? In a particular location of the West in a certain sense or or why this time and not another time? I just wonder what you think. No, what I would have done first is I first the first thing here I would apply my own theory the way I began to this. First, I I always try to ask are these designation to be taken for what they are? I think that what people call fundamentalism often covers two very much opposed phenomena. I think that what we usually refer to as fundamentalism, you know, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, they kind that that kind of people, I would even deny to them the term fundamentalism. You know how I have a very naive naive criterion of defending what I'm really tempted to even claim is authentic fundamentalism from this kind of fake fundamentalism. How do you relate, is there envy or not? Let me be very naive, I don't have any illusions about Tibetan Buddhism, but Tibetan Buddhists that I've met or Amish—again I don't have illusions about Amish, according to some statistics they have the highest rate of family incest—but they are authentic fundamentalists. You know what did strike me when I met them? They don't have this typical religious fake fundamentalism obsession with what the others' gaze are doing or what. They they are very benevolent, they don't have this hatred towards the others, they don't have the attitude of envy. They live in peace with others. I think the fake fundamentalism is this which is secretly secretly fascinated by the sinful ways of the others and so on and so on. So my next criticism would have been that if you look at it closely, so-called fundamentalism Pat Robertson, Falwell and their gang, Jimmy Swaggart, not to mention the really big ones and so on. But isn't it that the way they deliver their message undermines the message? In the sense that although the way they deliver their message is precisely an instance of what they criticize: a big ego trip and so on. Now, a more difficult question. I totally also agree with you that it's a misnomer that this is not the only fundamentalism we have. I think even that the... you know, what surprised me were the violent reactions to I don't think she's a great theoretician but it's an interesting book, Naomi Klein's new book *Shock Therapy*. What's the important... maybe I'm not saying she is a great theoretician, but it surprised me how violent the reactions were to the book. Why? Because she touched an important point: how let's call it liberal economic fundamentalism, how it is not ready to admit how "okay, we have markets, they work, but in order they work," whatever, "how but in order for the markets to work you need quite a lot of extra-market violence." You know, my this is the big maybe the biggest utopia of our time I claim: it's the market utopia. Which is why for me it's not the official story goes like that: the 90s, I mean is the end of utopias, finally we learn to renounce big utopias, plans to reconstruct society, blah blah blah, we learn to accept the lesser evil, no, and so on and so on and so on. But I think the true utopia were the 90s, the the Fukuyama utopia. And you know it's easy to make fun of Fukuyama, that idiot who thought the end of history, but basically even most of my so-called leftist friends, we are all Fukuyamaists de facto. Most of the leftists that I know, they silently accept the basic Fukuyama premise which is: capitalism, okay, capitalism with a human face and liberal democracy, are the frame which we cannot overcome. All we can do is make it a little bit more tolerant, better, and so on and so on and so on. So this is for me this is for me the true fundamentalism. It doesn't take into account the extent to which market in order to function—and already there is a lot of violence, millions losing job and so on and so on. There is a much more invisible objective violence of the market, but even if we discount this, market mechanism needs quite a lot of subjective violence. I mean, these are the big debates. For example, the well-known English of German origins philosopher Ralph Dahrendorf called this the problem of the valley of tears, like: democracy functions after you have a certain level of development of economy. But to get to that point, you need twenty years at least of authoritarianism, dictatorship. He openly says this, he says: "look at the third world countries," okay third world, outside the Western Europe, "which were are economically successful: South Korea, Chile, and so on." His conclusion is: they had to go through Pinochet or military dictatorship. But the problem is deeper today for me. If there is a lesson to be learned from China today, it's that because typically those who have sympathies for this dictatorship, why don't they also support China then today? China is doing exactly this in a much larger amount. The irony is that... I know but the problem is the following one for me. Because they have still this old liberal hope that China will get caught in the same dynamic when they still have this trust that after some ten–twenty years that sooner or later capitalism does bring with itself democracy the way we understand it. I think the lesson of China and so-called Asian values capitalism is not. I think that's the true danger today. I think that capitalism is entering a new stage where no longer democracy the way even in this formal limited way we used it democracy is needed. Democracy is needed. So in this sense, so that I don't get lost, in this sense I totally agree with you about how the term fundamentalism, first, should be used we should be very clear how we use it, what we designate with it. We shouldn't limit it to this so-called hardline religious freaks or whatever, no. I mean there the basic fundamentalism today I think it's precisely this liberal trust in the market mechanism. In the sense of you just have to clear the space for market mechanisms to let it work, market mechanism, and the work will be done. The other problem that I see for me is that the second distinction I would make is that the fundamentalists that I I wrote about this in my last big book *Parallax
more or less automatic of racism as a problem of tolerance. Make a simple experiment, I did make it. Go and check on the web Martin Luther King's speeches. If there is a great figure of anti-racist fight, of course it's Martin Luther King. You will see that the word tolerance is practically absent there. For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance, but with what? Emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle. So, why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance rather than problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice and so on? You see my point? That's for me the problem. Racism is a problem, but to perceive racism as problem of tolerance, it's not automatic. In this innocent shift of perspective there is ideology. Why? I claim the reason is the liberal multiculturalist basic ideological operation, the let's call it culturalization of politics. Political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation are naturalized, neutralized into cultural differences. That is, into different ways of life which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, so they can only be tolerated. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as welfare state or various socialist projects. Tolerance is their post-political ersatz. And I think the same goes for harassment, another heavily connoted ideological term. Again, of course, I am very much against brutal harassments like rape, bigotry and so on and so on. The problem is that in today's ideological space real harassments, their perception, is irreducibly intertwined with the narcissistic notion of an individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his or her private space. So I claim that the way we in the so-called highly developed Western countries, if you look closely how we effectively use the word tolerance, I claim it de facto as a rule means its exact opposite. Tolerance means: don't harass me. Don't harass me means: don't come too close to me. You know, like, are you washed, deodorants, don't smoke. And in other words, tolerance means I am intolerant towards your over-proximity to me. Tolerance means: don't come too close, stay stay at the proper distance. So ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem, blurs a crucial line of separation. Okay, another of such classical ideological notions today I think is this celebration pseudo-Deleuzian of nomadic existence and so on and so on. Why? Because instead of enabling us to draw the crucial distinction, it blurs it. It brings together under the same cover, nomadic existence, two totally different phenomena. One is the nomadic existence of, well, to be frank somebody like me, an probably upper-middle class intellectual travelling nicely, sometimes with upgrades and so on, even business class. But then you know, to put me together with, let's say to be a little bit pathetic, a third-world person, refugee from a war-torn or starved country or starved population, and claim we are both nomadic. It's a little bit like to quote Gayatri Spivak to take a rich fat lady who is dieting and a starving third-world woman and say they are basically doing the same thing, eating less than. This ideology of tolerance can be reduced to the motto: love your neighbor as yourself. However, as we learned from Freud, neighbor is not simply another person with a rich inner life filled with stories she or he is telling himself herself. This is the counter-revolution attacks or what? Enemy never... You see? I told... Okay. This is what in Lacan we call intervention of the real and so on. Okay, let's go on. It's so usually when we say neighbor, multiculturalist ideology tells us: yes, we should know the other from within, we should not objectivize the other. The premise of liberal tolerance is thus that such a person whom we know from within cannot ultimately be an enemy. Or to quote a well-known motto, which I totally oppose incidentally, and but it sounds so sublime, so deep: "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." Okay, there is a nice literary example known to all of us. Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*. It is true, Mary Shelley does something that a conservative would never have done. In the central part of her novel she allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective. Her choice expresses the liberal attitude towards the freedom of speech at its most radical. Everyone's point of view should be heard. In *Frankenstein*, the monster is not a thing, a horrible object no one dares to confront. He is fully subjectivized. Mary Shelley moves inside his mind and asks: what is it like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted by society? The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself as a deeply hurt, desperate individual yearning for company and love. Now along these lines, practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, the authorities in Iceland, Ísland, Reykjavík capital, but also now I heard in some other European countries, maybe even here in the United States, I don't know about it, they are recently imposing a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the other. In order to fight the growing xenophobia, the result of the greater and greater number of immigrant workers in Western Europe as well as sexual intolerance, they are organizing what is called living libraries. Members of ethnic or sexual minorities, gays, immigrant East Europeans or blacks are paid to visit an Iceland or British or German family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams and so on. In this way, the exotic stranger who was perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of his or her own. So this sounds very nice. What's the problem? The problem is let's take this noble motto, "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard," and do something very vulgar in the sense of British empiricism. Let's just replace the general name with a concrete example. Would you also say: Hitler was our enemy because we did not really try to hear his story? And the problem is deeper here than it may appear. Namely, the automatic presupposition which we should abandon is that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, our inner authentic self-experience, is the point of truth. As if if you humanize the other, if you get him at his or her or their innermost, then you can say this is what they truly are. But I think that this precisely, if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, is that this precisely is what we should radically abandon. If from what we know about Hitler, if we take again the worst example, one of the worst, Hitler, I think that even for him probably the same as Hannah Arendt claimed for Eichmann would have held. Probably he was, as we know from the memoirs of his secretary who died only two years ago or when, he was he could have been quite kind, compassionate, he liked to serve cakes to small children and so on, gentle vegetarian and so on. And I am even quite sure that he was absolutely sincere in this. This is the important lesson of Hannah Arendt, that people who cause great evil we should not elevate them into sublime Byronesque demoniac figures of evil. The gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their acts is always immense. So again, the experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie. That's not the point of truth. So let me give you two extreme examples which I already developed in some of my earlier books. One Western, one Eastern. The West: Père Joseph. You maybe know who he was, the grey eminence of Cardinal Richelieu. And you should maybe read the book Aldous Huxley, *Grey Eminence* about Père Joseph. What fascinated Aldous Huxley so much about Père Joseph? It's that he was, well, the most brutal realpolitiker, real politician that you can imagine, organizing kidnappings, torture, dark plotting. He is basically the guy, if we simplify history, who is responsible for Hitler, you know, in one sense. In the Years War, in Europe, he was the one who made a pact between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against okay, Catholic Austria, in order to weaken Germany, to prevent the reunification of Germany. He succeeded. The result was the German delay, deferral of reunification which was the structural condition for Hitler. Okay, the worst guy you can imagine. But there is something quite fascinating. After he did this dirty work every evening, metaphorically, almost every evening, he