First as Tragedy, then as Farce – The Double Death of Neoliberalism and the Idea of Communism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-11-25 · 0:59:47 · 8,477 words
ideologyliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencecapitalismcommunism-socialismpsychoanalysisdemocracyecology-climatecinema-art-cultureeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a lecture on how ideology functions today by appearing as non-ideology, using examples from Israeli war films, Cuban detective novels, Starbucks, Pepsi, and Tea Party populism to show that the ideological gesture is a reduction to a supposedly pre-ideological 'human core.' He argues for a distinction between formal and actual freedom, contending that the welfare state and collective infrastructure are conditions of possibility for genuine individual freedom rather than limitations on it. The talk addresses the problem of violence, distinguishing systemic/obscene violence from overt physical violence, and rehabilitates a notion of 'Gandhian violence' as a rupture that refuses the terms of the dominant dialogue. He concludes by pairing this interruptive violence with a call for new civility, and defends the word 'communism' as the name for the struggle over the commons in the face of ecological crisis and biogenetic enclosure.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “background noise of ideology”
The thick, unspoken ideological substrate that means even explicit agreement conceals real disagreement, conveyed by the package of assumptions that accompanies every statement.
as “ideology appearing as non-ideology”
The contemporary mode of ideology in which ideological content is delivered precisely through gestures that present themselves as purely human, apolitical, or common-sense, rather than through explicit doctrinal messaging.
The surplus meaning attached to a commodity (e.g. Starbucks coffee) that bundles ethical, ecological, and social redemption into the act of purchase, making consumption itself appear as social action.
Ulrich Beck's sociological concept, cited to show that ruling ideology repackages insecurity caused by dismantling welfare as new opportunity for self-reinvention and freedom of choice.
The ideological operation by which reduction to 'pure human experience' or elementary suffering erases the political questions (who, against whom, why) that give a situation its meaning.
as “formal freedom vs. actual freedom”
Formal freedom is the legal-liberal right to choose; actual freedom is the effective capacity to exercise choice, which depends on an elaborate invisible symbolic and institutional substrate (welfare state, rule of law, civility).
Implicitly operative in Žižek's account of how people identify not with what they are but with an ideal of what they might become when adopting an ideological stance (e.g. Thatcherite identification with potential market success).
La Boétie's concept of voluntary servitude, invoked to argue that subjection to power is never simple oppression but always involves obscure libidinal investment and 'dark dreams' on the part of the subjected.
Žižek's term for a non-physical but genuinely disruptive act that refuses the terms of the dominant framework and forces a change of terrain, as opposed to reactive or merely physical violence.
In the Nietzschean sense, violence that ultimately serves to preserve existing social relations rather than transforming them; Žižek applies it to Hitler to argue he was not truly radical.
Agamben's concept invoked to describe those excluded from the very coordinates of political dialogue, not legitimate enemies but bare life, dispossessed of recognition.
Distinguished from mere customs or manners, civility is the minimal shared code that allows strangers from different traditions to interact without resorting to violence; Žižek argues the left should reclaim it from power.
as “obscene violence”
The barbarian violence that secretly sustains public law and order, generating its own self-erasure so that it appears as natural authority rather than coercion.
Benjamin's category of violence that founds and preserves the legal order; Žižek contrasts it with divine violence when discussing Gandhi's movement.
Shared resources (ecological, biogenetic, informational) that are currently being enclosed by capital; the struggle over the commons is what Žižek means by communism today.
Benjamin's concept invoked by Žižek to distinguish a violence that breaks with the mythic cycle of law-founding and law-preserving violence; linked here to Gandhi's protest.
Žižek's ironic self-description to signal that values like collective discipline, solidarity, and sacrifice should not be ceded to the right and can be reclaimed for an emancipatory politics.
Stories he reaches for 5
Buying a Starbucks cappuccino is sold as supporting Guatemalan organic farmers and saving the planet; the owner appeared like Anthony Giddens calling Starbucks an ersatz place of collective experience. The sin of consumerism and its redemption are packaged together in the same purchase.
“buying a cup of Starbucks cappuccino, you are not just buying Starbucks cappuccino. You are supporting the Guatemala farmers in their organic farming, helping mother earth to survive”
SS thugs entered Freud's apartment; the image is read as dignified old European culture (Freud) facing the new barbarism (SS). But the SS man saw himself as defending European culture against the barbarism of modernity epitomized by Freud, showing that the civilization/barbarism distinction is internal to both sides.
“the SS guy perceived and legitimized himself as a defender of European culture and its spiritual values against the barbarism of modernity with its focus on economy and sex”
For every pair of Toms Shoes bought (at a premium), a pair is donated to a child in Africa. The consumer no longer has to feel guilty separately, the redemption is included in the price of sinning.
“the sin—if you pay a little bit more for the sin, you can buy way of sinning. At the same time buy your own redemption already.”
Stalin called Shostakovich to ask about Mandelstam; Shostakovich, who hated Stalin, nonetheless asked if he could talk with Stalin about 'life, death and similar things', revealing that even those who despised the absolute power were invested in it libidinally, caught in the dream of its inner wisdom.
“Shostakovich hated Stalin, but this idea, this absolute figure of power, just must have some inner wisdom, some kind of insight into ultimate things. You see, they were already caught in that dream.”
At a public debate, both BHL and Žižek stated their positions (liberal tolerance vs. communism) in abstract terms and found they could not disagree; BHL said 'if this is communism, I am a communist.' Žižek reads this as a sign that both were deep in ideology, the background noise ensured real disagreement beneath surface agreement.
“Bernard-Henri Lévy, the great neoliberal, he told me, oh my God, if this is communism, I am a communist. This was a sign that something was wrong.”
Works invoked 10
Lebanon film
Samuel Maoz's film set inside an Israeli tank; same critique as Waltz with Bashir, apparent pacifism erases political questions about the war's legitimacy.
The Lives of Others film
Oscar-winning anti-communist German film; Žižek argues it is not harsh enough because it reduces Stasi repression to individual pathology, missing the systemic nature of the GDR apparatus.
Novecento film
Bertolucci's epic film; the scene of the farmer cutting off his ear is described as shocking and used as the central image of productive interruptive 'Gandhian' political violence.
Piss Christ artwork
Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix in urine; used to argue that the transgressive art gesture and its liberal defence are now fully absorbed by ideology, transgression no longer works.
Waltz with Bashir film
Ari Folman's animated documentary about the Lebanon War is praised as artistically accomplished but criticized for enacting ideological depoliticization by reducing war to elementary human terror.
The Palace of Dreams book
Ismail Kadare's novel about an Ottoman Ministry of Dreams; called 'wonderful' and used to theorize the libidinal investment of subjects in state power.
Freud's work is cited for its Virgil epigraph, 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo', used to locate political struggle in the underground of dreams, fantasies, and identifications.
Aeneid book
Virgil's epic cited via Freud's epigraph to Traumdeutung: 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo', if you cannot move the heavens, stir up the underworld of dreams.
La Boétie's treatise on voluntary servitude, invoked to argue that political subjection always involves the subjected party's own libidinal investment.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes's Cuban police procedurals; Žižek enjoyed them enough to read several, but argues they function as ideological apologies for Cuba through the stoic acceptance of their disillusioned heroes.
People invoked 30
Timothy Garton Ash positive
Described as 'not exactly my political friend'; Žižek says they agree that The Lives of Others misses the systemic nature of GDR repression by requiring a bad individual minister.
Mahatma Gandhi positive
Central positive example: Gandhi's non-violence is reread as genuinely more radical and violent (in Žižek's sense) than Hitler's destructiveness, because Gandhi actually interrupted the functioning of the colonial state.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited briefly in Q&A: from early writings to late ones against Stalin, Lenin repeatedly emphasized civility and politeness as central political questions.
Paul Celan positive
His poem paraphrasing Brecht, 'What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much implicitly told', is cited as a model for how ideology critique should proceed, attending to the unspoken.
Listed among Soviet artists who had similar complex fixations on Stalin despite opposing him.
Ismail Kadare positive
His novel The Palace of Dreams is described as 'wonderful' and 'applies to us today perfectly'; used to illustrate the libidinal investment of subjects in state power through dreams.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Called 'the greatest utopian', the 1990s end-of-history thesis is presented as the true utopian fantasy that the financial crisis and 9/11 have exposed.
Mentioned in the Shostakovich anecdote as a figure whose fate Stalin was consulted about, and noted as another artist who had a similar complex investment in Stalin's power.
Mentioned in passing as the kind of sociological authority the Starbucks CEO was mimicking when speaking of 'postmodern risk society.'
Étienne de La Boétie positive
His treatise on voluntary servitude is cited to argue that subjection to power always involves libidinal investment, not simple oppression.
Antonio Negri positive
Agreed with on the point that contemporary struggles (ecology, biogenetics) are struggles for the commons.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my friend'; Žižek invokes his point that in politics there are real enemies, though he notes he often disagrees with him.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His concept of homo sacer is used to describe what happens to those who don't fit the coordinates of a purely dialogic politics, they become bare life, dispossessed of recognition as legitimate enemies.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Described as 'the very embodiment of how the ruling ideology reappropriated the legacy of '68'; used as the foil in the opening anecdote to show how both liberal and communist positions, stated abstractly, dissolve into ideological background noise.
Adolf Hitler negative
Used as the counter-example to Gandhi: Hitler's violence was reactive in the Nietzschean sense, aimed at preserving rather than transforming the fundamental social order.
Robert Conquest negative
Standard liberal-conservative historian of Stalinism; Žižek's critique is that he is not too harsh but too soft, he reduces Stalinist politicians to cynical liberal individuals beneath the ideology, missing that they had no other interpretive grid even in private.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Cited indirectly via Celan's paraphrase of him regarding the criminality of conversation in dark times.
Michel Foucault positive
Mentioned briefly for his concept of 'micro-practices' in the context of feminism's achievement of making visible the violence hidden in apparently natural authority.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes negative
His Havana Quartet is read as ideologically functioning as an apology for Cuba despite its surface criticism, by depoliticizing discontent through the stoic acceptance of its detective heroes.
Andres Serrano negative
His Piss Christ is used to illustrate how transgressive art and its liberal defence ('questioning our presuppositions of disgust') work 'all too well', the transgression is absorbed rather than genuinely disruptive.
Bernardo Bertolucci positive
His film Novecento supplies the key motif of the farmer cutting off his ear as the exemplary image of productive political 'violence' as withdrawal from the master's terrain.
Hannah Arendt positive
Her distinctions between authority, power, and violence are respected and acknowledged as subtle, but Žižek argues she doesn't go far enough in seeing how legitimate authority is secretly sustained by obscene violence.
Walter Benjamin positive
His thesis that every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism is cited and pushed further; his distinction between mythic and divine violence is invoked in the discussion of Gandhi.
Harry Frankfurt negative
The philosopher of bullshit is used ironically: his nomination of John McCain as a non-bullshitting politician reveals the ideological limits of the 'cut the crap' gesture.
Jürgen Habermas negative
The farmer's ear-cutting is described as 'anti-Habermasian' but Žižek also suggests that withdrawing from dialogue can paradoxically create the conditions for genuine dialogue, making the position more complex than simple rejection.
Ulrich Beck positive
His 'risk society' concept is used to show how ruling ideology repackages welfare-state dismantling as new opportunity and freedom.
The anecdote of Shostakovich asking Stalin to speak about 'life, death and similar things' illustrates how even Stalin's victims were libidinally invested in his absolute power.
Listed among Soviet artists who had a similar conversation or libidinal relation to Stalin.
Michael Hardt positive
Paired with Negri; their concept of the commons is endorsed for contemporary ecological and biogenetic struggles.
