First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-10-14 · 1:00:32 · 8,424 words
capitalismcommunism-socialismideologypsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracygeopolitics-warrevolution-violencereligion-theologyeconomicseveryday-lifehistory
Delivered around the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this talk diagnoses the comprehensive defeat of the left: the collapse of communist regimes, the disappearance of social democracy, and the rise of right-wing populism as the only remaining voice for workers. Žižek distinguishes constitutive (invisible, structural) ideology from constituted (surface, empirical) ideology, demonstrating how cultural capitalism, from Toms Shoes to Starbucks, converts consumerism into its own ethical alibi. He applies this framework to the US healthcare debate, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Indonesian killings in Joshua Oppenheimer's 'The Act of Killing', and the 'Ubuization' of power exemplified by Berlusconi, concluding with a call for 'Bartleby politics' and a Communist joke about a propagandist who converts God.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “basic income / basic rent”
The proposal that every citizen receives a guaranteed minimum income from the state regardless of employment status; Žižek reads it as symptomatic of the left's defeat, the most radical imagination available is merely to make capitalism livable.
as “rent”
The dominant form of profit in digital and resource capitalism (as opposed to Marxist surplus value from labor), illustrated by Microsoft's monopoly position and oil revenues, Žižek argues rent has displaced classic profit as the engine of contemporary capitalism.
Marx's term from the Grundrisse for collective social knowledge as the true source of value in an advanced economy, which Žižek argues Marx wrongly expected would automatically destroy capitalism rather than being privatized as rent.
Badiou's term (cited approvingly by Žižek) for the revolutionary movement's third mode of failure: driven by the correct instinct that every solidification into state power betrays the revolution, it retreats into ultra-leftist destructive terror to preserve its purity.
Badiou's alternative revolutionary strategy: instead of seizing state power, maintain a distance from it and create small spaces outside it; Žižek sympathizes but argues it concedes too much by declining to fight capitalism directly.
Secondary, empirical ideological content, the obvious perversions, false reasoning, and paranoid distortions (e.g. Sarah Palin death-panel claims) that are easy to laugh at and critique.
Today's capitalism's self-presentation in which consumerism is repackaged as ethical participation, buying a product simultaneously serves as an act of charity or social good.
Ulrich Beck's concept that ruling ideology weaponizes, selling the insecurity caused by welfare-state dismantlement as freedom and opportunity for self-reinvention.
as “formal freedom vs. actual freedom”
The distinction between freedom to choose within existing power coordinates (formal) and freedom to change those coordinates themselves (actual); Žižek revives the old communist critique to reframe the healthcare debate.
A Benjaminian category Žižek applies to the founding of Israel, a war not about justice but about whose force prevails, frankly acknowledged by the first generation of Israeli founders but subsequently obliterated by self-legitimating myth.
A tendency, exemplified by Berlusconi, in which those in power consciously undermine their own dignity and authority, a Foucauldian Ubu Roi dynamic of the clown as head of state.
as “voluntary servitude”
Étienne de La Boétie's 16th-century concept that Žižek invokes to explain how power persists not by force alone but because subjects invest their own desire and dreams in it.
A first step of ideological liberation consisting in refusing to 'dream the master's dream', a withdrawal or subtraction from ideological investment, named after Melville's Bartleby who says 'I prefer not to'.
as “Holy Ghost as emancipatory collective”
Žižek identifies the Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit) with the early name for the emancipatory collective, the Communist Party, suggesting the spirit of radical solidarity is the theologically productive residue of Christianity.
Stories he reaches for 4
Starbucks charges more but tells you that buying a coffee also means supporting rainforests and children in Guatemala. Žižek says he would prefer an honest itemized bill, price of coffee, plus price of ideology.
“you're not just buying a cappuccino, you're buying with it an ethics of community... I want a cup of coffee, I don't want those screw children in Guatemala”
Toms Shoes sells shoes on the promise that each purchase donates a pair to a child in need. Žižek reads the 'One for One' motto as the ideological mechanism of cultural capitalism: consumerism pays for its own sin and thereby legitimates itself.
“the very participating in consumerist activities is simultaneously presented as participation in the struggle against the evils ultimately caused by capitalist consumerism”
After Palestinians killed a young kibbutz member, Dayan's eulogy admitted that the Palestinians' hatred was justified because Israel had taken their land, then called for accepting 'our fate in all its brutality' rather than guilt. Žižek reads it as exemplary honest acknowledgment of founding violence before myth-making set in.
“Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years”
In Joshua Oppenheimer's film, former death-squad leaders openly describe and boast about their massacres and rapes, inspired by Hollywood gangster movies; Indonesian state TV celebrated them with applause. Žižek calls this the ethical catastrophe of globalization, even the last remnant of shame (secrecy) is gone.
“the beaming moderator turns to the camera and says 'Amazing! Let's give Anwar Congo a round of applause!'”
Works invoked 6
Grundrisse book
Žižek praises the 'wonderful insight' of the general intellect passage but criticizes Marx's naive conclusion that this development would automatically collapse capitalism.
Empire book
Negri's thesis that the nation-state is withering is held up as internally contradicted by Negri's own basic rent proposal.
The Act of Killing film
Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary about Indonesian death-squad leaders who boast openly about their massacres; Žižek uses it as evidence of globalization's ethical catastrophe and the collapse of even shame.
The Palace of Dreams book
Kadare's novel about an Ottoman ministry that reads dreams; Žižek recommends it and uses it to illustrate how power operates through the subjects' psychic investment.
Žižek quotes the 'two reigns of terror' passage at length as 'the best answer I know' to liberal critiques of revolutionary violence.
De La Boétie's 16th-century treatise invoked to explain how ideology persists through subjects' own psychic investment, the starting point for Bartleby politics.
People invoked 28
Indonesian death-squad leader featured in The Act of Killing; Žižek uses him as the extreme case of post-shame obscenity in which perpetrators openly celebrate their crimes.
Janez Drnovsek negative
Slovenian president described as a 'cold technocrat turned ridiculous self-taught New Ager' who told a pensioner unable to afford meat to embrace inner travel, Žižek's reductio of psychologizing poverty.
Udi Aloni positive
Described as a good friend; Žižek supported Aloni's film, visited Jerusalem with him, and adopts his framing for the Israeli-Palestinian binational state proposal and the 'demand the impossible' slogan.
Silvio Berlusconi negative
The primary contemporary example of 'Ubuization of power', a head of state who consciously undermines his own dignity; his press representative's impotence denial is Žižek's comic proof.
Philippe Van Parijs negative
Belgian sociologist cited as the main developer of the basic income/rent concept; Žižek notes his goal is to legitimize capitalism, which he reads as 'yet another dream' symptomatic of left defeat.
Ismail Kadare positive
Albanian novelist recommended for The Palace of Dreams; used to illustrate how political power works through dream-investment, supporting Bartleby politics.
Moshe Dayan positive
His eulogy for Roy is cited at length as an exemplary honest acknowledgment of Israel's founding violence, Žižek admires its candor even while noting the subsequent mythic manipulation.
Cited alongside Pasternak as a great dissident poet with an ambiguous fascination with Stalin, illustrating voluntary servitude.
Étienne de La Boétie positive
16th-century author of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude; Žižek invokes him to explain how power persists through subjects' own psychic investment in it.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek admires the 'living dialectic' irony that Negri, who spent decades arguing the nation-state is withering, proposes basic rent which requires a strong centralized state, his theory contradicts his own concrete proposal.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek draws on Badiou's three modes of revolutionary failure and the concept of 'sacrificial temptation of the void'; he broadly agrees but criticizes Badiou's subtraction strategy as conceding too much by abandoning the fight against capitalism.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Žižek recounts a public debate where both ended up agreeing on liberal-sounding generalities, using BHL as the foil to demonstrate how constitutive ideology traps even apparent opponents.
David Ben-Gurion positive
Representative of the first generation of Israeli founders who Žižek admires for their honesty in not claiming sacred right to the land but acknowledging raw force.
Cited as an example of dissident Soviet poets who, even in private notes, showed ambiguous fascination with Stalin, illustrating the psychic investment in power even by opponents.
Sarah Palin negative
Her 'death panels' claims represent constituted ideology, the obvious, laughable surface layer, but Žižek's point is that this is the less dangerous level; he admits to watching Fox News for its comedy value.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for his late seminars on Ubuism, the 'Ubu Roi' / Groucho Marx in power dynamic, to theorize Berlusconi's self-degradation of authority.
Mentioned as the symbolic figure of Polish Solidarity whose dramatic rise and then total marginalization illustrates the post-communist reversal.
John N. Gray positive
Quoted for the phrase 'we are forced to live as if we were free', used by Žižek to describe the paradox of compulsory freedom under neoliberalism.
Used as the paradigm case that Microsoft's dominance is not classic profit but rent, occupying a de facto monopoly position over access to the general intellect.
The general who crushed Solidarity becomes more popular than Walesa in post-communist Poland, used to illustrate the paradox of ex-communist returns to power.
His slogan 'dare to fight, dare to win' is cited by Badiou (and Žižek) to frame the problem: the left is afraid not to fight but to win, because victory risks restoration or purification terror.
Walter Benjamin positive
Referenced in passing for his typology of violence (mythic vs. divine), which Žižek invokes alongside Badiou's constitutive/constituted ideology distinction.
Mark Twain positive
Žižek calls him 'your own' (addressing an American audience) and quotes A Connecticut Yankee at length as 'the best answer I know' to liberal critiques of revolutionary terror.
Mentioned as a partial exception to the European pattern of left decline; his healthcare reform debate is the main example Žižek uses to analyze constitutive ideology and freedom of choice.
Cited for the concept of 'risk society'; Žižek uses the term to describe how ruling ideology repackages welfare-state dismantlement as opportunity.
Alfred Jarry positive
Creator of Ubu Roi, cited via Foucault as the cultural reference for the 'clown in power' dynamic.