was in permanent conversation, exchange of letters with some French convent with nuns, and the exchange of letter demonstrates that he was a practicing mystic, this same Père Joseph, and you cannot escape the conclusion: his mystical meditations are how should I put it simply, top of the top, absolutely at the level of Saint Teresa of whatever you want. And this is what fascinated Huxley. How is it possible that the same person who was ruthless, lying, poisoning, brutality itself, at the same time demonstrates a breathtakingly deep spiritual strength? Huxley's solution was a very simple one: was that there must be something in Western Christianity which enables this, opens up the possibility of this deviation. He thinks it's too much fixation on pain, fascination with the figure of Christ on the cross. So Huxley's solution: let's turn to Eastern spirituality. But there, I think the story is the same. I read a book which I often quote, Brian Victoria, he himself is a Zen Buddhist, *Zen at War*. Where you learn again, this is a book about how the Japanese Zen community related towards the Japanese war effort in the 30s and 40s. And you learn in this book that with really a couple, like five, six minor exceptions, millions of them not only totally supported Japanese war effort but even provided the justification of it. Let me mention a figure which I'm sure is well-known to many of you: Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, popular in the 60s here in the States and in all Europe as the great popularizer of Zen Buddhism. Maybe we should also read his text from the 30s and 40s where, for example, in justifying Japanese invasion of China, he said that the Chinese should learn that from the cosmic perspective the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love. Then he advises the attitude of a true warrior: that you should as it were overcome your ego and objectivize yourself, which makes killing much easier. He says like: when you kill a man, you shouldn't think I am pulling the trigger to hit him. You should say: I'm observing how my hand triggers a gun and when the bullet flows through the air, the enemy body stumbles upon it, so that instead of a substantial confrontation of me hurting another human being, you get some kind of an abstract, abstract ballet. So even more, Suzuki and others, if you want detailed proofs, read the book, demonstrate how he demonstrates how Suzuki even went a step further and claimed a very direct claim: that for the majority of ordinary people who don't have time for big meditations and so on and so on, to spend days on them or years, absolute obedience to military discipline it's the only practical way to achieve satori, the Zen Buddhist enlightenment. The idea is: when the commander shouts "shoot" and you shoot without thinking, you have overcome your false ego and so on and so on. So again, my point is not: look, Suzuki was a dirty militarist in reality. No, this would have been easy. My point is you got my point, to to accept this gap. That at the same time, he could have justified terrible crimes and at the same time he was absolutely authentic, authentic purveyor of spiritual experiences. So the lesson is clear. It concerns the difficulty to fully accept the gap between the inner authenticity of one's life and the ethics one practices. Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity. Let me engage now with a much more problematic maybe to some of you example, which I mean in with whole respect towards the victims, of course. When the United plane flight on September and other three planes were kidnapped, it is significant that that the focus of the phone calls to their closest relatives from the passengers when who knew they were about to die was always something like "I love you". However, a suspicion remains here. Is this desperate confession of love also not something of a sham? The same kind of fakery as the sudden turn to God and prayer of someone who suddenly faces the danger or proximity of death? In other words, you know I'm talking now about a very desperate moment. They knew they were dying, you make the last call to your wife, beloved, whatever, I love you. But I claim: why should this be authentic? There is no reason to think to think this is authentic. Another example came to my mind which is known to every old United States leftist. I remember when I was young, we were all taught the horror about the Rosenberg trial, you know, against the two of them, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of spying for Soviet Union. And we were fascinated by when their prison letters were translated, this sincerity, this purity. Even their advocates have to admit today, we know that maybe not both of them but he, Julius, I'm sorry we have to concede here to the devil the right when they are right, he was a spy. He was a spy. So this makes all the more crazy this as it were moral, as it were moral naivety, purity, how he was able to insist in his lie to the end. So I think that even when we are in this kind of a desperate situation, "now I know I'm going to die," I don't think we are authentic at that point. At that point we desperately construct a lie, the way we would like to be remembered and so on and so on. You know what would have been a truly radical ethical act here for me? Please don't take it in an obscene way, I mean it deadly seriously. Let's say I'm on a plane, of course this only holds if it's true, the implication. The the true act would have been, okay, I am on a plane, I have a chance to call my wife, I know in two minutes I will be dead. To call my wife and to say: "Listen darling, in in half a minute I will die but frankly, our marriage was hell, I'm glad," and so on. That would have been an act! That would have been something! Do you know to avoid this search, "oh my god now I must patch things up" and so on? At that point to assert, that would have been something. And incidentally I'm thinking, maybe even it would have been humanly the best thing, certainly for the wife it would have been easier to forget you in this way. Recall another tragic figure which really fascinated me from the Cold War era. Those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-communist hysteria in their own countries with the utmost sincerity. They were even ready to go to prison for their communist conviction and defense of Soviet Union, like I now read a biography of you know, the great black singer Paul Robeson, who was up to the end total defender of Soviet Union. Isn't it the very illusory nature of their belief which makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union makes the inner fragile beauty of their conviction all the more sublime. This leads us to an unexpected radical conclusion. It is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable terrifying reality of its point of reference. What if on the contrary such a blindness, such a violent gesture of exclusion, of refusing to see, such a disavowal of reality, such a fetishist attitude of "I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union, but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism" is an innermost constituent of every ethical stance? Immanuel Kant was already aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm propos the French Revolution in his late writing *Conflict of Faculties*. According to Kant, the Revolution's, French Revolution's true significance does not reside in what actually went on in Paris, much of which Kant was the first to concede was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion, but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe. A quote from Kant: "The recent revolution of a people which is rich in spirit may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity; it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators a taking of sides according to desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race." End of quote. So to translate this into Lacanian language: the real event, the dimension of the real, did not reside in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity. And mutatis mutandis I claim, does the same not apply to the Western admirers of the Soviet Union? The Soviet experience of building socialism in one country certainly did, to quote Kant, accumulate misery and atrocity, but it nevertheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators who were not themselves caught up in it. The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishist disavowal, of such a "I don't want to see something" as a condition of my sublime ethical enthusiasm? I think yes, every ethics with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis. To wonder at this fact is not a proper philosophical attitude. That is to say: what if that which appears as an inconsistency, as the failure to draw all the consequences from one's ethical attitude, what if this is on the contrary the positive condition of possibility of ethics? What if such an exclusion of some form of otherness from the scope of our ethical concerns is co-substantial with the very founding gesture of ethical universality? So that the more universal our ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion is. What the Christian all-inclusive attitude, Saint Paul's famous "there are no men or women, no Jew or Greek for me," what this attitude involves is a radical exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other particularistic religions, even in Islam, there is a place for others, they are tolerated even if they are looked upon with condescension. The Christian motto, "All men are brothers," however also means that those who do not accept to be my brothers are not men. In the early years of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini played on the same paradox when he claimed, I remember it plastically even now, in an interview for the Western press that the Iranian revolution is the most human in the entire history. Not one person was killed, he claimed in the Iranian revolution. When the surprised journalist asked him about the death penalties publicized in the very Iranian media, Khomeini calmly replied: "Those that we killed were not men but criminal dogs." I think this logic is somehow implied by every ethical universalism. So what then does ethical universality exclude? Which dimension? There is a wonderful passage in Marcel Proust's *Recherche*, *In Search of Lost Time*, in which Marcel, the figure in the novel, uses phone for the first time, speaking to his grandmother. Her voice heard alone apart from her body surprises, surprises Marcel. It is a voice of a frail old woman, not the gentle voice of the grandmother he remembers. And the point is that this experience then colors his entire perception of the grandmother. When later he visits her in person, he perceives her in a new way, as a strange mad old woman drowsing over her book, overburdened with age, flushed, coarse, vulgar, no longer the charming caring grandmother he remembered. This is how voice as autonomous partial object can affect our entire perception of the body to which it belongs. The lesson of this is that precisely the direct experience of the unity of a person, where voice seems to fit its organic whole, involves a necessary mystification. In order to penetrate to the truth of the person, one has to tear this unity apart, to focus on one of its aspects in its isolation, and then to allow this element to color our entire perception. This is what Freud I think meant when he opposed hermeneutics, when he wrote that one should interpret en détail, not en masse. To locate every feature of a human being into the totality of the person is to miss not only the meaning of this detail, but the true meaning of the whole itself. This is the very radical lesson of psychoanalysis I think that if I want really to understand you, no, I shouldn't see you as an whole person. I should do something like what Marcel experiences there, isolate one feature where when I isolate this feature I see the vulgarity, the whatever, and then let this feature color all of it. And to put it in back to Lacan, Lacanian terms, or even theological terms, in this way I pass from neighbor in the simple sense of semblant, of one who is like me, to the neighbor in this more radical dimension. This would be maybe for psychoanalysis the the expression of a neighbor. There is some someone whom you think you know him or her perfectly, person with whom you spent decades and so on. But doesn't it often happen that at a certain point this person does something, you catch an evil gaze, a nervous gesture, a some vulgarity, unexpected brutality, and all of a sudden you ask herself, "My God, is this really the person that I knew?" At that point you encounter the neighbor. So when Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the Judeo-Christian injunction to love your neighbor, they refer precisely to the dark impenetrable abyss which is a neighbor. Beneath the neighbor as my mirror image, the one who is like me, with whom I can empathize, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness, of someone about whom I ultimately do not know anything. Can I really know who he is? How can I be sure that his words are not a mere pretense? This is why Lacan applies to the neighbor the term "Thing". The thing, das Ding, used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction. The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's *The Shining* in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who with an evil grin goes on to slaughter his entire family. This is a neighbor. Since a neighbor is primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life or rather way of enjoyment disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when the neighbor comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. As Peter Sloterdijk, with whom politically I disagree but from time to time he says something penetrating, as Sloterdijk put it: more communication means at first above all more conflict. This is why, that's another thing problem that I have with this, we should hear everybody's his or there's story from within and so on. This is why I don't think I think this is a typical super-ego injunction. "No, you should understand everybody." It's not possible, so then you feel guilty, you are never up to the level. No, I think that how to put it very brutally but I think this is the only honest position, I don't want to understand everybody. I don't care about majority of the people. I think what we need today when we are different cultures violently thrown together, I think we need as Sloterdijk put it, a new code of discretion. We need more alienation. We need to learn to ignore each other. I don't think we need more to understand each other. This is again an impossible task which makes us forever guilty, "but did you really understand how did you know what I meant with that smile" and so on. We should this is typical liberal blackmail which we should which we should reject. Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this neighbor... sorry, the status of this neighbor would have been, and this is I think there you see clearly politically the limit of this. Let's understand the neighbor would be the deadlock of that Truth and Reconciliation procedure in South Africa. Of course I sympathize with it. But again, it has its limits. You know the wager was very honorable human one. Instead of engaging in revenge and so on, why don't we just offer to all Apartheid torturers the chance of confronting their victims, openly describing what they did, and in this way we guarantee them, if they come and confess they will be pardoned. The catch is that this procedure implies, or rather only works, when we can count how to put it on a minimum minimum ethical responsibility and dignity of the torturer. What if what happens is what according to my sources did happen, at least a couple of times, that you got an Apartheid murderer who torturer who came there, confronted his black victims, and with a cynical smile said: "Yes, don't you remember? I tortured you in this way, in that way, I confess everything. Okay, haha, now I'm over." And he perfectly followed the rules. The problem was that this implication was not met. Which is why based on this because the motto there in South Africa was "We forgive, we don't" sorry "We forgive but we will not forget it." I think this is a very limited motto. I'm opposed to it, it's a fake. First, again, it has limits. It works only at a certain level. Would you be ready to say this for Hitler or Stalin? "We forgive you dear Hitler, tell us the story of Holocaust, we will not forget it, but we forgive." No, I think that when we are dealing with really radical crimes, I'm almost tempted to propose the opposite motto: "I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you." This is I was told in in Korea, South Korea, how the people there spontaneously, a friend told me this, relate to Japanese crimes. I mean they are still traumatized by what the Japanese did to Koreans under the occupation in World War II and before. The treatment was so brutal, you know, tens of thousands of women forced into prostitution, not to speak about other things. The idea is: it's so horrible that for our psychological sanity we cannot afford to remember it, to think about it. So let's forget it, but we will never forgive you. I think this is a much more correct attitude when you are dealing when you are dealing with a neighbor. So again, the first conclusion is that neighbor, in this sense of the abyss of otherness which is simply the core of subjectivity, is the limit to ethical universality. Which is why all these formulas of love your neighbor as yourself are an impossible demand. Underlying this love is always fear. The predominant way to maintain a distance towards this inhuman neighbors' intruding proximity are customs, habits. What are habits? I would like here to repeat an old joke and maybe known to some of you and refer to the very important here in the United States philosophical debate which took place some four years ago in March The philosopher in question was Donald Rumsfeld, you remember, when he engaged in that amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. You remember, I quote him: "There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know." The it means very simply like: I don't know, I am now in Boston and I know that I know this, clear. Then he went on: "There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we know we don't know." Also it's clear, like: I know there are probably some cars in front of this building, but I don't know how many cars are there, but I know that I don't know this. Then Rumsfeld went on: "But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we don't know we don't know." It's clear what he meant, that was his argument. It's not only weapons of mass destruction which we at least know that we don't know. What if Saddam even has some weapons about the existence of which we don't even absolutely know, so we don't even know what we don't know? There may be something totally unexpected there. But did you notice the what's problematic here in his reasoning? That there is a fourth term which is missing. Known knowns, things we know that we know. Known unknowns, things we know that we don't know. Unknown unknowns, things we don't know that we don't know even. And something is missing, which is the most interesting category. Not the not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things that we know that we don't know, but things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious. And that's why you are in trouble in Iraq I claim. Because what the American politics didn't take into account is not some mystery there in Iraq or whatever, but the to use this inappropriate name, the the unconscious prejudices and so on, all these ideological prejudices, habits and so on, which determined the American politics and military activity without American soldiers and politicians even being aware of it. The problem was here I think, the problem was not that you missed something, the CIA didn't do well the analysis up there. The problem were all these prejudices, usually racist, cultural prejudices, political miscalculations and so on and so on, which then brought the result in which we are. And this unknown knowns are located in habits. What are habits? I'm more and more convinced that habits are an extremely interesting dialectical category. They are not as simple as it appears. Okay, we know that every community in order to function from a philosopher from a university department to whole nations needs some rules. People obey rules. However, I think these rules are never simple. It's never "these are the rules, if you obey them you are in, otherwise you are out." The catch is that every rules, for structural reasons which in Lacanian terms can be nicely explained as the inconsistency of the big other and so on, every rules need meta-rules, higher level rules, which tell you how to relate to explicit rules. The problem is that rules are never simply rules. We have often rules which explicitly prohibit something, but the message between the lines is solicitation. Like most of the sexual prohibitions work in this way. When father tells a son "don't mess with girls," it's basically "do it but discreetly, prove me that you are a man" or whatever. And also many social rules are like this. I don't know when I was in the army and so on. It was always that often a prohibition was a direct call: "violate the rule in a discreet way." But then, an even more interesting reversal is the opposite one, the opposite gap, when you don't have an explicit prohibition which between the lines you are called to violate, but you are explicitly allowed to do something but the message between the lines is "you shouldn't do it." Like you are given a certain freedom on condition that you do not use it. And I think this category is very useful in, for example, I will not be too long, my god, time is running. Let me give you a nice example. Soviet ex-Soviet Union, Russia was in deep crisis in the 90s in the Yeltsin era. From what friends told me, the main problem was precisely the collapse of these implicit unspoken rules. Like in old Soviet Union, you knew where you stand. You knew what do you have to do when a policeman stops you, how much how can you bribe him. You know when you should take authority seriously. You know when something was offered to you like "we live in free society, there is freedom of speech," you knew what this means, that you shouldn't do it, it was clear. And then in the Yeltsin years, it simply wasn't clear. This is what fascinated me in old socialist regimes, how these implicit rules covered everything. For example in my country, ex-Yugoslavia. You wanted a free medical service, you wanted a quality operation done fast? It was exactly codified for what type of operation, how much money, bribery to what doctor, how much to the nurse, how much to the top doctor and so on. The implicit rules were clear. The most elementary level of these habits is made, and this I think are rules at its purest, is made of so-called empty gestures, offers made or meant to be rejected. For example, a friend from Japan told me that in Japan workers have the right to days holiday every year. However, you are expected to use maximum half of this amount. So I, stupid as I am, I asked them "okay, why don't you simply put days?" They told me "you are an idiot, you don't understand it." And of course they were right. They were... what do you... that's the mystery of rules. Why this type of exchange? Let me give you another example which we have in our country, in my country, or in Europe, I don't know if you have it here. Let's say I compete with my friend for a job. I lose, he wins. It's considered polite for a friend to tell me: "Listen, I know you deserved it really, so I will step down and you get the job." But of course I'm expected to say "no," like "no, no, you have it" and so on. And that's the mystery of it. Although it's clear to both of us that he doesn't really mean it. It's in a way a sincere lie. We both know it's a fake, but it works. Sometimes you can even save a friendship. And I think that every procedure of of exchange, especially like apology, works like this. Let me in the American style of talk shows give you a confession. This happened to me with my good theoretical enemy, personal friend, I hope I'm allowed to say this, Judith Butler. When we were last summer together in some summer seminar, I, vulgar person as I am, I did something brutal. I used referring to her and to lesbians, unnatural bitches—I even prefer to forget what kind of name. Then I noticed she was a little bit hurt. Okay. So, life is full of surprises. So I called her immediately afterwards and told her, "Listen, I'm very sorry, you know," blah blah whatever. And she was very kind of course, she said: "Listen Slavoj, I know what person you are," now this was so nice kind of you know, "and of course I know you didn't mean it in any evil way, so please forget about it, you don't owe me an apology." Now what's the catch here? You got the catch. The catch is that she was able to say "you don't owe me an apology" only after I did offer an apology. And only in this way it worked. If I were to do what would have been logical and the way my evil mind works, I immediately wanted to do it, my idea was then to tell her "Okay, if it's not needed, I take it back the apology," no? No, it would have been impolite. On the other hand, if she were to say "Oh finally you did apologize! Yeah, yeah, you were nasty, you should apologize," it would also not be correct. You get it how something which logically if you analyze it it's meaningless. I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary, but in this very very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary. That's a symbolic gesture at its purest. This is what habits are about. But habits can be more complicated. The true mystery of habits is that it's not only that something is prohibited, but that prohibition itself is prohibited. In the sense that it's prohibited to how should I put it, to announce it publicly. I read this the description of this scene in some book on on Stalinism. It's a wonderful simple example. Imagine a dream for me, we are now in Moscow '36, '37. Central committee, okay, I am Stalin. I give a speech. Then one of you stands up and criticizes me, attacks me. Okay, everybody knows that the next day the question would be who saw that guy the last who... No? Okay. But then imagine that another guy would stand up and attack the first guy who attacked me, Stalin, and would say "Are you crazy? We don't attack comrade Stalin in Soviet Union! Why are you doing this?" I claim that this second guy would disappear even faster than the first guy. That is to say, it wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. This is the level at which customs function. And it interests it interests me more and more the way all this functions, namely this implicit, let's call it the implicit obscene underside of prohibitions which one shouldn't announce publicly, of transgressions which remain implicit. For example, a very touchy example, problematic: the Catholic Church pedophilia. I claim it's it's definitely this kind of inherent transgression of the Catholic Church. You cannot say the way the church is saying, "Okay, priests are humans like everybody else, of course some of them are pedophiliac, we we cannot control it," and so on. No, I even know some examples from a journalist who did research in my own country in Slovenia, that of priests who when they joined church were how should I put it, straight heterosexuals, and it was the institution itself which made them pedophiliac. So this is something, this is what interests me, how institutions have this kind of a secret collective unconscious, not in the Jungian sense, but in sense of an implicit symbolic structure which is publicly disavowed but nonetheless constitute a a disavowed constituent of their identity. Which is why typically the church reacts to these cases in this ultra-protective way. Okay, so and I think that these implicit rules, these unwritten prohibited habits which control us but they are prohibited to mention publicly, this is where change is the most difficult. For example, from my experience of the army when I served in '75, '76 in the Yugoslav army, this was my basic experience there, how on the one hand explicitly the military community was extremely homophobic. If somebody was discovered to be homosexual he was beaten every night, totally ignored and so on and so on. But that's only one side of the story. The other side of the story is that unbelievable to what extent the entire army life was penetrated with homosexual innuendos. Like for example, even to say hello in the morning we didn't say hello, we said "I'll smoke yours" or something like this like, vulgarly. It was unbelievable how again the explicit prohibition was sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a thwarted implicit homosexuality. The difficult thing is to do to change things here. That is to say, to change