Sigmund Freud positive
Appears both as a historical figure (the Berggasse apartment scene with the SS) and as theoretical authority: his Virgil epigraph from the Traumdeutung ('Acheronta movebo') is invoked to locate the political struggle in dreams, fantasies, and identifications; his lesson is also glossed as 'be ruthless with your desires.'
What it argues
ideology functioning as non-ideologyformal freedom versus actual freedomthe ideological background noise beneath explicit agreementGandhian violence as interruption of dialoguethe commons and the case for communismnew civility as a left-wing taskpsychoanalytic identification and ideological interpellation
Dialectical moves 10
“Ideology appears precisely as non-ideology — what looks like apolitical human truth is ideology at its purest.”
The contemporary ideological operation works not through explicit doctrine but through the denial of ideology, making the critique harder to mount.
“Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism — and to be civilized means to know one is potentially barbarian; every civilization which disavows its barbarian potential has already capitulated to barbarism.”
Civilization and barbarism are not opposites but internally related: the disavowal of barbarism is itself the completion of barbarism.
“Culture itself may be nothing but a hold, a brake, a respite in the pursuit of barbarity.”
Rather than being opposed to barbarism, culture is a temporary interruption of an ongoing barbaric process, inverting the standard hierarchy.
“The SS man legitimized himself as a defender of European culture against the barbarism of modernity epitomized by Freud — so the defender of civilization was the barbarian, and vice versa.”
The Nazi's self-perception inverts the standard image: the apparent barbarian (SS) claimed to defend civilization while its apparent defender (Freud) was cast as barbarian.
“The ideological gesture is the reduction to core human identity outside or beneath ideology — but this very reduction is ideology at its purest.”
The attempt to escape ideology by appealing to universal humanity is the most complete form of ideological capture.
“Hitler wasn't violent enough — all his violence was reactive violence; it was Gandhi with all his non-violence who was truly more radical.”
True radicality is not measured by overt physical force but by the depth of transformation demanded; Gandhi's refusal was more genuinely violent than Hitler's destructiveness.
“The true utopia is what goes on now — the 1990s Fukuyama moment was the true utopia, not the socialist alternatives that were dismissed as utopian.”
Realism and utopia are inverted: the fantasy that liberal democratic capitalism is the final answer is the real utopian illusion.
“Withdrawing from dialogue can be the only way to create the conditions for a true dialogue — so what appears anti-Habermasian may be the most genuinely Habermasian move.”
Breaking off communication, far from negating dialogue, can be its condition of possibility when existing dialogue is a false one.
“What appears as legitimate authority is sustained secretly by some kind of obscene violence — authority and violence are not opposites but the former conceals the latter.”
Hannah Arendt's sharp distinction between authority and violence is subverted: legitimate authority typically depends on a hidden violent substrate.
“People do not identify with what they are but with an ideal of what they may become — so ideological identification is always future-oriented and aspirational.”
Thatcherism and similar ideologies work not through description of existing identity but through the promise of a possible future self (the potential market winner).
Claims 18
asserts
Ideology today operates not through explicit doctrine but through the unspoken background noise that ensures even explicit agreement conceals real disagreement.the functioning of ideology
asserts
The ideological gesture par excellence is the reduction to a supposedly pre-ideological human core ('we are all the same human beings beneath ideology'), which itself is ideology at its purest.ideology and humanism
asserts
Contemporary commodity culture (Starbucks, Toms Shoes, Pepsi) incorporates ethical-ecological redemption into the act of consumption itself, making consumerism and philanthropy indistinguishable.consumerism and ideology
asserts
Israeli anti-war films like Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon function ideologically precisely through their apparent apolitical humanism, which erases the political questions about the legitimacy of the war.cinema and depoliticization
asserts
Leonardo Padura's Cuban detective novels function as apologies for Cuba by having their disillusioned but fundamentally accepting heroes depoliticize the situation.literature and ideology
rejects
Standard liberal histories of Stalinism (e.g. Robert Conquest) are not too harsh but too soft, because they reduce Stalinist politicians to cynical liberal-natural individuals beneath the ideology, when in fact they had no other interpretive grid even in private.liberal historiography of Stalinism
rejects
The film The Lives of Others fails because it relies on the naive liberal explanation that repression requires a pathological individual with elementary desires (sex, power), ignoring that the system would have functioned identically without him.liberal anti-communist cinema
asserts
The ruling ideology sells insecurity produced by the dismantling of the welfare state as new freedom and opportunity for self-reinvention.neoliberal ideology of free choice
asserts
Actual individual freedom depends on an elaborate symbolic and institutional substrate (rule of law, welfare state, norms of civility) that the free-choice ideology undermines by treating it as an obstacle.freedom and its institutional conditions
asserts
Healthcare (like water and electricity) should be a collectively guaranteed basic good from which individuals are freed from worrying, thereby expanding rather than restricting actual freedom of choice.healthcare as collective infrastructure
asserts
The populist right has appropriated the organizational energy and rhetoric previously belonging to the radical left, which is a political tragedy particularly for the United States.right-wing populism and the left
asserts
A purely dialogic politics that refuses to acknowledge real enemies ends up producing worse violence by treating those who don't fit its coordinates as bare life (homo sacer) rather than legitimate adversaries.politics and enemies
asserts
Hitler was not violent enough in the radical sense: his violence was reactive, aimed at preserving the existing social order, whereas Gandhi's non-violence was genuinely more transformative because it interrupted the functioning of the colonial state.Hitler, Gandhi, and the nature of radical violence
asserts
What appears as legitimate authority is as a rule secretly sustained by an obscene underlying violence that generates its own self-erasure.authority and obscene violence
asserts
Today those in power are becoming more obscene and undermining their own authority, which means the left should reclaim civility rather than treating transgression as inherently subversive.civility and left politics
reframes
The real utopia is actually existing liberal-democratic capitalism — the 1990s Fukuyama moment — not socialist alternatives; the financial crisis and 9/11 prove that capitalism is not the answer.utopia and realism
asserts
The struggles for ecology, biogenetics commons, and collective resources are the contemporary form of communist struggle, meaning communism names the struggle over the commons.communism and the commons
reframes
Withdrawing from or breaking down dialogue can be the only way to create the conditions for genuine dialogue, making it not anti-Habermasian but paradoxically more Habermasian.dialogue, withdrawal, and Habermas
Quotes 14
“Ideology is precisely that thick background noise on account of which even if we explicitly agreed, effectively we did not agree.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as background noise
“Be especially attentive when people, as it is fashionable today, use terms like 'cut the crap,' 'cut the bullshit.' At that point usually you get ideology at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-ideology gestures as ideology
“Every civilization which disavows its barbarian potential already capitulated to barbarism.”Slavoj Žižek · civilization and barbarism
“What if culture itself is nothing but a hold, a brake, a respite in the pursuit of barbarity?”Slavoj Žižek · culture as pause in barbarism
“The ideological gesture is this reduction to our core human identity outside or beneath ideology. When I hear words like 'beneath all the ideological dreams, we are the same human beings,' my reaction is that Joseph Goebbels one: show me this and I draw my gun.”Slavoj Žižek · humanist reduction as ideology
“Today the ruling ideology tries to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms.”Slavoj Žižek · neoliberal ideology of insecurity as freedom
“Freedom precisely as individual freedom takes a tremendous lot for granted in the form of this background.”Slavoj Žižek · institutional substrate of freedom
“Hitler was a coward. All his violence was in the strict Nietzschean sense reactive violence. He changed many things so that the fundamentals were not changed.”Slavoj Žižek · reactive violence / Hitler's conservatism
“A politics which wants to be purely dialogic, no enemies, ends up as sooner or later advocating even worse violence. Those who don't fit the coordinates of your dialogue are not even acknowledged as legitimate enemies but are homo sacer.”Slavoj Žižek · dialogism and excluded bare life
“Perhaps it's time for the left radicals to become the partisans of simple civility.”Slavoj Žižek · left reclaiming civility
“The true utopia is that what goes on now can go on now. We live in a utopia. The true utopia were the 1990s. After the greatest utopian is Fukuyama.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal capitalism as the true utopia
“Why should collective action, discipline, struggle, be automatically left to the enemies? As if if you mention these things, ooh, neo-fascist. No, we should take all that over.”Slavoj Žižek · reclaiming collective values for the left
“Withdrawing, breaking down the dialogue is often even the only way to create the conditions maybe for a true dialogue.”Slavoj Žižek · withdrawal as condition of genuine dialogue
“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. If you can't move the earth, move the underground. By underground I mean the underground of dreams, fantasies, identifications.”Slavoj Žižek · the struggle is over fantasies and identifications
Transcript 21 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here, but not to lose time because here you are my castrating super-ego figure minutes and so on. Let me go directly to the point. Of course this is like more in Kantian sense, regulative idea. Maybe I'm not so sure it will have some link with this. What I want to focus on is simply my eternal topic: the way ideology functions today, ideology and violence maybe. How do we know that we are in ideology and what do I mean by it? Sorry, hope this works. During a public debate that I had with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library, he made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance. Something like, would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they love, and so on and so on? To which I replied with a similar pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? The irony of this situation was of course that when the case is stated in these abstract terms, we both couldn't but agree with each other. What should I tell him? No, I want to live in a society where women are oppressed or whatever? What could he say? The irony was that Bernard-Henri Lévy, the great neoliberal—not only this, but the very embodiment of how the ruling ideology reappropriated the legacy of '68 as it were—he told me, oh my God, if this is communism, I am a communist. This was a sign that something was wrong. What was wrong was that we both were knee-deep in ideology. Ideology is precisely that thick background noise on account of which even if we explicitly agreed, effectively we did not agree. You know, like to say today I want women to be able to choose a man they love, blah blah blah, you never say only this. There comes a package within: how do you mean it? Do you mean this postmodern permissivity and so on? Or to say in this sense that I'm for communism, again, it can mean many things. It always means more. This background noise, I think, accounts for ideology. And be especially attentive when people, as it is fashionable today, use terms like "cut the crap," "cut the bullshit." At that point usually you get ideology at its purest. For example, the very guy who is the ideologist of bullshit, Harry Frankfurt. I know, like critique of the jargon, blah blah, all that. But a German journalist, maybe you know somewhere else, the only case I know is for a German philosophical journal, a journalist asked him: okay, give me one politician who is not bullshitting. You know whom he gave? John McCain. For me, not exactly. What this background noise of ideology conveys is more often than not the obscenity of the barbarian violence which sustains the public law and order. This is why Walter Benjamin's thesis that every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism has a precise impact on the very notion of being civilized. To be civilized means to know one is potentially barbarian. Every civilization which disavows its barbarian potential already capitulated to barbarism. This is how one should read the report about a weird confrontation in Vienna in when SS thugs entered Freud’s—Sigmund Freud’s—apartment on Berggasse just to examine it. The old dignified Freud, so people describe the scene, standing in front of a young SS bull. The idea was this is a metaphor of what was the best in old European culture, Freud, confronting the worst of the new emerging barbarism. One should nonetheless add to the clarity of this image that the SS guy perceived and legitimized himself as a defender of European culture and its spiritual values against the barbarism of modernity with its focus on economy and sex, the barbarism which for the Nazis was epitomized by the name Freud. What this means is that, again, Benjamin’s claim that every document of culture is at the same time a document of barbarism should be pushed a step further. What if culture itself is nothing but a hold, a brake, a respite in the pursuit of barbarity? This perhaps is one of the way to read Paul Celan’s succinct paraphrase of Brecht. This is Paul Celan’s poem: "What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much implicitly told." And again, this is how ideology, the critique of ideology, should proceed today. For example, because today ideology as a rule appears precisely as non-ideology. And you should detect it as the unspoken background. Not only if, how should I put it, if in the old days, in a more traditional functioning of ideology, you had the explicit ideological message—sacrifice whatever—and then you got the obscene message between the lines. I claim fascists are masters in this. Official message is: sacrifice yourself, your country needs, and then the line between message is: pretend to do this and you can, I don’t know, rape girls, kill the Jews, whatever, all the obscene payment that you get. Today more and more, and it's a much more dangerous strategy, it's the opposite one. You are directly addressed as hedonistic consumerist subject, but the price comes implicitly. And the irony is that this price is more and more explicitly stated, sold to you. Like what we were talking about Starbucks is precisely this semantic density. You know, as they bombard you again and again with the message: buying a cup of Starbucks cappuccino, you are not just