First as Tragedy, then as Farce
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2010-01-05 · 2:21:08 · 20,594 words
ideologycapitalismecology-climatepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologyrace-antisemitismcommunism-socialismphilosophy-generalhistory
Žižek delivers a lecture in India centred on his book 'First as Tragedy, Then as Farce', arguing that ideology today functions not through mystification but through fetishism, a lie that lets us endure the truth. He contrasts the urgency of the ecological crisis with the speed of the financial-crisis response to expose capitalism's demonic unconditional logic of self-expansion, and develops parallels between Marx's proletariat and Ambedkar's untouchables as figures of universal humanity without a proper place. A lengthy Q&A with a critical discussant (Nivedita Menon) challenges his Eurocentrism, rehabilitation of colonialism, and Christianity, to which Žižek defends his atheist reading of Holy Ghost as radical community without guarantee.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “transgressions are regulated”
The insight that apparent spontaneous violations, first drink, first cigarette, are socially learned and ritualised, hence no less ideological than official norms.
The psychoanalytic gap between one's immediate miserable self-awareness and the grandiose symbolic identity attributed by others, Žižek invokes it self-deprecatingly about his own public image.
Žižek's dismissive label for a left that has abandoned structural critique and reduced politics to cultural victimisation and legal remedies.
Kant's concept of evil done purely for its own sake, without utilitarian motive, Žižek uses it to characterise capitalism's unconditional drive to self-expand even at the cost of human survival.
Capitalism's unconditional commitment to self-expansion, which, like Don Giovanni's refusal to repent, presses on regardless of consequences including human extinction; a perverted Kantian ethics of evil.
Sloterdijk's inversion of Marx's ideology formula: 'They know well what they are doing, but they are doing it nonetheless', Žižek uses it to argue ideology still functions even without naive belief.
as “symptom (ideological)”
The crack in a false universal edifice where the repressed truth breaks through, contrasted with the fetish, the symptom is the moment of truth that pierces the global lie.
as “Asian mode of production (as symptomal category)”
Žižek reads Marx's Asian mode of production as an empty container, a symptomal point that reveals the Eurocentric limits of historical materialism by gathering everything that doesn't fit.
as “fetish / fetishism (ideological)”
A lie not that misrepresents the truth but that enables you to endure it, e.g. charity as the fetish that lets a ruthless exploiter maintain a good self-image.
Marx's term from the Grundrisse for collective productive knowledge; Žižek argues it is increasingly reprivatised, as with Bill Gates, so that we pay rent for what is the substance of us all.
as “from profit to rent”
Žižek's thesis that postmodern capitalism is moving backwards from surplus-value extraction toward rent, for natural resources, intellectual property, and even basic income schemes.
as “soft fascism (Gandhi's organicism)”
Žižek's polemical description of Gandhi's vision of caste hierarchy as a naturally harmonious organic whole where everyone has their place, contrasted with Ambedkar's structural critique.
Rancière's concept adopted by Žižek to describe those, untouchables, proletarians, who appear to have a place in the social order but effectively have no proper place, and thereby stand for universal humanity.
as “interspace / third space”
The hidden zone between inside and outside in buildings, sewers, canalisations, that Žižek uses to figure the invisible social space occupied by manual scavengers and the structurally excluded.
Referenced by the discussant quoting Žižek's book: today we are all potentially homo sacer, the ethico-political challenge being to recognise ourselves in this figure.
Used implicitly in the claim that capitalist social exchange universalises participants imperceptibly, converting assertion of cultural identity into lifestyle choice.
as “Holy Ghost as radical egalitarian community”
Žižek's atheist re-reading of the Holy Spirit as a community without guarantee, without a big Other knowing the historical truth, the opposite of both transcendent God and Stalinist Party.
as “big Other”
Lacan's symbolic order; Žižek invokes it to describe Stalinism's claim that the Party embodies objective historical truth, a guarantee the true atheism (Holy Ghost) does away with.
Stories he reaches for 16
John Carpenter's film: a man puts on sunglasses and sees the real message beneath advertising ('Don't think, spend money, obey'). Žižek urges putting on such glasses when encountering charity advertising, seeing 'we live nice lives ruining others; for a cappuccino you can feel good going on as you are.'
“He sees the real message... 'Don't think, spend money, obey.' We should try to put these glasses on a little bit.”
Job's three friends insist his suffering must have a deeper meaning; Job says no. God vindicates Job. But when Job asks why, God's answer ('Where were you when I created the monsters?') can be read as divine abdication: 'I created one big mess', a model for Žižek's radical atheism.
“God's true answer is, 'You think your life is a mess, look at the whole creation, I created one big mess.' It's a kind of a divine abdication.”
Gates is not rich through super-exploitation but through reprivatising Windows, a language that is the shared space within which we all communicate. We pay him a rent for what is the substance of collective life.
“Windows, his language, whatever, is the very substance, the space which we all share within which we communicate. And we pay him a rent.”
Žižek proposes a Brechtian triptych: (1) the canonical version; (2) Antigone wins but triggers civil war, wandering amid ruins quoting herself; (3) the Chorus constitutes a democratic popular committee and arrests both Antigone and Creon. The third is his preferred radical-left version.
“When the two are struggling, chorus constitutes itself as a democratic committee of the city, arrests both of them... this would be my Antigone.”
The Jaws shark functions like the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew: ordinary Americans have many inconsistent fears (immigrants, nature, banks, state control) and the shark-figure, like Nazism's Jew, condenses them all into one, producing false consistency.
“An ordinary American in his daily life experiences a whole series of inconsistent fears... the ideological trick is to exchange all these fears for one fear which kind of stands for all of them.”
The audience fell silent for a few seconds, unsure whether to applaud, a 'properly Stalinist misunderstanding' where people wait for the leader's signal for supposedly spontaneous applause.
“It was a properly Stalinist misunderstanding: people were not sure should we applaud or not — Is this the silence where Comrade Stalin signals now you can have spontaneous applause?”
The Pope and others blamed Madoff for a crisis of values rather than capitalism itself. Žižek argues Madoff was not an anomaly but was simply doing in a slightly more radical way what the system pushes everyone to do.
“Madoff was just doing in a little bit more radical way where the system is — he was following where the system is pushing you.”
Nixon asks God what will happen to the US, it will be a Soviet Republic (Nixon weeps). Brezhnev asks about the USSR, it will be a Chinese colony (Brezhnev weeps). Honecker asks about East Germany, God turns around and weeps.
“Honecker asks, 'What will be with my beautiful German Democratic Republic?' God turns around and starts to cry.”
Žižek criticises Benigni's film for its sentimental ending, proposing instead that the son knew all along his father's game was a fiction and was protecting the father, a true reversal that would be genuinely terrifying.
“Wouldn't it be nice that if at the very end we were to discover that the son knew all the time that it's not a game?”
Facing the stone statue's ultimatum, Don Giovanni could have renounced his sins and been saved, but heroically refuses, from no utilitarian benefit. This is Žižek's emblem of capitalism's diabolical ethics: the system must go on even if we all die.
“Heroically he says, 'No, I renounce nothing.' This is diabolical evil. Evil you don't do it for profit — the system, it must go on even if we all die.”
Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle staged Tristan dying alone, with Isolde having returned to her husband, for Isolde it was just a short affair. This brutally deflating ending makes the opera more truthful and sad.
“In his reading, Tristan dies alone. Isolde—for Isolde this was a short love affair, sorry, it's over now, I return to my husband—Tristan just imagines Isolde.”
Primo Levi describes prisoners pinching their cheeks and trying to walk briskly past an SS doctor who assigns them to work or death in seconds, tragicomically naive preparations for a two-second mortal gaze.
“They had all these tragic, terrifyingly naive advices like pinch your lips or body red because then you appear more red and like more alive.”
Half-dissident Chinese scientists reportedly hold that the huge lakes created by the Three Gorges Dam disturbed fault lines and contributed to or directly caused the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, illustrating how human power produces unpredictable geological effects (Anthropocene).
“They claim that this big Three Gorges Dam they're building — these new gigantic lakes created are precisely above the area of key breaks beneath in the earth.”
Kant defines marriage in Metaphysics of Morals as a contract between two adults regulating the mutual use of their sex organs for pleasure, and asks whether a wife can use police to retrieve a runaway husband, since he left with her legally co-owned property (his penis).
“Kant defines marriage: 'A contract between two adults, a contract regulating the mutual use of sex organs for pleasure.'”
Žižek asks audiences to recall their first drink or cigarette, it was bitter, horrible, and notes they were taught to enjoy it by imitating peers. This shows transgressions must be learned, not felt spontaneously.
“The first cigarette—you start coughing and so on, it's horrible. This is the crucial lesson: especially transgressions are regulated.”
Žižek proposes a mega-experiment reshooting Star Wars with the Jedi as reactionary particularist feudalists and the Emperor/Darth Vader as progressives seeking equality against the caste-like diversity of princesses and noble houses.
“What if we say that all that Jedi and so on, these are reactionary particular feudalists and the Emperor and Darth Vader are the progressives who want equality?”
Works invoked 17
Antigone play
Sophocles' play used as a vehicle for three alternative political scenarios; Žižek says he never liked Antigone ('Antigone is a bitch') and endorses a version where the democratic committee arrests both protagonists.
Grundrisse book
Marx's notebooks cited for the concept of General Intellect; Žižek praises Marx's insight but criticises his naive expectation that the dominance of knowledge would automatically dissolve capitalism.
They Live film
John Carpenter's 'wonderful, silly, short movie', Žižek uses the ideological sunglasses as a key motif for seeing through commodity advertising and charity to their hidden message.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Wagner's opera discussed via Ponnelle's staging where Tristan dies alone; Žižek endorses this deflating reading as producing a truth-effect by changing the ending.
If This Is a Man book
Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir; Žižek uses the selekcja scene to argue that the Holocaust is best approached through terrifying comedy, not conventional tragedy.
Star Wars film
Žižek proposes a thought-experiment reshooting Star Wars to rehabilitate the Emperor and Darth Vader as progressive universalists against the reactionary particularism of the Jedi, using the franchise to illustrate ideology in popular imagination.
Don Giovanni opera
Mozart's opera cited as the 'most beautiful example from classical European culture' of radical evil, Don Giovanni's refusal to repent before the stone statue illustrates capitalism's demonic unconditional drive.
Life is Beautiful film
Žižek hated it for the sentimental lie of its ending; argues it doesn't go to the end of the terrifying comedy it begins, and proposes a reversal (son knew all along) that would make it genuinely devastating.
The Laws of Manu book
Ancient Hindu legal text Žižek intends to write about; compared structurally to Thomas Aquinas's sophistic justification of wealth, both exemplify how ideological systems justify hierarchy by making egalitarianism the greater sin.
Jaws film
Spielberg's film used as a paradigm case of ideological condensation: the shark functions like anti-Semitism's Jew, gathering inconsistent fears into one terrifying figure.
Kant's text cited for its perversely systematic definition of marriage as mutual contract over sex organs and the question of whether a wife may use police to retrieve a runaway husband, illustrating Kant's genius in following logic to its extremes.
Sloterdijk's book credited for inverting Marx's ideology formula into the cynical: 'They know well what they are doing, but they are still doing it.'
Žižek's own book, the announced focus of the lecture; discussed via its central arguments on ideology as fetish, the financial crisis, and the need to reinvent communism.
Paradise Lost book
Milton's Satan cited as the first formulation of radical evil: 'Evil, be thou my good', the model for capitalism's demonic unconditional ethics.
The Lives of Others film
Žižek says this Oscar-winning anti-communist film is actually too soft on Stalinism, it presents the system sentimentally rather than confronting its full horror.
It book
Stephen King novel; cited for the monsters hiding in the sewage system beneath a town, illustrating Žižek's thesis about the hidden inter-space where the structurally excluded (like manual scavengers) dwell.
Rancière's book recommended for translation; develops the logic of 'the part of no part' which Žižek connects to Ambedkar's untouchables as the universal dimension within the social order.
People invoked 35
Mentioned as a reader of Jaws who interpreted the shark as big capital exploiting ordinary Americans, one of the competing ideological readings Žižek dismisses as asking the wrong question.
Primo Levi positive
His memoir If This Is a Man is used to illustrate how the Holocaust generates tragicomic scenes, the selekcja preparation, that reveal the limits of tragic representation.