Žižek says he is 'very critical of Chavez often' but defends him against the charge of non-democratic court appointments by asking whether the previous members were democratically nominated.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek credits Marx with the 'wonderful insight' of general intellect in the Grundrisse but criticizes him for naively expecting capitalism to automatically collapse when knowledge becomes the source of value, and for using oil as an unfortunate example.
What it argues
defeat of the left after 1989constitutive vs. constituted ideologycultural capitalism and ethical consumerismfreedom of choice as ideological mystificationBartleby politics and subtractive resistanceUbuization of powerrent vs. profit in digital capitalism
Dialectical moves 8
“Far from being a utopian dream, the binational state is already a fact — the de facto reality of today's Israel and West Bank.”
The 'impossible' solution is actually more realistic than the 'realistic' two-state solution, inverting the terms of the debate.
“The very act of consumerism is presented as its own opposite — buying shoes or coffee becomes participating in the struggle against the evils caused by consumerism.”
Cultural capitalism cancels its own guilt by making the sin simultaneously its own penance, a dialectical short-circuit.
“Freedom of choice functions only against a thick invisible background — to have more genuine freedom, you need less choice in certain domains (water, electricity, healthcare).”
More background determination (state provision) enables more actual freedom, inverting the liberal equation of less state = more freedom.
“The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not repression by the established order but the interiority of nihilism and cruelty within the revolutionary project itself.”
The greatest danger to revolution is internal, its own destructive temptation, not external suppression.
“What is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? (Mark Twain on the two reigns of terror)”
The terror we are taught to fear (revolutionary violence) is minor compared to the invisible structural terror of poverty, inverting the moral hierarchy of violence.
“It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roy's blood. (Moshe Dayan's eulogy, cited by Žižek)”
The source of the Palestinian's hatred is the Israelis' own dispossession of them, the victim is also the cause, a move Žižek presents as exemplary honest dialectics.
“Toni Negri, who spent his career arguing the nation-state is withering away, makes a proposal — basic rent — that requires an extremely strong centralized state.”
Negri's own concrete proposal contradicts his theoretical framework, demonstrating the 'living dialectic' of ideas running against their authors.
“God interrupts the Devil: 'First, I am not Lord but comrade. Second, are you crazy talking to fictions? I don't exist. And third, be short, otherwise I'll miss my party cell meeting.'”
A God who knows he doesn't exist and passes entirely into the love binding an emancipatory collective, theology's truth is radical immanent solidarity.
Claims 17
asserts
The left has suffered a genuine and underestimated defeat: first the collapse of communist state socialism, now the disintegration of social democratic welfare-state parties across Europe.defeat of the left after 1989
asserts
The most radical economic proposal from the left in recent decades — basic income — is a symptom of defeat, because it accepts capitalism and merely dreams of a perfect welfare state.basic income proposal
asserts
The dominant source of profit in digital capitalism is not Marxist surplus value but rent — exemplified by Microsoft's monopoly on the general intellect.rent vs. profit in capitalism
asserts
Marx failed to foresee that the general intellect (collective knowledge) could itself be privatized and sold as rent rather than automatically dissolving capitalism.Marx's theory of general intellect
asserts
Toni Negri's proposal for basic rent contradicts his own Empire thesis by requiring a strong centralized state that acknowledges citizenship — a living dialectical irony.Negri's internal theoretical contradiction
asserts
Cultural capitalism — the mechanism by which consumerism presents itself as its own ethical opposite (Toms Shoes, Starbucks) — is the real ideological achievement of contemporary capitalism.cultural capitalism
asserts
The dangerous part of ideology in the healthcare debate is not right-wing paranoia but the shared liberal assumption of freedom of choice, which constitutes the invisible ideological field.freedom of choice as ideology
asserts
Freedom of choice is not a natural datum but only functions against a thick invisible background of legal, educational, ethical, and economic conditions — the state must sustain that background.freedom of choice and the state
asserts
Universal healthcare would not restrict freedom but expand it by eliminating the burden of medical choice, freeing people's time and energy for genuine life projects.healthcare reform and actual freedom
rejects
Presenting poverty as a free lifestyle choice (as the Slovenian president did) psychologizes an objective social predicament and must be rejected.psychologization of poverty
reframes
The two-state solution is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East, not its path, because neither side truly wants it; the binational secular state is the 'impossible' realistic option.Israeli-Palestinian conflict
asserts
The binational state is not utopian but already factually exists — the entire territory is de facto controlled by one sovereign power divided by internal borders resembling apartheid.Israel-Palestine as de facto one state
asserts
The first generation of Israeli founders were more honest than their successors: they openly admitted they had no right to Palestinian land and that the founding was an exercise of force.Zionist founding honesty vs. contemporary self-legitimation
rejects
Badiou's 'subtraction' strategy effectively means not fighting capitalism at all, and although it names a real problem, its price is too high.Badiou's subtraction strategy
asserts
The Indonesian mass killings depicted in The Act of Killing represent an ethical catastrophe caused by globalization, not an exclusively third-world phenomenon — Berlusconi's Italy shows a European variant.ethical catastrophe of globalization
asserts
The left today must become the defender of common decency and civility — not bourgeois complacency but civility combined with the spirit of struggle.left's task today
asserts
The first step of ideological liberation is to stop dreaming the master's dream — Bartleby politics of 'I prefer not to' — before any positive political construction.Bartleby politics as first step
Quotes 11
“The reality of the noble struggle for freedom and justice turned out to be the craze for bananas and pornography.”Slavoj Žižek · disappointment after 1989
“If you really believe in capitalism, the only reply is that secretly the communists still rule — you know we don't have real capitalism but capitalism manipulated by a hidden communist elite.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-communist paranoia as symptom
“The most radical imagination today, imagination in the sense of something which really has the trust to realize itself, is: you accept capitalism as it is, you just dream of a perfect welfare state.”Slavoj Žižek · defeat of the left's imagination
“Badiou says he never understood what it means to fight capitalism. He said capitalism is like the air we are breathing, how can you fight it.”Slavoj Žižek · limits of subtraction strategy
“I would like to see in an honest left-wing dictatorship when you get the bill from Starbucks: thirty cents tax, one dollar coffee, and one dollar the ideology that you buy.”Slavoj Žižek · cultural capitalism as ideological price
“We are forced to live as if we were free.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom of choice as compulsion
“Formal freedom is the freedom to choose within the coordinates of the existing power relations while actual freedom grows when we can change the very coordinates of our changes.”Slavoj Žižek · formal vs. actual freedom
“Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible — Let's be realists, let's demand the impossible.”Slavoj Žižek · impossible as the only realism
“Our task today: civility with the spirit of struggle, no neutrality.”Slavoj Žižek · left's political task
“The first thing to do — it's the first part of what I call Bartleby politics — is 'I prefer not to': we stop to dream your dream. This is not unimportant, this is extremely important.”Slavoj Žižek · Bartleby politics as first step of liberation
“A God who wholly became man, a comrade among us, crucified together with two social outcasts, and who not only doesn't exist but himself knows this and who entirely passes over into the love which binds together members of the Holy Ghost.”Slavoj Žižek · immanent God of the radical left
Transcript 3 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I am glad to be here. As usual, I have too many things to say, so I hope a little bit of time tolerance can be counted on. Okay, let me go directly to the point. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th should be the time to reflect. It is a commonplace to emphasize the miraculous nature of the disintegration of socialist regimes. It was, so we hear, like a dream come true, something unimaginable happened, something one couldn't consider possible even a couple of months earlier: free elections, the disintegration of the communist regime which collapsed like a house of cards and so on. Who in Poland could have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president? However, to this one should add an even greater miracle was what happened only a couple of years later: the return of the ex-communists to power through free democratic elections. Walesa totally marginalized and much less popular than General Wojciech Jaruzelski who a decade and a half earlier crushed Solidarity with a military coup d'état. Why this reversal? The standard explanation evokes the immature expectations of the people who simply didn't possess a realistic image of capitalism. They wanted to have a cake and eat it. They wanted the capitalist democratic freedom and material abundance without paying the price for it, without losing the security and stability more or less guaranteed by the communist regimes. As the sarcastic Western commentators noted, the reality of the noble struggle for freedom and justice turned out to be the craze for bananas and pornography. So when the unavoidable disappointment set in, it gave rise to three sometimes opposed, sometimes overlapping reactions in post-communist countries. First, the nostalgia for the good old communist times. Second, the rightist proto-fascist nationalist populism. Three, the renewed belated anti-communist paranoia. The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously. Far from expressing a serious wish to return to the grey socialist reality, it is more I think a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. The rise of the rightist populism is also not an East European specialty. It's a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization. More interesting is the weird resurrection of anti-communism almost two decades after the events. I think the reason behind it is a simple one. It's this is the logic: if capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still so miserable? If you really believe in capitalism, the only reply is that secretly the communists still rule, that you know we don't have real capitalism but somehow capitalism manipulated by hidden communist elite. And then I try to explain to people, but this is capitalism, that capitalism is manipulated by elites and so on. So it is an obvious fact that when people protested against communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted solidarity and a rough kind of justice. They wanted the freedom to live their own lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they please. They wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy. As many conspicuous analysts observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling socialist ideology itself. Does this mean that we should renounce this excess? Was this disappointment of the people really just a sign of immaturity, they wanted too much and so on and so on? Were they utopians, or is the ongoing financial meltdown, the ongoing financial crisis a proof that it is perhaps today's global capitalism which is in its own way utopian? But nonetheless what one has to admit and with this I would like really to begin is a defeat, a real defeat. A defeat in the sense that I don't think we even took into account the dimensions of this defeat of the left. Look, first you are here almost an exception, a wonderful exception now under Obama, but I think that you can observe now in many European countries almost in a with in a clinical purity the process of disintegration of the old even social democratic welfare state left. First it was the communist state socialism left, then now with years of delay this left is disappearing. You can see this in West Germany, you can see this in France and so on and so on. I think if you ask me we are moving towards a new state where the opposition, and this is already the situation in Poland today, the opposition will no longer be between welfare state social democracy and some kind of Christian populist conservatives, but more between a kind of a mainstream liberal tolerant capitalism with all the political correctness included but at the same time economic liberalism, market and so on, mainstream party and then on the right a populist reaction to it. So the choice is between politically correct whatever you want liberal pro-capitalist mainstream and populist reactions where to make things even worse the only ones who dare to mention obscene notions like workers and so on are usually the right-wing populists. Whatever remains of the left at least in Europe, they are so terrorized of being