buying Starbucks cappuccino. You are supporting the Guatemala farmers in their organic farming, helping mother earth to survive, even in our societies. My God, there is a whole sociological theory, a wild one. Once I saw an interview on CNN of the owner of Starbucks who appeared almost like, you know, Anthony Giddens from Seattle, how should I put it? Where he said: "In our postmodern risk society," and so on, he said this. He said: "You know, these old places of collectivity, collective solidarity, town halls, parks, no longer operate. So Starbucks should also be an ersatz place of collective experience," and so on and so on. I mean, they made you aware, at least maybe this is a good sign, that they made you aware of what you are buying on the side. This is getting more and more palpable today. For example, it’s not only Starbucks. It’s, you know, there is a company called in United States "Toms Shoes" which was founded in Their idea is the following one: when you buy shoes, with every pair of shoes—this is why they are a little bit more expensive—they promise you to give one pair of shoes, again, to one of these proverbial starving children in Africa or whatever. So that you see the paradox: it’s no longer here I’m a consumerist, but then in the afternoon when I get a moral hangover or whatever, I should do something good for the—no, it’s that, how should I put it, the sin—if you pay a little bit more for the sin, you can buy way of sinning. At the same time buy your own redemption already. You know, like, you know, in your very consumption is included the price for ecological, social, humanitarian, and so on and so on, redemption. This logic even reached its extreme point with a recent—it was even a shock for me—in United States, Pepsi-Cola started a new wave of publicity where I will read it to you, I was shocked. "Pepsi"—that's their publicity—"Pepsi has always been about refreshment, but what if instead of just refreshing people, Pepsi will help to refresh the world? If you've got an idea about how to make the world a better place, whether it’s saving something, creating something, or fixing something, we want you to tell us about it. Then you vote to decide which ideas are the best." And then, you know, Pepsi will give the money to whatever, an ecological cause, and so on. I find this so wonderful, so that you are even given the freedom of choice to decide about this surplus which makes a commodity more than a commodity and so on and so on. This ideological trend is based in what? In again, ideology appearing as its opposite, as non-ideology. What do I mean by this? I will give you just two extremely simple clear examples. First, I hope you saw one of the two recent Israeli films about the Lebanon War: Ari Folman's animated documentary *Waltz with Bashir* or Samuel Maoz's *Lebanon*. What both film movies are about—a war—but they both enact a certain, how should I call it, reduction to the apolitical elementary experience of terror of being at war. For example, *Lebanon*, most of the movie takes place within an Israeli tank penetrating into Lebanon, and it doesn't celebrate Israeli technological masters or whatever. No, it shows all the horror. Soldiers experience this as a meaningless nightmare, are terrified, and so on and so on. But nonetheless, it may appear pacifistic, good, but I think the price we pay is a total depoliticization of a society. You know, the moment you focus only on soldiers finding themselves in this absurd situation of killing and so on, questions like "But wait a minute, what were they doing there?" "It was a war of whom against"—all this somehow disappears. You get just pure non-ideological, as it were, human suffering. But so that you will not say that it's only this side, American-Israeli, that I attack, let me take a similar example of very refined functioning of ideology from today's Cuba. I like detective novels, so I couldn't resist reading a couple of Cuban detective novels. He’s a very good writer, you can get them now, they are printed here. So-called *Havana Quartet* or *Havana Red*, *Havana Blue* by Leonardo Padura Fuentes. It’s a—Fuentes, sorry—it’s a—they are police procedurals set in today's Havana. First, they are extremely critical of today's Cuban society. It’s none of the idealism of sacrificing for socialism. They show prostitution, exploitation, corruption of the nomenklatura, not misery. Even more, the explicit topic of these novels is that because of the communist adventure, the whole, the entire younger generation of today's Cuba is a lost generation, in the sense of things are happening politically, artistically, economically, they are in the void, they are, how should I put it, losing time, missing—not the Stalinist train of history, this is only in our hearts, people didn't yet grow to that—but simply missing what is going on today. So I thought, oh my God, I would like to meet this guy, I'm sure he has a nice villa in somewhere in Miami suburbs. Then I was told, no, he is very celebrated as their main export article. He lives in Cuba, is fully recognized there, not even this kind of a, you know, half-dissident like every second of your book is prohibited or whatever. And I think I got the logic why. Because in a very perfidious way the book works and his books as apologies for Cuba. His heroes, although disappointed, depressed, seeking refuge in alcohol and drinks, fantasizing about alternate historical realities, mourning all the time their lost chances, and of course, they are all depoliticized. They ignore the official socialist ideology. But nonetheless, they fundamentally accept their situation. The idea is, as mature men, we shouldn't dream about Miami, in all bitterness, we are citizens of this island, here we should stay and make the best of the worst situation. This acceptance is the background of all critical remarks and dark descriptions. Although totally disillusioned, they are from here and here to stay. This misery is their world, they struggle to find a meaningful life within its coordinates. And I think this is why, again, it functions in a perfect way as ideology, precisely in depoliticizing the situation. So again, the main point is, ideological gesture is this, how should I put it, reduction to our core human identity outside or beneath, beyond ideology. You know, when I hear, to be a little bit tasteless in a metaphor, when I hear words like "but never forget that beneath all the ideological dreams, orientations, we are the same human beings sharing anxieties and so on," well, my reaction is that Joseph Goebbels one, no? Show me this and I draw my gun. Why? You know where you can see clearly the limit of this approach? And here, I don't do it in any kind of cheap liberal bashing, but even with a certain respect, let's take the classical liberal-conservative interpreters, historians of Stalinism, like Robert Conquest and so on. You know what's my reproach to them? Not that they are too harsh, but that when they try implicitly, if not explicitly, to account for the mechanism of Stalinism, they are too soft. If you read these standard biographies, critiques, don't you have this impression—at least this is my impression—that the only explanation they give is that official ideology was a total cynical instrument, nobody took it seriously, that if you, as it were, if you scratch the surface, you will discover an ordinary guy caring just for power, money, wealth, influence? In other words, ideology is just a—not even a mask in the sense of appearance which seduces you, but just a cynical tool. Stalinists were really brutal people obsessed with—they were brutal—but obsessed with power, power and so on, humiliating and so on. In other words, if you scratch the surface, you all of a sudden encounter this same proto-natural liberal individual. You know where you can find this at its purest? I’m sorry if I repeat my example, I use it in another talk, but it's crucial. Did you see the movie which is resolutely anti-communist, *The Lives of Others*, *Das Leben der Anderen*, the German one which got Oscar? Again, I claim as a leftist, some kind of communist, my God, this movie is not hard enough, harsh enough. You know what’s the story? To cut long story short: top minister in ex-German Democratic Republic wants to screw a wife of a—beautiful wife of a—of a theater writer, great theater star of East Germany. So, to get rid of the competition, the husband, he orders the Stasi, the secret police, to control the guy and so on and so on. You know what's the problem with this theory? My God, what naive liberalism do we encounter here? The idea is that, don't they get it? And here I occasionally, not always, even agree with my not exactly political friend, Timothy Garton Ash. I met him two days ago, we totally agreed that the guy with all his furious anti-communism didn't get it that in East Germany the way it was, a writer like that, big public figure, popular, plays and so on performed in the West, he would have been covered totally by at least ten agents, even if there is no sleazy minister who wants to screw his wife. You know, in a typical liberal illusion, they have to look for this patholo—if something evil is happening, there must be some sleazy individual with one of these, as we put it, elementary human desires: you want women, you want power or whatever. The true horror of GDR and other Stalinist country was again that even if—I refer to the film now—even if all of the secret police were to be, I wouldn't say honest, honest in their own terms—like just sincerely believing doing their work, like the other hero of the film is this half-honest Stasi guy, the hero of the film—exactly the same thing would have happened. You don't need—you don't need the bad minister with his pathological desire to have it all—to have it all started. So what are the consequences of this, how should I call it, move away from ideology which is in itself part of ideology? Just to return for a moment to Stalinism. The problem I find again in these histories of Stalinism—to return to it—is that they treat Stalinist politicians as if beneath the official dogma, they disposed of another elementary, cynical, liberal-natural, utilitarian, egotistic individual, language, as if they knew what they were really doing. But what if the really horrible thing that you discover now that some of the Stalinist archives are partially open to the public at least, is that in private they spoke exactly the same language? It wasn't that in private they were cynics, more—they were cynics, brutal and so on, but still, within, they didn't have another interpretive grid, another network to interpret what they were doing. They weren't cynics in this simple way. So where this dehumanization of politics—nothing against humanism—but humanization in the sense of "don't forget we are really warm human beings," bring us? In the middle of April of this year, precisely when they had in the United States these so-called right-wing populist Tea Parties protesting new taxes and so on, I was sitting in a hotel room in Syracuse, United States, and I was jumping between the two TV channels. A documentary on Pete Seeger, you know, the great American country singer, populist-left, and of course Fox News report on the anti-tax Tea Party in Austin, Texas. In this Republican populist Tea Party, a country singer performed an anti-Obama populist song full of complaints on how Washington is taxing the hard-working ordinary people to finance the rich Wall Street executive and so on and so on. And what shocked me—it was really an unpleasant surprise—is how similar the entire rhetoric was. Because in the Pete Seeger show, they played some of his legendary songs which basically were saying the same thing, of course not the same thing, but at least superficially, you know: we poor hard-working people are exploited by the rich bankers and so on and so on. This weird similarity between the two singers, both formulating an anti-establishment populist complaint against the exploitative rich and calling for radical measures up to civil disobedience—is this not a painful reminder that with regard to the form of organization, today's radical populist right strangely reminds us of the old populist left? Are today's Christian survivalist fundamentalist groups with their half-legal status, which see—these groups—the main threat to their freedom in the oppressive state apparatus, are they not organized precisely like, for example, Black Panthers back in the '60s and so on? I'm not saying they are the same. What I'm saying is that this is for me another confirmation again of Walter Benjamin's thesis that behind every fascism, there is a right-wing revolution. The true tragedy, especially of the United States, political tragedy for me, is that the populist right took over, how should I put it, very naively and in very naive energetic terms, the energy which was before invested into the radical left. How did it do it? I think that one of the key points here is ideology, again at its most elementary, which appears as non-ideology of freedom of choice. This is I think again why the present moment in United States, with all Obama’s limitation, is very important. The topic is ideology of free choice. That's the only really effective argument of the right. What's the situation here? We all know the old Marxist critique about how the multiplicity of choices the market bombards us with obfuscate the absence of real choices. Like, we are given all the false choices, Coke or Pepsi, whatever, we are not given real choices. But I think something else is also happening, which theorists of so-called risk society like Ulrich Beck made it clear, that there is also the opposite phenomenon: we are all the time bombarded with calls to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque, where we are not even superficially qualified or given enough data to make a decision. So what's for me again the problem here? Today in the era of risk society, the ruling ideology tries to sell us the very insecurity caused, for example, by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms. You have to change your job every year, relying on short-term contracts. Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage. Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose either between life now or long-term security? And if you nonetheless persist in your anxiety, then they tell you that, you know, you escape from freedom, you are immature, you are not ready to accept new freedoms, and so on and so on. Here, I think—this will be the little bit of real Stalinism I hope we all share—here nonetheless we can make some use—not in this dark Stalinist sense—of the opposition between formal freedom and actual freedom. By actual freedom, I don’t mean any of this Stalinist stuff. I simply mean the following, which has to be emphasized today again and again. I claim the way we should answer those who advocate free choice is not by saying, "No, no, there are some higher things we should limit our free choice," we should just make a simple observation: in our complex postmodern and so on societies, yes, free choices are extremely important. But are we aware—and I will say something now very naive from our daily experience—just think a little bit of what does it mean to be free: you can walk freely, buy freely, you can move freely, you can choose your job freely, whatever, all this petty—are we aware of what an elaborate, let's call it, symbolic and institutional substrate, network, has to be here in order for us to effectively function as free individuals? I can walk freely on the street because I know that if somebody beats me, attacks me, I can, more or less, you never know, call the police, I rely on that. I can deal with others freely because I know that, at least within reasonable limits, I can expect that we all follow the same rules of politeness, you know, that like we walk on the street, by mistake I hit you, no? I will just look at you and say, "sorry," and you will say something like, "oh, it's okay, doesn't matter," we will not start shooting each other or whatever. I mean, you know what I mean, that freedom precisely as individual freedom takes a tremendous lot for granted in the form of this background. And for me, here we should demystify the freedom of choice. The way these Republican defenders in United States and elsewhere argue for the freedom of choice, they simply don't see that their actions undermine much of this invisible substance which then actually limits, constrains our freedom of choice. For example, when I was involved with some debates there in the States, I used a very demagogic argument which worked. I told them: listen, compare healthcare, why not, with water and electricity. All three—health, water, electricity—are absolutely crucial for our lives. But concerning water and electricity, if you ask me, I renounce with great pleasure my freedom of choice to choose the water provider and so on and so on. I don't want to think about it. I just want to be relatively relying and so on and so on. And I claim it's the same with healthcare. Okay, for the time being, before we Stalinists take over, okay, let the rich have their higher paid—but isn't part of not only elementary decency, egalitarian decency, that one of the things that we should still be proud to be from Europe, this basic idea that independently of status and so on, some—there should be some basic security for a decent life for all of us? Not only because of this, but even from the standpoint of freedom of choice. If you don't have to worry about, "Oh my God, do I have to have half a million of pounds ready for a difficult operation," if you can at least basically be able to forget about illness—not in the sense of I will not get it, but in the sense of if it comes, I can at least basically rely on a network which is there—can we even imagine how much more actual freedom of choice this gives us in actual lives? I mean, can you imagine a life where you have all the freedom to—what—to run all the day around looking for the doctor you can afford, looking for the water supply you can afford, looking for electricity provider? We simply should accept this. Now, do I have still five, ten minutes to concluding thoughts? So I’m often accused of this, the problem of violence. Okay, I have some peculiar, unorthodox opinions there. But I hope we can come to an agreement as to the basics. First, when we talk, because yes, let me return to this point, freedom of choice. This is an example of where I'm not afraid to use the term violence. But the violence I'm talking about, it's not the violence of killing others, imprisoning others, not even physical violence. It's something which is, in a way, psychologically very violent, but it's more, how should I call it, a defensive gesture of inner transformation. What we should do is, how should I put it, the way, why are unfortunately, referring to the last opinion polls, Republicans by manipulating freedom of choice even more or less, more and more unfortunately, I hope it will not last, winning. They are mobilizing a certain rather complex mechanism of choice and social identification. You know that, you know, these are wonderful psychoanalytic questions which we should and theories we should apply here. Like the question is to be asked apropos freedom of choice and so on, not only what is the ideology you adopt, but as what do you identify yourself in adopting that ideology? I think it was already your own years ago Manchester, the beginning of cultural studies guys who made, apropos when they analyzed Margaret Thatcher, a very nice discovery: that people do not identify when making ideological choices with what they are, they identify with an ideal of what they may become. It's always this possibility. And this is how, for example, Thatcherism works. You don't identify with what you are, you identify with the market luck around the corner or what. And this is how it works also. So again, here we need psychoanalysis. But furthermore, this identification, the way we dream, the way we perceive ourselves, this is maybe the harshest of all struggles. This is an—I will quote an old liberal, he needs some reform here—Sigmund Freud who, you know, used that wonderful fragment from Virgil, *Aeneid*, at the beginning of *Traumdeutung*, like "*Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo*." If you can't move the earth, move the underground. By underground I mean the underground of dreams, fantasies, identifications, and so on. This is the struggle today. Even if it—even if the healthcare reform fails in the United States, I’m tempted to say if the result will be that we should see the limitations of this pure rational choice, sorry, pure freedom of choice theory, not the limitation in some communitarian sense—no, we need more social discipline—but the limitation in the sense that by the way it actually functions, it effectively limits our actual freedoms, the struggle will be worth of it. So my final metaphor, I read recently a wonderful novel which I think applies to us today perfectly. It’s the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, *The Palace of Dreams*. It’s the story which takes place in an unnamed East European, Oriental empire, basically Turkey in the 19th century, where the central ministry of this state is Tabir Saray, the Palace of Dreams. The idea is that they collect dreams from the entire empire and interpret them to read the future of the nation and so on. There is thousands of bureaucrats doing these jobs, immense political struggles involved in it. Why? Here are just a couple of lines from the book. "In my opinion," Kurt went on—Kurt is one of the heroes of the novel—"it is the only organization in the state, this Ministry of Dreams, where the darker side of its subjects' consciousness enters into direct contact with the state itself. The masses don't rule, but they do possess mechanism through which they influence all the state's affairs, including its crimes, and that mechanism is the Tabir Saray." "Do you mean to say," asked the cousin, another guy in this conversation in the novel, "that the masses are to a certain point responsible for everything that happens and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?" "Yes," said Kurt. "In a way, yes." I think the topic here is, if you of course abstract from this mythic content, is simply that when we are subjects to power, as we learn from wonderful theorists like the old good treatise on *servitude volontaire* by La Boétie, you know, we are always, we want it or not, invested in power. When we obey power, it’s never simple oppression. Even when oppression seems pure, look for dark investments, for precisely obscure dreams. This link and there we should attack. For example, I was always shocked, back to Stalinism, obviously you can say I have strange fixations there. You know what shocked me, to what extent even all those who had—who had nothing but—but hatred for Stalinism, if you look at the—I’m speaking now mostly about poets, composers and so on—had, if you look at their most intimate notes, a strange fixation, respect and so on. You know, for example, there is a wonderful anecdote about Shostakovich. Stalin called him once, you know, the phone rang, "hi, Stalin here." Shostakovich first didn't believe and then asked him: "What do you say about, think about Mandelstam? Should we arrest him or not?" Then Shostakovich squeezed out, and then asked Stalin: "Can I talk with you?" Stalin said "Why?" Shostakovich said "I would like to talk with you about life, death and similar thing." All of a sudden you can see Shostakovich hated Stalin, but this idea, this absolute figure of power, just must have some inner wisdom, some kind of insight into ultimate things. You see, they were already caught in that dream. The same goes for practically all of them, for Mandelstam himself, for Meyerhold, for Bulgakov and so on and so on, who has a—had a similar conversation with Stalin. This is, I think, the most difficult thing to do. It is a—something which can be psychologically very violent. Now I will give you a brutal metaphor. Did you see—it’s a little bit too Stalinist epic, but it has its nice moments—Bertolucci's this big movie *Novecento*, 20th Century? Some—approximately half an hour into the movie, there is a scene which shocked me. There is a confrontation between the striking poor farmers on strike and their landowner who in very reasonable economic terms explains to them how because of the—like today—because of the financial crisis, market drop and so on, you should accept only half the wages. He reasons with them. And the farmers say, "sorry, we starve, we don't accept it." Then the owner starts to shout at the market—at the farmers—"but are you so stupid, don't you have ears to listen to me?" And then comes a wonderful moment, that's the violence I advocate, not literally but you will see the point. One of the farmers steps forward, takes out a knife, a kind of a curved knife, and cuts off his own ear and says: "Na, here you have it. Like talking about our ears." The message is the right one. The message is, "No, we are stepping—" it's a kind of a very, unfortunately, anti-Habermasian almost message. But I think in a deeper sense maybe it is Habermasian. It is that in a way, you know, it's the gesture of withdrawal. It's not this fascist gesture, "I don't talk with you," but it's "no, I—I give you my ear, I don't talk at that level. You have to step out of that." And this is—there is—there is a violence in this. And this violence, this is what I would have called ironically the—the violence of Gandhi, Gandhian violence. This is why I wrote and that famous, to shock my friends, I like to do this, the famous statement for which I was accused for I don't know what, that Hitler wasn't violent enough. My American publisher got a heart attack, Picador. They called me: "What, do you—are you saying he should killed all of us Jews? That it wasn't enough half?" and so on. No, my message is that Hitler was a coward. All his violence was in the strict Nietzschean sense reactive violence. He did all these things because, to cut a long story short, here I remain an old-fashioned leftist, because he wanted basically the society function the way it is. You know, he changed many things so that the fundamentals were not changed. While Gandhi, with all his non-violence, he did something pretty brutal in a good sense. He really wanted to stop with his protest and so on the entire functioning of the British state in India. He didn't just talk with them. At a symbolic level, he did precisely to all those British liberals, "but listen, the situation is complex, let's talk." Basically Gandhi—Gandhi did—did this. So, I think that this is how maybe you will agree, I would be into—maybe not. On the one hand I am for, how should I put it, for this type of violence. Not—it's not a question of physical violence. The question is nonetheless of accepting that as my friend Alain Badiou would have put it, I often disagree with him but here I do, that you know, unfortunately in politics there are real enemies. Politics is not a domain where we will all just be friends and so on and so on. And why I'm saying this? Because I claim that a politics which wants to be purely dialogic, no enemies, ends up as sooner or later advocating even worse violence. Because if you say, no, we should all be in a dialogue blah blah, then those who don't fit the coordinates of your dialogue are not even admit—are not even acknowledged as legitimate enemies but are those, homo sacer for Agamben, dispossessed and so on and so on. The second thing I want to say just to conclude now, really, like physically I prove it to you, two, three pages, is that paradoxically, this—and I like this conclusion—this need for violence, but violence in this sense of it’s more, how should I call it, the interrupting violence, should be combined, I think, with—let's call it, may sound strange to you what I will say, with a need for new civility. I claim that and here again, I agree with what some of these risk theorists are saying, you know, today's society, we have to reinvent the rules, we cannot simply rely on old customs to tell us and so on. But the only way to avoid war in such a situation is to rely on something which may appear modest, on what I’m tempted to call some elementary rules of civility. Civility are not customs. Civility is what you need—let's say you are from where you are, I’m from where I am, I admit it, I am Balkan ethnic cleansing subject, that's what—but how do we talk? We don't share some traditional customs. The only thing that prevents us shooting each other is elementary civility. And I mean this in a very serious sense. There were times, '60s, revolution, hippies, all that, where we thought those in power stand for this fake dignity, rigid manners, politeness. So it is something subversive if you use dirty words or whatever. I think that Berlusconi is our future, in the sense that today those in power, for reasons I don't have time to develop now, are getting more and more obscene, undermining their own authority. So perhaps, just perhaps, it's time for the left radicals to become the partisans of simple civility. And I mean this even in a slightly conservative sense to provoke you with art. Then, I remember—conclusion—a couple of years ago, there was in New York a big exhibition, Andres Serrano photographs, where maybe you remember the scandal, the guy presented some statue of Jesus Christ in urine and so on. And he was attacked by conservatives. Then—then some these permissive liberals counter-attacked him, claiming, "But you shouldn't read this as a simple provocation. That by displaying Christ in urine the—the artist wants to make you think, reflect on what is the basis of your feeling of disgust, how do we relate to inner, to the inner of our body," and so on and so on. You know what's the problem for me with this? Is that it works all too well. Let me give you to conclude in my style, an extremely vulgar example which I will never do. Let me imagine myself shooting—making a video shot of myself shitting. You see everything: how the shit comes gradually out, my satisfied smile, ah, it's finally out. And then people attack me, "vulgarity!" What if I say then exactly the same words? It may seem a provocation, but I'm just questioning the very presuppositions of our feeling disgust, I'm subverting the limit inside-outside, it's not as simple as that. That's what I'm claiming. I'm getting slowly more respectful towards these much-despised ordinary people and so on and so on. So again, now really half a minute to conclude with violence. For me—and this is an old even feminist lesson, what was now that you will see that I did my theoretical homework—I'm well aware, and I respect it, of the finesse of Hannah Arendt's distinctions between authority, power, and violence. He makes very nice points of how violence is not authority, violence is the explosion of the impotent ones and so on. But I claim where maybe she doesn't go far enough is to see how often or even as a rule what appears as legitimate authority is sustained secretly by some kind of obscene violence. And that's our task today. This is what, with all my people claim anti-feminist bad taste jokes, one thing has to be admitted: the great achievement, theoretical result even, of feminism of the '60s, this big era and '70s, was to teach us how to perceive as violent what appeared as natural traditional authority. You know, this elementary insight, no, when woman obeys a man, it's not natural authority. This appearance of natural authority is generated by some very brutal—to use the Michel Foucault term—micro-practices or whatever. This is why I put so much emphasis on violence. Not that I am fascinated by violence, but that I claim maybe the task, one of the great tasks today of critique, even honest self-critique of liberalism, is to teach us to