Roberto Benigni negative
Žižek criticises Life is Beautiful for the sentimental lie of its final minutes, which withdraws from the truly terrifying comedy it could have achieved.
Udi Aloni positive
Described as 'my friend'; organised solidarity between radical Tel Aviv lesbians and conservative Palestinian Muslim women, Žižek's example of genuine political miracle transcending identity antagonism.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Žižek argues Gandhi's approach to untouchability is 'soft fascism', an organic-identity politics that gives dignity within hierarchy rather than challenging the system itself.
John Carpenter positive
Praised for They Live as a wonderful film that naively but accurately dramatises ideology as hidden message beneath everyday signs, Žižek uses it as his key illustration of how to 'put on the glasses.'
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle positive
Otherwise 'not too good director' who did something wonderful with Tristan und Isolde: staging Tristan dying alone while Isolde returns to her husband, a sobering truth-effect Žižek endorses.
Jimmy Swaggart negative
Cited as the exemplar of fake fundamentalism: caught visiting a prostitute, he said 'to fight a sin you have to know it', the obsessive fascination with sin revealing libidinal investment in what is condemned.
Jacques Lacan positive
Called 'my psychoanalytic master'; invoked for the paradox that Marx invented the symptom, and for the notion of the big Other as symbolic guarantee that radical atheism does away with.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek follows Chesterton's reading of the crucifixion: at the moment of 'Father, why have you forsaken me?', God becomes for a moment a blasphemous atheist, the foundation of Žižek's radical atheist Christianity.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide positive
Cited as a 'heroic figure' who used the Haitian state while keeping popular mobilisation at his side, Žižek's preferred model of non-statal use of the state against itself.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Žižek credits Ambedkar with the definitive critique of caste ideology ('there are no castes without outcasts') and says he intends to write a text on Laws of Manu, Ambedkar, and Gandhi; calls Ambedkar the genuine transgressive thinker India should foreground over Western names.
Dipesh Chakrabarty positive
Indian theoretician working in Chicago, cited for his thesis that humanity is entering the Anthropocene, becoming a geological factor, a notion Žižek uses to frame ecological crisis as genuinely tragic in the sense of hamartia.
Mother Teresa negative
Žižek says he never had any respect for her; cites her appearing in Bhopal the morning after the disaster saying 'don't blame anyone, it was God's will', calling her a paid corrupted ideologist.
Alain Badiou negative
Žižek disputes Badiou's strategy of 'subtraction', politics at a distance from the state, as a comfortable hypocritical stance that leaves one's hands clean while abandoning real political engagement.
Michael Nyman positive
Mentioned as a composer Žižek is in contact with, hoping to collaborate on a Brecht-style short opera with three versions of the Antigone story.
Fredric Jameson positive
A 'good friend' who once said it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than a change in capitalism; also cited as identifying St. Augustine as the great institutionaliser of Christianity. Žižek notes some disagreement on whether we still need ideology theory.
Stephen King positive
Žižek says he quite likes King; cites the novel It, monsters hiding in the sewage system, as illustrating his thesis about the third space between inside and outside where the structurally excluded reside.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Credited for the formula of cynical reason: 'They know well what they are doing, but they are still doing it', the inversion of the Marxist ideology formula.
Jacques Rancière positive
Žižek recommends translating Rancière's La Mésentente (Disagreement) for its concept of 'the part of no part', those who have no proper place in the social order yet stand for universality; connects directly to Ambedkar and untouchables.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Austrian writer quoted for the insight that 'at its most fundamental level language is lying, we have to torture the language to make it tell the truth'; connected to Žižek's critique of the chorus as language at its purest.
Christopher Hitchens positive
Žižek says he always followed Hitchens' 'missionary position', his confrontational polemical stance, citing it as the basis for his own refusal to respect figures like Mother Teresa.
Bill Gates negative
Used as the paradigm case of rent-extraction from General Intellect: Gates is rich not from super-exploitation but from privatising the shared communicative substance (Windows) and charging rent for access.
Mao Zedong positive
Žižek wrote an introduction to a selection of Mao's texts; invokes Mao's insight that being a true Marxist doesn't mean always privileging economic class struggle, some constellations require different priorities.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited apropos the banality of evil in the Holocaust: it is not individual demons but systemic logic, Žižek uses this to deflect blame from individual capitalists.
Herbert Marcuse positive
Frankfurt School theorist cited for the addition to Marx's tragedy/farce thesis: sometimes a farce can be more terrible than tragedy itself.
John Milton positive
Paradise Lost's Satan cited as the first articulation of radical evil: 'Evil, be thou my good', following evil unconditionally, independent of any pathological benefit.
Augustine of Hippo negative
Following Jameson, identified as the great institutionaliser of Christianity who successfully defused its originally radical egalitarian edge.
Noam Chomsky negative
Cited as holding that in a cynical era we no longer need ideology theory, just telling people what really goes on, a view Žižek disagrees with, arguing ideology still operates and analysis is required.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked throughout: for General Intellect, the symptomal logic, Asian mode of production as Eurocentric container, proletariat as 'part of no part'; Žižek also criticises Marx's naive expectation that General Intellect would dissolve capitalism.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited on repetition in history (tragedy/farce), on the death of God as the death of the big God himself on the cross, and for an ingenious aesthetic reading of Antigone where she begins to do her own PR, the seed of comedy already in tragedy.
Immanuel Kant positive
Called 'a genius' and 'the most perverse philosopher'; Žižek draws on Kant's notion of radical evil and his systematic application of legal categories to sexuality in the Metaphysics of Morals.
Gérard Wajcman positive
French psychoanalyst cited for his analysis of nature documentaries as fascist social utopias and for the insight that humans require a narrative/fantasy background even for sex.
Thomas Aquinas negative
Cited for the sophistic argument that poverty is only for saints and that ordinary people who want communal property sin through pride, an ideological move Žižek compares to the sophistry of the Laws of Manu.
Martin Luther positive
Cited for the Protestant-excremental theory: God created man as divine shit, falling out of God's anus, a resource for Žižek's identification of universal humanity with the excremental remainder rather than organic wholeness.
What it argues
ideology as fetish vs. symptomcapitalism's demonic ethics of unconditional self-expansionecological crisis and the suspension of democracyAmbedkar, caste, and the universal dimension of the outcastradical atheism and Holy Ghost as egalitarian communitythe integration of 1968 protest culture into capitalismtragedy, farce, and comedy as registers of historical horror
Dialectical moves 9
“Precisely these violations, transgressions are regulated, had to be learned. There is nothing spontaneous about them.”
What appears as libidinal freedom from ideology is itself ideology's product, transgression is the most regulated behaviour of all.
“It is our ecological concerns which are grounded in the utilitarian sense of survival and as such they lack the properly ethical dimension. If we look for the ethical dimension, it is to be found in capitalism's unconditional commitment to its own ever-expanding reproduction.”
The apparent opposition, ethical ecology vs. amoral capitalism, is inverted: ecology is utilitarian self-interest, while capitalism has the (perverse) structure of a Kantian unconditional duty.
“Ideology is not a lie which misrepresents the truth; it is a lie which enables you to endure the truth.”
The shift from symptom to fetish: ideology no longer conceals reality but provides the screen that lets us tolerate the reality we already know.
“The formula of cynicism is not 'they don't know it but they are doing it' — it is 'they know well what they are doing, but they are still doing it.'”
Following Sloterdijk, Žižek argues enlightened cynicism is not a post-ideological stance but ideology's contemporary mode of operation.
“It's not that they are not fundamentalists — my problem with American fundamentalists is that they are not fundamentalists.”
True fundamentalism would be serene and non-envious; the obsessive fascination with others' sins reveals American religious right's actual libidinal investment in the sin they condemn.
“God stops to believe in himself. God himself becomes — Chesterton's words — for a moment a blasphemous atheist.”
Christ's cry of abandonment is not a moment of human doubt but God's own abdication, the death of the transcendent guarantor, making Christianity the most radical atheism.
“Not we trust God but God has to trust us.”
The Incarnation reverses the direction of dependence: God cedes his omnipotence and entrusts the work of emancipation to human community (Holy Ghost).
“Resistance is surrender — there is a certain type of being critical which fits perfectly even if it apparently criticises power relations.”
A politics of pure critique at a safe distance from power actually confirms existing relations; genuine resistance requires dirty hands in the state.
“We are not they are not shit by dealing with shit — we are all shit.”
Rather than dignifying the untouchable within hierarchy (Gandhi), the move is to identify universal humanity with the excremental remainder: human being is itself the excess that doesn't fit the cycle of life.
Claims 17
asserts
Transgressions and violations of social norms are not spontaneous but learned and regulated — they are ideological through and through.ideology / transgression
asserts
Comedy, not tragedy, is the only form adequate to horrors like the Holocaust and the Gulag, because those horrors stripped victims of the very dignity required for tragic experience.tragedy, comedy, Holocaust representation
asserts
The ecological crisis is treated as endlessly negotiable while the financial crisis prompted an almost immediate suspension of democratic procedure — exposing that ideology makes financial reproduction feel more real than survival.ecology-capitalism contradiction / ideology
reframes
It is capitalism, not ecology, that has the properly ethical structure, insofar as its unconditional drive to self-expand mirrors the Kantian notion of radical evil — doing something for its own sake regardless of consequences.the ethics of capitalism vs. ecological concern
asserts
Today ideology functions predominantly as fetish rather than symptom: not a lie that conceals the truth but a lie that enables us to endure the truth we already know.contemporary functioning of ideology
asserts
The anti-alienation protest culture of 1968 was triumphantly integrated by capitalism into flexible intellectual labour, pluralist sexuality, and private education.capitalism's absorption of 1968 critique
asserts
Contemporary capitalism is moving from profit back to rent — reprivatising the General Intellect (e.g. Microsoft Windows) and extracting payment for what is the shared symbolic substance of collective life.political economy of cognitive capitalism
asserts
Western societies are developing their own caste system: old manual workers, intellectual workers, and structurally excluded outcasts who are effectively three sub-castes of the working class.class structure in late capitalism / caste
reframes
Gandhi's approach to untouchability is a form of identity politics that accepts the caste hierarchy and merely seeks to dignify each rung, whereas Ambedkar correctly saw that 'there are no castes without outcasts' — the outcast is the symptomal point revealing the whole system's untruth.Gandhi vs. Ambedkar on caste
asserts
The untouchables — like the proletariat — represent not mere marginals to be included but the universal dimension of humanity, the 'part of no part' that stands for all.untouchables / proletariat / universality
asserts
Radical atheism is not the Stalinist denial of God but the rejection of any guarantee of meaning — any big Other who pulls the strings — and it is best expressed in the Christian figure of God dying on the cross.atheism / Christianity / Holy Ghost
asserts
The Church's entire history is one long attempt to neutralise the subversive egalitarian edge of Christianity itself, through moves structurally identical to the sophistry of the Laws of Manu.Christianity / ideology / institutionalisation
rejects
Badiou's position of 'subtraction' — politics at a distance from state power — is a comfortable hypocritical stance that leaves the exercise of power to others while retaining clean hands for criticism.Badiou's strategy of subtraction
asserts
The problems posed by ecology, new poverty, and biogenetics cannot be solved within the horizon of liberal democratic capitalism, but this does not mean we need a new Leninist party — we must simply begin to think.limits of capitalism / political strategy
reframes
Identity politics (queer, feminist, race) operates with a horizon of tolerance and mutual recognition, whereas radical class politics requires a logic of antagonism — we want to annihilate (socially) the upper class, not merely coexist with it.identity politics vs. class struggle
reframes
American religious fundamentalists are not true fundamentalists — their obsessive fascination with what sinners do betrays envy and an ego-driven performance that contradicts the very message they preach.American religious fundamentalism
asserts
It is much easier today to imagine the end of all life on earth than a modest but genuine change in capitalism.ideological closure / capitalist realism
Quotes 13
“Ideology is not a lie which misrepresents the truth; it is a lie which enables you to endure the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishism as dominant mode of ideology
“It is much easier for us today to imagine the end of the life on the entire earth than to imagine an even modest but nonetheless strong change in capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalist realism / ideological closure
“The formula of cynicism: not 'they don't know what they are doing, but they are doing it' — it's 'they know well what they are doing, but still they are doing it.'”Slavoj Žižek · cynical reason as contemporary ideology
“Not God is there, we are here, God sends a messenger. No — God who dies on the cross is the big God himself. Not we trust God but God has to trust us.”Slavoj Žižek · radical atheism / Holy Ghost
“There are no castes without outcasts. You cannot have a complete caste system.”Slavoj Žižek · Ambedkar on caste / symptomal logic
“My problem with American fundamentalists is not that they are fundamentalists, it is that they are not fundamentalists.”Slavoj Žižek · false fundamentalism / envy