things at the level of what Lacan called the big Other. And now I'm coming, if you allow me, I'm a little bit more please, I you are my super-ego Irena. The problem is the big Other. That's the tragedy today. We conservatives are telling us we live in a godless era, blah blah blah. No, I think if anything we believe more than ever, but we objectivize onto habits onto the big Other our beliefs. What do I mean by this? What is the Lacanian big Other? Of course, the most obvious figure of the big Other is the big Other in the sense of God, the guarantee of meaning, some big symbolic institution. Here, so that I will not say only bad things about Christianity, here I think precisely every leftist materialist should fully appreciate the what in bombastic terms we call Judeo-Christian legacy, whose message I think is precisely basically there is no big Other. In what sense do I mean this? I think the text, the first criticism of ideology, okay is the book of how do you call the guy who was screwed up by God? Job. The book of Job. What's so interesting? Why is this the first criticism of ideology? Remember what happens. Things look really bad for Job, he loses his wife, his goats, whatever, everything. And what happens then? Okay, it's a traumatic situation, loss. Then, do you remember, three, I think there are three or four, three theological friends came, each of them explaining, trying to convince Job that his suffering, his misfortunes have a deeper meaning. That's the point. It's not so much that he is guilty, that's only the first theological friend says "God is just so if you are suffering even if you don't know what you must have done something." Then others give more refined accounts, like maybe God is testing you, but the message is clear: "You must this has a meaning. It's not just a contingent misfortune." And then comes the beauty. When at the end you remember God comes, his message is "No, all that the three theological friend says is lie, everything that you said is true." That is to say God's answer is unbelievable, it's truly as my favorite theologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: "God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist." God's defense is not "No, it looks to you that it's meaningless catastrophe but it has a deeper meaning." No, God, you know when God then goes into this crazy rhetorics of "but what about did you see how the sun rises? Did you see how when it rains it can rain on a desert where nobody needs it?" and so on. God's message is: "You are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like this." It's as if God concedes that his own creation is somehow meaningless, doesn't have a cover in meaning. Which is why I think we should effectively read Job as prefiguring Christ. Because I think, to be brutal and to read the Bible, now I'm giving you a very condensed version of a longer theological argument, what dies on the cross is precisely this God which is the guarantee of a deeper meaning. Here I think Christianity has still a very radical message. What do I mean by this? You know that disgusting for me at least metaphor of evil as a stain. Like, if you look at a picture, if you look too close at the picture you see only the stain. But if you look from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as a stain is effectively just an element which contributes to the global harmony. So the idea is what to our finite perspective appears as a stain, evil, really from the omnipotent all-seeing divine gaze, for that gaze is part of a global harmony. Of course now the problem is, can we really then say Holocaust, Gulag or not just the usual suspects for example, and this always shocks me, here you can see the falsity of all this humanitarianism and so on. My God, everybody knows what is going on now. According to Time Magazine cover story last summer, in the last ten years at least five million people died unnatural death in Congo. But they are not in, so nobody cares. So okay, Congo, Holocaust, Gulag and so on. Is it are we ready to say "No, this appears only in our perspective because of our over-proximity as a stain, but really it contributes to global meaning, beauty of the universe" and so on? I think that Christ marks the moment when you no longer can say this. The death of Christ means precisely the death of that God up there which guarantees meaning. Because what comes after Christ is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is simply the community of believers. The meaning of the death of Christ for me is: there is no big Other, I throw myself into the universe, it's up to you. As every deep theologist knows, the message of Christ is not: "trust God," but "God trusts you, it's up to you, up to your freedom." It's a very materialist message if you want. Okay, that's one aspect. But then there is the opposite aspect of the big Other which is much more interesting. The aspect of appearances. You know the classical joke, I used it three-four times, but now I will give a different twist to it. That famous joke about you know, a man who thinks he is a grain, a seed, and okay is cured but then goes out of is dismissed from the psychiatric ward and then immediately comes back and says: "I encountered a a chicken." And the doctor tells him: "But why are you afraid? You know now that you are not the seed and the chicken will not eat you." He says: "Okay, I know it, but does the chicken know it? That I'm no longer..." Okay. Now what I want to do now is to claim how this is a joke, but it depicts a very real a mechanism. A whole country fell apart so that the in order to protect the chicken's ignorance. It's Yugoslavia. Namely, what it's clear now from some memoirs that they published is that already in the early mid-70s it was clear to the inner circle nomenclature that the country is in deep economic trouble. But Tito, lifelong president, was old and dying. So they made a collective decision that Tito should die happy. So they prolonged the false the false welfare by by collecting incredible debts in a couple of years, fifteen for Yugoslavia fifteen more than fifteen billions of dollars, so that the 70s went so-so relatively well. When Tito died economic crisis did strike and so on. So you see it's literally this logic: we know it, the chicken should not the chicken should not get it. And I claim this is ultimately what culture is. It's not "we don't know," it is as if for a gaze of some big Other there is always a chicken which shouldn't know it. This chicken can be a children. For example, how do you let's say you are one of the parents, you are fighting with your partner, blah blah blah. How do you measure the amount of your civilization? It's if you are still able to say: "But the child shouldn't know it. No, let's cover it, let's keep it secret from from the child." Of course the tragedy is that usually the child does know it, but pretends not to notice, not to hurt you and so on. But the mystery is then that it works. I mean, appearances are a big mystery here. Again, sorry for my old communist obsessions, an incredible story about appearances from Soviet Union again, it's here you can see the theological dimension of Stalinism. In '53 in the summer, Beria, the secret police boss, was arrested. At that very point the first volume of the new edition of Soviet Encyclopedia appeared, where ABC... Beria. There was a page on Beria in it. What happened? This was printed just before Beria's arrest, so Beria was celebrated as a great leader. What then happened after Beria's arrest was that every subscriber, and we are talking about over two million subscribers, he got one leaf of paper which fitted exactly that page and he was ordered to cut out that page and put in the new page, which re-established perfect continuity. The previous entry went on, then instead of Beria which was almost two pages, they replaced it with Bering Strait, you know, between Alaska and so on, with some photos and so on. So ask yourself a simple question. Whom were they trying to deceive? For whom were they trying to re-establish this continuity? As if you know nothing should be the the appearances should not be disturbed. Not for any empirical person. There was no empirical chicken who shouldn't know. The chicken was the big Other, because every empirical person knew it because he had to do it, to cut it out, put it in and so on. Now that you will not say that I'm just making fun of Eastern Europe, you in United States had the same, I know at least one wonderful example. You know of course Hitchcock's *Vertigo*. Remember the scene after Scotty saves Madeleine from when she jumps into the the Golden Gate bay there beneath the bridge and takes her home, okay, undresses her, puts her into his bed? Then you have in his living room a long panning shot showing him, then the camera passes the kitchen sink above which her underwear is drying up. And then the camera passes on, shows the door of the bedroom where she is. There is only one problem with this scene. Put if you don't believe me rent or if you have the video, put the freeze on that very moment when you see the underwear above the kitchen sink. It's not underwear. There's just abstract pieces of cloth like like towels and so on, no underwear. You know why? I read in a book about *Vertigo*. The reason is that these were the last years of Hays Code censorship. They insisted that it shouldn't be underwear. Because if it's really underwear, it would have been a proof that Scotty saw her naked. This is not allowed, so it shouldn't be underwear. But it's the same mystery as with Stalin and Beria. Now whom were they trying to protect? Because we viewers, we all automatically assume that we see underwear. There is so in other words there is there is a big Other here. So, if you allow me a little bit more please, I yeah, yeah, yeah. I would like now to give you three examples, okay I will try to condense it a little bit, a couple of examples of how this defense against the traumatic what happens when this protective screen of habits disintegrates, how do you protect yourself of the over-proximity of the of the neighbor? One interesting example here would have been pornography. I claim that the role of this stupid protective screen is there played by the stupidity of the story. Because the problem of pornography would have been of course hardcore pornography, the over-proximity of the neighbor, intrusive. Which is why I think to block too much of identification, they do something which did always surprise me as incredibly vulgar, but I think there is a necessity in it. Did you notice if you watch hardcore pornography how incredibly stupid the story, the narrative is which introduces the as if as if somehow it's the choice: you see it all but the story should be openly ridiculous? Like I don't know, I remember when I was young I saw one which you know, a plumber comes, fixes a hole in the sink and then the housewife said, "I have another hole to be fixed" and it's indescribable. Now people are telling me: but today this is falling apart. You have this, especially French Catherine Breillat, *Romance* and so on, films which try to combine really engaged melodrama with hardcore pornography. No, I think censorship did strike back with even stronger oppression. The latest fashion I was told is so-called Gonzo, Gonzo hardcore. Which is what? Which is kind of like we talk about embedded journalism, embedded hardcore, which means that actors don't even pretend that they are part of the story, they with their comments, ironic grimaces and so on, they directly address the camera. They don't pretend. And I think that this precisely is censorship. They fear that the proximity of the neighbor would have been too direct and so on and so on. Okay, the next example but I will skip it I wanted to use here is is torture. The way to deal in order to deal with torture, we are now in the middle of the process where torture is being rehabilitated, how there the dimension of the neighbor should disappear. And finally, my royal example as it were would be that of anti-semitism. Because if there is in our Western tradition one epitome of the disturbing neighbor who is always too close and so on, it is the Jew. So let me make my position very clear here. Of course I totally reject those leftists who think that because of the international situation, all the suffering of the Palestinians and so on, one should make compromises and tolerate a little bit of anti-semitism. Like, one should understand them, you know, they... No, I think that anti-semitism is for me the zero-level ideology. You don't make compromises there. To put it quite metaphysically: it's always bad. But something very strange is happening later, sorry, is happening recently. I think that we are witnessing a strange new mode of anti-semitism, and before you start shouting I will give you a proof at least wait to the end of my argument, Zionist anti-semitism. Why? This idea came to me when I was in Israel with my friends, like my film maker Udi Aloni. We had a debate and then he was ferociously attacked by hardline Zionists there. What did strike me is how the the criticism reproduced all the usual clichés against the Jews in the West. The reproach was: you just pretend to be one of us, but you are really uprooted, you don't you are not solidary enough with the with the State of Israel, you are really too cosmopolitan, you don't have roots, you are not identified with your community, you think only about only about commercial success and so on and so on. In other words, what did shock me is how the the Zionist critique of those Jews who do not solidarize fully with the State of Israel takes over precisely all the standard clichés, main clichés in the West against against the Jews. If you don't believe me, do something. Go on the internet and look under www.masada2000.org/list_a. It's a Zionist website where you get the list of what they call self-hating Jews. It's a shocking document. Why? Because first the term they use is something like "Self-hating internal terrorist shit," like they call them shit. Point two, and you find there many of our friends Judith Butler is there of course, Avital Ronell, four thousand. What shocked me is that every person is described in an extremely aggressive way, the photo chosen is usually one that makes you look like a freak, ridiculous, and on the top of it, wherever they have wherever they could have got it, you have email address, a solicitation to hate mail, of course. But the impression is really "My God, we are back at the like anti-semitism, you know, the list of shitty Jews." It's precisely the same