see violence, to rediscover violence where violence generates its own self-erasure. There I think we can easily find common language even with two such strange—maybe even the two of us will discover that we don't only love Stalin, that we love some other things. Thanks very much for your patience. And again, I read your book on democracy and I must clarify here when I problematize democracy, again it’s not, ooh, a new Leninist central committee. What I like is how you break the confines of simply multi-party democracy and look at all different forms without—that’s what I like about your work—without the usual operation of privileging another, usually more primordial form. Like when I was in China, they told me: "we discovered that your Western democracy is meaningless, we discovered what is true democracy, we call it deliberative democracy." Like the idea is we should really debate things. Then I asked them a simple question: I totally agree, but who decides then? Ah, they became evasive. The important thing is that we debate. So I like this, we should really do this. Otherwise, I think it will be very difficult to avoid new authoritarianism, very soft one, but no less dangerous than I see this, how should I put it, decisions of the people, by the people, blah blah, but which step outside the bounds of this standard democracy. Slavoj's books will be on sale outside that door, my books will be out sale on that door. You see this, I am a noble intellectual creature, this is the are you to go to the anti-my text, are you Jewish by any chance? Pass. Secular, secular. Yeah. Secular Jew, that’s the worst. This means—this means you don't care about God, you care only about money and this... No questions, guys, there’ll be no questions. It’s interruption or civility. No, but what I mean... and our speaker’s defining civility as non-interruption. Carry on. Okay, I will bow down to your brutal phallocentrism, please. Well, we've almost run out of time. I will just take—you have to keep your questions really short. We're going to get lots of questions and then you can finish the event by inventing and free-associating on the questions. Alright, I will give you this Buddhist bullshit, clap with one hand, this... Okay, if you like the lecture, you know we... Okay, very brief. Um, yeah, I have a question for about Slavoj’s new found LSE-compatible Kantian liberalism. I wasn’t at that lecture... No, I mean if your strategy that you're advocating is some kind of civility, a moral behavior and we have communism as a permanent motive in Lenin... Yeah, is it? From early Lenin till in the last writings against Stalin, read what Lenin wrote about—it wasn’t just Stalin stuff, he emphasized again and again, civility, politeness is the central question. Okay, my question, but to move from—okay, from ideology critique, very important and so on, to move to a strategy, a strategic formulation or articulation of, let’s say, intervention, organization for a democratic communism, what would be the prospect, what is the prospect, what is your standing on this? Let’s hear—answer. Okay, that’s the question. We’re going to take two or three, then you can answer them all at the end because we’re going to run out—lots of people have classes to go to. I want to get a few points from here. I have someone up there. Yes. A very short question: is cutting off your ear an act of civility? Ah, don't answer, don't answer. Okay. Yes. Hi, I know I’m supposed to be brief, but I’ll try my best to be as brief as possible. You have to be. Um, again going back to the lady, what she said, but my one is in a bit different tangent. You said about Gandhian violence and also my referral point would be the civil rights movement and also the liberation of India. Don’t you think that with the proposition of this violence, there is always the position of the ruling class which always has that particular allowance ground? It can give the symbolic positions, allow the symbolic positions like giving liberation to India or like, you know, some symbolic changes within the civil rights movement, but go on with their ruling ideology nonetheless. You talked about formal freedom and actual freedom. My question is in today's world if actual freedom is just a utopia or if it is really achievable? Okay, the guy on the top. With regards to psychoanalysis, do you believe that the current catering to our desires has resulted in people being less pursuing their drives to Eros and Thanatos less? Okay, now I'll ask you just one question. Do you see yourself actually as anti-Habermasian? In the last minutes you could easily be thought to be. But isn't Habermas’ view when dialogue breaks down, dialogue breaks down and then you’re in a non-discursive situation where anything is possible, in other words, forms of violence? But the point of dialogue is once you enter a dialogue, it raises inherently the possibility that you might come to an understanding because if you didn’t make that presupposition about dialogue, it would fragment, you wouldn't go on. You wouldn't go on because you wouldn't think you could engage the other. But when language breaks down and dialogue is finished, and that is your point, then the game is entirely different. So is that anti-Habermasian? I’m not sure. No, I will try to be as short as possible. Alright, we’ve only got five minutes because of classes, I’m afraid.
Thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here, but not to lose time because here you are my castrating super-ego figure minutes and so on. Let me go directly to the point. Of course this is like more in Kantian sense, regulative idea. Maybe I'm not so sure it will have some link with this. What I want to focus on is simply my eternal topic: the way ideology functions today, ideology and violence maybe. How do we know that we are in ideology and what do I mean by it? Sorry, hope this works. During a public debate that I had with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library, he made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance. Something like, would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they love, and so on and so on? To which I replied with a similar pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? The irony of this situation was of course that when the case is stated in these abstract terms, we both couldn't but agree with each other. What should I tell him? No, I want to live in a society where women are oppressed or whatever? What could he say? The irony was that Bernard-Henri Lévy, the great neoliberal—not only this, but the very embodiment of how the ruling ideology reappropriated the legacy of '68 as it were—he told me, oh my God, if this is communism, I am a communist. This was a sign that something was wrong. What was wrong was that we both were knee-deep in ideology. Ideology is precisely that thick background noise on account of which even if we explicitly agreed, effectively we did not agree. You know, like to say today I want women to be able to choose a man they love, blah blah blah, you never say only this. There comes a package within: how do you mean it? Do you mean this postmodern permissivity and so on? Or to say in this sense that I'm for communism, again, it can mean many things. It always means more. This background noise, I think, accounts for ideology. And be especially attentive when people, as it is fashionable today, use terms like "cut the crap," "cut the bullshit." At that point usually you get ideology at its purest. For example, the very guy who is the ideologist of bullshit, Harry Frankfurt. I know, like critique of the jargon, blah blah, all that. But a German journalist, maybe you know somewhere else, the only case I know is for a German philosophical journal, a journalist asked him: okay, give me one politician who is not bullshitting. You know whom he gave? John McCain. For me, not exactly. What this background noise of ideology conveys is more often than not the obscenity of the barbarian violence which sustains the public law and order. This is why Walter Benjamin's thesis that every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism has a precise impact on the very notion of being civilized. To be civilized means to know one is potentially barbarian. Every civilization which disavows its barbarian potential already capitulated to barbarism. This is how one should read the report about a weird confrontation in Vienna in when SS thugs entered Freud’s—Sigmund Freud’s—apartment on Berggasse just to examine it. The old dignified Freud, so people describe the scene, standing in front of a young SS bull. The idea was this is a metaphor of what was the best in old European culture, Freud, confronting the worst of the new emerging barbarism. One should nonetheless add to the clarity of this image that the SS guy perceived and legitimized himself as a defender of European culture and its spiritual values against the barbarism of modernity with its focus on economy and sex, the barbarism which for the Nazis was epitomized by the name Freud. What this means is that, again, Benjamin’s claim that every document of culture is at the same time a document of barbarism should be pushed a step further. What if culture itself is nothing but a hold, a brake, a respite in the pursuit of barbarity? This perhaps is one of the way to read Paul Celan’s succinct paraphrase of Brecht. This is Paul Celan’s poem: "What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much implicitly told." And again, this is how ideology, the critique of ideology, should proceed today. For example, because today ideology as a rule appears precisely as non-ideology. And you should detect it as the unspoken background. Not only if, how should I put it, if in the old days, in a more traditional functioning of ideology, you had the explicit ideological message—sacrifice whatever—and then you got the obscene message between the lines. I claim fascists are masters in this. Official message is: sacrifice yourself, your country needs, and then the line between message is: pretend to do this and you can, I don’t know, rape girls, kill the Jews, whatever, all the obscene payment that you get. Today more and more, and it's a much more dangerous strategy, it's the opposite one. You are directly addressed as hedonistic consumerist subject, but the price comes implicitly. And the irony is that this price is more and more explicitly stated, sold to you. Like what we were talking about Starbucks is precisely this semantic density. You know, as they bombard you again and again with the message: buying a cup of Starbucks cappuccino, you are not just buying Starbucks cappuccino. You are supporting the Guatemala farmers in their organic farming, helping mother earth to survive, even in our societies. My God, there is a whole sociological theory, a wild one. Once I saw an interview on CNN of the owner of Starbucks who appeared almost like, you know, Anthony Giddens from Seattle, how should I put it? Where he said: "In our postmodern risk society," and so on, he said this. He said: "You know, these old places of collectivity, collective solidarity, town halls, parks, no longer operate. So Starbucks should also be an ersatz place of collective experience," and so on and so on. I mean, they made you aware, at least maybe this is a good sign, that they made you aware of what you are buying on the side. This is getting more and more palpable today. For example, it’s not only Starbucks. It’s, you know, there is a company called in United States "Toms Shoes" which was founded in Their idea is the following one: when you buy shoes, with every pair of shoes—this is why they are a little bit more expensive—they promise you to give one pair of shoes, again, to one of these proverbial starving children in Africa or whatever. So that you see the paradox: it’s no longer here I’m a consumerist, but then in the afternoon when I get a moral hangover or whatever, I should do something good for the—no, it’s that, how should I put it, the sin—if you pay a little bit more for the sin, you can buy way of sinning. At the same time buy your own redemption already. You know, like, you know, in your very consumption is included the price for ecological, social, humanitarian, and so on and so on, redemption. This logic even reached its extreme point with a recent—it was even a shock for me—in United States, Pepsi-Cola started a new wave of publicity where I will read it to you, I was shocked. "Pepsi"—that's their publicity—"Pepsi has always been about refreshment, but what if instead of just refreshing people, Pepsi will help to refresh the world? If you've got an idea about how to make the world a better place, whether it’s saving something, creating something, or fixing something, we want you to tell us about it. Then you vote to decide which ideas are the best." And then, you know, Pepsi will give the money to whatever, an ecological cause, and so on. I find this so wonderful, so that you are even given the freedom of choice to decide about this surplus which makes a commodity more than a commodity and so on and so on. This ideological trend is based in what? In again, ideology appearing as its opposite, as non-ideology. What do I mean by this? I will give you just two extremely simple clear examples. First, I hope you saw one of the two recent Israeli films about the Lebanon War: Ari Folman's animated documentary *Waltz with Bashir* or Samuel Maoz's *Lebanon*. What both film movies are about—a war—but they both enact a certain, how should I call it, reduction to the apolitical elementary experience of terror of being at war. For example, *Lebanon*, most of the movie takes place within an Israeli tank penetrating into Lebanon, and it doesn't celebrate Israeli technological masters or whatever. No, it shows all the horror. Soldiers experience this as a meaningless nightmare, are terrified, and so on and so on. But nonetheless, it may appear pacifistic, good, but I think the price we pay is a total depoliticization of a society. You know, the moment you focus only on soldiers finding themselves in this absurd situation of killing and so on, questions like "But wait a minute, what were they doing there?" "It was a war of whom against"—all this somehow disappears. You get just pure non-ideological, as it were, human suffering. But so that you will not say that it's only this side, American-Israeli, that I attack, let me take a similar example of very refined functioning of ideology from today's Cuba. I like detective novels, so I couldn't resist reading a couple of Cuban detective novels. He’s a very good writer, you can get them now, they are printed here. So-called *Havana Quartet* or *Havana Red*, *Havana Blue* by Leonardo Padura Fuentes. It’s a—Fuentes, sorry—it’s a—they are police procedurals set in today's Havana. First, they are extremely critical of today's Cuban society. It’s none of the idealism of sacrificing for socialism. They show prostitution, exploitation, corruption of the nomenklatura, not misery. Even more, the explicit topic of these novels is that because of the communist adventure, the whole, the entire younger generation of today's Cuba is a lost generation, in the sense of things are happening politically, artistically, economically, they are in the void, they are, how should I put it, losing time, missing—not the Stalinist train of history, this is only in our hearts, people didn't yet grow to that—but simply missing what is going on today. So I thought, oh my God, I would like to meet this guy, I'm sure he has a nice villa in somewhere in Miami suburbs. Then I was told, no, he is very celebrated as their main export article. He lives in Cuba, is fully recognized there, not even this kind of a, you know, half-dissident like every second of your book is prohibited or whatever. And I think I got the logic why. Because in a very perfidious way the book works and his books as apologies for Cuba. His heroes, although disappointed, depressed, seeking refuge in alcohol