“With racism, sexism, the horizon is mutual tolerance. But the proper logic of radical politics is exactly the opposite: we want, not physically but socially, to annihilate them.”Slavoj Žižek · identity politics vs. class antagonism
“When I criticize Buddhism I explicitly criticize Western Buddhism. And I am just raising a question: how did Buddhism when it came to power effectively function? Was there really less killing?”Slavoj Žižek · Buddhism / religion and power
“At its most fundamental level, language is lying — it's a lie and we have to torture the language to make it tell the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · language and truth / Jelinek
“My idea of resistance is surrender: there is a certain type of being critical which fits perfectly even if it apparently criticizes power relations.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of comfortable resistance / Badiou
“We are not — they are not shit by dealing with shit — we are all shit. Man was created falling out of God's anus. Man is excremental, excessive.”Slavoj Žižek · excremental humanity / Luther / universal identification with outcast
“I am an extreme atheist. What interests me in Christianity is not belief. What interests me is Holy Spirit in the sense of a new type of egalitarian collective.”Slavoj Žižek · atheist appropriation of Christianity
“It is indeed true that we live in a society of risky choices, but it is one in which only some do the choosing, while others do the risking.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism and risk asymmetry
Transcript 21 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I hope this works. Thank you very much, I'm really, really grateful and honored to be here, but it's in my nature to be evil so, thanking you, I cannot but begin with a couple of nasty rejoinders, remarks to you. First, you lied a little bit, no? There is no father, but you told me there is a wife who supports you a little bit and I like this because in the West I know quite a couple in England, in Greece of leftist presses where, you know, you have a crazy wife who wants to annoy her husband who is a rich manager and husband allows her as a play: "Here you have half a million to play your leftist dreams." At least you do it here in a feminist way that the wife gives the money, no? Point two, this brings me already to the first theoretical point. I loved that little misunderstanding when you were silent for three-four seconds and it was a properly Stalinist misunderstanding: people were not sure should we applaud or not, you know? Is this the silence where Comrade Stalin signals now you can have spontaneous applause? This is already quite seriously brings me to my first point, just an introductory remark, because the first lesson when we try to locate ideology—now I'm offering a variation of what I developed already yesterday—is that usually we perceive our social life in this way: we obey customs and so on, but from time to time it's too restraining, all the rules, and you explode in some either orgy or violence, whatever. That's the spontaneity. You need a little bit of fresh air to break the rules. I claim precisely these violations, transgressions are regulated, had to be learned. There is nothing spontaneous about them. Listen, I dare you, I hope we are the same humans, so I dare you if you had the same experience as all of my friends when I asked them. Look, let's take even these most ordinary transgressions. Do you remember, if you do, if you do it—I'm an anti-alcoholic, not for religious reasons, purely as a Stalinist, I think if you get drunk you are not attentive, you get, you smile, you get too good and then the enemy can attack, that's totally [unintelligible]. But remember how did it probably happen when you had your first drink? In a company with other boys and somebody told you: "You know, parents, our adults drink this," and then you tried it, but you said: "But this is bitter, horrible," and so on. And then you were told: "No, no, you should enjoy this," and so on. So again, it's—you do it through imitating your peers and you have literally to learn to enjoy it. I mean, let's be frank: if you want pleasure, you don't drink whiskey, you drink mango lassi or whatever, no? And it's the same with, for example, with smoking. Admit it, the first cigarette—[coughs]—you start coughing and so on, it's horrible. This is the crucial lesson: especially transgressions are regulated. So again, just a final more serious thing about your reaction to your nice introduction. Yes, I did discover by going through the package that you sent me, Ambedkar, and I was quite fascinated by his work. It put so many things into proper perspective that if I will be able a little bit to play the role of—what role? You know, often with nations, there's nothing racist about it, it goes even more the same for us in the West. You need a foreigner to bring you to yourself. You know, to tell or at least to help you, although with Ambedkar I'm not saying I'm discovering him for you. But nonetheless, if I will play a little bit this role of bringing you back to Ambedkar, to show you how—you know, I would like to live not in a world where somebody reacts and the same goes with different names, of course, for other countries, like: "Oh, this is our local theoretician, who cares? I want big international names." I would like to live in the world where Ambedkar would be the proper transgression, the real thing. Oh, you want to read again that Foucault, that Heidegger? But you know, Ambedkar is the... and he deserves this. I will be really—this is no bad joke, irony, whatever—honored if I am, if I will maybe help a little bit because I intend to write a text on Laws of Manu, Ambedkar, Gandhi and so on, all that topic. The final remark to introduce another theoretical notion: the way you introduced me, no? You know, all this big thing—oh, I hate that guy. I mean, I ask you a frank question: look at that face. If you are—I see some older ladies here—if you are an older lady and have a daughter, I ask you a sincere question: would you allow that guy to take your daughter to cinema, no? Never, admit it, you are right. Okay, no but quite seriously, you know, when I was presented in all these terms: this, that, books, whatever, journal of me—I never visited that, I'm too embarrassed to—that Žižek studies, whatever—I somehow felt self-alienated in the sense of, you know, some glorious identity was outlined by you. Am I really that? Like, who, me in my miserable existence, do I fit that? And you know that in psychoanalysis we call this gap between you in your immediate miserable self-awareness and the symbolic place that you occupy—we call it symbolic castration. So thanks for a castrating experience. That's what I expect from friends, how should I put it. Okay, now enough of this, we don't have endless time, so let me begin by a little bit more serious tone from now on. Let me begin by telling you what I want to do today. It's the book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. It, of course, refers to that famous paraphrase of Marx where Marx paraphrases Hegel's theory of repetition, claiming, "Yes, history repeats itself, but first as tragedy, then as farce." But not so many people know that the story goes on. Herbert Marcuse, one of the Frankfurt School guys, proposed a further variation in when he said that nonetheless sometimes a farce can be more—not tragic—precisely more terrible than tragedy itself. The repetition may be a farce, but a farce can be more crazy. And I'm sorry if I improvise a little bit, I like to do this, I can give you—I wonder, this would be the true multicultural dialogue, not that boring shit Taj Mahal, our great monuments, I don't care about that. But for example, do you have a similar phenomenon? You must have. You had, we Europeans with Holocaust and so on, definitely don't have a monopoly of suffering, how should I put it, no? What I'm saying is that nonetheless, insofar as—I'm sorry for this Eurocentric bias, but insofar as our trauma, one of our traumas is Holocaust, killing of the Jews by the Nazis, did you notice something very weird about Holocaust in cinema? That the majority of films, especially those which really work, are comedies. I think this is a very deep lesson. What? And I claim there is a deep insight again in it. In what sense? You know, we usually are not aware that tragedy is never—how should I put it naively—tragic to the end. In tragedy, even as a victim, you retain a certain dignity of experience. You know, tragedy is this big tragic fall. You may fail, but your subjectivity retains this dignity of greatness. The problem with Holocaust is that it doesn't work. To put it in paradoxical terms, we can imagine a tragedy in a concentration camp: what, a bad Nazi confronting a hero and then the hero says heroically, "Shoot me but I don't..." whatever. No, sorry, you give, concede too much to the fascists. The people were so totally terrorized, reduced to living dead and so on, that the suffering was so horrible that the very grounds for tragic experience of your predicament were taken from you. And the same also I think up to a point goes for Gulag. Let's be frank: if you read, for example, some minutes, transcriptions of the big Stalinist show trials, Bukharin and so on, it's a comedy in a way. I'll go even a step further. Probably it is—okay, you read it in English, it is not translated in your languages—Primo Levi, his famous memoirs of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Where with a couple of scenes, you cannot avoid the temptation of saying, "But in a way this is a comedy." For example, the most horrifying scene he discovers, when a guy, once every two months I think in Auschwitz, they had something called selekcja in Polish, the term selection, which means all the prisoners were had to walk briefly in—let's say, sorry, my bad taste—let's say you are SS doctor, no, sorry. I'm a prisoner, naked, I had quickly, quickly to walk past you. And you have a list and you just knock me, you know, left or right. You put me into two categories: that is to say, he goes to be burned, he is allowed to work a little bit more. Of course, here already comical things happened, you know, like, like comical in the terrifying sense, like often the SS doctor, you know, put the wrong name, got it wrong and so on. But then when Primo Levi describes how prisoners tried to prepare themselves. It's almost a comedy. They knew everything is focused in those two-three seconds. You have to impress the gaze. By... and then they had all these tragic, naive, terrifyingly naive advices like pinch your lips or body red because then you appear more red and like more alive. You know, you had to impress the doctor as being strong enough and so... this is a comedy. Can you imagine this as a comic scene? So, you see here my point, which is that when things are really bad, only a comedy—of course not a comedy where you laugh, but a kind of a totally terrifying comedy—can live up to it. And this is why, to go a little bit further in criticism of ideology, I didn't like the film which, although it is a Holocaust comedy, it doesn't go to the end. Probably some of you know it, got Oscar and so on, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful. You know what's the problem? What I don't like there? The lie at the end. You know, the final three-four minutes where you are supposed to cry, serious ones. You know what's the story, no? Father and son are put into Auschwitz. To make it less traumatic to his small son, father pretends that this is just a big competition game. If you survive it without protesting, there is a big prize, but any moment you want you leave, and at the end he sacrifices himself, the son survives and so on and so on. I can easily imagine how to change the film a little bit and to make it really terrifying. For example, wouldn't it be nice—nice in a terrifying sense intellectually—that if at the very end we were to discover that the son knew all the time that it's not a game? He just pretended that he believes his father in order to not to hurt his father. So that the true performance is not father staging the idea of competition to protect the son, but son protecting the father. That would make the film in some naive sense even much more tragic, if you want, in some sense. This is why I'm always for a kind of changes of let's say the ending of an opera which, how should I put it, produces an effect of truth. You know, you change the ending and all of a sudden... for example, I don't know to what extent do you know, you know at least the story, Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde. At the end, the two lovers die. You know, Tristan is dying wounded, Isolde comes, they die together, although not quite, but that's another story. I've written a book on it. My point is that Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, otherwise not too good director, did something wonderful, which is so brutal, sobering. In his reading, Tristan dies alone. Isolde—for Isolde this was a short love affair, sorry, it's over now, I return to my husband—Tristan just imagines Isolde to die alone. It makes so much more sad, the story. Or my ultimate temptation—sorry for annoying you, at the end I will return to the Ambedkar and Laws of Manu—I hope a story which probably you know, Antigone. I tend, I'm even in contact with some composers, maybe Michael Nyman, to do a kind of a Brecht-style short opera with three versions. The first—it would be like what Brecht did in some of his learning plays, that the basic story is the same, you know it, then at a certain point which with me would be when Antigone has the conflict, confrontation with Creon who prohibits the funeral of her brother, three different turns. First version would have been the same as we all know: Creon says no, Antigone is buried alive, the son... blah blah... what we know. In the second version—now this is a really evil one—Antigone would succeed and would convince Creon: "Yeah, yeah, human dignity, everybody deserves a funeral, let's bury Polineices." But then, as Creon predicted, because Polineices was considered by the majority as a traitor, this triggers civil war, the whole city is ruined. A kind of an anti-Antigone version. And my idea is at the end to have Antigone walking around, everything is in ruins, in blood, and Antigone as this heart-bleeding liberal quoting herself, you know, saying that, "Oh but," how is it, the famous line, "I'm created for love, not for war, I didn't really want this," and so on and so on. So an anti-Antigone version. Because Antigone is a bitch, I never liked her. Hegel in his aesthetics has an ingenious insight. Hegel sees the beginning of comedy, of this twist from tragedy to comedy, already in Antigone. You know where? It's really a nice reading. Hegel was not an idiot. When Antigone is condemned and changed into... I mean outcast. At that point, before she is an egotist bitch, you can see, brutal towards her sister and so on, she starts to treat herself as a poetic topic. She has a speech where she says, "Like that old hero from our mythology, like that I am." In other words, she's already doing her PR, how should I put it? You know, she's already composing poems about herself. She is already narcissistically imagining what a beautiful tragic victim she is now, like that god, like this god, and so on and so on. It's a fake already. But okay, now comes the point. The third version would have been my preferred one, a kind of a hardline leftist, I wouldn't say Stalinist. Usually, unfortunately, the chorus, not only in Sophocles but in most of Greek tragedies, is the agency of common stupidity. Chorus says big wisdoms, and I don't believe in a wisdom of language. Yesterday, replying to a question apropos Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer, I