accused caught in the old 19th-century paradigm or whatever that they are afraid of even mentioning mentioning the term working class. Most of them spend all their propaganda convincing themselves and others that we are really the party of this new postmodern dynamic digital capitalisms and so on and so on. So where are we then? What happens in this defeat? Let me give you another example. Sorry, I'm losing time but please count this already as a debate. I'm answering questions, my own questions, but who cares? Look, the only really interesting economic proposal from the left of the last decades that I'm aware of is the so-called basic income or basic rent proposal. I think it's almost a symptom of our state today. It's I claim an impossible dream, the dream that capitalism itself, that we can keep it and make it work in a socialist way as it were. It has one very good, you know what's the basic idea? The basic idea is that each citizen independently of his status, it has nothing to do with your employment, should be guaranteed, should get from the state a certain minimal income which enables him or her survival with a minimally decent standard of living. The idea is that in this way you solve the problem of unemployment, you solve the problem of of consumerism because like by giving money to the people you will have enough demand on the market to prevent crisis and so on and so on. Then one element which really is attractive to me, that we know all that in the market the one who sells his work is in a his labor force rather is in an underprivileged situation. Like you don't have really a choice, you have to sell yourself to survive. Here the choice to work or not would have been a real choice. Like you do it or you can say no, I will not work. But the problem here is that if you try to locate this proposal into a classic Marxist perspective, you see how crazy it looks. First it's a rent, this is why in Brazil they are right to call it renta básica, the basic rent. So already today we have rent emerging as the main source of the profit in new digital industries. It's clear that what what the source of Bill Gates' wealth is not the old profit, it's rent. Bill Gates is doing, to give you a simple explanation I develop this in my new book in the last chapter, the way I read Bill Gates' wealth is that I know you can play this boring old Marxist games that it's extra extra profit from the I don't think it really works. It's rent, in what sense? We should be here go to the end, critical of Marx himself where needed. You know Marx had that wonderful insight in that famous passage from his Grundrisse into how with the key role of knowledge in the production process in all senses, from scientific knowledge to expertise, time this so-called labor theory of value with time spent of labor as the source of value becomes meaningless. And Marx then uses this famous term general intellect, that the true source of values is the collective knowledge as it were. But so but Marx is here also at his lowest. He comes very close to a simplistic expectation that this means when capitalism will reach this level it will simply collapse. He says it will become meaningless because labor time spent on labor is no longer the source of value. Now what Marx was not able to imagine I think is this what he calls general intellect, collective knowledge, that it can itself be privatized and then sold. If you are in a monopoly position to market it, sold for not so much for profit as for rent. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think quite a good theory that this is what is happening today. On the one hand we have people like Bill Gates, he succeeded through his market I mean every idiot knows that Microsoft is by far not the best program. Why do we all use it? Because it's he occupies the de facto more or less monopoly position. So it's not profit, we are paying the rent to be able to participate in the general intellect as it were. That's what Marx didn't quite get it. On the other hand Marx made another wonderful mistake when he insisted on that the only source of value is labor and so on, he gives a very unfortunate example although his theory is right, of example namely of oil. But exactly today oil is a source again but it's not profit, it's rent. And what I'm claiming is that if we add to all this even the basic rent, then we have from the orthodox Marxist standpoint an absurd situation where we have a narrow productive core of old-fashioned workers and capitalist and basically the large majority of society just exploits them. Those who collect rent, those who have natural resources, and those who don't work. For me the conclusion is not that we should drop all these notions proletarian, exploitation and so on, but we should really redefine them. Another nice ironic point about basic rent idea is that for example in Europe the great proponent of basic rent is Toni Negri. But it's funny, Toni Negri proposed in the last decade two or one idea in two aspects which I think are proven false. One is you know the whole idea of Empire is that sovereign state power, nation-state is diminishing, more and more negligible and so on and so on. And also you know we are all nomadic moving, all this Deleuzian poetry so who cares if you are citizen or not. But wait a minute, the whole point of basic rent is an extremely important role of a central state who acknowledges you as a citizen. It's a rent for the privilege to be a citizen of a certain state. This is I think kind of a living dialectic how I admire this irony of how a theoretician who spent all his time advocating a certain line of thought, Empire, diminishing role of the state, then makes a proposal which runs exactly runs against. The dream is as it is clear you should read the guy, he's interesting, Robert Van Parijs, a Belgian I think sociologist who developed this notion of of basic income or basic rent. His idea is that this is the only way to legitimize capitalism. I think it's yet another dream. But again I read this as the sign of a defeat, defeat in the sense that the most radical imagination today, imagination in the sense of something which really has the trust to realize itself, is you accept capitalism as it is, just you dream of of a perfect welfare state. How should I put it? It's a perfect welfare state dream. Now how does this defeat then function? I want to quote here Alain Badiou who described three distinct ways for a revolutionary movement to fail. First there is of course a direct defeat. You are simply crushed by the enemy forces. Then there is a defeat in the victory itself. One wins over the enemy temporarily at least by way of taking over the main power agenda of the enemy. This should be like either parliamentary democracy or communist so-called totalitarianism, like you end up imitating the enemy. And then Badiou claims there is the most authentic but also the most terrifying mode of the defeat: guided by the correct instinct telling us that every solidification of the revolution into a new state power equals its betrayal, but unable to invent or impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by the ultra-leftist resort to all destructive terror. Whatever you want, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge and so on. Badiou aptly calls this last version the sacrificial temptation of the void, a quote from Badiou. One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was "dare to fight, dare to win." But we know that if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure: the attack didn't succeed, while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restoration. It is from here that this sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order, it is the interiority of nihilism and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void. End of quote. It sounds deep, almost Heideggerian, that you know the greatest danger is the inherent nihilism of the revolutionary project itself. But nonetheless what Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao's "dare to win." You should be afraid to win, to take power, to establish a new social political reality because the lesson of the 20th century is that victory either ends in restoration, return to the state power logic, or gets caught into the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification. This is why Badiou proposes to replace this 20th-century revolutionary logic with what he calls subtraction. Instead of winning, taking over power, one maintains a distance toward state power, one subtracts from the domain of state power, one creates small spaces outside state power. Again sympathetic as this proposal is, I think we simply pay too high a price for it. It simply means, and Badiou does accept this conclusion, that to put it in blunt terms we don't fight capitalism. Badiou explicitly claims this. He says he never understood what does it mean to fight capitalism. He even at one point, and I have here my Stalinist mind, he said this in one obscure interview in Italy and I caught him there, it's all in my black book, no, where he said but capitalism is like the air we are breathing, how can you fight it and so on. Okay, maybe this is true, I mean it's easy to laugh at him, the problem is very real. But what I'm saying is that we should at least really admit the problem. I mean capitalism in some sense did effectively win the its the capitalist ideology in its both most basic components, it's the air we are breathing today. And here following Badiou I would like to introduce a distinction between referring to Benjamin different types of violence, Badiou has a wonderful proposal to distinguish between constitutive and constituted ideology. Constituted is secondary empirical ideology, like obvious examples of perversion, of false reasoning, of crazy ideological paranoia, while constitutive ideology is a much more dangerous formal ideology, a very invisible form of how you reason. And I will try it immediately now to demonstrate how this works for example apropos of the health care debate that you have now. All those, and I'm the first to enjoy them, I love them, Sarah Palin-style, I'm dangerous here, I warn you, the only TV station that I watch here is Fox News, of course it's the only funny one. No, what I mean, you know all this madness of of Obama already preparing that death panels which will decide who dies or not, or even nicer, my favorite one, it really gives me some kind of intellectual orgasm is I read somewhere that Obama is already secretly constructing small concentration camps around United States and then on a certain night all the patriotic Americans will be arrested there and I read even a further point which I like that Obama knows that American police force is too patriotic to be confided with this task of guarding patriots there so he is secretly importing policemen with Chavez. Remember various... okay these are jokes but then we have a much more fundamental level which is the level of all the topic of the freedom of choice, freedom to choose. There we don't laugh, there ideology works even those who know oh those crazy right-wing lunatics and so on will say but nonetheless what about you know freedom the choice is the how should I put it dangerous part of ideology. And this is the problem. This this determines the field which then obliterates many things. How does this work? I will repeat an old story. A year ago I was had the misfortune to have a public debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library. I remember what happened. 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." I made a similarly pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on, with the rise of new walls between countries, is there not a need to find a new collective mode of action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? Now the catch is of course that if you put it in this general way we all agree. What can I say? No, I don't want women to choose their partners. Even Bernard-Henri Lévy to his almost I'm tempted to say honor he said, "Oh wait a minute, if this is communism I am a communist" and so on. This was precisely for me the proof that we were both within ideology. We were fighting too much at the level of what I called constituted ideology. We shared some frame. Which what is the function of this frame? To make invisible what I am tempted to call the background sound. You know of course we all like women to dress the way they want, to choose a man they love, blah blah blah. But again what does this mean to claim this in a concrete global constellation? You know does this justify bombing or whatever, what does this do and so on. This invisible background is the point. Why don't we see this background? Because precisely of the depth of our immersion into ideology and its main feature today is I think what some analysts call, this is the strength of today's today's capitalism, to present itself as cultural capitalism. What do I mean by this? Here is a wonderful case of the so-called cultural capitalism brought to extreme. Recently I saw the publicity for Toms Shoes, a company founded in now I read from their publicity, founded on a simple premise: with every pair you purchase, Toms will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One. Using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good is what we are all about. Of the planet's six billion people, four billion live in conditions inconceivable to many. Let's take a step towards a better tomorrow. End of quote. The motto One for One provides the key to unravel the ideological mechanism that sustains Toms Shoes. The very relationship between egoistic consumerism and altruistic charity becomes one of exchange. That is to say, the, let's call it ironically, sin of consumerism, buying a new pair of shoes, is paid for and thereby erased by the awareness that one of those who really need shoes gets another pair for free. The process thus reaches its climax: the very participating in consumerist activities is simultaneously presented as participation in the struggle against the evils ultimately caused by