and drinks, fantasizing about alternate historical realities, mourning all the time their lost chances, and of course, they are all depoliticized. They ignore the official socialist ideology. But nonetheless, they fundamentally accept their situation. The idea is, as mature men, we shouldn't dream about Miami, in all bitterness, we are citizens of this island, here we should stay and make the best of the worst situation. This acceptance is the background of all critical remarks and dark descriptions. Although totally disillusioned, they are from here and here to stay. This misery is their world, they struggle to find a meaningful life within its coordinates. And I think this is why, again, it functions in a perfect way as ideology, precisely in depoliticizing the situation. So again, the main point is, ideological gesture is this, how should I put it, reduction to our core human identity outside or beneath, beyond ideology. You know, when I hear, to be a little bit tasteless in a metaphor, when I hear words like "but never forget that beneath all the ideological dreams, orientations, we are the same human beings sharing anxieties and so on," well, my reaction is that Joseph Goebbels one, no? Show me this and I draw my gun. Why? You know where you can see clearly the limit of this approach? And here, I don't do it in any kind of cheap liberal bashing, but even with a certain respect, let's take the classical liberal-conservative interpreters, historians of Stalinism, like Robert Conquest and so on. You know what's my reproach to them? Not that they are too harsh, but that when they try implicitly, if not explicitly, to account for the mechanism of Stalinism, they are too soft. If you read these standard biographies, critiques, don't you have this impression—at least this is my impression—that the only explanation they give is that official ideology was a total cynical instrument, nobody took it seriously, that if you, as it were, if you scratch the surface, you will discover an ordinary guy caring just for power, money, wealth, influence? In other words, ideology is just a—not even a mask in the sense of appearance which seduces you, but just a cynical tool. Stalinists were really brutal people obsessed with—they were brutal—but obsessed with power, power and so on, humiliating and so on. In other words, if you scratch the surface, you all of a sudden encounter this same proto-natural liberal individual. You know where you can find this at its purest? I’m sorry if I repeat my example, I use it in another talk, but it's crucial. Did you see the movie which is resolutely anti-communist, *The Lives of Others*, *Das Leben der Anderen*, the German one which got Oscar? Again, I claim as a leftist, some kind of communist, my God, this movie is not hard enough, harsh enough. You know what’s the story? To cut long story short: top minister in ex-German Democratic Republic wants to screw a wife of a—beautiful wife of a—of a theater writer, great theater star of East Germany. So, to get rid of the competition, the husband, he orders the Stasi, the secret police, to control the guy and so on and so on. You know what's the problem with this theory? My God, what naive liberalism do we encounter here? The idea is that, don't they get it? And here I occasionally, not always, even agree with my not exactly political friend, Timothy Garton Ash. I met him two days ago, we totally agreed that the guy with all his furious anti-communism didn't get it that in East Germany the way it was, a writer like that, big public figure, popular, plays and so on performed in the West, he would have been covered totally by at least ten agents, even if there is no sleazy minister who wants to screw his wife. You know, in a typical liberal illusion, they have to look for this patholo—if something evil is happening, there must be some sleazy individual with one of these, as we put it, elementary human desires: you want women, you want power or whatever. The true horror of GDR and other Stalinist country was again that even if—I refer to the film now—even if all of the secret police were to be, I wouldn't say honest, honest in their own terms—like just sincerely believing doing their work, like the other hero of the film is this half-honest Stasi guy, the hero of the film—exactly the same thing would have happened. You don't need—you don't need the bad minister with his pathological desire to have it all—to have it all started. So what are the consequences of this, how should I call it, move away from ideology which is in itself part of ideology? Just to return for a moment to Stalinism. The problem I find again in these histories of Stalinism—to return to it—is that they treat Stalinist politicians as if beneath the official dogma, they disposed of another elementary, cynical, liberal-natural, utilitarian, egotistic individual, language, as if they knew what they were really doing. But what if the really horrible thing that you discover now that some of the Stalinist archives are partially open to the public at least, is that in private they spoke exactly the same language? It wasn't that in private they were cynics, more—they were cynics, brutal and so on, but still, within, they didn't have another interpretive grid, another network to interpret what they were doing. They weren't cynics in this simple way. So where this dehumanization of politics—nothing against humanism—but humanization in the sense of "don't forget we are really warm human beings," bring us? In the middle of April of this year, precisely when they had in the United States these so-called right-wing populist Tea Parties protesting new taxes and so on, I was sitting in a hotel room in Syracuse, United States, and I was jumping between the two TV channels. A documentary on Pete Seeger, you know, the great American country singer, populist-left, and of course Fox News report on the anti-tax Tea Party in Austin, Texas. In this Republican populist Tea Party, a country singer performed an anti-Obama populist song full of complaints on how Washington is taxing the hard-working ordinary people to finance the rich Wall Street executive and so on and so on. And what shocked me—it was really an unpleasant surprise—is how similar the entire rhetoric was. Because in the Pete Seeger show, they played some of his legendary songs which basically were saying the same thing, of course not the same thing, but at least superficially, you know: we poor hard-working people are exploited by the rich bankers and so on and so on. This weird similarity between the two singers, both formulating an anti-establishment populist complaint against the exploitative rich and calling for radical measures up to civil disobedience—is this not a painful reminder that with regard to the form of organization, today's radical populist right strangely reminds us of the old populist left? Are today's Christian survivalist fundamentalist groups with their half-legal status, which see—these groups—the main threat to their freedom in the oppressive state apparatus, are they not organized precisely like, for example, Black Panthers back in the '60s and so on? I'm not saying they are the same. What I'm saying is that this is for me another confirmation again of Walter Benjamin's thesis that behind every fascism, there is a right-wing revolution. The true tragedy, especially of the United States, political tragedy for me, is that the populist right took over, how should I put it, very naively and in very naive energetic terms, the energy which was before invested into the radical left. How did it do it? I think that one of the key points here is ideology, again at its most elementary, which appears as non-ideology of freedom of choice. This is I think again why the present moment in United States, with all Obama’s limitation, is very important. The topic is ideology of free choice. That's the only really effective argument of the right. What's the situation here? We all know the old Marxist critique about how the multiplicity of choices the market bombards us with obfuscate the absence of real choices. Like, we are given all the false choices, Coke or Pepsi, whatever, we are not given real choices. But I think something else is also happening, which theorists of so-called risk society like Ulrich Beck made it clear, that there is also the opposite phenomenon: we are all the time bombarded with calls to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque, where we are not even superficially qualified or given enough data to make a decision. So what's for me again the problem here? Today in the era of risk society, the ruling ideology tries to sell us the very insecurity caused, for example, by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms. You have to change your job every year, relying on short-term contracts. Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage. Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose either between life now or long-term security? And if you nonetheless persist in your anxiety, then they tell you that, you know, you escape from freedom, you are immature, you are not ready to accept new freedoms, and so on and so on. Here, I think—this will be the little bit of real Stalinism I hope we all share—here nonetheless we can make some use—not in this dark Stalinist sense—of the opposition between formal freedom and actual freedom. By actual freedom, I don’t mean any of this Stalinist stuff. I simply mean the following, which has to be emphasized today again and again. I claim the way we should answer those who advocate free choice is not by saying, "No, no, there are some higher things we should limit our free choice," we should just make a simple observation: in our complex postmodern and so on societies, yes, free choices are extremely important. But are we aware—and I will say something now very naive from our daily experience—just think a little bit of what does it mean to be free: you can walk freely, buy freely, you can move freely, you can choose your job freely, whatever, all this petty—are we aware of what an elaborate, let's call it, symbolic and institutional substrate, network, has to be here in order for us to effectively function as free individuals? I can walk freely on the street because I know that if somebody beats me, attacks me, I can, more or less, you never know, call the police, I rely on that. I can deal with others freely because I know that, at least within reasonable limits, I can expect that we all follow the same rules of politeness, you know, that like we walk on the street, by mistake I hit you, no? I will just look at you and say, "sorry," and you will say something like, "oh, it's okay, doesn't matter," we will not start shooting each other or whatever. I mean, you know what I mean, that freedom precisely as individual freedom takes a tremendous lot for granted in the form of this background. And for me, here we should demystify the freedom of choice. The way these Republican defenders in United States and elsewhere argue for the freedom of choice, they simply don't see that their actions undermine much of this invisible substance which then actually limits, constrains our freedom of choice. For example, when I was involved with some debates there in the States, I used a very demagogic argument which worked. I told them: listen, compare healthcare, why not, with water and electricity. All three—health, water, electricity—are absolutely crucial for our lives. But concerning water and electricity, if you ask me, I renounce with great pleasure my freedom of choice to choose the water provider and so on and so on. I don't want to think about it. I just want to be relatively relying and so on and so on. And I claim it's the same with healthcare. Okay, for the time being, before we Stalinists take over, okay, let the rich have their higher paid—but isn't part of not only elementary decency, egalitarian decency, that one of the things that we should still be proud to be from Europe, this basic idea that independently of status and so on, some—there should be some basic security for a decent life for all of us? Not only because of this, but even from the standpoint of freedom of choice. If you don't have to worry about, "Oh my God, do I have to have half a million of pounds ready for a difficult operation," if you can at least basically be able to forget about illness—not in the sense of I will not get it, but in the sense of if it comes, I can at least basically rely on a network which is there—can we even imagine how much more actual freedom of choice this gives us in actual lives? I mean, can you imagine a life where you have all the freedom to—what—to run all the day around looking for the doctor you can afford, looking for the water supply you can afford, looking for electricity provider? We simply should accept this. Now, do I have still five, ten minutes to concluding thoughts? So I’m often accused of this, the problem of violence. Okay, I have some peculiar, unorthodox opinions there. But I hope we can come to an agreement as to the basics. First, when we talk, because yes, let me return to this point, freedom of choice. This is an example of where I'm not afraid to use the term violence. But the violence I'm talking about, it's not the violence of killing others, imprisoning others, not even physical violence. It's something which is, in a way, psychologically very violent, but it's more, how should I call it, a defensive gesture of inner transformation. What we should do is, how should I put it, the way, why are unfortunately, referring to the last opinion polls, Republicans by manipulating freedom of choice even more or less, more and more unfortunately, I hope it will not last, winning. They are mobilizing a certain rather complex mechanism of choice and social identification. You know that, you know, these are wonderful psychoanalytic questions which we should and theories we should apply here. Like the question is to be asked apropos freedom of choice and so on, not only what is the ideology you adopt, but as what do you identify yourself in adopting that ideology? I think it was already your own years ago Manchester, the beginning of cultural studies guys who made, apropos when they analyzed Margaret Thatcher, a very nice discovery: that people do not identify when making ideological choices with what they are, they identify with an ideal of what they may become. It's always this possibility. And this is how, for example, Thatcherism works. You don't identify with what you are, you identify with the market luck around the corner or what. And this is how it works also. So again, here we need psychoanalysis. But furthermore, this identification, the way we dream, the way we perceive ourselves, this is maybe the harshest of all struggles. This is an—I will quote an old liberal, he needs some reform here—Sigmund Freud who, you know, used that wonderful fragment from Virgil, *Aeneid*, at the beginning of *Traumdeutung*, like "*Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo*." If you can't move the earth, move the underground. By underground I mean the underground of dreams, fantasies, identifications, and so on. This is the struggle today. Even if it—even if the healthcare reform fails in the United States, I’m tempted to say if the result will be that we should see the limitations of this pure rational choice, sorry, pure freedom of choice theory, not the limitation in some communitarian sense—no, we need more social discipline—but the limitation in the sense that by the way it actually functions, it effectively limits our actual freedoms, the struggle will be worth of it. So my final metaphor, I read recently a wonderful novel which I think applies to us today perfectly. It’s the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, *The Palace of Dreams*. It’s the story which takes place in an unnamed East European, Oriental empire, basically Turkey in the 19th century, where the central ministry of this state is Tabir Saray, the