also already remind my listeners of how Elfriede Jelinek, this Austrian writer, said something wonderful. He said at its most fundamental level language is lying, it's a lie and we have to torture the language to make it tell the truth. And I think chorus is language at its purest. Chorus are wisdoms. What are wisdoms? Proverb is a wisdom for me. What is a proverb? It's the most opportunistic thing you can imagine. Anything goes. Let's say I do something risky and I succeed. I don't know what you have in your country, in my language we have dozens of proverbs to just... like "only those who risk profit" or this kind of a... as a wisdom. Say let's say I don't succeed, I fail. We again have dozens of... like for example, a nice vulgarity: we have our standard vulgar version is something like—we put it in much more brutal terms—"you cannot urinate against the wind," no? Like "don't go...". You know, this is wisdom. So my dream of Antigone would have been to change the role of the chorus into a like—okay, to cut a long story short so that we don't lose too much time—when the two are struggling, bury not Antigone and Creon, chorus constitutes itself as a democratic committee of the city, arrests both of them as... and establishing a kind of a popular dictatorship. You know, this would be my Antigone, my god, no? I mean, none of those, you are just fighting with each other, bourgeois. And I'm very radical here. My other dream is—admit it, this is pretty crazy, but this is a mega experiment, I don't have, I don't know, half a billion at least to do this and permission—to reshoot Star Wars by rehabilitating the Emperor and Darth Vader. What if we say that all that Jedi and so on, these are reactionary particular feudalists and so on, and the Emperor and Darth Vader are the progressives who want equality, want wash away all this—I will ironically use it—this kind of a caste-different systems, you know, this Princess Amidala Naboo here, all that? Maybe they are the progressives, maybe we should change the entire perspective here. But okay, so nonetheless, to return to this problem tragedy, farce. To go back with it: in my book, tragedy is September 11th. I'm not saying it's a central event. I mean, my god, already your event is much more crucial even as a symptom of time. By "your event" I mean Bhopal, no? And I don't know if you agree, but many people were unmasked there. Sorry if I offend some of you. I always followed Christopher Hitchens' missionary position. I never had any respect for Mother Teresa. And I read how, you know, the very next morning she was there in Bhopal saying, "Don't blame anyone, it was God's will," and so on and so on, no? She was for me the lowest of these—how should I put it—paid corrupted ideologists. Absolutely no respect for her. Okay, so let's say tragedy and farce is the financial crisis of the last year. But now I would like to take another approach and to use the same farce, financial crisis, and another tragedy which is not a single tragedy but tragedy of looming ecological catastrophe. This is maybe the best way to begin. You know that a month ago, I think it was a month ago, there was this big conference of all leaders of the great powers in Copenhagen to find a way to confront ecology. And the key to see—if you want to get a simple signal of where do we stand—compare that response to ecological threat with the response to financial crisis. You know, we have all these other crises. We have ecology, we have poverty, we have millions dying because of illness. Everybody knows that the whole problem of AIDS in Africa, more or less, could be solved—some doctors even told me the number, about billion dollars. Now you will say this is a lot. Yeah, but it's nothing compared to what was immediately spent for the financial crisis. You see the paradox? We all know we can all die, life can be changed. And I even am not an ecological fundamentalist. I think those who claim, "But we cannot be sure, is it sun, man and so on," I mean who is causing things, problems? They are right, but this for me makes the situation even more tragic, you know? Namely, the fact that the situation is non-transparent. We really don't know. That's the tragic moment of—this is more genuinely tragic of humanity. This logic of hamartia, you know, like you do something and then you have to confront consequences of which you were not aware. For example, I have friends in China, half-dissidents, who told me that—that's what they told me, I'm not a scientist to judge it—that there is a kind of an agreement in Chinese community, community of scientists, geologists and so on, that—remember the big earthquake there, when was it, two years ago or where? That it was basically man-made. How? They claim that because they know the fault lines deep into the earth, that you know this big Three Gorges Dam they're building, these new gigantic lakes created are precisely above the area of this key—how do you call it—breaks beneath in the earth. And they that they put a strong, such a strong additional pressure, disturbing the fragile balance, that if not directly causing the earthquake, they at least strongly contributed to it. And it is one of yours, with whom I otherwise don't agree but I respect him—one of yours, I mean an Indian theoretician, Dipesh Chakrabarty, who works in, I think, in Chicago, who published recently an interesting text claiming that elements like this signal that we are entering a new era, a new even geological era. It's no longer Pleistocene or what what all that, it's Anthropocene in the sense that we humanity are becoming so powerful that we are even becoming an ecological—sorry—a geological factor. But the problem is that this power is not a transparent power. We produce effects but we don't control them. We don't know. So again, taking all this into account, the non-transparency of the situation and so on, doesn't mean we should relativize ecological crisis. The conclusion of "we cannot be sure" is not "okay, so let's do nothing," it's that we should work even more, trying to understand, taking measures and so on and so on. Okay, so now I come to my first conclusion. Did you notice the stupidity of it, how when we are facing ecological crisis, there is always time for endless negotiations? All the ideological conflicts explode, like one of the preferred games of big Western powers is to blame you, like CIB (China, India, Brazil), it's called by some of my friends—China, India, Brazil. You are the three big guys, no? Brazil is destroying the lungs of humanity in the rainforest and so on and so on. Either you use it in this way or whatever, we are all playing games. But do you know what a miserable result there was? They promised some billions to poor, but even this is thinned out, there are no obligations, it's all just promises and so on. So basically they don't take it seriously. On the contrary, and here our survival is at stake, but they deal with it as something: "Okay, okay, we have time to negotiate, postpone it and so on." With financial crisis, this was the real. You remember, in one week they found first billion dollars, then the numbers get sublime in the Kantian sense, beyond representation. I mean not that I have it, but somewhere till billion, I can at least vaguely imagine what this is. Beyond, it simply becomes unrepresentable, how should I put it, no? And this is what shocked me, how even in the United States, which boasts to be the big democracy and so on, for a moment they even almost suspended democracy. What I mean by this? Do you remember a year and four months ago, or five, in September when the crisis exploded? Do you remember first it was still President Bush proposed to the Congress this first big measure, billions of dollars. Congress voted no with a large majority. Then something remarkable happened. A kind of a de facto—of course not formal—suspension of democracy in the sense that all, the entire political class—Bush, Obama, McCain, all of them—went in panic to the Congress and basically told them what: "Listen, no bullshit, we need this money, it has to be done now. Now there is no place for democratic debates, it has to be done, no debate." And the Congress was blackmailed, you remember. One week later, the money was there. We don't kid here. It's really true what my good friend Fredric Jameson told me once, referring to all these catastrophic movies, the last one being where, you know, that you disappeared there, up to Himalaya, you know, that big wave... that how it's much easier for us today to imagine—to imagine the end of the life on the entire earth—we have every year at least two-three films imagining this—than to imagine an even modest but nonetheless strong change in capitalism. It is as if, you know—to put it in ironic terms—maybe the life of earth will end and so on, but capitalism is always here. And can you imagine this change? How, I remember when I was young, unfortunately I'm old enough, that there were still debates like, "Is capitalism here to stay? Will it be socialism? Will it be some other new authoritarianism?" or all those debates. "Is the state here to stay? Can we have another organization?" But we supposed life will go on and we have alternatives. Now, nobody even debates all this. I mean, even the left is becoming, at least in the West—with you, I hope it is at least a little bit different—the left more and more is becoming, let's call it, ethico-legal left. Focusing on cultural problems, formulated already in the ideological terms of victimization, harassment, and then how to legally solve the problem. What does this show? I want to make a first more theoretical proposal here. The conflict between capitalism and ecology may appear to be a typical conflict between egotistic, short-term interests and the properly ethical care for the common good of humanity. It may appear that, you know, on the one hand this short-term profit, hedonism, whatever, this idea of "let's just profit, we'll see whatever happens happens," and long-term ethical concerns. But I claim, upon a closer look, it immediately becomes clear that the situation is exactly the opposite one. It is our ecological concerns which are grounded in the utilitarian sense of survival and as such they lack the properly ethical dimension. In the sense—I mean they are ethical, but you know what I want to say—when you care for ecology you don't say: "This is my conditional, unconditional duty, independently of consequences," you know, this heroic attitude of, to put it in Latin, fiat justitia, pereat mundus—let the justice be done even if the whole world falls apart. No, the problem is here precisely how to prevent the world from falling apart. That is to say, ecological concerns can be put in the terms of enlightened self-interest. If we look in this opposition between ecology and continuing explosion of capitalism for the ethical dimension, it is, I claim, to be found in capitalism's unconditional commitment to its own ever-expanding reproduction. A capitalist who dedicates himself unconditionally to the capitalist self-expansion is effectively ready to put everything, including the survival of humanity, at stake. Like, you know, the system, it must go on even if we all die. This is a strange ethical motto, but I claim it is in a... in what sense is it ethical? To understand this, and here is another thing I would like to understand in your tradition, what would have been in your tradition counterpoint—do you have something that would correspond, Immanuel Kant's notion of radical evil? It's a complex problem in the sense that Kant oscillated and so on, but his basic insight, which was then too radical for Kant, he withdrew—was that—I mean Kant is a genius for me, even in details, you know? Kant is maybe the most perverse philosopher. In the sense that, for example, look at his definition of marriage. Kant. You know how he defines marriage? "A contract between two adults, a contract regulating the mutual use of sex organs for pleasure." No sublimity, that's marriage for Kant. And then he brings this to the end. On the next page—this is from his Metaphysics of Morals, Sitten, customs—he asks: "If a husband escapes the wife, does she have the right to bring him back through police?" His answer is yes, but not of any sentimentality, because legally he ran away with of course his penis which was legally co-owned by the wife, no? So it's purely a matter of getting back property and so on and so on. So Kant developed this pretty terrifying notion of radical evil. What is radical evil? It is, how should I put it, evil for the sake of evil. Evil which is not done for any, what Kant calls pathological reasons—profit, wealth, pleasure or whatever. It's done just for the sake of it. You must know this, that the first one to formulate this—although it's more complex—is the Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost. You know that famous phrase, "Evil, be thou my good." This means precisely: you follow it even if everything falls apart. And the most beautiful example from classical European culture that I know of this is Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni. If you know it, you know what happens towards the end: that stone statue, Il Commendatore, comes and confronts Don Giovanni, telling him, "Now you will die. But you have the time to repent. If you repent, you still can go to heaven. If you don't renounce your sins before you die, you will burn forever in hell." So look at the position of Don Giovanni. His position is clear: from the utilitarian choice he should have renounced, he doesn't—he knows he will die. He doesn't profit anything by remaining faithful to his sins. From any utilitarian logic you should say, "I renounce it, so at least..." No, you know, that's this demonic greatness. Heroically he says, "No, I renounce nothing." This is diabolical evil. Evil you don't do it—incidentally, but that's my experience with my monsters called children—children between four and five are very close to this diabolical evil, although I claim—but that's another point. Okay, so what I want to say is that if this looks—seems to you a kind of a crazy speculation—look at capitalism. It has this dimension of a perverted demonic ethics: self-expansion must go on unconditionally. And I'm not blaming people here. Here I took a lesson from Hannah Arendt apropos of Holocaust, you know? It's not—this doesn't mean that capitalists are some kind of a Byron-esque demonic larger-than-life evil heroes. You concede to them too much. It's in the system. Which is why, apropos of the last crisis, ongoing financial, I hope—probably of course they did—yours... incidentally, I started to love your newspapers. I think they are much better organized than the Western press. It must have been reported, you know, that the biggest scam—maybe you are coming close to it, now comes the evil moment, I will tell you—you know that Bernard Madoff who stolen through that Ponzi scheme or whatever billions, no? And incidentally, I didn't quite get it, but what you were saying here, you know, like "become paid this, become this"—it sounded as your own Bernard Madoff scheme, you know? I hope you will succeed, how should I put it, no? I'm good, see, I am this traditional paid ideologist, corrupted by him. "Do this, yes, buy his books" and so on. Okay, sorry, let's go on. So you know why I didn't like this focus on Madoff. They are—as if everybody liked to demonize him in this way—even one, another one of the most disgusting ethical figures, an old pervert living in a castle in Rome who calls himself Pope, you know. Of course, they joined this game, claiming, "This crisis is not the crisis of capitalism, of our system, it's the crisis of values," you know? It's exactly not the crisis of values. Madoff was just doing in a little bit more radical way where the system