capitalist consumerism. And okay I don't want here to lose too much time repeating my old examples but this is why I really hate, like take this personally, I really hate Starbucks coffee. They are it. You know you cannot even, it you know the only moment when I was really tempted to become a brutal consumerist was when I enter Starbucks coffee and you get there the message which is okay we cost a little bit more but when you buy a cup of coffee as they repeat you again and again you are not just buying a cappuccino, you're buying with it an ethics of community, you meet friends there, we support rainforest, we support starving children in Guatemala and I'm almost tempted to say no, I want a cup of coffee, I don't don't want those screw children in Guatemala and so on, don't mess with that. But you see the operation is that the the act of consumerism is as it were its own opposite. You know this is the ideological profit that you are paying. You are literally you know it is as if you know sometimes you have the price analysis, tax so much and so on. I would like to see in an honest left-wing dictatorship when you get the bill from Starbucks let's say it's two and a half, it's I don't know thirty cents tax, one dollar coffee and one dollar the ideology that you buy or whatever, which is precisely this ideological satisfaction: you see I'm not just buying thing, I'm doing something, I'm helping rainforest, I'm all that all that. In this way even Che Guevara became the icon signifying all and nothing. That is to say whatever you want it to signify: youth rebellion against authoritarianism, solidarity with the poor and exploited, saintliness up to the liberal communist entrepreneurial spirit of working for the good of all. A couple of years ago even a high Vatican representative proclaimed that the celebration of Che is to be understood as the admiration of a man who risked and gave his life for the good of others. But as usual harmless beatification is mixed with its opposite, obscene commodification. Recently a friend from Australia sent me publicity motto of a Australian company which put on the market a Che Guevara ice cream focusing its promotion on the eating experience of course. Here is the description: the revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live in your mouth and so on and so on. You see that's a joke but it's a very effective joke. That is to say this is the triumph of today's capitalism. An entire ideological historical narrative is constructed in which socialism appears as conservative, hierarchical, administrative, so that the lesson of '68 which was basically we tend to forget this basically an anti-capitalist protest all of a sudden becomes goodbye Mr. Socialism, the true revolution is that of postmodern cultural cultural capitalism and so on and so on. This again as I already said this material force of ideology is directly palpable in the ongoing debate about health care reform. We are here at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology, the freedom of choice. This especially holds today in the era when sociologists like Ulrich Beck call our era risk society, when the ruling ideology tries to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms. You have to change job every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment. 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 a standard health insurance and retirement plan so that you have to opt for additional coverage. Why not perceive it as an opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, today's ideologists will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom of the escape from freedom, of the immature sticking to old stable forms. Even better, when this is when this situation is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as a psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities, then we as it were automatically interpret all these changes as the result of our personalities, not as the result of me being thrown around by the market forces. To quote John Gray, we are forced to live as if we were free. The extreme case of this paradox of being forced to live as free is the way popular anti-consumerist ideology is recently dealing with the topic of poverty, presenting it as a matter of personal choice. Books and articles in popular lifestyle journals abound which advise us how to step out of consumerism and adopt a way of life free of the compulsion to possess the latest products. The ideological bias of this solution is obvious: by way of presenting poverty as a free choice, it psychologizes an objective social predicament. Let me do a little bit of self-criticism of my nation. Janez Drnovsek, the Slovenian President in the first years of the 20th century, a cold technocrat, turned ridiculous self-taught New Ager, used to answer ordinary people's letters in a popular weekly magazine. In one of the letters an old lady complained that due to her low retirement money pension she was not able to eat meat and to travel. The president's answer was that she should be glad about her predicament, simple food without meat is healthier, and instead of the distractions of tourist travel she should engage on a spiritually much more satisfying inner travel, the ex- like don't travel outside, travel inside and so on and so on. Some of us remember the old infamous communist mantra against the bourgeois formal freedom. Ridiculous as it was, there is a moment of truth in the distinction between formal and actual freedom. Formal freedom is the freedom to choose within the coordinates of the existing power relations while actual freedom grows when we can change the very coordinates of our changes. The moment we approach the health care debate in this way, the freedom to choose appears in a different way. If the health care reform will pass, a large part of your population will be effectively delivered of the very dubious freedom to worry about who will cover their illness, to find a way in the intricate network of financial and other decisions. Being able to take the basic health care as for granted, to count on it like one counts on water or electricity supply without worrying to choose the water or electricity company, they will simply gain more time and energy to dedicate their lives to other things. So again we should accept this topic freedom of choice. But you know the catch is first where is freedom of choice actually of some value? Like I'm sorry but I wouldn't like to live in a society where for example I would have to choose electricity, water... this would be a nightmare society. I prefer these things simply to be in the background. Why not do the same for health care? I mean it can be done. Look at Europe, everybody says Canada it doesn't work. I was recently in Norway, not a communist country, but a country with an extremely high degree of some kind of, I don't know, it's part of their past or what let's call it collective decision spirit. When the so-called crisis of postmodern capitalism, the fiasco of old old industries which like really produce objects with manual labor occurred, they did something unthinkable and according to our predictions of our liberal ideologist impossible: representatives of society, trade unions even capitalist managers met and made a large-scale decision and it worked absolutely triumphantly. I'm not saying Norway is our ideal, I'm saying that we should stop this ideology of you know all large decision is automatically nightmarish bureaucracy a nightmarish bureaucracy and so on and so on. So sorry, let me go on, yeah, it's a bit of confusion. So again the lesson to be learned is that the freedom of choice is something which actually functions only if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions, if this network is here as the invisible thick background of the exercise of our freedom. Again we shouldn't say no we want less freedom, we should say wait a minute freedom is not in the air. And this is why incidentally also even to have a functioning liberal state you need more and more an extremely strong state. If anything the Bush presidency is a proof of this. Where is this myth that the state is disappearing? There never in the history of humanity probably was a state machinery as strong as United States regulating so many things and so on and so on. And I'm not criticizing even this, I'm saying that you know to to make choices you always make choices against a certain background within a certain context and so on and so on. So that's the true problem. The true problem is what choices what choices are neglected, disappear if you focus on certain choices and so on and so on. This is the main task today: to render visible the thick invisible background, especially now I move further with regard to all this noble multiculturalist projects. One should always ask what is the concrete background. Let me take you an example which may be problematic for some of you when I recently visited recently, okay a year ago, Ramallah and Jerusalem. I learned that in Jerusalem in the Eastern part, the state of Israel is quietly carrying out a very expensive multi-year development plan in the so-called Holy Basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled old city. It's part of an effort to strengthen the state of of Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel. The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to private groups which are simultaneously buying Palestinian property, has drawn almost no public international scrutiny. As part of the plan garbage dumps and wastelands are cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views along with new signs and displays which point out significant points of Jewish history and conveniently many of the unauthorized Palestinian houses had to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the era of the area. This Holy Basin is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions so that the official argument is that this site is developed for everyone's benefit: Jews, Muslims and Christians since it involves restoration which will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest. However as people from Peace Now noted, the plan aims to create an ideological tourist park which will determine Jewish dominance in the area. You know this is the problem I have and here I'm sympathetic with my friend Udi Aloni who was recently attacked in New York Book Review for calls problematizing certain features of the Toronto Film Festival. It's not at all a question of I would be have been the first to be totally opposed to it of boycotting Jewish artists or whatever and so on and so on. But I experienced this when I visited to support his film. I visited but not as part of official invitation as a private person a year ago Jerusalem Film Festival. The way it was presented to me was in all that madness of hatred around us, we are here in the middle, we are an island of tolerance and so on and so on. I mean it's ridiculous, an island of tolerance but did they get it that precisely as such their function was in a way to set the standard, to render this is the to render invisible how the very fact that they function there as an island of tolerance is based on the repression of Palestinians and so on and so on and so on. You know so we should be I claim extremely sensitive and that's my point to this ideological operation which obfuscates the very real cultural and economic violence which is usually sustaining these celebrated open multicultural whatever areas. Here one cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first generation founders of the state of Israel who in no way obliterated the let's call it founding crime of establishing a new state. They openly admitted they have no right to the land of Palestine and it is just their force against the force of the Palestinians. People tend to forget this today. I admire them. They were honest. I mean the first generation at least at this level, Ben-Gurion and so on. They never said it's our sacred land, no, they said no we have no I will give you a surprising quote. On 29th of April a group of Palestinians from Gaza that had crossed the border to plunder the harvest in a Nahal Oz kibbutz field, Roy, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields, galloped towards them, Palestinians, on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away. He was seized by the Palestinians carried back and then carried back to the Gaza Strip. When the United Nations returned his body, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the Chief of Staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day. Listen to it. It's breathtaking. Dayan speaking: "Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance. It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roy's blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz [the kibbutz near the border] bears the burden of Gaza's gates on its shoulders?" End of quote. Apart from the pure ideological manipulation, parallel between Roy and the blinded Samson which plays a key role in the later IDF mythology, what cannot but strike the eye is the apparent non sequitur, the gap between the first and the second paragraph from this passage of Dayan's speech. In the first paragraph Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have the full right to hate the Israeli Jews since they took their land. His conclusion however is not the obvious admission of one's own guilt, but to fully accept the destiny of our generation in all its brutality. That is to say to assume the burden not of guilt but of the war where might will be right where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles of justice, it was an exercise, yeah, minutes no, in mythic violence. The insight totally obliterated by the recent Israelis' self-legitimation. And I think that I'm ready to go very far in understanding the Israelis. I think again here following conversations with my good friend Udi Aloni that that precisely if we take into the account of all all the complexity of the situation, we should apply also to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the