the same logic. So again, here we have the problem with the neighbor and so on. So if you allow me just three minutes more, I would like to conclude with a question which maybe bothers you. So does this mean we should just in a kind of a Levinasian way respect our neighbors, no universality, just let's keep a distance and so on? No, there is a positive universal ethics which does take into account this. What kind of ethics? Ethics I would say without morality. But this I don't mean the Nietzschean point when morality means how you relate to others and ethics means are you faithful to yourself, to your existential choice and so on. I mean something else. For me, to use Schiller's opposition of naive and sentimental, morality is sentimental. You do something but you feel good doing it, no? Like, you know, when you pay for charity for the African kid you think isn't it nice, there is a happy kid there because I sent him ten dollars a month whatever. Ethics is much more ruthless. And I would like just to finish to give you a brief example. You find it in the bookstores, one of the defining novels for me by a Hungarian writer, now an old lady who emigrated from Switzerland... from Hungary in '56, Agota Kristof, Agota Kristof. I like the name, it looks as if some stupid Eastern European mispronounced Agatha Christie, no? She wrote a trilogy *The Notebook*, *The Proof*, *The Third Lie*. It tells the story of two young boys, twins, living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian border town during the last years of the World War II and the early years of communism. These twins are absolutely immoral. They lie, blackmail, kill. But I think they stand for absolute ethics. Let me give you a couple of examples. One day they meet in a forest a starved deserter and bring him some things he asked them for. Then that's their narration: "When we come back with the food and blanket, he (the deserter) says: 'You are very kind.' We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all.'" I think this is a wonderful truly Christian ethical stance. You just do what is needed, you don't do it because it's good, you do it because the other needs it, because it has to be done. And no matter what the other asks you. For example one night the twins find themselves sleeping in the same bed with a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning the twins awake and want to leave bed. But the officer holds them back. Dialogue: "Don't move, keep sleeping," says the officer. The boys said: "We want to urinate. We have to go." "Don't go, do it here," we ask "where?" He says: "On me, yes, don't be afraid, piss on my face." We do it. Then we go out into the garden because the bed is all wet. Like, totally cold normal, the guy wants to piss on his face, what's the problem? Why not? This is the true work of love, I think. Then the twins' closest friend is the priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them and their clothes and plays erotic games with them and so on. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp. One of the Jews asks them "Please, bread." The housekeeper, the young girl, shows a little bit of bread, then smiles and eats herself the bread. The boys decide to punish her. They stole from the German officer a little bit of ammunition and put her put into the kitchen stove so that her face explodes and disfigures her. It's considered simple ethical act, I would have done absolutely the same. Then the two brothers blackmail the good priest. Because they have a young girl who is harassed by the whole village, poor girl, and the girl needs help to survive. So what do they do? They go to the priest and said: "We heard a story that you were once playing with a small girl." The priest said it's not true. And the boys said: "We don't care, but the girl needs money so if you don't give us so much money every week, we will tell this to the whole village." Then the priest said, I quote it: "It's monstrous! Have you any idea what you are doing?" The boys' answer: "Yes sir, we are blackmailing you." "At your age it's deplorable!" The boys' answer: "Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to do this. But Harelip (the girl) and her mother absolutely need money." I would do the same. There is nothing personal in this blackmail. Later they even become close friends with the priest, and when the girl can survive on her own, learns to work and so on, they go to the priest and said "thanks very much now we no longer need any money." They tell the priest, quote: "Keep it, you have given enough. We took your money when it was necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip, to the girl, we have also taught her taught her to work." And the same when the mother the grandmother asked them to to ask them to kill her, they killed her and so on. That's where I stand. If you would ask me what kind of ethics I would like to follow, it's precisely this: an ethical monster without empathy, doing simply the duty the duty to help others with blind spontaneity but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction. I claim that with more people like these two monstrous children, the world would have been a pleasant place to stay. It is only in such a world that we would be really alive. You know the old religious question: is there life after death? Wolf Biermann, the German in the old days dissident poet, has a wonderful poem where he asks the true question. He says: "The true question is not: is there life after death, but is there life before death?" And his answer is: "Okay, only with certain attitude" and so on. And I think these two children with their ruthless, brutal ethics: you do it, it's needed, you blackmail the priest, it's needed, you kill, friend asks you to piss on his face, what's the problem, you do it. That's what I would like to be. Thanks very much. Now we can pretend now we can pretend that we are in a democracy for for some time. So we have approximately half an hour for questions. So I would like to ask everybody to make them as short as possible so that we can have as many people as possible asking the questions. Okay? Thank you. Very enjoyable. But, go to but directly, yeah. No, I don't have a but. I have a question. Um, how um, when you think about fundamentalism as a big Other, or? No, almost the opposite. Opposite. Okay. Is this the question? Or you want to elaborate it? No, I want you to elaborate it because if you look at... By fundamentalism you mean what we usually mean by fundamentalism, so-called religious fundamentalism or what? That's only one of many so I don't know, I'll leave it up to you. No I just want to get the location of your question. Um well, there's fundamentalisms, I mean, there's a kind of a secular fundamentalism that you saw in the 50s, maybe in Eastern Europe... Ah yes! Yeah. So, I mean there's different ones. But I think people think about religious fundamentalism. Um do you do you have a theory or an account of the rise of it in the 70s? In a particular location of the West in a certain sense or or why this time and not another time? I just wonder what you think. No, what I would have done first is I first the first thing here I would apply my own theory the way I began to this. First, I I always try to ask are these designation to be taken for what they are? I think that what people call fundamentalism often covers two very much opposed phenomena. I think that what we usually refer to as fundamentalism, you know, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, they kind that that kind of people, I would even deny to them the term fundamentalism. You know how I have a very naive naive criterion of defending what I'm really tempted to even claim is authentic fundamentalism from this kind of fake fundamentalism. How do you relate, is there envy or not? Let me be very naive, I don't have any illusions about Tibetan Buddhism, but Tibetan Buddhists that I've met or Amish—again I don't have illusions about Amish, according to some statistics they have the highest rate of family incest—but they are authentic fundamentalists. You know what did strike me when I met them? They don't have this typical religious fake fundamentalism obsession with what the others' gaze are doing or what. They they are very benevolent, they don't have this hatred towards the others, they don't have the attitude of envy. They live in peace with others. I think the fake fundamentalism is this which is secretly secretly fascinated by the sinful ways of the others and so on and so on. So my next criticism would have been that if you look at it closely, so-called fundamentalism Pat Robertson, Falwell and their gang, Jimmy Swaggart, not to mention the really big ones and so on. But isn't it that the way they deliver their message undermines the message? In the sense that although the way they deliver their message is precisely an instance of what they criticize: a big ego trip and so on. Now, a more difficult question. I totally also agree with you that it's a misnomer that this is not the only fundamentalism we have. I think even that the... you know, what surprised me were the violent reactions to I don't think she's a great theoretician but it's an interesting book, Naomi Klein's new book *Shock Therapy*. What's the important... maybe I'm not saying she is a great theoretician, but it surprised me how violent the reactions were to the book. Why? Because she touched an important point: how let's call it liberal economic fundamentalism, how it is not ready to admit how "okay, we have markets, they work, but in order they work," whatever, "how but in order for the markets to work you need quite a lot of extra-market violence." You know, my this is the big maybe the biggest utopia of our time I claim: it's the market utopia. Which is why for me it's not the official story goes like that: the 90s, I mean is the end of utopias, finally we learn to renounce big utopias, plans to reconstruct society, blah blah blah, we learn to accept the lesser evil, no, and so on and so on and so on. But I think the true utopia were the 90s, the the Fukuyama utopia. And you know it's easy to make fun of Fukuyama, that idiot who thought the end of history, but basically even most of my so-called leftist friends, we are all Fukuyamaists de facto. Most of the leftists that I know, they silently accept the basic Fukuyama premise which is: capitalism, okay, capitalism with a human face and liberal democracy, are the frame which we cannot overcome. All we can do is make it a little bit more tolerant, better, and so on and so on and so on. So this is for me this is for me the true fundamentalism. It doesn't take into account the extent to which market in order to function—and already there is a lot of violence, millions losing job and so on and so on. There is a much more invisible objective violence of the market, but even if we discount this, market mechanism needs quite a lot of subjective violence. I mean, these are the big debates. For example, the well-known English of German origins philosopher Ralph Dahrendorf called this the problem of the valley of tears, like: democracy functions after you have a certain level of development of economy. But to get to that point, you need twenty years at least of authoritarianism, dictatorship. He openly says this, he says: "look at the third world countries," okay third world, outside the Western Europe, "which were are economically successful: South Korea, Chile, and so on." His conclusion is: they had to go through Pinochet or military dictatorship. But the problem is deeper today for me. If there is a lesson to be learned from China today, it's that because typically those who have sympathies for this dictatorship, why don't they also support China then today? China is doing exactly this in a much larger amount. The irony is that... I know but the problem is the following one for me. Because they have still this old liberal hope that China will get caught in the same dynamic when they still have this trust that after some ten–twenty years that sooner or later capitalism does bring with itself democracy the way we understand it. I think the lesson of China and so-called Asian values capitalism is not. I think that's the true danger today. I think that capitalism is entering a new stage where no longer democracy the way even in this formal limited way we used it democracy is needed. Democracy is needed. So in this sense, so that I don't get lost, in this sense I totally agree with you about how the term fundamentalism, first, should be used we should be very clear how we use it, what we designate with it. We shouldn't limit it to this so-called hardline religious freaks or whatever, no. I mean there the basic fundamentalism today I think it's precisely this liberal trust in the market mechanism. In the sense of you just have to clear the space for market mechanisms to let it work, market mechanism, and the work will be done. The other problem that I see for me is that the second distinction I would make is that the fundamentalists that I I wrote about this in my last big book *Parallax
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View*. What I spoke with some fundamentalists in this narrow sense really. What surprised me is that they are truly a threat to belief—no, not in this sense authentic
View*. What I spoke with some fundamentalists in this narrow sense really. What surprised me is that they are truly a threat to belief—no, not in this sense authentic
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but in a
but in a
Slavoj Žižek
much more formal sense. I think there the way I understood
much more formal sense. I think there the way I understood
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them, their mystery is that they treat they treat religious statement like "Christ has arisen from the dead" and so on, as simple positive knowledge statements. Which is why, for example, let's take the Turin
them, their mystery is that they treat they treat religious statement like "Christ has arisen from the dead" and so on, as simple positive knowledge statements. Which is why, for example, let's take the Turin
Slavoj Žižek
Shroud—I like these mysteries,
Shroud—I like these mysteries,
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you know, is it or not. Every genuine Catholic is horrified
you know, is it or not. Every genuine Catholic is horrified
Slavoj Žižek
by the idea that it may be authentic. Because if it is, you immediately
by the idea that it may be authentic. Because if it is, you immediately
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have very delicate problems.