is—he was following where the system is pushing you. So okay, this—the reason I—the reason I talked so much about this dimension is to let you know how strong ideology is. This madness of expansion must go on, this is the reality of ideology today. Anyone who tells you we no longer live in ideology, look at this. What ideology is—one of the names of ideology today—is the very force, this compulsion, which you don't even feel as a pressure, compulsion, which makes you act in this sense of: capitalist reproduction must go on, we cannot even imagine and so on and so on. So a little bit, if you allow me to improvise about ideology now here. How does ideology work? Ideology is—you know, forget all those simple definitions, ideology confuses things, mystifies... No, the force of ideology is that it does deal with real problems. But it mystifies them, so ideology is something which mystifies a real problem. What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example of a joke, one story from some of my earlier books that you know, then another story. I remember from socialist times, the greatest cultural catastrophe of the fall of communism was for me the disappearance of wonderful political jokes. One of them, it's a wonderful, maybe you know it, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, it's a joke from Poland about "What is Socialism?". You must—the only thing you must know to understand the joke is that communists in power boasted that our system is the synthesis of all the greatest achievements of humanity, no? So the joke goes: "Socialism is a synthesis of all great results of the past humanity. From prehistoric societies it took barbarism. From slave society it took slavery. From medieval society it took domination. From capitalism it took exploitation. And from socialism it took the name." You see? This is ideology. Now you will say, what has this to do with ideology? Ah, let me apply this to a film which, I hated it, but it's well known, maybe you are too young to see it, all of you, you must have... this film about sharks attacking a small American city, Jaws, the first mega-hit by Steven Spielberg. I claim Jaws, in the Jaws shark functions—sharks function exactly like socialism. Namely, when I was young, people were debating: what does this figure of the killing shark symbolize? There were right-wingers who claimed: "This is American protective racist ideology. Sharks are the threat of the immigrants, third world invading United States and so on." Then there were the opposite guys, Fidel Castro himself, who likes the film, strangely—he said it's clear: sharks attacking the small city is big capital exploiting small American—ordinary... But you know what's my point? That this is the wrong question. The reality for me, the way I read it, it's very simple reading, is the following one: an ordinary American in his daily life experiences a whole series of inconsistent fears. You are afraid of immigrants. But you are afraid of nature, natural catastrophes. You are afraid of being exploited by big banks. You are afraid of state control, whatever. And what the ideological turn, reversal, trick, is to, as it were, exchange all these fears for one fear which kind of stands for all of them. It brings, in a way, consistency into it. And now I hope you get my point, which is that, for example, with anti-Semitism Hitler did exactly the same. An ordinary German in the '20s experienced what? On the one hand fear of banks, fear of the corrupted, he perceived this media, on the other hand decay of morality, moral crisis, promiscuity and so on and so on. And what Hitler did—or general Nazism—and it's precisely from rich bankers he got, he took profit-making, from—from law, legal class he took this corruption of the law, from poor people he took this dirtiness, violence and so on, and from Jews he took the name. You got it? It's exactly the same logic in this reversal. Now you will tell me—let's make a step further here, this—things here are becoming really interesting—because now you will tell me, "But this no longer functions today, we live in a cynical era." I mean even if you have—okay, taking—ignoring fundamentalists here and there—the predominant society—the predominant attitude in democratic countries is one of cynical distrust. There is some truth in it. For example, I report about this in one of my again early books, I'm sure unknown to you, one of my formative experiences—I still think it was shocking—was in the early—throughout the '90s there were many racist outbursts against immigrants in all around Europe. For example, these so-called skinheads, violent youth, they were for example in Germany they usually targeted Turkish immigrants or the Vietnamese; in England—more than you Indians, you were good guys—when they discovered that the majority of Indians voted for Margaret Thatcher, this was you were... Pakistanis were considered more—it was more noble to beat a Pakistani, how should I put it there, no? And so on. And I read or I saw on German TV an interview which really impressed me. Namely, they interviewed a skinhead after they caught him beating foreigners, like with a simple question: "Why are you doing it?" You know what he did? He all of a sudden started to talk like a social theorist. He said: "Our societies have a crisis of values. When I was young I lacked properly paternal authority and in our society..." like the whole primitive social science and—and that's the formula of cynicism. You mentioned it I think or—or should I mention this—Marxist formula of ideology: "They don't know it, but they are doing it." And how Peter Sloterdijk in his book on cynical reason turned it around. He said today the formula is not "They don't know what they are doing, but they are doing it," it's "They know well what they are doing, but still they are doing it," no? And this is I think a perfect example. He gives you the whole theory why he beats foreigners, nonetheless he beats foreigners. This may appear a very tragic situation. And incidentally, this may amuse you: the same goes—at least they are telling me—my psychoanalysts. Not like me, those who bluff in theory. Real one who deal with people. I mean, I—there was a pressure on me to become a practicing analyst, but there are two problems. First one is: I talk all the time. Can you imagine me listening to someone there? And the second problem is... okay, there are many problems. I don't go... Me, psychoanalyst, never. But what I want to say is that friends who really do it are telling me that something strange is going on today where not only the narrow educated classes, but already the average middle classes, the usual candidates for psychoanalytic patients—they no longer come with—in this naive way with the symptom, you know. They tell like my own naive ironic brutal example: a patient tells you a dream—like, "I was penetrating a thick forest, I killed a dragon, then I entered a castle." And then the analyst says: "Yeah, of course, the dragon is your father, you killed him to enter your mother." And then the patient says: "Oh my god, really, ooh, what a shock," whatever. They—they usually come to you already with an interpretation, how should I put it? You know what I mean, they say: "I think I'm an obsessional neurotic" and you cannot surprise the patients. Like, you know, one of the famous phrases of Freud is that—the example of verneinung, negation. How he asked one of his patients, "Who is that woman in your dream?" The patient said, "I don't know who she is, I'm sure of one thing: it's not my mother." And then Freud says, "Okay, of course, through negation." But a friend of mine told me, practicing analyst in France this time, that he had the same experience and you know what—how the patient presented the dream? He said, "I don't know who is this woman, but I'm sure it has something to do with my mother, you know?" Like they concede it in advance. And this is a very strange logic. So some of my friends—here I want to praise theory a little bit—Fredric Jameson even up to a point or Noam Chomsky, whom I don't know personally but I consider him in a wider sense a colleague—they think we live in such a cynical era that we no longer need a theory of ideology. You know, those in power are openly cynically corrupted, so as Chomsky put in a conversation recently, "We just need to tell people what really goes on." I—I don't agree. Why not? Ah, let's go a little bit further. And you have this more widely developed in the book, like to tease you a little bit about the book that you published. I think that today more and more ideology functions no longer in the mode of what in psychoanalysis we call symptom, but in the mode of a fetish. What is the difference? To be extremely simple: symptom is the moment of truth which breaks up the global lie. Let's say you try to repress something—a traumatic experience, a lie, horrible thing you did—but symptoms are the cracks in your edifice, you know? It returns. Like to give you a ridiculous example—consciously ridiculous. Let's say you are an adolescent who is afraid of sexuality. So you say, "I don't want anything to have with sex, I escape into pure mathematics or physics." But then, you know, whatever you do, like then all of a sudden you have a task: "How much energy is released when two bodies hit each other?" My god, you are lost, you know? You know what I mean? This is symptom. It comes back to haunt you in the cracks. But—and of course, in Marx's terms, the symptomal logic is the logic of false universality. Which is very correctly Jacques Lacan, my psychoanalytic master, said paradoxically that Marx invented the notion of the symptom. Symptom is when you look at a universality, symptom—every, let's say, universal order is based on a lie. A symptom is a point where this lie appears, a... Like let me be open here. In Marx himself you have symptoms. Which one? You were also the center of these debates at the beginning of 20th century and later about so-called Asian mode of production. You know, the first Marxist dogma was: pre-class, primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever will follow, I prefer not to... Then, okay, we know in Grundrisse fragments Marx introduces between the first and the second Asian mode of production. But I agree with those who claim that this Asian mode of production appears to be a positive category. But if you look at it closely, how it effectively function, it really means it's a kind of a container for all that doesn't fit others. You know, there is something which, because of maybe Eurocentric limitation of Marxist edifice, precisely, no wonder that Asian modes of production are non-European, don't—don't fit his general scheme. So he pretends just to add a category which neatly fits the series. But in reality there is no positive substance in this category. This category is an empty container. It means everything that doesn't fit in my as it were my official line. And in sciences you often have this. And I claim that this is also—if I may make a jump towards the end—the problem with castes, no? That the untouchables are your Asian mode of production, how should I put it, no? The whole point of ideology is to claim there is a place for everyone in the social edifice. But their place is a no place. They—they don't fit in. Okay, so this is the symptomal logic. General lie, you have to isolate the element where the crack in the false edifice where the truth breakthrough... breaks through. Fetishism is something opposite and much more interesting theoretically. Fetishism is at its most elementary a lie, not the moment of truth which breaks the edifice of lie, but a lie which enables you to sustain, to endure the truth. Why? You know, fetishists are not crazy people who have some fixation—foot, whatever and... fetishists are usually very strong realists. But how do they manage? Let me, I think I even quote it in the book, a wonderful story—wonderful again in the terrifying sense—which effectively happened to a friend of mine in Slovenia some years ago. The story is so ridiculous that it is true, how should I put it. It was a guy who was totally dedicated, happy with his wife and so on. Wife died of a cancer. He, on the surface, accepted it totally. He didn't play a game, like, "Wife is still with me." No, he organized the funeral, everything was fine. But nonetheless, everybody noted—noticed something strange. He was always carrying with himself his old socks or what, some—something absolutely minimal thing which belonged to the wife. He could accept the reality of the wife's death only insofar as he had this fetish. You know, the logic was: "I know well that she is dead, but I have the socks." This is the logic of fetish. You have a small thing which enables you to accept the truth which would otherwise be unbearable. And I think that today ideology functions in this way. I mean, do you really—who today believes in those big things, democracy, whatever? We all know politicians are corrupted, it's all a scam, blah blah blah. But we need a fetish, something which enables us to endure. For me, charity is today the ultimate fetish. You know, you are—you are a ruthless exploiter and so on, but then you give some money to—whatever—a local university, orphanage, whatever—and this fetish enables you to maintain the image of yourself as a good person. You know, you don't really have to change. You know what I mean? Fetish is what—it is not the lie which misrepresents the truth, it is the truth, it's the lie which enables you to endure the truth. Okay, so now I really must start towards the end. I am fascinated by what John Carpenter, do you know that guy, American movie director? My god, you know, American movies were much better in the '70s and early '80s. He made a wonderful movie, They Live. It's a wonderful, silly, short movie. Story: a guy in Los Angeles enters an abandoned church and finds there strange sunglasses. So that... and then he goes to the city, puts them on, and what he sees? He sees the real message, how should I put it. Like, you know, it's wonderfully naive. You have the big publicity poster, like: "Go to Hawaii, have the—have the holidays of your lifetime, enjoy," and so on. Then you put glasses on, it says: "Don't think, spend money, obey," or whatever. Like in a naive way you see the true message. And it's important to—when you buy things or when you read publicity—to try to put these glasses on a little bit, no? I claim whenever you see—it's very popular in the West, this hypocritical charity business, you know—like you find it almost every day in American newspapers—a figure of some usually African starved black child with, I don't know, twisted lips, some terrifying disease, and then the message is: "You see, for a price of a couple of cappuccinos or what, you can make a difference, you can save this child's life," or whatever. True, but what do we see if we put the glasses on? I claim something like: "We live nice lives ruining others, poor and so on. For a price of a couple of cappuccinos, we offer you a way out. You can feel good going on living the way you live," and so on and so on. Ideology is here. You know where, my god, now I'm around into my talk and I will have to... no, no, no. To tell you, you know if you want another example of ideology. Is it popular here? In my country it is and I hate it. All those nature documentaries on channels like National Geographic, Animal Planet and so on. What is really happening there? A French psychoanalyst, Gérard Wajcman, wrote a wonderful text where he isolated many details there. Like why is it when you see... he first starts with his experience in safari. Where he said they went to see with trucks, jeeps, some lions, and lions just ignored them, went on and so on. And claim: "We were invisible for lions." Then he goes on claiming, and this is—okay, now I'm