old motto from '68, *Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible*. Let's be realists, let's demand the impossible. That is to say, if there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted negotiations in the Middle East, it is that the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution: the two separate states. Although none of the two sides really want this solution. Israel would probably prefer a little bit of the West Bank that it is ready to cede to become part of Jordan. And the Palestinians consider also the pre-67 Israel part of their land. So although none really no none of the two warring parties really wants the two-state solution, but nonetheless it is perceived somehow accepted by both sides as the only realistic feasible solution. What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution: a binational secular state comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories, West Bank and Gaza. Now to those who dismiss the binational state as a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence, I following Udi Aloni have here a simple reply. Maybe, but far from being utopian, is it not that the binational state already is a fact? It is the reality of today's Israel and West Bank. It is de facto one state. The entire territory is de facto controlled by one sovereign power, the state of Israel, divided by internal borders. So that the task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform it into a secular democratic state. I'm not saying this will happen, I'm just saying if this will not happen it will just endlessly go obviously. Although I'm more on Palestinian side, but obviously both sides are somehow in love with this indefinite protraction. Israel for obvious reasons, they are slowly cutting slicing the land and so on. So again such crazy wagers maybe the only way to fight today's moral vacuity which is bombarding us. A film made by Anwar Congo and his friends who are now respected politicians but were gangsters and death squads leaders playing a key role in the killing of around two millions and a half of alleged communist sympathizers, mostly ethnic Chinese. *The Act of Killing* is about killers who have won. After their victory, their crimes were not relegated to the status of the dirty secret, the founding crime whose traces are to be obliterated. On the contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacres. For example it's shocking, you can see in the camera and they wanted to do this film, they are not caught on a secret camera, a guy who describes with obvious pleasure, or not even pleasure, just normal, like the it took him some twenty thirty rates to discover that the most satisfying way to rape a woman is to that you have a friend with the wire around her neck pulling it down strangling her that it also gives you more satisfaction and so on and so on. And then in October the Indonesian State TV produced a talk show celebrating Anwar and his friends and in the middle of this show, after Anwar says that killings their killings were inspired by gangster movies, the beaming moderator of the talk show turns to the camera and says "Amazing! Let's give Anwar Congo a round of applause!" And then when she asks Anwar is he fears the revenge of the victim's relatives, Anwar answers "They can't! When they raise their hands, we will wipe them out." And again the studio audience explodes into exuberant cheers. I mean it's absolute obscenity, like you think it's kind of a nightmarish dream. People openly applauded for explaining a account how they did with the models on Hollywood cinema. They even made it clear that that the only way to do the fix to really do the killings is that they imagine themselves as heroes of Hollywood gangster movies. Like they imagine themselves as James Cagney, as... so they it's very nice insight into okay nice, terrifying into what kind of fiction they needed to be able to do it. But again what is so absolutely depressing is that even this last level of shame that you find in Nazis, you know like we did it secretly, falls down. You have simply people openly exchanging you know it was better to torture like this, you know if you squeeze the ball in that way it hurts more, whatever, it's an absolute nightmare. What we should ask is how this is possible. But what we should absolutely not do especially here is playing the racist card. Of course it's Indonesia, third world country and so on and so on. Here, this should be the starting point for what we call the ethical catastrophe caused by the ongoing globalization. And I don't have time to go further into it, but it's and don't let's even not be so sure that this is limited to third world countries. I don't have time to go into it but if you if you follow what goes now in Italy with Berlusconi, it's not yet that but it's approaching that. I mean it's you know I never thought as an old leftist that I would live in a situation where we the left will become let's call it the defenders of civility, of common decency and civility. In '68 we used "fuck you, screw you" all that to embarrass those in power. They are now the dirty guys more and more. Look Italy, it's something that sincerely worries me that happens there. You have a chief of state de facto who consciously ruins his own authority, makes fun of himself. It's really like Michel Foucault in his late seminars spoke about Ubuism, Ubu, Roi Ubu, Alfred Jarry, Groucho Marx in power, clown in power and this is effectively approaching it. For example I couldn't believe it, now a couple of weeks ago Berlusconi's press representative, a lawyer, said "it's a dirty lie that Berlusconi is impotent, he is ready to prove in court that he is not impotent." I mean like I'm just asking what, how? I would like to you know what I mean? And I and I think that it's and this is I had I don't want again to take too much time, but it's I see this as an all around tendency, this Ubuization of power, loss of the dignity of power. And I think again that we shouldn't be afraid. We shouldn't be afraid to stand for common decency, civility and so on and so on. The point is of course that this civility is not the this civility is not the this civility of this you know bourgeois complacency we treat each other nicely and so on and so on. It's the civility absolutely combined by the spirit of struggle. That's our task today: civility with the spirit of struggle, no neutrality. You will tell me now I'm trying to sell you some totalitarian message. Maybe, but the one who put in best terms this totalitarian message is your own, I admire him for this, Mark Twain. Let me read you a passage from his *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court* where Mark Twain provides the best answer I know of to this boring reproach, oh Jacobin French revolutionary terror. Here it is, your own Mark Twain: "There were two reigns of terror, if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; one... our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." End of quote. And you know this is how we should function today. Like you know when people complain for example I am very critical of Hugo Chavez often, but when people complain what about Chavez, for example he nominated in an non-democratic way new members of the constitutional court. Okay but I ask them, do you imply that the previous member were somehow democratically nominated or what? You know what you know what this is the problem. I mean to see to see things in the to see things in the perspective in this sense. Okay now to conclude, so what can we do in this situation where although we see ominous signs, I'm not afraid to use this moralistic terms: ethical degradation, moral vacuity, total penetration by ideology and so on. Does this mean we can't do anything? No, we can do, we can do quite many thing and even if we cannot do it we can do this nothing, doing nothing in a and with this I will conclude, if I have the guys already left in panic. They are not the true hard-line communists, they are the liberal softies. We need them now as fellow travelers, in the second stage we say nice to meet you, here is a ticket to Gulag one way thick one way ticket, no, sorry. No, what I'm saying is that even if this situation remains appears almost invincible today, we should always bear in mind the lesson first elaborated by de La Boetie, the 16th-century political theoretician in his wonderful treatise on voluntary servitude. Sorry, would you like to speak presence in marks and then we'll just do a handful of questions? Ah now this is your revenge. No okay so allow me really just to conclude then two three minutes. Okay what I wanted first to present is a wonderful novel that I propose you to read it: Ismail Kadare, the Albanian guy, *The Palace of Dreams*. An imaginary story of a like Turkey 19th-century regime where there is a big ministry whose function is to read people's dreams and and it's so nicely done that what this is about they control the way they are aware that the reason people obey power is not simply oppression and so on, is they invest their dreams into it. Even if you hate the tyrant, you are often fascinated by him, attached to it. It's interesting to read from this point Soviet poet poets from the Stalinist era. All of them, the greatest dissident, Pasternak, Mandelstam, they were all you can see from private notes in a very ambiguous way fascinated by Stalin and so on. So what we can do, the first thing to do and it's very important thing to do, it's the first part of what I call Bartleby politics is "I prefer not to" in the sense of we stop to dream your dream. This is not unimportant, this is extremely important. This is a first step towards towards ideological liberation. To gain now it's really the end, to gain this space of freedom even religion can come handy why if it works as a religion not I like religion without God, I like religion as something which allows you a distance towards being immersed into existing reality. What kind of God do we get here in the religion I would like to see functioning? You are my superego. Conclusion: I heard recently a wonderful good old communist Bolshevik joke from 1920s, it's important because at that point they still believed in power of communist propaganda, it wouldn't have been possible later. Joke about an able communist propagandist who after his death finds himself of course in hell but being a wonderful propagandist he quickly
Thanks very much. I am glad to be here. As usual, I have too many things to say, so I hope a little bit of time tolerance can be counted on. Okay, let me go directly to the point. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th should be the time to reflect. It is a commonplace to emphasize the miraculous nature of the disintegration of socialist regimes. It was, so we hear, like a dream come true, something unimaginable happened, something one couldn't consider possible even a couple of months earlier: free elections, the disintegration of the communist regime which collapsed like a house of cards and so on. Who in Poland could have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president? However, to this one should add an even greater miracle was what happened only a couple of years later: the return of the ex-communists to power through free democratic elections. Walesa totally marginalized and much less popular than General Wojciech Jaruzelski who a decade and a half earlier crushed Solidarity with a military coup d'état. Why this reversal? The standard explanation evokes the immature expectations of the people who simply didn't possess a realistic image of capitalism. They wanted to have a cake and eat it. They wanted the capitalist democratic freedom and material abundance without paying the price for it, without losing the security and stability more or less guaranteed by the communist regimes. As the sarcastic Western commentators noted, the reality of the noble struggle for freedom and justice turned out to be the craze for bananas and pornography. So when the unavoidable disappointment set in, it gave rise to three sometimes opposed, sometimes overlapping reactions in post-communist countries. First, the nostalgia for the good old communist times. Second, the rightist proto-fascist nationalist populism. Three, the renewed belated anti-communist paranoia. The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously. Far from expressing a serious wish to return to the grey socialist reality, it is more I think a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. The rise of the rightist populism is also not an East European specialty. It's a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization. More interesting is the weird resurrection of anti-communism almost two decades after the events. I think the reason behind it is a simple one. It's this is the logic: if capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still so miserable? If you really believe in capitalism, the only reply is that secretly the communists still rule, that you know we don't have real capitalism but somehow capitalism manipulated by hidden communist elite. And then I try to explain to people, but this is capitalism, that capitalism is manipulated by elites and so on. So it is an obvious fact that when people protested against communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted solidarity and a rough kind of justice. They wanted the freedom to live their own lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they please. They wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy. As many conspicuous analysts observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling socialist ideology itself. Does this mean that we should renounce this excess? Was this disappointment of the people really just a sign of immaturity, they wanted too much and so on and so on? Were they utopians, or is the ongoing financial meltdown, the ongoing financial crisis a proof that it is perhaps today's global capitalism which is in its own way utopian? But nonetheless what one has to admit and with this I would like really