have very delicate problems.
Slavoj Žižek
Like: okay, then we do the DNA test and then the question
Like: okay, then we do the DNA test and then the question
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who is the father of Christ becomes a very empirical question. And to be cynical you would probably discover that some probably Arab slave of the Joseph family no had something to do... I mean, you never know into what you get, no. But I spoke with some fundamentalists who are usually very pro-science. They say no, they even have theory. They say God doesn't have DNA so it will be Mary's DNA redoubled just two times the same and so on. You know what I mean? The
who is the father of Christ becomes a very empirical question. And to be cynical you would probably discover that some probably Arab slave of the Joseph family no had something to do... I mean, you never know into what you get, no. But I spoke with some fundamentalists who are usually very pro-science. They say no, they even have theory. They say God doesn't have DNA so it will be Mary's DNA redoubled just two times the same and so on. You know what I mean? The
Slavoj Žižek
horrible thing is that for them again religious which is why true in this narrow sense religious fundamentalists, they love science. They they simply they basically reduce religious statement to similar positive statements of science and I think that in this way even the true greatness of religious belief is lost. As every authentic religious person knows, belief is an existential wager, belief is not believe in facts. Belief is always a decision. Like, belief is that I say all people have the same dignity and it's in a way a crazy thing, because when I look at you at you, to put it in simple rational terms I can say "but I need more than you, you more, why?" I mean, this is a pure this is a crazy decision which I accept in in a way. There must be something crazy, absurd in an authentic belief. So the paradoxical conclusion for me would have been that this kind of anti-Darwinian fundamentalists and so on, they are not a threat to science, they are a threat to authentic religious belief. The third problem I have here is that what do we mean by belief today more generally? I think that again what I wanted but I lost the thread to develop a little bit one of the lines that I had to drop out like... Listen for me even New York Times was kind enough to publish a text of mine but now the story goes even later about that I love the Chinese because it's mad. You remember that two months ago they passed a law regulating reincarnation, no? And I love this, that it's not a joke like, you know, if you want to reincarnate there you have to fill out a form: where, how. And then I can even imagine, I have this evil imagination how some bureaucrat in Beijing says: "Ah you want to reincarnate as a lama, sorry, all posts are taken. There are some insects free, some dogs there, make your choice what." It's quite but now they're playing the game even further. I read a couple of days ago that now Dalai Lama in reaction to this—because this law regulating reincarnation, the whole point is to prevent Dalai Lama choosing his successor. Now Dalai Lama claimed that maybe he will not reincarnate but he will organize something like the the Council in Vatican, some kind of a parliament of all Buddhist figures, Tibetan, to democratically elect the next Dalai Lama. The irony is that the answer of Chinese government was: "No, you are violating the tradition! Dalai Lama should be reincarnated!" and so on. Because they want to control it. My point is that it's too it's too easy to say that they are simply how should I put it that they are simply faking. We are back to that model that I used of a chicken a chicken doesn't know. The mode of belief today for us is not that we directly believe, is that we need to relate to another one, a child, all as for Stalinist pure appearance, it's another who believes for us. That's our typical strategy today. You don't have to believe, but you need to know that the chicken doesn't know it as it were, that we need a chicken. And here okay to repeat an old joke, I use it in my book, here the formula of this belief was given perfectly by Niels Bohr, you know that wonderful story about Niels Bohr who he had at the entrance of his country house a horseshoe, superstitious object preventing blah blah blah evil spirits to enter the house. And he was asked by a friend scientist: "Why do you have this? Are you crazy? Do you believe in this?" Niels Bohr said: "Of course I don't believe in it." Then friend asked him: "But why do you have it?" He says: "Of course I don't believe that horseshoe protects the house from, but he said but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's how that's how beliefs function today. We don't believe in it, we are very rational, cynical, but we nonetheless believe that it works even if you don't believe in it. And at this level we are ultra-fundamentalists. And this other belief, this transposed belief, this is the most difficult thing to accept. It's not for you to be an atheist, it's for you worrying: does my child know? Or the innocent figure, no, there things are this is where ideology is today. We have no illusions, but there is a chicken who has to have illusions for us how should I put it, no? Okay, I'm sorry I got lost a little bit but that's. Wonderful ending point. Um just cause that was leading into my question. You give a great um position on ethics as it were, but I was wondering where do you stand as for how we progress toward the future with dealing with ideology? You give a good criticism of the cynic in *The Sublime Object*, right? Yeah. But I was wondering what is the alternative in our now postmodern world? Ah that's a good question, I will tell you. Okay, I can only give you a very abstract number. I think that the problem I see is a political but not in this superficial sense to find a political form. The problem today is that we have on the one hand this let's call it liberal individualism whatever and then this new forms or rather return to old communities and so on. Is it possible to invent a new collectivity to overcome individualism without regressing into some kind of traditional community? To invent a new form of collective? And this I think it's deeply political. It's why many thinkers, philosophers to whom I feel very close like from Alain Badiou to Giorgio Agamben and so on are so focused on Saint Paul. Saint Paul is for them a political project of precisely community of believers which is not a traditional community. It's not a traditional hierarchy organic community, it's a based on universal truth community of believers. I mean this is for me the... This is for me the crucial question. Or to put it in another way: the problem how to not accept what I referred to propos the death of Christ, the fact that the big Other doesn't exist, but not as sometimes here I have problems with some Lacanians, Miller even and others around him who basically adopt this this would be maybe an answer to you. Their view is that psychoanalysis provides to put it naively the ultimate authentic insight. But it's just a momentary insight. You see there is no big Other, void, whatever. But then life goes on and you have to return to some kind of illusion. In other words, the idea is that our social life is necessary illusory. And all you can do is get these momentary insights. I think if this is the case then life is boring, how should I put it, no? I think that the whole point is can nonetheless this can the very fact that as Lacan puts it there is no big Other and so on, can does this mean that it's just a radical truth you know like Lacan develops propos Antigone? Is truth just this momentary encounter, for a moment you see it you shouldn't look too long into the truth then it renders you blind then you must somehow return to the world of illusions, or can we make truth operative in politics, in social life? Of course my whole point would be yes, we can. And I think more and more that the whole development pushes into this direction, social development. In the sense of problems from ecology to other problems they will push us in this direction. For example, ecology would be another mega example of what I said ideology. On the one hand it's absolutely a real problem ecology. But I think that precisely because of this, ecology is one of the biggest fields of ideological investment today. I mean I think there was a book written by an American he's called Tim Morton something like this, I'm sorry I'm bad for names, with a wonderful title I think the title of the book is already *Ecology Without Nature*. I think that should be our... No but it's a wonderful book. No, what he means is not some kind of subjectivism. What he means is that what we mean by nature automatically when we talk about ecology, the usual paradigm is: there is some kind of a homeostasis some kind of a harmonious organic reproduction balance disturbed by human hubris and then we should re-establish the balance. I think this very paradigm should be radically dropped. If there is a lesson from radical Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould and others, it's precisely that there is no nature. If by nature we understand this kind of a balance which was disturbed. Nature is crazy in itself. I mean, let's what is our main source of energy? Oil. What is oil? Can we even imagine what kind of a mega catastrophe had to occur on earth so that there was oil? In other words, I think that ecological crisis is even much more serious than we think. We cannot even rely we have nowhere to withdraw. There is no natural balance to which we can return. The situation is totally open. And I like a certain crazy German ecologist who draw this radical conclusion and said that the goal of humanity should be not to re-establish any natural balance but to violate nature even more. His idea is that nature left to itself would explode, render human life impossible. So since humanity can survive only in certain geographic, weather and so on conditions, we should try and fix, freeze the earth. So we should be even more violent and so on. In other words, I think we should totally drop all reference to all anti-scientific jargon especially, you know, this is the usual ecological ideology. How the source of ecological troubles is our over-exploitation, objectivization of nature, we act as if nature is out there the object as if we are not embedded in nature, breathing with it, so we should step out of technological attitude and live with nature. I think this is a problem, not a solution. The problem for me is the following one: we all know we're in deep shit, warming, whatever. The problem is why don't we act? I think it's a perfect example of what in psychoanalysis is called the fetishist disavowal: I know very well but. We know it very well, but you hear a talk, you read a text about ecology, it convinces you, then you step out, you see there is sun, there are birds, rain, and you simply precisely because we are embedded