Palace of Dreams. The idea is that they collect dreams from the entire empire and interpret them to read the future of the nation and so on. There is thousands of bureaucrats doing these jobs, immense political struggles involved in it. Why? Here are just a couple of lines from the book. "In my opinion," Kurt went on—Kurt is one of the heroes of the novel—"it is the only organization in the state, this Ministry of Dreams, where the darker side of its subjects' consciousness enters into direct contact with the state itself. The masses don't rule, but they do possess mechanism through which they influence all the state's affairs, including its crimes, and that mechanism is the Tabir Saray." "Do you mean to say," asked the cousin, another guy in this conversation in the novel, "that the masses are to a certain point responsible for everything that happens and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?" "Yes," said Kurt. "In a way, yes." I think the topic here is, if you of course abstract from this mythic content, is simply that when we are subjects to power, as we learn from wonderful theorists like the old good treatise on *servitude volontaire* by La Boétie, you know, we are always, we want it or not, invested in power. When we obey power, it’s never simple oppression. Even when oppression seems pure, look for dark investments, for precisely obscure dreams. This link and there we should attack. For example, I was always shocked, back to Stalinism, obviously you can say I have strange fixations there. You know what shocked me, to what extent even all those who had—who had nothing but—but hatred for Stalinism, if you look at the—I’m speaking now mostly about poets, composers and so on—had, if you look at their most intimate notes, a strange fixation, respect and so on. You know, for example, there is a wonderful anecdote about Shostakovich. Stalin called him once, you know, the phone rang, "hi, Stalin here." Shostakovich first didn't believe and then asked him: "What do you say about, think about Mandelstam? Should we arrest him or not?" Then Shostakovich squeezed out, and then asked Stalin: "Can I talk with you?" Stalin said "Why?" Shostakovich said "I would like to talk with you about life, death and similar thing." All of a sudden you can see Shostakovich hated Stalin, but this idea, this absolute figure of power, just must have some inner wisdom, some kind of insight into ultimate things. You see, they were already caught in that dream. The same goes for practically all of them, for Mandelstam himself, for Meyerhold, for Bulgakov and so on and so on, who has a—had a similar conversation with Stalin. This is, I think, the most difficult thing to do. It is a—something which can be psychologically very violent. Now I will give you a brutal metaphor. Did you see—it’s a little bit too Stalinist epic, but it has its nice moments—Bertolucci's this big movie *Novecento*, 20th Century? Some—approximately half an hour into the movie, there is a scene which shocked me. There is a confrontation between the striking poor farmers on strike and their landowner who in very reasonable economic terms explains to them how because of the—like today—because of the financial crisis, market drop and so on, you should accept only half the wages. He reasons with them. And the farmers say, "sorry, we starve, we don't accept it." Then the owner starts to shout at the market—at the farmers—"but are you so stupid, don't you have ears to listen to me?" And then comes a wonderful moment, that's the violence I advocate, not literally but you will see the point. One of the farmers steps forward, takes out a knife, a kind of a curved knife, and cuts off his own ear and says: "Na, here you have it. Like talking about our ears." The message is the right one. The message is, "No, we are stepping—" it's a kind of a very, unfortunately, anti-Habermasian almost message. But I think in a deeper sense maybe it is Habermasian. It is that in a way, you know, it's the gesture of withdrawal. It's not this fascist gesture, "I don't talk with you," but it's "no, I—I give you my ear, I don't talk at that level. You have to step out of that." And this is—there is—there is a violence in this. And this violence, this is what I would have called ironically the—the violence of Gandhi, Gandhian violence. This is why I wrote and that famous, to shock my friends, I like to do this, the famous statement for which I was accused for I don't know what, that Hitler wasn't violent enough. My American publisher got a heart attack, Picador. They called me: "What, do you—are you saying he should killed all of us Jews? That it wasn't enough half?" and so on. No, my message is that Hitler was a coward. All his violence was in the strict Nietzschean sense reactive violence. He did all these things because, to cut a long story short, here I remain an old-fashioned leftist, because he wanted basically the society function the way it is. You know, he changed many things so that the fundamentals were not changed. While Gandhi, with all his non-violence, he did something pretty brutal in a good sense. He really wanted to stop with his protest and so on the entire functioning of the British state in India. He didn't just talk with them. At a symbolic level, he did precisely to all those British liberals, "but listen, the situation is complex, let's talk." Basically Gandhi—Gandhi did—did this. So, I think that this is how maybe you will agree, I would be into—maybe not. On the one hand I am for, how should I put it, for this type of violence. Not—it's not a question of physical violence. The question is nonetheless of accepting that as my friend Alain Badiou would have put it, I often disagree with him but here I do, that you know, unfortunately in politics there are real enemies. Politics is not a domain where we will all just be friends and so on and so on. And why I'm saying this? Because I claim that a politics which wants to be purely dialogic, no enemies, ends up as sooner or later advocating even worse violence. Because if you say, no, we should all be in a dialogue blah blah, then those who don't fit the coordinates of your dialogue are not even admit—are not even acknowledged as legitimate enemies but are those, homo sacer for Agamben, dispossessed and so on and so on. The second thing I want to say just to conclude now, really, like physically I prove it to you, two, three pages, is that paradoxically, this—and I like this conclusion—this need for violence, but violence in this sense of it’s more, how should I call it, the interrupting violence, should be combined, I think, with—let's call it, may sound strange to you what I will say, with a need for new civility. I claim that and here again, I agree with what some of these risk theorists are saying, you know, today's society, we have to reinvent the rules, we cannot simply rely on old customs to tell us and so on. But the only way to avoid war in such a situation is to rely on something which may appear modest, on what I’m tempted to call some elementary rules of civility. Civility are not customs. Civility is what you need—let's say you are from where you are, I’m from where I am, I admit it, I am Balkan ethnic cleansing subject, that's what—but how do we talk? We don't share some traditional customs. The only thing that prevents us shooting each other is elementary civility. And I mean this in a very serious sense. There were times, '60s, revolution, hippies, all that, where we thought those in power stand for this fake dignity, rigid manners, politeness. So it is something subversive if you use dirty words or whatever. I think that Berlusconi is our future, in the sense that today those in power, for reasons I don't have time to develop now, are getting more and more obscene, undermining their own authority. So perhaps, just perhaps, it's time for the left radicals to become the partisans of simple civility. And I mean this even in a slightly conservative sense to provoke you with art. Then, I remember—conclusion—a couple of years ago, there was in New York a big exhibition, Andres Serrano photographs, where maybe you remember the scandal, the guy presented some statue of Jesus Christ in urine and so on. And he was attacked by conservatives. Then—then some these permissive liberals counter-attacked him, claiming, "But you shouldn't read this as a simple provocation. That by displaying Christ in urine the—the artist wants to make you think, reflect on what is the basis of your feeling of disgust, how do we relate to inner, to the inner of our body," and so on and so on. You know what's the problem for me with this? Is that it works all too well. Let me give you to conclude in my style, an extremely vulgar example which I will never do. Let me imagine myself shooting—making a video shot of myself shitting. You see everything: how the shit comes gradually out, my satisfied smile, ah, it's finally out. And then people attack me, "vulgarity!" What if I say then exactly the same words? It may seem a provocation, but I'm just questioning the very presuppositions of our feeling disgust, I'm subverting the limit inside-outside, it's not as simple as that. That's what I'm claiming. I'm getting slowly more respectful towards these much-despised ordinary people and so on and so on. So again, now really half a minute to conclude with violence. For me—and this is an old even feminist lesson, what was now that you will see that I did my theoretical homework—I'm well aware, and I respect it, of the finesse of Hannah Arendt's distinctions between authority, power, and violence. He makes very nice points of how violence is not authority, violence is the explosion of the impotent ones and so on. But I claim where maybe she doesn't go far enough is to see how often or even as a rule what appears as legitimate authority is sustained secretly by some kind of obscene violence. And that's our task today. This is what, with all my people claim anti-feminist bad taste jokes, one thing has to be admitted: the great achievement, theoretical result even, of feminism of the '60s, this big era and '70s, was to teach us how to perceive as violent what appeared as natural traditional authority. You know, this elementary insight, no, when woman obeys a man, it's not natural authority. This appearance of natural authority is generated by some very brutal—to use the Michel Foucault term—micro-practices or whatever. This is why I put so much emphasis on violence. Not that I am fascinated by violence, but that I claim maybe the task, one of the great tasks today of critique, even honest self-critique of liberalism, is to teach us to see violence, to rediscover violence where violence generates its own self-erasure. There I think we can easily find common language even with two such strange—maybe even the two of us will discover that we don't only love Stalin, that we love some other things. Thanks very much for your patience. And again, I read your book on democracy and I must clarify here when I problematize democracy, again it’s not, ooh, a new Leninist central committee. What I like is how you break the confines of simply multi-party democracy and look at all different forms without—that’s what I like about your work—without the usual operation of privileging another, usually more primordial form. Like when I was in China, they told me: "we discovered that your Western democracy is meaningless, we discovered what is true democracy, we call it deliberative democracy." Like the idea is we should really debate things. Then I asked them a simple question: I totally agree, but who decides then? Ah, they became evasive. The important thing is that we debate. So I like this, we should really do this. Otherwise, I think it will be very difficult to avoid new authoritarianism, very soft one, but no less dangerous than I see this, how should I put it, decisions of the people, by the people, blah blah, but which step outside the bounds of this standard democracy. Slavoj's books will be on sale outside that door, my books will be out sale on that door. You see this, I am a noble intellectual creature, this is the are you to go to the anti-my text, are you Jewish by any chance? Pass. Secular, secular. Yeah. Secular Jew, that’s the worst. This means—this means you don't care about God, you care only about money and this... No questions, guys, there’ll be no questions. It’s interruption or civility. No, but what I mean... and our speaker’s defining civility as non-interruption. Carry on. Okay, I will bow down to your brutal phallocentrism, please. Well, we've almost run out of time. I will just take—you have to keep your questions really short. We're going to get lots of questions and then you can finish the event by inventing and free-associating on the questions. Alright, I will give you this Buddhist bullshit, clap with one hand, this... Okay, if you like the lecture, you know we... Okay, very brief. Um, yeah, I have a question for about Slavoj’s new found LSE-compatible Kantian liberalism. I wasn’t at that lecture... No, I mean if your strategy that you're advocating is some kind of civility, a moral behavior and we have communism as a permanent motive in Lenin... Yeah, is it? From early Lenin till in the last writings against Stalin, read what Lenin wrote about—it wasn’t just Stalin stuff, he emphasized again and again, civility, politeness is the central question. Okay, my question, but to move from—okay, from ideology critique, very important and so on, to move to a strategy, a strategic formulation or articulation of, let’s say, intervention, organization for a democratic communism, what would be the prospect, what is the prospect, what is your standing on this? Let’s hear—answer. Okay, that’s the question. We’re going to take two or three, then you can answer them all at the end because we’re going to run out—lots of people have classes to go to. I want to get a few points from here. I have someone up there. Yes. A very short question: is cutting off your ear an act of civility? Ah, don't answer, don't answer. Okay. Yes. Hi, I know I’m supposed to be brief, but I’ll try my best to be as brief as possible. You have to be. Um, again going back to the lady, what she said, but my one is in a bit different tangent. You said about Gandhian violence and also my referral point would be the civil rights movement and also the liberation of India. Don’t you think that with the proposition of this violence, there is always the position of the ruling class which always has that particular allowance ground? It can give the symbolic positions, allow the symbolic positions like giving liberation to India or like, you know, some symbolic changes within the civil rights movement, but go on with their ruling ideology nonetheless. You talked about formal freedom and actual freedom. My question is in today's world if actual freedom is just a utopia or if it is really achievable? Okay, the guy on the top. With regards to psychoanalysis, do you believe that the current catering to our desires has resulted in people being less pursuing their drives to Eros and Thanatos less? Okay, now I'll ask you just one question. Do you see yourself actually as anti-Habermasian? In the last minutes you could easily be thought to be. But isn't Habermas’ view when dialogue breaks down, dialogue breaks down and then you’re in a non-discursive situation where anything is possible, in other words, forms of violence? But the point of dialogue is once you enter a dialogue, it raises inherently the possibility that you might come to an understanding because if you didn’t make that presupposition about dialogue, it would fragment, you wouldn't go on. You wouldn't go on because you wouldn't think you could engage the other. But when language breaks down and dialogue is finished, and that is your point, then the game is entirely different. So is that anti-Habermasian? I’m not sure. No, I will try to be as short as possible. Alright, we’ve only got five minutes because of classes, I’m afraid.