simplifying his reading, it's much more elaborate—but that, did you notice something which happens also in this, always in this animal life documentaries? It's the original Veda. Everybody is at his, her, their proper place, things function there. I think it's basically a—a social utopia, a kind of a good, beautiful fascist utopia. Our lives are a mess, there everyone knows what to do, how to do and so on. Even when they make a documentary—National Geographic often does—about human life. A small Indian railways, there was a report, or a small city in—in North—in North of United States. They treat it, I claim, as an animal community. It's like a big nest of ants or whatever, everybody knows what to do. And this is I think especially important with regard to sexuality. You know our sexual life are a mess, you never know how to do it, it doesn't work, you are impotent, you are too potent, whatever. And what is even more crucial: we need stories. We humans, as this guy Gérard Wajcman put so nicely, we cannot have ahistorical sex, how should I put it, no? We need a story to arouse us, a narrative background. That's, incidentally, this is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. It's not everything is about sex. It's that, on the contrary, even sex is not sex. You need a fantasy, a story, for the sex to function. You must imagine your partner as someone and so on, whatever. So the point is that animals are presented as once where, when it's a mating season, you feel horny, you do it, it functions. Rabbits just screw like crazy, they don't have to tell stories and so on, no? And that's the dream is of ahistorical sex, how should I put it, no? So again, you see how even in this pure escape to nature you can see ideology. Now to really, just to start to conclude, I'm so sad it looks bad for Manu, how should I put it, no? It will not happen. How did we in the West come—come to this? I claim the biggest ideological triumph of capitalism in the West was how it reacted to when I was young, you know, that big contestation, protest movement of '68. This movement targeted three institutions: factories, schools and families. Factories as alienated labor, schools oppressive universities—this is why students were... family as, you know, patriarchal family oppression and so on. The triumph of capitalism was to integrate this critique. In today's cultural capitalism, they say, "No, we outsource it" or "It's intellectual capitalism, no longer this hierarchic standard Fordist work." Family: they say, "No, we are pluralists." I claim that even today, more and more in the West, the ideal sexuality is no longer even a single partner. It's more and more a kind of experimenting with yourself, if it you are bisexual it's even better, no? The idea is: let's have a plastic identity, don't get fixed to one identity, experiment with yourself. School: it's the same. We have all these private schools, quick specialized courses, nobody wants to take the big university and so on and so on. In other words, all this anti-alienation, authentic life, anti-consumerism protest of the young generation in '68, the ruling ideology and capitalist system in a triumphant way integrated it. And this is furthermore, I claim, connected, linked to a very important change in—about this you can read a little bit in the book, but more in my next book—in capitalist relations. You know, I try to be an old-fashioned Marxist, but it's difficult. Like let's take exploitation. I don't think we can simply apply to explain inequalities today the old Marxist notion of exploitation. If we do it, we arrive to a crazy result that, for example, today Venezuela is exploiting United States. Because for Marx explicitly natural resources are not the source of value. I think something is happening which Marx suspected but draw the wrong conclusion. You know, Marx—and this is Marx at his most perceptive but at the same time most naive—in his manuscripts for Capital, usually referred to as Grundrisse, Marx plays with the idea of what he calls General Intellect. Claiming that more and more the productive factor is not work, measured by time, but knowledge. Not only knowledge in the sense of theory, knowledge in the sense of practical knowledge and so on. And he thought, wrongly from this, I think, that the moment knowledge will become absolutely predominant, capitalism will have to somehow disintegrate in itself. What Marx didn't take into account is the possibility of this what he refers to as General Intellect, the collective productive knowledge, being reprivatized again. And I think, to put it in very simple terms, this is what happens today with a figure like, like Bill Gates. He is not as rich as he is because of his—because of super-exploitation or what. He reprivatized something which is the substance of us all. Windows, his language, whatever, is what? It's General Intellect in the sense of: it's the very substance, the space which we all share within which we communicate. And we pay him a rent. It's not profit, it's a rent. And some economists already developed this idea in a nice way: that how capitalism is as it were moving backwards in postmodern societies from profit back to rent. Rent as rent for natural resources is being rehabilitated, exploiting oil and so on; rent for intellectual services; even some—and this is for me the ultimate capitalist social-democratic utopianism—even the problem of unemployed to be solved by paying them a rent. Do you know this theory which is now fashionable among some leftists, of the so-called basic rent or basic income? But typically in Brazil where they made it a law, they call it Renta Básica, basic rent. The idea is that every citizen of a state, independently of his status, whatever, has to get from the state a minimum of money enabling him a dignified survival. So now, rent all around. I—I think that this all this brings us to mystification of our lives. One of the prices—and here if you allow me just five minutes, I would like to return to nonetheless to Ambedkar and to India—the result of this is that we in the West are approaching to a kind of—our own caste society, I claim. The result of all this is that—they say working class is disappearing. It's not, I think it's separating—separating into three. We have whatever remained of the old manual working class, we have so-called intellectual workers, programmers or whatever, but I include here all that aspect of services: psychologists, babysitters, whatever. And we then have the outcasts, those living in slums and so on. And I think these three, I call them ironically castes, are basically three sub-castes of the working class and they are more and more developing their own, not even sub-culture—I'm tempted to say simply culture. And the whole social logic. As a rule, working class—and this is a very sad fact—is as a rule more patriotic, nationalist, religiously conservative. Intellectual workers—I mean in United States you can see if you go to a restaurant: working class eats fat hamburgers and so on; middle class likes these disgusting politically correct dishes, you know, one slice of salmon with two carrots and so on—I'm not that. And then you have the excluded who are usually either religious fanatics or gangsters, whatever—not only. But what I'm saying is that—is that this is the crucial: it's not only from profit to rent, it's from a clear class distinction back to our own form of castes. And the temptation we face is the same as is the same as is the same as yours. And here I think we again just to conclude should return to Ambedkar, Gandhi and so on. It's extremely important. The way I see it—now I feel a little bit stupid, I'm teaching you—but take this more as a kind of exam, you are all my collective professors. I will try to give—what I see in Ambedkar. I think they both were probably, I never know, honest men who sincerely tried to do something for the untouchables. But what Gandhi did is nonetheless a kind of—to put it ironically—untouchable identity politics. His idea is that hierarchy is just a later corruption of the original Hindu system, which is more a kind of—I call it ironically—soft fascism. In the sense of everyone organically at his, her, their own place, and the point is not to abolish the system but to give dignity to each of its components. Like, you know, Dalits are still Dalits but they are children of God, oh we should admire them and so on, all that stuff. While Ambedkar saw the problem where it is. As he puts it, this is I think one of the—in a wonderful playing with words—one of the ultimate statements of the critique of ideology, worthy of the greatest formulas of Marx and others. This, you know, famous saying by Ambedkar: "There are no castes without outcasts." You cannot have a complete caste system. There are some who, exactly in the parallel to the Asian mode of production, no matter how you try to convince them, "But you have your organic place within society"... You also did translate Rancière. But then you should translate his wonderful book La Mésentente, Disagreement, where he develops wonderfully this logic of what he calls "the part of no part." There is always a part of society which appears to be organic part of society but it's really a place—those with no proper place. This was the basic Marxist idea of proletarians: you know, those who are necessary for the system but don't really fit into it. And—and what also Ambedkar saw, this is endlessly important, this is the true way to fight Eurocentrism. He also saw what all radical critics East or West see: that the point is not this liberal inclusion—"Oh my god, it breaks my heart seeing Dalits to suffer, let's bring them in, giving them their space." No, they should be our standard, in the formal sense that they, without proper specific place, they stay—they stand for the dimension of universality. Precisely, you know, this is the biggest lesson of critique of ideology. As Marx put it, proletarians precisely because they have no proper place in society, they stand for the universal dimension of humanity. To see in the outcast the universal dimension, not just the marginals who, "Oh we have to be good to include them" and so on and so on. Okay, I will now really stop just with one, I claim, very ironic—and I cannot resist finishing with—this dimension of where to locate these outcasts. You know, let me make a short detour referring to all these pro—ah, first another point. From here also I claim that one what one should do, if one really—the first gesture of—in dealing with Dalits or even the lowest among them, manual scavengers and so on, is to—not to say, "But they are children of God, oh oh," but on the contrary: we are—not they are not shit by dealing with shit, but we are all shit. And Luther said this—this is why I like European Protestantism, you know—Luther has this wonderful theory in his—Martin Luther, not black anti-racist, the German guy—that—that he said that God is—sorry—man is divine shit. Man was created falling out of God's anus. Man is excremental, excessive. We have—and in a way, in a way Veda already knew it. You know, this is what I discovered with such pleasure in reading the background of the Laws of Manu, no? How—what's the scheme? You know what's the old Veda scheme, you must know it better than me. It's this cycle of life where the stronger eats the less strong. You have this circle, no? Gods eat humans, humans eat animals, animals eat plants, plants eat earth and water and of course within them. But then the idea is that we humans don't want to be eaten by God. And here then priests enter. The function of the priest is to offer ersatz victims, no? So you admit this famous circle of life and then you say, "No, no, but we humans want to cheat," no? "We will bribe gods to—to bypass us in the chain of eating and..." This makes us the excrement. We are effectively... if you—of course this is only the first step towards saying: "There is no Mother Earth." Nature—there is no harmony, cycle of life to which we should return. Nature is one big shitty mess. If you don't believe me, just make a simple reflection. Oil. Can we even imagine what kind of a mega-catastrophe must have happened on our earth to have so much oil? Nature is not harmony, homeostasis. Nature is crazy, catastrophes all the time and so on and so on. It's difficult to accept this. So to conclude: what are then these shit places of shit, invisible places? Again, maybe I should learn here from you, but maybe it's universal. In typical European buildings—this is what always fascinated me—how a wall in a building is never a simple dividing line between inside and outside. There is always a third place created between the walls where strange things happen. A mysterious place where, for example, shit disappears or electricity comes and so on. Because I challenge you: of course rationally you know, canalization and so on. But after you go to the flush toilet, shit disappears from your life. In the sense that it's all hidden beneath. Which is why one of the most terrifying experiences—it's like vampires, the return of the living dead—is that when it gets stuck and shit come—shit come up... comes back. The return of the shit, how should I put it. So what I'm saying is that this is why I like horror movies, you remember, where always in this space between the two walls or what, where there is electricity, sewage, canalization, there are living dead, monsters, vampires or whatever, they are there. Like you remember one of the great Stephen King—and I quite like him, I must say—Stephen King novels—the big one, I didn't read it too long—It. It's these evil monsters are hiding precisely in canalization down there, no? And so this is difficult thing to accept. Not just this exclusion, inclusion, but every inclusion-exclusion creates a third space. And this is our place. This space has to be—has to become visible. Not visible in the simple rational sense. You know the problem with us humans is that, how should I put it, of course we see things. But often we see them but nonetheless, emotionally, symbolically, whatever—like that husband who was able to talk about his deceased wife—we ignore them. To—to look into these interspaces, to see what's going on there. Every society has its own interspaces. This is maybe the first task today. Because this is what I got from you: of course you all know about manual scavengers and so on and so on. You see them but in a way, by way of dealing with shit, they are shit. In the sense of they just do their work. Of course rationally you know, you may even see them, but they are not, how should I put it, part of your space. What I'm saying is that one should do even more than ordinary liberalism. The point is not just to graciously include them, giving them their space. To take there, them as the minimal level of universal humanity. So when you see a scavenger, always remember: the way you deal with him is the way you treat your universal humanity. I'm sorry if I was too long, but that's my nature. Thank you very much. Oh, no... wait. Ah yeah, now works. Okay. You also should... Ah, you go there, okay. This guy. I was actually struck by the fact that Slavoj thinks this guy should be going out with the daughters of older ladies. I notice he did not think that he might want to—older ladies might be quite happy to go out with that guy, Slavoj. You might want to give them a try. Oh no, no, I am here on your side. When I was in the high school, my ideal was to screw the teacher. I don't... I think this is the most authentic sexual experience of our life. You are the teacher now though. You are the teacher now, that's the problem. Sorry, what? You are the teacher now, that's the problem. Let's make it problematic, that's true. So a jinn, a jinn appeared to a man and offered him three wishes. The man was very excited. First of all he said, "I