horrible thing is that for them again religious which is why true in this narrow sense religious fundamentalists, they love science. They they simply they basically reduce religious statement to similar positive statements of science and I think that in this way even the true greatness of religious belief is lost. As every authentic religious person knows, belief is an existential wager, belief is not believe in facts. Belief is always a decision. Like, belief is that I say all people have the same dignity and it's in a way a crazy thing, because when I look at you at you, to put it in simple rational terms I can say "but I need more than you, you more, why?" I mean, this is a pure this is a crazy decision which I accept in in a way. There must be something crazy, absurd in an authentic belief. So the paradoxical conclusion for me would have been that this kind of anti-Darwinian fundamentalists and so on, they are not a threat to science, they are a threat to authentic religious belief. The third problem I have here is that what do we mean by belief today more generally? I think that again what I wanted but I lost the thread to develop a little bit one of the lines that I had to drop out like... Listen for me even New York Times was kind enough to publish a text of mine but now the story goes even later about that I love the Chinese because it's mad. You remember that two months ago they passed a law regulating reincarnation, no? And I love this, that it's not a joke like, you know, if you want to reincarnate there you have to fill out a form: where, how. And then I can even imagine, I have this evil imagination how some bureaucrat in Beijing says: "Ah you want to reincarnate as a lama, sorry, all posts are taken. There are some insects free, some dogs there, make your choice what." It's quite but now they're playing the game even further. I read a couple of days ago that now Dalai Lama in reaction to this—because this law regulating reincarnation, the whole point is to prevent Dalai Lama choosing his successor. Now Dalai Lama claimed that maybe he will not reincarnate but he will organize something like the the Council in Vatican, some kind of a parliament of all Buddhist figures, Tibetan, to democratically elect the next Dalai Lama. The irony is that the answer of Chinese government was: "No, you are violating the tradition! Dalai Lama should be reincarnated!" and so on. Because they want to control it. My point is that it's too it's too easy to say that they are simply how should I put it that they are simply faking. We are back to that model that I used of a chicken a chicken doesn't know. The mode of belief today for us is not that we directly believe, is that we need to relate to another one, a child, all as for Stalinist pure appearance, it's another who believes for us. That's our typical strategy today. You don't have to believe, but you need to know that the chicken doesn't know it as it were, that we need a chicken. And here okay to repeat an old joke, I use it in my book, here the formula of this belief was given perfectly by Niels Bohr, you know that wonderful story about Niels Bohr who he had at the entrance of his country house a horseshoe, superstitious object preventing blah blah blah evil spirits to enter the house. And he was asked by a friend scientist: "Why do you have this? Are you crazy? Do you believe in this?" Niels Bohr said: "Of course I don't believe in it." Then friend asked him: "But why do you have it?" He says: "Of course I don't believe that horseshoe protects the house from, but he said but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's how that's how beliefs function today. We don't believe in it, we are very rational, cynical, but we nonetheless believe that it works even if you don't believe in it. And at this level we are ultra-fundamentalists. And this other belief, this transposed belief, this is the most difficult thing to accept. It's not for you to be an atheist, it's for you worrying: does my child know? Or the innocent figure, no, there things are this is where ideology is today. We have no illusions, but there is a chicken who has to have illusions for us how should I put it, no? Okay, I'm sorry I got lost a little bit but that's. Wonderful ending point. Um just cause that was leading into my question. You give a great um position on ethics as it were, but I was wondering where do you stand as for how we progress toward the future with dealing with ideology? You give a good criticism of the cynic in *The Sublime Object*, right? Yeah. But I was wondering what is the alternative in our now postmodern world? Ah that's a good question, I will tell you. Okay, I can only give you a very abstract number. I think that the problem I see is a political but not in this superficial sense to find a political form. The problem today is that we have on the one hand this let's call it liberal individualism whatever and then this new forms or rather return to old communities and so on. Is it possible to invent a new collectivity to overcome individualism without regressing into some kind of traditional community? To invent a new form of collective? And this I think it's deeply political. It's why many thinkers, philosophers to whom I feel very close like from Alain Badiou to Giorgio Agamben and so on are so focused on Saint Paul. Saint Paul is for them a political project of precisely community of believers which is not a traditional community. It's not a traditional hierarchy organic community, it's a based on universal truth community of believers. I mean this is for me the... This is for me the crucial question. Or to put it in another way: the problem how to not accept what I referred to propos the death of Christ, the fact that the big Other doesn't exist, but not as sometimes here I have problems with some Lacanians, Miller even and others around him who basically adopt this this would be maybe an answer to you. Their view is that psychoanalysis provides to put it naively the ultimate authentic insight. But it's just a momentary insight. You see there is no big Other, void, whatever. But then life goes on and you have to return to some kind of illusion. In other words, the idea is that our social life is necessary illusory. And all you can do is get these momentary insights. I think if this is the case then life is boring, how should I put it, no? I think that the whole point is can nonetheless this can the very fact that as Lacan puts it there is no big Other and so on, can does this mean that it's just a radical truth you know like Lacan develops propos Antigone? Is truth just this momentary encounter, for a moment you see it you shouldn't look too long into the truth then it renders you blind then you must somehow return to the world of illusions, or can we make truth operative in politics, in social life? Of course my whole point would be yes, we can. And I think more and more that the whole development pushes into this direction, social development. In the sense of problems from ecology to other problems they will push us in this direction. For example, ecology would be another mega example of what I said ideology. On the one hand it's absolutely a real problem ecology. But I think that precisely because of this, ecology is one of the biggest fields of ideological investment today. I mean I think there was a book written by an American he's called Tim Morton something like this, I'm sorry I'm bad for names, with a wonderful title I think the title of the book is already *Ecology Without Nature*. I think that should be our... No but it's a wonderful book. No, what he means is not some kind of subjectivism. What he means is that what we mean by nature automatically when we talk about ecology, the usual paradigm is: there is some kind of a homeostasis some kind of a harmonious organic reproduction balance disturbed by human hubris and then we should re-establish the balance. I think this very paradigm should be radically dropped. If there is a lesson from radical Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould and others, it's precisely that there is no nature. If by nature we understand this kind of a balance which was disturbed. Nature is crazy in itself. I mean, let's what is our main source of energy? Oil. What is oil? Can we even imagine what kind of a mega catastrophe had to occur on earth so that there was oil? In other words, I think that ecological crisis is even much more serious than we think. We cannot even rely we have nowhere to withdraw. There is no natural balance to which we can return. The situation is totally open. And I like a certain crazy German ecologist who draw this radical conclusion and said that the goal of humanity should be not to re-establish any natural balance but to violate nature even more. His idea is that nature left to itself would explode, render human life impossible. So since humanity can survive only in certain geographic, weather and so on conditions, we should try and fix, freeze the earth. So we should be even more violent and so on. In other words, I think we should totally drop all reference to all anti-scientific jargon especially, you know, this is the usual ecological ideology. How the source of ecological troubles is our over-exploitation, objectivization of nature, we act as if nature is out there the object as if we are not embedded in nature, breathing with it, so we should step out of technological attitude and live with nature. I think this is a problem, not a solution. The problem for me is the following one: we all know we're in deep shit, warming, whatever. The problem is why don't we act? I think it's a perfect example of what in psychoanalysis is called the fetishist disavowal: I know very well but. We know it very well, but you hear a talk, you read a text about ecology, it convinces you, then you step out, you see there is sun, there are birds, rain, and you simply precisely because we are embedded
unknown
in it, wired into it, we cannot really accept that this can change. So I think paradoxically we need more more alienation from nature. In the sense of we have to accept nature in its total contingency, madness.
in it, wired into it, we cannot really accept that this can change. So I think paradoxically we need more more alienation from nature. In the sense of we have to accept nature in its total contingency, madness.
Slavoj Žižek
That's
That's
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nature. Nature is not balance, paradise.
nature. Nature is not balance, paradise.