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And the books will be signed and then you'll come back and get a unique signature in years to come: "I met him." Nice point. What I find, I will start with
And the books will be signed and then you'll come back and get a unique signature in years to come: "I met him." Nice point. What I find, I will start with
Slavoj Žižek
you, missing in Habermas is a
you, missing in Habermas is a
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precise theory—it can be theorized as "no," it's not simply that the dialogue breaks down. If we have something to learn from psychoanalysis and politics is that often, withdrawing, breaking down the dialogue
precise theory—it can be theorized as "no," it's not simply that the dialogue breaks down. If we have something to learn from psychoanalysis and politics is that often, withdrawing, breaking down the dialogue
Slavoj Žižek
is ideally—can is often even the—the only way to create the conditions maybe for a true dialogue.
is ideally—can is often even the—the only way to create the conditions maybe for a true dialogue.
unknown
Like it's the—sorry to contradict
Like it's the—sorry to contradict
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myself—the "cut the crap," "cut the bullshit" move where then you open the space. And the same I would say for civility. You know, I'm not civility and cutting the ear. You know that you can also, here the analysis becomes more complex, you can also follow civility in a very brutal, insensitive way. Civility can also be the tool
myself—the "cut the crap," "cut the bullshit" move where then you open the space. And the same I would say for civility. You know, I'm not civility and cutting the ear. You know that you can also, here the analysis becomes more complex, you can also follow civility in a very brutal, insensitive way. Civility can also be the tool
Slavoj Žižek
of this kind of a brutal, cold keeping the distance. You know this proverbial scene of a poor guy comes to you all in blood, beaten, demands help, and you say: "Can you please behave more—more nicely and—tell me"—whatever. In this sense, yes, absolutely, I accept the paradox.
of this kind of a brutal, cold keeping the distance. You know this proverbial scene of a poor guy comes to you all in blood, beaten, demands help, and you say: "Can you please behave more—more nicely and—tell me"—whatever. In this sense, yes, absolutely, I accept the paradox.
unknown
Cutting—cutting—cutting the ear can absolutely without any problem function as an act of civility. Even more, it can—and that's crucial, not in some stupid dialectical way, but let's
Cutting—cutting—cutting the ear can absolutely without any problem function as an act of civility. Even more, it can—and that's crucial, not in some stupid dialectical way, but let's
unknown
say—just an example—you are bullshitting. No, you are not, I am. But when I do this, basically what I'm saying is:
say—just an example—you are bullshitting. No, you are not, I am. But when I do this, basically what I'm saying is:
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beneath your appearance of civility,
beneath your appearance of civility,
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you are basically extremely brutal and ignorant. Don't take it personally. Even when I send you to Gulag, it's just for... Okay, let's go on. So the others, yes, mythic violence, India and so on. I would only say that I don't think what Gandhi was doing can—it was later recuperated to use Benjamin in mythic violence. But what I was struggling for through all these violent reflections was, you know, the counter-point of Benjamin, divine violence. I think we should look maybe in Gandhi one of the
you are basically extremely brutal and ignorant. Don't take it personally. Even when I send you to Gulag, it's just for... Okay, let's go on. So the others, yes, mythic violence, India and so on. I would only say that I don't think what Gandhi was doing can—it was later recuperated to use Benjamin in mythic violence. But what I was struggling for through all these violent reflections was, you know, the counter-point of Benjamin, divine violence. I think we should look maybe in Gandhi one of the
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aspects of divine violence. As to that stuff about desires, Eros, Thanatos and so on. Well, desires are
aspects of divine violence. As to that stuff about desires, Eros, Thanatos and so on. Well, desires are
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not fixed for me.
not fixed for me.
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The psychoanalysis that I advocate, it’s not, you know, "make a trip to your inner, listen to your desires." No, we should be ruthless with our desires. I’m even ready to go as far in a slightly Stalinist move and to say we have
The psychoanalysis that I advocate, it’s not, you know, "make a trip to your inner, listen to your desires." No, we should be ruthless with our desires. I’m even ready to go as far in a slightly Stalinist move and to say we have
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wrong and correct desires. You should be a ruthless censor of your desires. This is for me at least the lesson of—the lesson of Freud. And then was there—the first one, what would have been democratic communism and so on and so on? I don't like to bluff here. I don't have a clear vision. All I’m simply saying is that because of ecological crisis, new forms of apartheid, biogenetics, and so on, we are approaching a stage where the standard models of collective or individual activity—market, charity, state intervention—will not do the job. We have to—the struggle is, that's why
wrong and correct desires. You should be a ruthless censor of your desires. This is for me at least the lesson of—the lesson of Freud. And then was there—the first one, what would have been democratic communism and so on and so on? I don't like to bluff here. I don't have a clear vision. All I’m simply saying is that because of ecological crisis, new forms of apartheid, biogenetics, and so on, we are approaching a stage where the standard models of collective or individual activity—market, charity, state intervention—will not do the job. We have to—the struggle is, that's why
Slavoj Žižek
I cling
I cling
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to the crazy word communism—the struggles today for ecology, for even in biogenetics and so
to the crazy word communism—the struggles today for ecology, for even in biogenetics and so
Slavoj Žižek
on, are here and only here, I agree with Negri and Hardt, are the struggles for commons. Now we are in a new process of enclosing the commons and here something will have to be invented. Maybe it will not be, maybe there is shit ahead of us. I'm here not the traditional Marxist, I hope we also this share, unfortunately there is no train of history and we just have to jump on it and progress is here. There is no guarantee. We will have to act. Sorry, one question I missed after divine violence and before desires, my God, I... can the guy do it very briefly again, ask free—freedom? I’m very sorry. One—please say it. Did anybody feel their question was not addressed? If so, repeat it. I asked if actual freedom is just a utopia or it is achievable in today's world. Okay, my standard, here I remain the standard leftist. The true utopia is that what goes on now can go on now. We live in a utopia. If there is a lesson from this ongoing financial crisis is that the end of utopias was not, as the official story goes, and then the realism. No, the true utopia were the 1990s. After the greatest utopian is Fukuyama, who thought we have the answer. For me, the meaning of all these shitty events from September 11th to financial meltdown is that unfortunately that—by that I mean the standard liberal democratic capitalism—is not the answer. The true utopia is that. As to actual freedom, of course it's possible, but don't mystify it. Here, we don't have time, I will stop in seconds. Here you will get the darker side of me. I think that part of this new freedom will have to be also, of course not terroristic in the sense of imposed by state, but a new sense of solidarity, discipline, and so on. This is why often I ironically define myself as left-wing fascist. In the
on, are here and only here, I agree with Negri and Hardt, are the struggles for commons. Now we are in a new process of enclosing the commons and here something will have to be invented. Maybe it will not be, maybe there is shit ahead of us. I'm here not the traditional Marxist, I hope we also this share, unfortunately there is no train of history and we just have to jump on it and progress is here. There is no guarantee. We will have to act. Sorry, one question I missed after divine violence and before desires, my God, I... can the guy do it very briefly again, ask free—freedom? I’m very sorry. One—please say it. Did anybody feel their question was not addressed? If so, repeat it. I asked if actual freedom is just a utopia or it is achievable in today's world. Okay, my standard, here I remain the standard leftist. The true utopia is that what goes on now can go on now. We live in a utopia. If there is a lesson from this ongoing financial crisis is that the end of utopias was not, as the official story goes, and then the realism. No, the true utopia were the 1990s. After the greatest utopian is Fukuyama, who thought we have the answer. For me, the meaning of all these shitty events from September 11th to financial meltdown is that unfortunately that—by that I mean the standard liberal democratic capitalism—is not the answer. The true utopia is that. As to actual freedom, of course it's possible, but don't mystify it. Here, we don't have time, I will stop in seconds. Here you will get the darker side of me. I think that part of this new freedom will have to be also, of course not terroristic in the sense of imposed by state, but a new sense of solidarity, discipline, and so on. This is why often I ironically define myself as left-wing fascist. In the
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sense of there are values like discipline,
sense of there are values like discipline,
Slavoj Žižek
collective spirit, sacrifice—my God, why should be automatically leave this to the enemies? You know, as if if you mention collective action, discipline, struggle, ooh, neo-fascist. No, we should take all that over.
collective spirit, sacrifice—my God, why should be automatically leave this to the enemies? You know, as if if you mention collective action, discipline, struggle, ooh, neo-fascist. No, we should take all that over.