to begin is a defeat, a real defeat. A defeat in the sense that I don't think we even took into account the dimensions of this defeat of the left. Look, first you are here almost an exception, a wonderful exception now under Obama, but I think that you can observe now in many European countries almost in a with in a clinical purity the process of disintegration of the old even social democratic welfare state left. First it was the communist state socialism left, then now with years of delay this left is disappearing. You can see this in West Germany, you can see this in France and so on and so on. I think if you ask me we are moving towards a new state where the opposition, and this is already the situation in Poland today, the opposition will no longer be between welfare state social democracy and some kind of Christian populist conservatives, but more between a kind of a mainstream liberal tolerant capitalism with all the political correctness included but at the same time economic liberalism, market and so on, mainstream party and then on the right a populist reaction to it. So the choice is between politically correct whatever you want liberal pro-capitalist mainstream and populist reactions where to make things even worse the only ones who dare to mention obscene notions like workers and so on are usually the right-wing populists. Whatever remains of the left at least in Europe, they are so terrorized of being accused caught in the old 19th-century paradigm or whatever that they are afraid of even mentioning mentioning the term working class. Most of them spend all their propaganda convincing themselves and others that we are really the party of this new postmodern dynamic digital capitalisms and so on and so on. So where are we then? What happens in this defeat? Let me give you another example. Sorry, I'm losing time but please count this already as a debate. I'm answering questions, my own questions, but who cares? Look, the only really interesting economic proposal from the left of the last decades that I'm aware of is the so-called basic income or basic rent proposal. I think it's almost a symptom of our state today. It's I claim an impossible dream, the dream that capitalism itself, that we can keep it and make it work in a socialist way as it were. It has one very good, you know what's the basic idea? The basic idea is that each citizen independently of his status, it has nothing to do with your employment, should be guaranteed, should get from the state a certain minimal income which enables him or her survival with a minimally decent standard of living. The idea is that in this way you solve the problem of unemployment, you solve the problem of of consumerism because like by giving money to the people you will have enough demand on the market to prevent crisis and so on and so on. Then one element which really is attractive to me, that we know all that in the market the one who sells his work is in a his labor force rather is in an underprivileged situation. Like you don't have really a choice, you have to sell yourself to survive. Here the choice to work or not would have been a real choice. Like you do it or you can say no, I will not work. But the problem here is that if you try to locate this proposal into a classic Marxist perspective, you see how crazy it looks. First it's a rent, this is why in Brazil they are right to call it renta básica, the basic rent. So already today we have rent emerging as the main source of the profit in new digital industries. It's clear that what what the source of Bill Gates' wealth is not the old profit, it's rent. Bill Gates is doing, to give you a simple explanation I develop this in my new book in the last chapter, the way I read Bill Gates' wealth is that I know you can play this boring old Marxist games that it's extra extra profit from the I don't think it really works. It's rent, in what sense? We should be here go to the end, critical of Marx himself where needed. You know Marx had that wonderful insight in that famous passage from his Grundrisse into how with the key role of knowledge in the production process in all senses, from scientific knowledge to expertise, time this so-called labor theory of value with time spent of labor as the source of value becomes meaningless. And Marx then uses this famous term general intellect, that the true source of values is the collective knowledge as it were. But so but Marx is here also at his lowest. He comes very close to a simplistic expectation that this means when capitalism will reach this level it will simply collapse. He says it will become meaningless because labor time spent on labor is no longer the source of value. Now what Marx was not able to imagine I think is this what he calls general intellect, collective knowledge, that it can itself be privatized and then sold. If you are in a monopoly position to market it, sold for not so much for profit as for rent. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think quite a good theory that this is what is happening today. On the one hand we have people like Bill Gates, he succeeded through his market I mean every idiot knows that Microsoft is by far not the best program. Why do we all use it? Because it's he occupies the de facto more or less monopoly position. So it's not profit, we are paying the rent to be able to participate in the general intellect as it were. That's what Marx didn't quite get it. On the other hand Marx made another wonderful mistake when he insisted on that the only source of value is labor and so on, he gives a very unfortunate example although his theory is right, of example namely of oil. But exactly today oil is a source again but it's not profit, it's rent. And what I'm claiming is that if we add to all this even the basic rent, then we have from the orthodox Marxist standpoint an absurd situation where we have a narrow productive core of old-fashioned workers and capitalist and basically the large majority of society just exploits them. Those who collect rent, those who have natural resources, and those who don't work. For me the conclusion is not that we should drop all these notions proletarian, exploitation and so on, but we should really redefine them. Another nice ironic point about basic rent idea is that for example in Europe the great proponent of basic rent is Toni Negri. But it's funny, Toni Negri proposed in the last decade two or one idea in two aspects which I think are proven false. One is you know the whole idea of Empire is that sovereign state power, nation-state is diminishing, more and more negligible and so on and so on. And also you know we are all nomadic moving, all this Deleuzian poetry so who cares if you are citizen or not. But wait a minute, the whole point of basic rent is an extremely important role of a central state who acknowledges you as a citizen. It's a rent for the privilege to be a citizen of a certain state. This is I think kind of a living dialectic how I admire this irony of how a theoretician who spent all his time advocating a certain line of thought, Empire, diminishing role of the state, then makes a proposal which runs exactly runs against. The dream is as it is clear you should read the guy, he's interesting, Robert Van Parijs, a Belgian I think sociologist who developed this notion of of basic income or basic rent. His idea is that this is the only way to legitimize capitalism. I think it's yet another dream. But again I read this as the sign of a defeat, defeat in the sense that the most radical imagination today, imagination in the sense of something which really has the trust to realize itself, is you accept capitalism as it is, just you dream of of a perfect welfare state. How should I put it? It's a perfect welfare state dream. Now how does this defeat then function? I want to quote here Alain Badiou who described three distinct ways for a revolutionary movement to fail. First there is of course a direct defeat. You are simply crushed by the enemy forces. Then there is a defeat in the victory itself. One wins over the enemy temporarily at least by way of taking over the main power agenda of the enemy. This should be like either parliamentary democracy or communist so-called totalitarianism, like you end up imitating the enemy. And then Badiou claims there is the most authentic but also the most terrifying mode of the defeat: guided by the correct instinct telling us that every solidification of the revolution into a new state power equals its betrayal, but unable to invent or impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by the ultra-leftist resort to all destructive terror. Whatever you want, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge and so on. Badiou aptly calls this last version the sacrificial temptation of the void, a quote from Badiou. One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was "dare to fight, dare to win." But we know that if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure: the attack didn't succeed, while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restoration. It is from here that this sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order, it is the interiority of nihilism and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void. End of quote. It sounds deep, almost Heideggerian, that you know the greatest danger is the inherent nihilism of the revolutionary project itself. But nonetheless what Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao's "dare to win." You should be afraid to win, to take power, to establish a new social political reality because the lesson of the 20th century is that victory either ends in restoration, return to the state power logic, or gets caught into the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification. This is why Badiou proposes to replace this 20th-century revolutionary logic with what he calls subtraction. Instead of winning, taking over power, one maintains a distance toward state power, one subtracts from the domain of state power, one creates small spaces outside state power. Again sympathetic as this proposal is, I think we simply pay too high a price for it. It simply means, and Badiou does accept this conclusion, that to put it in blunt terms we don't fight capitalism. Badiou explicitly claims this. He says he never understood what does it mean to fight capitalism. He even at one point, and I have here my Stalinist mind, he said this in one obscure interview in Italy and I caught him there, it's all in my black book, no, where he said but capitalism is like the air we are breathing, how can you fight it and so on. Okay, maybe this is true, I mean it's easy to laugh at him, the problem is very real. But what I'm saying is that we should at least really admit the problem. I mean capitalism in some sense did effectively win the its the capitalist ideology in its both most basic components, it's the air we are breathing today. And here following Badiou I would like to introduce a distinction between referring to Benjamin different types of violence, Badiou has a wonderful proposal to distinguish between constitutive and constituted ideology. Constituted is secondary empirical ideology, like obvious examples of perversion, of false reasoning, of crazy ideological paranoia, while constitutive ideology is a much more dangerous formal ideology, a very invisible form of how you reason. And I will try it immediately now to demonstrate how this works for example apropos of the health care debate that you have now. All those, and I'm the first to enjoy them, I love them, Sarah Palin-style, I'm dangerous here, I warn you, the only TV station that I watch here is Fox News, of course it's the only funny one. No, what I mean, you know all this madness of of Obama already preparing that death panels which will decide who dies or not, or even nicer, my favorite one, it really gives me some kind of intellectual orgasm is I read somewhere that Obama is already secretly constructing small concentration camps around United States and then on a certain night all the patriotic Americans will be arrested there and I read even a further point which I like that Obama knows that American police force is too patriotic to be confided with this task of guarding patriots there so he is secretly importing policemen with Chavez. Remember various... okay these are jokes but then we have a much more fundamental level which is the level of all the topic of the freedom of choice, freedom to choose. There we don't laugh, there ideology works even those who know oh those crazy right-wing lunatics and so on will say but nonetheless what about you know freedom the choice is the how should I put it dangerous part of ideology. And this is the problem. This this determines the field which then obliterates many things. How does this work? I will repeat an old story. A year ago I was had the misfortune to have a public debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library. I remember what happened. 