want to be Slavoj Žižek." "Idiot," the jinn said, "you are Slavoj Žižek." Now this is just one of the many jokes and stories that emerge from the internet about this eminent Slovenian Lacanian whom it has been our pleasure to listen to today. And his own jokes and anecdotes are, of course, legendary—the medium through which he makes complex theoretical points, as we saw. Of course, this means that it becomes the burden of every unfortunate person writing about him or commenting on his work to tell a few jokes themselves. Often they are Professor Žižek's own. So it struck me that the truth of the joke with which I began is that Slavoj Žižek longs to be Slavoj Žižek. He never quite makes it though, because Žižeks keep escaping himself. In an interview to the Guardian a couple of years ago he was asked, "What do you most dislike about your appearance?" and he replied, "That it makes me appear the way I really am." Having followed Professor Žižek's work for a while now in growing bewilderment, I understand his predicament. There are at least two Žižeks in there. Several, I suspect, but at least two, and whichever one manifests himself, Slavoj is taken aback and rather dissatisfied. "Is this me?" he seems to ask. This evening in my brief 18-minute intervention, I will focus on this book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. So in the first part, there's the Žižek who we encountered today, whose analysis and critique of capitalism, free-market logic, capitalist media and American imperialism are dazzling and exhilarating. Breathlessly you bowl along encountering such insightful gems as—it is—he says this in one of—in the book: "It is indeed true that we live in a society of risky choices, but it is one in which only some do the choosing, while others do the risking." For his relentless exposure of capitalism's exploitativeness and hypocrisy, his robust espousal of communism, for his sharp critique of America and his explicitly anti-Zionist critique of Israeli policy towards Palestine, conservative opinion has dubbed Žižek the most dangerous philosopher in the West. In October this year when he spoke on this book in New York, there was a bomb threat. We only had like crowds of people struggling to get in—there was an actual bomb threat, despite which the hall remained packed until he concluded a characteristic bravura performance. The only difference was he completed it in minutes flat. With a lot of difficulty. You can see this on Democracy Now!. You can see the minutes ticking away and he actually concludes it in minutes because security guys are busy evacuating the hall. Now the pro—let's say you're not pro-capitalist, anti-communist, Zionist or an admirer of America's war on terror. Let's say you're in fact enthralled, as I am, by Žižek's analysis, by his promise that communism is to be reinvented in each era, his recognition that truth is partial, accessible only when one takes sides. Through the idea of the commons he reaches communism. He says it enables us to see the progressive enclosure of the commons as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance. However, this idea of the proletariat is to be radicalized to a level beyond Marx's imagination. And so the emancipatory subject is no longer a particular social agent but an explosive combination of different agents. "What unites us," Žižek says, "is that in contrast to the classic image of the proletariat who have nothing to lose but their chains, we're in danger of losing everything. We are all potentially a homo sacer and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure." The proper political act today would be to interrupt, he says, the present predominant movement; in short, to pull the emergency cord on the train of historical progress. The task is to castrate those in power and thereby hangs a joke involving a raped woman and some testicles, which you can find on page But the castration is not to be conducted in a direct climactic confrontation; rather, he says, the task is to, I quote, "undermine those in power with patient ideological critical work, so that although they are still in power, all of a sudden one notices that the powers that be are afflicted with unnaturally high-pitched voices." So there you are, you know, willingly seduced by the Žižek—older lady though one is—with his promises of a new reinvented communism, a non-masculinist, castrated, emasculated communism for the 21st century, democratic, fluid, a heterogeneous communism located in and arising from the experiences of different kinds of communities all over the world. Beguiled by this dazzling androgynous figure, you don't notice that you're being led deeper and deeper into a dark alley. Until you realize with a sudden shock, waiting at the end of it with a smug smile, twirling his moustachios, casually tapping his bludgeon against a beefy palm, is that tough guy: 20th-century Marxism. This other Žižek, not the big other which he agrees does not exist, but the big self, as it turns out, proceeds to spell out a radical left politics constituted explicitly by Eurocentrism extolled as a virtue, Christianity, not merely religion in general, and a universalism that necessarily then is surreptitiously coded as European and Christian. This other Žižek asserts the very specific European experience of modernity as the norm to be emulated, colonialism as the cleansing force that brought this modernity to benighted and backward societies, and revolutionary terror as sacred and unavoidable. This communism holds in contempt all the lively subversive political currents of today—queer politics, race politics, feminism—dismissed as political correctness and mere identity politics. So I really don't think Žižek's reading of Ambedkar takes into account the fact that the architect of the Constitution and passionate advocate of modern citizenship, Ambedkar entered the space of citizenship not as someone who merely left Hinduism behind but as one who had entered Buddhism. He entered citizenship with an identity. Ecological movements are rejected because either because capitalism has appropriated the ecological vocabulary—Starbucks is the exemplar—while political movements, as you saw, that invoke Mother Earth, such as that led by Evo Morales, are reactionary because they reiterate, he says, the sexualized cosmology of a maternal order of nature. Why do you think that traditional families are less susceptible to capitalist domination? He doesn't explain and I'm a little afraid to ask. Again, as an example of what he calls the growing privatization of the social, he says children are increasingly cared for not by parents but by paid nurses or child minders. So this is the growing privatization of the social. So this was a little puzzling because childcare was a social responsibility and carried out by people called parents till the late 20th century? That's a nice little puzzle for women who have not found much sociality in the lonely grueling business of childcare which has been their singular responsibility and not of parents. If society and the state and fathers do not consider childcare to be their business and the market does because it is business, then that's how the patriarchal sexual division of labor will be bypassed and a left politics that is still insensitive to this is, as they quaintly say in the US, toast. In short, Professor Žižek appears to be contemptuous of any political movement that is not a formal political party seeking to take state power. This is the one point on which he disagrees even with his friend Alain Badiou, who advocates subtraction—that is, politics at a distance from state power. Žižek holds that the state is to be taken over and made to act in a non-statal way. Surely this is an impossibility, just as much as a capitalism that acts in a non-capitalist way? Such a project assumes the separation of the state from its social environment, the critique of which assumption surely is the starting point of revolutionary politics. I don't mean capitalism is inevitable or omnipotent. The point is that the state is fully integrated into the network of capitalist social relations, which is why every Marxist revolutionary takeover of the state in the 20th century eventually ended up building capitalism. Now, the point is I suspect that Žižek attributes omnipotence to capitalism. Because he sees every single political development as capitalism's triumph. Queer politics arose out of capitalism's needs, ecological movements are co-opted by Starbucks and helps it make more bucks and so on. There seems to be no outside to capitalism. Foucault, of course, has been accused of this kind of wall-to-wall view of power, but even he acknowledged that at the heart of the power relationship and constantly provoking it are recalcitrants of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Foucault reads phenomena like Starbucks environmentalism like this in one of his interviews: "For each move by one adversary, there is an answering one by another. One has to recognize the indefiniteness of the struggle." For Žižek on the other hand, as he wrote elsewhere, resistance is surrender. The other piece of news is that God is back. And not just God in some general sense, but the Christian God, reconciled with Judaism via St. Paul and the Holy Ghost. Now this is a perfectly legitimate project and it—to bring religion back into an emancipatory politics of the left. But this project has to be placed in the context of Professor Žižek's insistence that communism refers to singular universality bypassing particular determinations. Add to this his dismissal of Buddhism as a fetish for corporate CEOs, of
I hope this works. Thank you very much, I'm really, really grateful and honored to be here, but it's in my nature to be evil so, thanking you, I cannot but begin with a couple of nasty rejoinders, remarks to you. First, you lied a little bit, no? There is no father, but you told me there is a wife who supports you a little bit and I like this because in the West I know quite a couple in England, in Greece of leftist presses where, you know, you have a crazy wife who wants to annoy her husband who is a rich manager and husband allows her as a play: "Here you have half a million to play your leftist dreams." At least you do it here in a feminist way that the wife gives the money, no? Point two, this brings me already to the first theoretical point. I loved that little misunderstanding when you were silent for three-four seconds and it was a properly Stalinist misunderstanding: people were not sure should we applaud or not, you know? Is this the silence where Comrade Stalin signals now you can have spontaneous applause? This is already quite seriously brings me to my first point, just an introductory remark, because the first lesson when we try to locate ideology—now I'm offering a variation of what I developed already yesterday—is that usually we perceive our social life in this way: we obey customs and so on, but from time to time it's too restraining, all the rules, and you explode in some either orgy or violence, whatever. That's the spontaneity. You need a little bit of fresh air to break the rules. I claim precisely these violations, transgressions are regulated, had to be learned. There is nothing spontaneous about them. Listen, I dare you, I hope we are the same humans, so I dare you if you had the same experience as all of my friends when I asked them. Look, let's take even these most ordinary transgressions. Do you remember, if you do, if you do it—I'm an anti-alcoholic, not for religious reasons, purely as a Stalinist, I think if you get drunk you are not attentive, you get, you smile, you get too good and then the enemy can attack, that's totally [unintelligible]. But remember how did it probably happen when you had your first drink? In a company with other boys and somebody told you: "You know, parents, our adults drink this," and then you tried it, but you said: "But this is bitter, horrible," and so on. And then you were told: "No, no, you should enjoy this," and so on. So again, it's—you do it through imitating your peers and you have literally to learn to enjoy it. I mean, let's be frank: if you want pleasure, you don't drink whiskey, you drink mango lassi or whatever, no? And it's the same with, for example, with smoking. Admit it, the first cigarette—[coughs]—you start coughing and so on, it's horrible. This is the crucial lesson: especially transgressions are regulated. So again, just a final more serious thing about your reaction to your nice introduction. Yes, I did discover by going through the package that you sent me, Ambedkar, and I was quite fascinated by his work. It put so many things into proper perspective that if I will be able a little bit to play the role of—what role? You know, often with nations, there's nothing racist about it, it goes even more the same for us in the West. You need a foreigner to bring you to yourself. You know, to tell or at least to help you, although with Ambedkar I'm not saying I'm discovering him for you. But nonetheless, if I will play a little bit this role of bringing you back to Ambedkar, to show you how—you know, I would like to live not in a world where somebody reacts and the same goes with different names, of course, for other countries, like: "Oh, this is our local theoretician, who cares? I want big international names." I would like to live in the world where Ambedkar would be the proper transgression, the real thing. Oh, you want to read again that Foucault, that Heidegger? But you know, Ambedkar is the... and he deserves this. I will be really—this is no bad joke, irony, whatever—honored if I am, if I will maybe help a little bit because I intend to write a text on Laws of Manu, Ambedkar, Gandhi and so on, all that topic. The final remark to introduce another theoretical notion: the way you introduced me, no? You know, all this big thing—oh, I hate that guy. I mean, I ask you a frank question: look at that face. If you are—I see some older ladies here—if you are an older lady and have a daughter, I ask you a sincere question: would you allow that guy to take your daughter to cinema, no? Never, admit it, you are right. Okay, no but quite seriously, you know, when I was presented in all these terms: this, that, books, whatever, journal of me—I never visited that, I'm too embarrassed to—that Žižek studies, whatever—I somehow felt self-alienated in the sense of, you know, some glorious identity was outlined by you. Am I really that? Like, who, me in my miserable existence, do I fit that? And you know that in psychoanalysis we call this gap between you in your immediate miserable self-awareness and the symbolic place that you occupy—we call it symbolic castration. So thanks for a castrating experience. That's what I expect from friends, how should I put it. Okay, now enough of this, we don't have endless time, so let me begin by a little bit more serious tone from now on. Let me begin by telling you what I want to do today. It's the book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. It, of course, refers to that famous paraphrase of Marx where Marx paraphrases Hegel's theory of repetition, claiming, "Yes, history repeats itself, but first as tragedy, then as farce." But not so many people know that the story goes on. Herbert Marcuse, one of the Frankfurt School guys, proposed a further variation in when he said that nonetheless sometimes a farce can be more—not tragic—precisely more terrible than tragedy itself. The repetition may be a farce, but a farce can be more crazy. And I'm sorry if I improvise a little bit, I like to do this, I can give you—I wonder, this would be the true multicultural dialogue, not that boring shit Taj Mahal, our great monuments, I don't care about that. But for example, do you have a similar phenomenon? You must have. You had, we Europeans