Slavoj Žižek
Nature is you know, something happens, small imbalance, and everything goes crazy. I mean, every natural balance is temporary, fragile and so on and so on. Why am I saying this? Because this would be for me to bring it to the end what Lacan says, the big Other doesn't exist. To you know, usually people say either you are a subjectivist, self-responsible, and this means you are arrogant, absolute subject, or you defer to the higher authority. The difficult thing is to separate between these two, to accept that we are totally responsible but nonetheless we are not absolute subjects. You know that it's a very difficult position to sustain, but I think we will be forced into it as it were. I'm sorry, okay it was I was too... you should be my super-ego, my god! You should be my... to evoke the most noble example from American culture, you should be my Miss Bates, you know from *Mother* from *Psycho*, yes! Sorry, please. I will try to be shorter, I'm very sorry. We will have two last questions, and please finish within seven minutes. This is super-ego! Why seven? Why not eight, why not six? Okay, okay, sorry, please. I'd just like to ask you about your idea of ethics and how it's similar or different to Richard Rorty's idea of ethics, because even when you said that helping when it's needed it sounds like Rorty's idea of solidarity and Rorty's particularly Rorty's idea of ethics without principles, like this deeply unrooted ethics that's highly contextual so it's not very absolute in that sense. So I'd just like to know what you think about that. That's a nice question, I'm so sad I don't have time, but first let me say: I greatly appreciated Rorty as a person. He was one of the few academics that I knew, academics are usually very filthy, plotting against each other, he was one of the few persons that I knew that I can authentically say he was a good person. But I totally disagree. I disagree first with the his underlying premise which is again as you said, no positive universal values but just this his liberalism at its purest: each of us has his story, basically what makes us ethical subjects is our suffering and our right to tell about our suffering and so on. The best way to develop where I disagree with Rorty would have been with reference to Kant. Rorty opposes the private domain, as he calls it embedded in philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger who have these private fantasies, and then the boring Habermasians who have objective rules. For him the point is the balance between these two dimensions. As he puts it: Heidegger and the wild guys are good, the moment you let them to gain power you get mad. But I think that what Rorty misses is the way Kant already uses in exactly the opposite way the distinction between public and private. Kant is here still my ideal. You know that for Kant in his I think *What is Enlightenment?* text, he there for Kant private use of reason is precisely what Rorty would have called public. For Kant, when you work for a state, it's private use of reason. Why? Because it's not just the abstract space of intellectual debate, but it's part of the common good of a society, it's already part it's pre-destined whom you serve and so on. And for Kant, precisely when you subtract from your community and just talk in the free space of reason with others, individuals, this is the public use of reason. So the paradox again for Kant is that state is a private institution, but universities should be public, exempted from... So this universal dimension is missing for me in Rorty. I'm this is why I'm sorry that I didn't have time to develop it further, because the conclusion of what I said, it's definitely not some kind of total idiosyncrasy, we are just this kind of terrible abysses of neighbor, we cannot... No, no, no, I'm totally pro-universality, how should I put it. I believe in universality. I think that one of the greatest ontological errors as it were undermine sustaining this liberal multiculturalist ideology is precisely this distrust of universality, as if every universality is ideological, imposed and so on. I don't think this is the true problem today. The problem today is not how to reach plurality, more plurality. The problem is precisely the opposite one: unity, universality. So I'm very much pro-universality. So again, along this lines I don't have time now to go into it, I think that one should definitely move beyond Rorty to a kind of without any shame to a kind of a more aggressive universal project. The key problem is for me universality and truth. Because Rorty basically plays this game of, you know, "there is no truth, there are just stories that we are telling" and so on and so on. No, emphatically here Rorty is a postmodernist, I am not. I believe in universal truth. But with all the Leninist paradoxes that truth is partial, truth is not what unites us, truth is division. Sorry. I was at the end of your talk, you were discussing a morality without narcissism, and I've always seen certainly conventional morality as being inherently or de facto very narcissistic. So could
Nature is you know, something happens, small imbalance, and everything goes crazy. I mean, every natural balance is temporary, fragile and so on and so on. Why am I saying this? Because this would be for me to bring it to the end what Lacan says, the big Other doesn't exist. To you know, usually people say either you are a subjectivist, self-responsible, and this means you are arrogant, absolute subject, or you defer to the higher authority. The difficult thing is to separate between these two, to accept that we are totally responsible but nonetheless we are not absolute subjects. You know that it's a very difficult position to sustain, but I think we will be forced into it as it were. I'm sorry, okay it was I was too... you should be my super-ego, my god! You should be my... to evoke the most noble example from American culture, you should be my Miss Bates, you know from *Mother* from *Psycho*, yes! Sorry, please. I will try to be shorter, I'm very sorry. We will have two last questions, and please finish within seven minutes. This is super-ego! Why seven? Why not eight, why not six? Okay, okay, sorry, please. I'd just like to ask you about your idea of ethics and how it's similar or different to Richard Rorty's idea of ethics, because even when you said that helping when it's needed it sounds like Rorty's idea of solidarity and Rorty's particularly Rorty's idea of ethics without principles, like this deeply unrooted ethics that's highly contextual so it's not very absolute in that sense. So I'd just like to know what you think about that. That's a nice question, I'm so sad I don't have time, but first let me say: I greatly appreciated Rorty as a person. He was one of the few academics that I knew, academics are usually very filthy, plotting against each other, he was one of the few persons that I knew that I can authentically say he was a good person. But I totally disagree. I disagree first with the his underlying premise which is again as you said, no positive universal values but just this his liberalism at its purest: each of us has his story, basically what makes us ethical subjects is our suffering and our right to tell about our suffering and so on. The best way to develop where I disagree with Rorty would have been with reference to Kant. Rorty opposes the private domain, as he calls it embedded in philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger who have these private fantasies, and then the boring Habermasians who have objective rules. For him the point is the balance between these two dimensions. As he puts it: Heidegger and the wild guys are good, the moment you let them to gain power you get mad. But I think that what Rorty misses is the way Kant already uses in exactly the opposite way the distinction between public and private. Kant is here still my ideal. You know that for Kant in his I think *What is Enlightenment?* text, he there for Kant private use of reason is precisely what Rorty would have called public. For Kant, when you work for a state, it's private use of reason. Why? Because it's not just the abstract space of intellectual debate, but it's part of the common good of a society, it's already part it's pre-destined whom you serve and so on. And for Kant, precisely when you subtract from your community and just talk in the free space of reason with others, individuals, this is the public use of reason. So the paradox again for Kant is that state is a private institution, but universities should be public, exempted from... So this universal dimension is missing for me in Rorty. I'm this is why I'm sorry that I didn't have time to develop it further, because the conclusion of what I said, it's definitely not some kind of total idiosyncrasy, we are just this kind of terrible abysses of neighbor, we cannot... No, no, no, I'm totally pro-universality, how should I put it. I believe in universality. I think that one of the greatest ontological errors as it were undermine sustaining this liberal multiculturalist ideology is precisely this distrust of universality, as if every universality is ideological, imposed and so on. I don't think this is the true problem today. The problem today is not how to reach plurality, more plurality. The problem is precisely the opposite one: unity, universality. So I'm very much pro-universality. So again, along this lines I don't have time now to go into it, I think that one should definitely move beyond Rorty to a kind of without any shame to a kind of a more aggressive universal project. The key problem is for me universality and truth. Because Rorty basically plays this game of, you know, "there is no truth, there are just stories that we are telling" and so on and so on. No, emphatically here Rorty is a postmodernist, I am not. I believe in universal truth. But with all the Leninist paradoxes that truth is partial, truth is not what unites us, truth is division. Sorry. I was at the end of your talk, you were discussing a morality without narcissism, and I've always seen certainly conventional morality as being inherently or de facto very narcissistic. So could
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you just describe first of all is it possible to speak of a morality qualitatively without narcissism, and second of all how would that work or what would it look like qualitatively? That's a good question. Like was I simply representing with this example two freaks or
you just describe first of all is it possible to speak of a morality qualitatively without narcissism, and second of all how would that work or what would it look like qualitatively? That's a good question. Like was I simply representing with this example two freaks or
Slavoj Žižek
it works?
it works?
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Okay. All I can tell you
Okay. All I can tell you
Slavoj Žižek
very I will take your question very sincerely and try to answer naively, I mean like: yes, I know some people with whom this works. That is to say who effectively do things and they are not naive in the sense that they don't reflect. They can reflect very cruelly and so on. But what I like is that there is simply a certain a certain non-narcissistic ruthlessness in what they are doing. There is none of this satisfaction "I do it because it feels so nice doing it." Now here I have a slight disagreement with my good friend Irena, no because me Lenin would enter that and you would have small problems here, no. Like I sorry a big problem, okay yeah. Which is why again when I take power you go to re-education camp. But since I'm your friend, I will tell you how lucky your life will be: when you will be there in Siberian re-education camp, I will call I as I will call the boss of the camp and every Sunday you will get for free an additional plate of that shitty cabbage soup there, you know. Isn't this nice? So it will be not so bad for you then. Sorry, please no, you see what I mean. I think back to this: no, I think there are situations in how should I put it struggle, struggling situation and so on, when this kind of collective can work, can work in a way. And I think that in a way if you read authentically—I'm a total materialist, but this is for me where I write atheist Christian books, no—this is the way I appreciate Jesus. I mean what I mean if there was no Jesus, of course, what I mean is the figure there, is that it's totally how should I put it, non-narcissistic in the sense that the way I see is that in Christianity you cannot say you cannot have a blasphemy of Christianity because in a way Christianity is already its own blasphemy. My friend Terry Eagleton already develops how the whole logic of Jesus is the logic of like you know this whole idea he is the King of Jer—the King of the Jews, it's clear that this is staged as a kind
very I will take your question very sincerely and try to answer naively, I mean like: yes, I know some people with whom this works. That is to say who effectively do things and they are not naive in the sense that they don't reflect. They can reflect very cruelly and so on. But what I like is that there is simply a certain a certain non-narcissistic ruthlessness in what they are doing. There is none of this satisfaction "I do it because it feels so nice doing it." Now here I have a slight disagreement with my good friend Irena, no because me Lenin would enter that and you would have small problems here, no. Like I sorry a big problem, okay yeah. Which is why again when I take power you go to re-education camp. But since I'm your friend, I will tell you how lucky your life will be: when you will be there in Siberian re-education camp, I will call I as I will call the boss of the camp and every Sunday you will get for free an additional plate of that shitty cabbage soup there, you know. Isn't this nice? So it will be not so bad for you then. Sorry, please no, you see what I mean. I think back to this: no, I think there are situations in how should I put it struggle, struggling situation and so on, when this kind of collective can work, can work in a way. And I think that in a way if you read authentically—I'm a total materialist, but this is for me where I write atheist Christian books, no—this is the way I appreciate Jesus. I mean what I mean if there was no Jesus, of course, what I mean is the figure there, is that it's totally how should I put it, non-narcissistic in the sense that the way I see is that in Christianity you cannot say you cannot have a blasphemy of Christianity because in a way Christianity is already its own blasphemy. My friend Terry Eagleton already develops how the whole logic of Jesus is the logic of like you know this whole idea he is the King of Jer—the King of the Jews, it's clear that this is staged as a kind
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of a ridiculous carnival and so on. It's it's so how should I put it, it's I think totally this is how one should read all these statements, Paulinian about love and so on and so on, as totally
of a ridiculous carnival and so on. It's it's so how should I put it, it's I think totally this is how one should read all these statements, Paulinian about love and so on and so on, as totally
Slavoj Žižek
non as totally non-narcissistic. It's not love in the sense of "I love myself loving somebody." It's love without this dimension. And again, I think that it's not only freaky individuals who do it here and there. I think that there are from time to time collectives, like again maybe some political collectives and so on where this works. Okay, but this... thank you, interrupting it now. Thanks at this high point. Thank you!
non as totally non-narcissistic. It's not love in the sense of "I love myself loving somebody." It's love without this dimension. And again, I think that it's not only freaky individuals who do it here and there. I think that there are from time to time collectives, like again maybe some political collectives and so on where this works. Okay, but this... thank you, interrupting it now. Thanks at this high point. Thank you!