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." I made a similarly pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on, with the rise of new walls between countries, is there not a need to find a new collective mode of action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? Now the catch is of course that if you put it in this general way we all agree. What can I say? No, I don't want women to choose their partners. Even Bernard-Henri Lévy to his almost I'm tempted to say honor he said, "Oh wait a minute, if this is communism I am a communist" and so on. This was precisely for me the proof that we were both within ideology. We were fighting too much at the level of what I called constituted ideology. We shared some frame. Which what is the function of this frame? To make invisible what I am tempted to call the background sound. You know of course we all like women to dress the way they want, to choose a man they love, blah blah blah. But again what does this mean to claim this in a concrete global constellation? You know does this justify bombing or whatever, what does this do and so on. This invisible background is the point. Why don't we see this background? Because precisely of the depth of our immersion into ideology and its main feature today is I think what some analysts call, this is the strength of today's today's capitalism, to present itself as cultural capitalism. What do I mean by this? Here is a wonderful case of the so-called cultural capitalism brought to extreme. Recently I saw the publicity for Toms Shoes, a company founded in now I read from their publicity, founded on a simple premise: with every pair you purchase, Toms will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One. Using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good is what we are all about. Of the planet's six billion people, four billion live in conditions inconceivable to many. Let's take a step towards a better tomorrow. End of quote. The motto One for One provides the key to unravel the ideological mechanism that sustains Toms Shoes. The very relationship between egoistic consumerism and altruistic charity becomes one of exchange. That is to say, the, let's call it ironically, sin of consumerism, buying a new pair of shoes, is paid for and thereby erased by the awareness that one of those who really need shoes gets another pair for free. The process thus reaches its climax: the very participating in consumerist activities is simultaneously presented as participation in the struggle against the evils ultimately caused by capitalist consumerism. And okay I don't want here to lose too much time repeating my old examples but this is why I really hate, like take this personally, I really hate Starbucks coffee. They are it. You know you cannot even, it you know the only moment when I was really tempted to become a brutal consumerist was when I enter Starbucks coffee and you get there the message which is okay we cost a little bit more but when you buy a cup of coffee as they repeat you again and again you are not just buying a cappuccino, you're buying with it an ethics of community, you meet friends there, we support rainforest, we support starving children in Guatemala and I'm almost tempted to say no, I want a cup of coffee, I don't don't want those screw children in Guatemala and so on, don't mess with that. But you see the operation is that the the act of consumerism is as it were its own opposite. You know this is the ideological profit that you are paying. You are literally you know it is as if you know sometimes you have the price analysis, tax so much and so on. I would like to see in an honest left-wing dictatorship when you get the bill from Starbucks let's say it's two and a half, it's I don't know thirty cents tax, one dollar coffee and one dollar the ideology that you buy or whatever, which is precisely this ideological satisfaction: you see I'm not just buying thing, I'm doing something, I'm helping rainforest, I'm all that all that. In this way even Che Guevara became the icon signifying all and nothing. That is to say whatever you want it to signify: youth rebellion against authoritarianism, solidarity with the poor and exploited, saintliness up to the liberal communist entrepreneurial spirit of working for the good of all. A couple of years ago even a high Vatican representative proclaimed that the celebration of Che is to be understood as the admiration of a man who risked and gave his life for the good of others. But as usual harmless beatification is mixed with its opposite, obscene commodification. Recently a friend from Australia sent me publicity motto of a Australian company which put on the market a Che Guevara ice cream focusing its promotion on the eating experience of course. Here is the description: the revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live in your mouth and so on and so on. You see that's a joke but it's a very effective joke. That is to say this is the triumph of today's capitalism. An entire ideological historical narrative is constructed in which socialism appears as conservative, hierarchical, administrative, so that the lesson of '68 which was basically we tend to forget this basically an anti-capitalist protest all of a sudden becomes goodbye Mr. Socialism, the true revolution is that of postmodern cultural cultural capitalism and so on and so on. This again as I already said this material force of ideology is directly palpable in the ongoing debate about health care reform. We are here at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology, the freedom of choice. This especially holds today in the era when sociologists like Ulrich Beck call our era risk society, when the ruling ideology tries to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms. You have to change job every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment. 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 a standard health insurance and retirement plan so that you have to opt for additional coverage. Why not perceive it as an opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, today's ideologists will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom of the escape from freedom, of the immature sticking to old stable forms. Even better, when this is when this situation is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as a psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities, then we as it were automatically interpret all these changes as the result of our personalities, not as the result of me being thrown around by the market forces. To quote John Gray, we are forced to live as if we were free. The extreme case of this paradox of being forced to live as free is the way popular anti-consumerist ideology is recently dealing with the topic of poverty, presenting it as a matter of personal choice. Books and articles in popular lifestyle journals abound which advise us how to step out of consumerism and adopt a way of life free of the compulsion to possess the latest products. The ideological bias of this solution is obvious: by way of presenting poverty as a free choice, it psychologizes an objective social predicament. Let me do a little bit of self-criticism of my nation. Janez Drnovsek, the Slovenian President in the first years of the 20th century, a cold technocrat, turned ridiculous self-taught New Ager, used to answer ordinary people's letters in a popular weekly magazine. In one of the letters an old lady complained that due to her low retirement money pension she was not able to eat meat and to travel. The president's answer was that she should be glad about her predicament, simple food without meat is healthier, and instead of the distractions of tourist travel she should engage on a spiritually much more satisfying inner travel, the ex- like don't travel outside, travel inside and so on and so on. Some of us remember the old infamous communist mantra against the bourgeois formal freedom. Ridiculous as it was, there is a moment of truth in the distinction between formal and actual freedom. Formal freedom is the freedom to choose within the coordinates of the existing power relations while actual freedom grows when we can change the very coordinates of our changes. The moment we approach the health care debate in this way, the freedom to choose appears in a different way. If the health care reform will pass, a large part of your population will be effectively delivered of the very dubious freedom to worry about who will cover their illness, to find a way in the intricate network of financial and other decisions. Being able to take the basic health care as for granted, to count on it like one counts on water or electricity supply without worrying to choose the water or electricity company, they will simply gain more time and energy to dedicate their lives to other things. So again we should accept this topic freedom of choice. But you know the catch is first where is freedom of choice actually of some value? Like I'm sorry but I wouldn't like to live in a society where for example I would have to choose electricity, water... this would be a nightmare society. I prefer these things simply to be in the background. Why not do the same for health care? I mean it can be done. Look at Europe, everybody says Canada it doesn't work. I was recently in Norway, not a communist country, but a country with an extremely high degree of some kind of, I don't know, it's part of their past or what let's call it collective decision spirit. When the so-called crisis of postmodern capitalism, the fiasco of old old industries which like really produce objects with manual labor occurred, they did something unthinkable and according to our predictions of our liberal ideologist impossible: representatives of society, trade unions even capitalist managers met and made a large-scale decision and it worked absolutely triumphantly. I'm not saying Norway is our ideal, I'm saying that we should stop this ideology of you know all large decision is automatically nightmarish bureaucracy a nightmarish bureaucracy and so on and so on. So sorry, let me go on, yeah, it's a bit of confusion. So again the lesson to be learned is that the freedom of choice is something which actually functions only if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions, if this network is here as the invisible thick background of the exercise of our freedom. Again we shouldn't say no we want less freedom, we should say wait a minute freedom is not in the air. And this is why incidentally also even to have a functioning liberal state you need more and more an extremely strong state. If anything the Bush presidency is a proof of this. Where is this myth that the state is disappearing? There never in the history of humanity probably was a state machinery as strong as United States regulating so many things and so on and so on. And I'm not criticizing even this, I'm saying that you know to to make choices you always make choices against a certain background within a certain context and so on and so on. So that's the true problem. The true problem is what choices what choices are neglected, disappear if you focus on certain choices and so on and so on. This is the main task today: to render visible the thick invisible background, especially now I move further with regard to all this noble multiculturalist projects. One should always ask what is the concrete background. Let me take you an example which may be problematic for some of you when I recently visited recently, okay a year ago, Ramallah and Jerusalem. I learned that in Jerusalem in the Eastern part, the state of Israel is quietly carrying out a very expensive multi-year development plan in the so-called Holy Basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled old city. It's part of an effort to strengthen the state of of Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel. The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to private groups which are simultaneously buying Palestinian property, has drawn almost no public international scrutiny. As part of the plan garbage dumps and wastelands are cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views along with new signs and displays which point out significant points of Jewish history and conveniently many of the unauthorized Palestinian houses had to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the era of the area. This Holy Basin is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions so that the official argument is that this site is developed for everyone's benefit: Jews, Muslims and Christians since it involves restoration which will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest. However as people from Peace Now noted, the plan aims to create an ideological tourist park which will determine Jewish dominance in the area. You know this is the problem I have and here I'm sympathetic with my friend Udi Aloni who was recently attacked in New York Book Review for calls problematizing certain features of the Toronto Film Festival. It's not at all a question of I would be have been the first to be totally opposed to it of boycotting Jewish artists or whatever and so on and so on. But I experienced this when I visited to support his film. I visited but not as part of official invitation as a private person a year ago Jerusalem Film Festival. The way it was presented to me was in all that madness of hatred around us, we are here in the middle, we are an island of tolerance and so on and so on. I mean it's ridiculous, an island of tolerance but did they get it that precisely as such their function was in a way to set the standard, to render this is the to render invisible how the very fact that they function there as an island of tolerance is based on the repression of Palestinians and so on and so on and so on. You know so we should be I claim extremely sensitive and that's my point to this ideological operation which obfuscates the very real cultural and economic violence which is usually sustaining these celebrated open multicultural whatever areas. Here one cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first generation founders of the state of Israel who in no way obliterated the let's call it founding crime of establishing a new state. They openly admitted they have no right to the land of Palestine and it is just their force against the force of the Palestinians. People tend to forget this today. I admire them. They were honest. I mean the first generation at least at this level, Ben-Gurion and so on. They never said it's our sacred land, no, they said no we have no I will give you a surprising quote. On 29th of April a group of Palestinians from Gaza that had crossed the border to plunder the harvest in a Nahal Oz kibbutz field, Roy, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields, galloped towards them, Palestinians, on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away. He was seized by the Palestinians carried back and then carried back to the Gaza Strip. When the United Nations returned his body, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the Chief of Staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day. Listen to it. It's breathtaking. Dayan speaking: "Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance. It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roy's blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz [the kibbutz near the border] bears the burden of Gaza's gates on its shoulders?" End of quote. Apart from the pure ideological manipulation, parallel between Roy and the blinded Samson which plays a key role in the later IDF mythology, what cannot but strike the eye is the apparent non sequitur, the gap between the first and the second paragraph from this passage of Dayan's speech. In the first paragraph Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have the full right to hate the Israeli Jews since they took their land. His conclusion however is not the obvious admission of one's own guilt, but to fully accept the destiny of our generation in all its brutality. That is to say to assume the burden not of guilt but of the war where might will be right where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles of justice, it was an exercise, yeah, minutes no, in mythic violence. The insight totally obliterated by the recent Israelis' self-legitimation. And I think that I'm ready to go very far in understanding the Israelis. I think again here following conversations with my good friend Udi Aloni that that precisely if we take into the account of all all the complexity of the situation, we should apply also to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the old motto from '68, *Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible*. Let's be realists, let's demand the impossible. That is to say, if there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted negotiations in the Middle East, it is that the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution: the two separate states. Although none of the two sides really want this solution. Israel would probably prefer a little bit of the West Bank that it is ready to cede to become part of Jordan. And the Palestinians consider also the pre-67 Israel part of their land. So although none really no none of the two warring parties really wants the two-state solution, but nonetheless it is perceived somehow accepted by both sides as the only realistic feasible solution. What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution: a binational secular state comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories, West Bank and Gaza. Now to those who dismiss the binational state as a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence, I following Udi Aloni have here a simple reply. Maybe, but far from being utopian, is it not that the binational state already is a fact? It is the reality of today's Israel and West Bank. It is de facto one state. The entire territory is de facto controlled by one sovereign power, the state of Israel, divided by internal borders. So that the task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform it into a secular democratic state. I'm not saying this will happen, I'm just saying if this will not happen it will just endlessly go obviously. Although I'm more on Palestinian side, but obviously both sides are somehow in love with this indefinite protraction. Israel for obvious reasons, they are slowly cutting slicing the land and so on. So again such crazy wagers maybe the only way to fight today's moral vacuity which is bombarding us. A film made by Anwar Congo and his friends who are now respected politicians but were gangsters and death squads leaders playing a key role in the killing of around two millions and a half of alleged communist sympathizers, mostly ethnic Chinese. *The Act of Killing* is about killers who have won. After their victory, their crimes were not relegated to the status of the dirty secret, the founding crime whose traces are to be obliterated. On the contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacres. For example it's shocking, you can see in the camera and they wanted to do this film, they are not caught on a secret camera, a guy who describes with obvious pleasure, or not even pleasure, just normal, like the it took him some twenty thirty rates to discover that the most satisfying way to rape a woman is to that you have a friend with the wire around her neck pulling it down strangling her that it also gives you more satisfaction and so on and so on. And then in October the Indonesian State TV produced a talk show celebrating Anwar and his friends and in the middle of this show, after Anwar says that killings their killings were inspired by gangster movies, the beaming moderator of the talk show turns to the camera and says "Amazing! Let's give Anwar Congo a round of applause!" And then when she asks Anwar is he fears the revenge of the victim's relatives, Anwar answers "They can't! When they raise their hands, we will wipe them out." And again the studio audience explodes into exuberant cheers. I mean it's absolute obscenity, like you think it's kind of a nightmarish dream. People openly applauded for explaining a account how they did with the models on Hollywood cinema. They even made it clear that that the only way to do the fix to really do the killings is that they imagine themselves as heroes of Hollywood gangster movies. Like they imagine themselves as James Cagney, as... so they it's very nice insight into okay nice, terrifying into what kind of fiction they needed to be able to do it. But again what is so absolutely depressing is that even this last level of shame that you find in Nazis, you know like we did it secretly, falls down. You have simply people openly exchanging you know it was better to torture like this, you know if you squeeze the ball in that way it hurts more, whatever, it's an absolute nightmare. What we should ask is how this is possible. But what we should absolutely not do especially here is playing the racist card. Of course it's Indonesia, third world country and so on and so on. Here, this should be the starting point for what we call the ethical catastrophe caused by the ongoing globalization. And I don't have time to go further into it, but it's and don't let's even not be so sure that this is limited to third world countries. I don't have time to go into it but if you if you follow what goes now in Italy with Berlusconi, it's not yet that but it's approaching that. I mean it's you know I never thought as an old leftist that I would live in a situation where we the left will become let's call it the defenders of civility, of common decency and civility. In '68 we used "fuck you, screw you" all that to embarrass those in power. They are now the dirty guys more and more. Look Italy, it's something that sincerely worries me that happens there. You have a chief of state de facto who consciously ruins his own authority, makes fun of himself. It's really like Michel Foucault in his late seminars spoke about Ubuism, Ubu, Roi Ubu, Alfred Jarry, Groucho Marx in power, clown in power and this is effectively approaching it. For example I couldn't believe it, now a couple of weeks ago Berlusconi's press representative, a lawyer, said "it's a dirty lie that Berlusconi is impotent, he is ready to prove in court that he is not impotent." I mean like I'm just asking what, how? I would like to you know what I mean? And I and I think that it's and this is I had I don't want again to take too much time, but it's I see this as an all around tendency, this Ubuization of power, loss of the dignity of power. And I think again that we shouldn't be afraid. We shouldn't be afraid to stand for common decency, civility and so on and so on. The point is of course that this civility is not the this civility is not the this civility of this you know bourgeois complacency we treat each other nicely and so on and so on. It's the civility absolutely combined by the spirit of struggle. That's our task today: civility with the spirit of struggle, no neutrality. You will tell me now I'm trying to sell you some totalitarian message. Maybe, but the one who put in best terms this totalitarian message is your own, I admire him for this, Mark Twain. Let me read you a passage from his *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court* where Mark Twain provides the best answer I know of to this boring reproach, oh Jacobin French revolutionary terror. Here it is, your own Mark Twain: "There were two reigns of terror, if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; one... our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." End of quote. And you know this is how we should function today. Like you know when people complain for example I am very critical of Hugo Chavez often, but when people complain what about Chavez, for example he nominated in an non-democratic way new members of the constitutional court. Okay but I ask them, do you imply that the previous member were somehow democratically nominated or what? You know what you know what this is the problem. I mean to see to see things in the to see things in the perspective in this sense. Okay now to conclude, so what can we do in this situation where although we see ominous signs, I'm not afraid to use this moralistic terms: ethical degradation, moral vacuity, total penetration by ideology and so on. Does this mean we can't do anything? No, we can do, we can do quite many thing and even if we cannot do it we can do this nothing, doing nothing in a and with this I will conclude, if I have the guys already left in panic. They are not the true hard-line communists, they are the liberal softies. We need them now as fellow travelers, in the second stage we say nice to meet you, here is a ticket to Gulag one way thick one way ticket, no, sorry. No, what I'm saying is that even if this situation remains appears almost invincible today, we should always bear in mind the lesson first elaborated by de La Boetie, the 16th-century political theoretician in his wonderful treatise on voluntary servitude. Sorry, would you like to speak presence in marks and then we'll just do a handful of questions? Ah now this is your revenge. No okay so allow me really just to conclude then two three minutes. Okay what I wanted first to present is a wonderful novel that I propose you to read it: Ismail Kadare, the Albanian guy, *The Palace of Dreams*. An imaginary story of a like Turkey 19th-century regime where there is a big ministry whose function is to read people's dreams and and it's so nicely done that what this is about they control the way they are aware that the reason people obey power is not simply oppression and so on, is they invest their dreams into it. Even if you hate the tyrant, you are often fascinated by him, attached to it. It's interesting to read from this point Soviet poet poets from the Stalinist era. All of them, the greatest dissident, Pasternak, Mandelstam, they were all you can see from private notes in a very ambiguous way fascinated by Stalin and so on. So what we can do, the first thing to do and it's very important thing to do, it's the first part of what I call Bartleby politics is "I prefer not to" in the sense of we stop to dream your dream. This is not unimportant, this is extremely important. This is a first step towards towards ideological liberation. To gain now it's really the end, to gain this space of freedom even religion can come handy why if it works as a religion not I like religion without God, I like religion as something which allows you a distance towards being immersed into existing reality. What kind of God do we get here in the religion I would like to see functioning? You are my superego. Conclusion: I heard recently a wonderful good old communist Bolshevik joke from 1920s, it's important because at that point they still believed in power of communist propaganda, it wouldn't have been possible later. Joke about an able communist propagandist who after his death finds himself of course in hell but being a wonderful propagandist he quickly
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convinces
convinces
Slavoj Žižek
there in hell the guards to let him go out and to heaven. When after a week the devil notices his absence, he quickly pays a visit to God up demanding the return to hell what belongs to the devil, no, like I want my prisoner down there. However immediately after devil addresses God, "My Lord", God interrupts him because you know he was already brainwashed by communist. God interrupts him: "First, I am not Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy talking to fictions? I don't exist. And third, be short otherwise I'll meet my party cell meeting, I'll miss it." This is God of today's radical left. A God who wholly became man, a comrade among us, crucified together with two social outcasts, and who not only doesn't exist but himself knows this and who entirely passes over into the love which binds together members of the Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost if you don't know is one of the first names for the emancipatory collective like the Communist Party. They called it Holy Ghost in that time. That's what we need today. Thanks very much.
there in hell the guards to let him go out and to heaven. When after a week the devil notices his absence, he quickly pays a visit to God up demanding the return to hell what belongs to the devil, no, like I want my prisoner down there. However immediately after devil addresses God, "My Lord", God interrupts him because you know he was already brainwashed by communist. God interrupts him: "First, I am not Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy talking to fictions? I don't exist. And third, be short otherwise I'll meet my party cell meeting, I'll miss it." This is God of today's radical left. A God who wholly became man, a comrade among us, crucified together with two social outcasts, and who not only doesn't exist but himself knows this and who entirely passes over into the love which binds together members of the Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost if you don't know is one of the first names for the emancipatory collective like the Communist Party. They called it Holy Ghost in that time. That's what we need today. Thanks very much.