with Holocaust and so on, definitely don't have a monopoly of suffering, how should I put it, no? What I'm saying is that nonetheless, insofar as—I'm sorry for this Eurocentric bias, but insofar as our trauma, one of our traumas is Holocaust, killing of the Jews by the Nazis, did you notice something very weird about Holocaust in cinema? That the majority of films, especially those which really work, are comedies. I think this is a very deep lesson. What? And I claim there is a deep insight again in it. In what sense? You know, we usually are not aware that tragedy is never—how should I put it naively—tragic to the end. In tragedy, even as a victim, you retain a certain dignity of experience. You know, tragedy is this big tragic fall. You may fail, but your subjectivity retains this dignity of greatness. The problem with Holocaust is that it doesn't work. To put it in paradoxical terms, we can imagine a tragedy in a concentration camp: what, a bad Nazi confronting a hero and then the hero says heroically, "Shoot me but I don't..." whatever. No, sorry, you give, concede too much to the fascists. The people were so totally terrorized, reduced to living dead and so on, that the suffering was so horrible that the very grounds for tragic experience of your predicament were taken from you. And the same also I think up to a point goes for Gulag. Let's be frank: if you read, for example, some minutes, transcriptions of the big Stalinist show trials, Bukharin and so on, it's a comedy in a way. I'll go even a step further. Probably it is—okay, you read it in English, it is not translated in your languages—Primo Levi, his famous memoirs of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Where with a couple of scenes, you cannot avoid the temptation of saying, "But in a way this is a comedy." For example, the most horrifying scene he discovers, when a guy, once every two months I think in Auschwitz, they had something called selekcja in Polish, the term selection, which means all the prisoners were had to walk briefly in—let's say, sorry, my bad taste—let's say you are SS doctor, no, sorry. I'm a prisoner, naked, I had quickly, quickly to walk past you. And you have a list and you just knock me, you know, left or right. You put me into two categories: that is to say, he goes to be burned, he is allowed to work a little bit more. Of course, here already comical things happened, you know, like, like comical in the terrifying sense, like often the SS doctor, you know, put the wrong name, got it wrong and so on. But then when Primo Levi describes how prisoners tried to prepare themselves. It's almost a comedy. They knew everything is focused in those two-three seconds. You have to impress the gaze. By... and then they had all these tragic, naive, terrifyingly naive advices like pinch your lips or body red because then you appear more red and like more alive. You know, you had to impress the doctor as being strong enough and so... this is a comedy. Can you imagine this as a comic scene? So, you see here my point, which is that when things are really bad, only a comedy—of course not a comedy where you laugh, but a kind of a totally terrifying comedy—can live up to it. And this is why, to go a little bit further in criticism of ideology, I didn't like the film which, although it is a Holocaust comedy, it doesn't go to the end. Probably some of you know it, got Oscar and so on, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful. You know what's the problem? What I don't like there? The lie at the end. You know, the final three-four minutes where you are supposed to cry, serious ones. You know what's the story, no? Father and son are put into Auschwitz. To make it less traumatic to his small son, father pretends that this is just a big competition game. If you survive it without protesting, there is a big prize, but any moment you want you leave, and at the end he sacrifices himself, the son survives and so on and so on. I can easily imagine how to change the film a little bit and to make it really terrifying. For example, wouldn't it be nice—nice in a terrifying sense intellectually—that if at the very end we were to discover that the son knew all the time that it's not a game? He just pretended that he believes his father in order to not to hurt his father. So that the true performance is not father staging the idea of competition to protect the son, but son protecting the father. That would make the film in some naive sense even much more tragic, if you want, in some sense. This is why I'm always for a kind of changes of let's say the ending of an opera which, how should I put it, produces an effect of truth. You know, you change the ending and all of a sudden... for example, I don't know to what extent do you know, you know at least the story, Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde. At the end, the two lovers die. You know, Tristan is dying wounded, Isolde comes, they die together, although not quite, but that's another story. I've written a book on it. My point is that Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, otherwise not too good director, did something wonderful, which is so brutal, sobering. In his reading, Tristan dies alone. Isolde—for Isolde this was a short love affair, sorry, it's over now, I return to my husband—Tristan just imagines Isolde to die alone. It makes so much more sad, the story. Or my ultimate temptation—sorry for annoying you, at the end I will return to the Ambedkar and Laws of Manu—I hope a story which probably you know, Antigone. I tend, I'm even in contact with some composers, maybe Michael Nyman, to do a kind of a Brecht-style short opera with three versions. The first—it would be like what Brecht did in some of his learning plays, that the basic story is the same, you know it, then at a certain point which with me would be when Antigone has the conflict, confrontation with Creon who prohibits the funeral of her brother, three different turns. First version would have been the same as we all know: Creon says no, Antigone is buried alive, the son... blah blah... what we know. In the second version—now this is a really evil one—Antigone would succeed and would convince Creon: "Yeah, yeah, human dignity, everybody deserves a funeral, let's bury Polineices." But then, as Creon predicted, because Polineices was considered by the majority as a traitor, this triggers civil war, the whole city is ruined. A kind of an anti-Antigone version. And my idea is at the end to have Antigone walking around, everything is in ruins, in blood, and Antigone as this heart-bleeding liberal quoting herself, you know, saying that, "Oh but," how is it, the famous line, "I'm created for love, not for war, I didn't really want this," and so on and so on. So an anti-Antigone version. Because Antigone is a bitch, I never liked her. Hegel in his aesthetics has an ingenious insight. Hegel sees the beginning of comedy, of this twist from tragedy to comedy, already in Antigone. You know where? It's really a nice reading. Hegel was not an idiot. When Antigone is condemned and changed into... I mean outcast. At that point, before she is an egotist bitch, you can see, brutal towards her sister and so on, she starts to treat herself as a poetic topic. She has a speech where she says, "Like that old hero from our mythology, like that I am." In other words, she's already doing her PR, how should I put it? You know, she's already composing poems about herself. She is already narcissistically imagining what a beautiful tragic victim she is now, like that god, like this god, and so on and so on. It's a fake already. But okay, now comes the point. The third version would have been my preferred one, a kind of a hardline leftist, I wouldn't say Stalinist. Usually, unfortunately, the chorus, not only in Sophocles but in most of Greek tragedies, is the agency of common stupidity. Chorus says big wisdoms, and I don't believe in a wisdom of language. Yesterday, replying to a question apropos Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer, I also already remind my listeners of how Elfriede Jelinek, this Austrian writer, said something wonderful. He said at its most fundamental level language is lying, it's a lie and we have to torture the language to make it tell the truth. And I think chorus is language at its purest. Chorus are wisdoms. What are wisdoms? Proverb is a wisdom for me. What is a proverb? It's the most opportunistic thing you can imagine. Anything goes. Let's say I do something risky and I succeed. I don't know what you have in your country, in my language we have dozens of proverbs to just... like "only those who risk profit" or this kind of a... as a wisdom. Say let's say I don't succeed, I fail. We again have dozens of... like for example, a nice vulgarity: we have our standard vulgar version is something like—we put it in much more brutal terms—"you cannot urinate against the wind," no? Like "don't go...". You know, this is wisdom. So my dream of Antigone would have been to change the role of the chorus into a like—okay, to cut a long story short so that we don't lose too much time—when the two are struggling, bury not Antigone and Creon, chorus constitutes itself as a democratic committee of the city, arrests both of them as... and establishing a kind of a popular dictatorship. You know, this would be my Antigone, my god, no? I mean, none of those, you are just fighting with each other, bourgeois. And I'm very radical here. My other dream is—admit it, this is pretty crazy, but this is a mega experiment, I don't have, I don't know, half a billion at least to do this and permission—to reshoot Star Wars by rehabilitating the Emperor and Darth Vader. What if we say that all that Jedi and so on, these are reactionary particular feudalists and so on, and the Emperor and Darth Vader are the progressives who want equality, want wash away all this—I will ironically use it—this kind of a caste-different systems, you know, this Princess Amidala Naboo here, all that? Maybe they are the progressives, maybe we should change the entire perspective here. But okay, so nonetheless, to return to this problem tragedy, farce. To go back with it: in my book, tragedy is September 11th. I'm not saying it's a central event. I mean, my god, already your event is much more crucial even as a symptom of time. By "your event" I mean Bhopal, no? And I don't know if you agree, but many people were unmasked there. Sorry if I offend some of you. I always followed Christopher Hitchens' missionary position. I never had any respect for Mother Teresa. And I read how, you know, the very next morning she was there in Bhopal saying, "Don't blame anyone, it was God's will," and so on and so on, no? She was for me the lowest of these—how should I put it—paid corrupted ideologists. Absolutely no respect for her. Okay, so let's say tragedy and farce is the financial crisis of the last year. But now I would like to take another approach and to use the same farce, financial crisis, and another tragedy which is not a single tragedy but tragedy of looming ecological catastrophe. This is maybe the best way to begin. You know that a month ago, I think it was a month ago, there was this big conference of all leaders of the great powers in Copenhagen to find a way to confront ecology. And the key to see—if you want to get a simple signal of where do we stand—compare that response to ecological threat with the response to financial crisis. You know, we have all these other crises. We have ecology, we have poverty, we have millions dying because of illness. Everybody knows that the whole problem of AIDS in Africa, more or less, could be solved—some doctors even told me the number, about billion dollars. Now you will say this is a lot. Yeah, but it's nothing compared to what was immediately spent for the financial crisis. You see the paradox? We all know we can all die, life can be changed. And I even am not an ecological fundamentalist. I think those who claim, "But we cannot be sure, is it sun, man and so on," I mean who is causing things, problems? They are right, but this for me makes the situation even more tragic, you know? Namely, the fact that the situation is non-transparent. We really don't know. That's the tragic moment of—this is more genuinely tragic of humanity. This logic of hamartia, you know, like you do something and then you have to confront consequences of which you were not aware. For example, I have friends in China, half-dissidents, who told me that—that's what they told me, I'm not a scientist to judge it—that there is a kind of an agreement in Chinese community, community of scientists, geologists and so on, that—remember the big earthquake there, when was it, two years ago or where? That it was basically man-made. How? They claim that because they know the fault lines deep into the earth, that you know this big Three Gorges Dam they're building, these new gigantic lakes created are precisely above the area of this key—how do you call it—breaks beneath in the earth. And they that they put a strong, such a strong additional pressure, disturbing the fragile balance, that if not directly causing the earthquake, they at least strongly contributed to it. And it is one of yours, with whom I otherwise don't agree but I respect him—one of yours, I mean an Indian theoretician, Dipesh Chakrabarty, who works in, I think, in Chicago, who published recently an interesting text claiming that elements like this signal that we are entering a new era, a new even geological era. It's no longer Pleistocene or what what all that, it's Anthropocene in the sense that we humanity are becoming so powerful that we are even becoming an ecological—sorry—a geological factor. But the problem is that this power is not a transparent power. We produce effects but we don't control them. We don't know. So again, taking all this into account, the non-transparency of the situation and so on, doesn't mean we should relativize ecological crisis. The conclusion of "we cannot be sure" is not "okay, so let's do nothing," it's that we should work even more, trying to understand, taking measures and so on and so on. Okay, so now I come to my first conclusion. Did you notice the stupidity of it, how when we are facing ecological crisis, there is always time for endless negotiations? All the ideological conflicts explode, like one of the preferred games of big Western powers is to blame you, like CIB (China, India, Brazil), it's called by some of my friends—China, India, Brazil. You are the three big guys, no? Brazil is destroying the lungs of humanity in the rainforest and so on and so on. Either you use it in this way or whatever, we are all playing games. But do you know what a miserable result there was? They promised some billions to poor, but even this is thinned out, there are no obligations, it's all just promises and so on. So basically they don't take it seriously. On the contrary, and here our survival is at stake, but they deal with it as something: "Okay, okay, we have time to negotiate, postpone it and so on." With financial crisis, this was the real. You remember, in one week they found first billion dollars, then the numbers get sublime in the Kantian sense, beyond representation. I mean not that I have it, but somewhere till billion, I can at least vaguely imagine what this is. Beyond, it simply becomes unrepresentable, how should I put it, no? And this is what shocked me, how even in the United States, which boasts to be the big democracy and so on, for a moment they even almost suspended democracy. What I mean by this? Do you remember a year and four months ago, or five, in September when the crisis exploded? Do you remember first it was still President Bush proposed to the Congress this first big measure, billions of dollars. Congress voted no with a large majority. Then something remarkable happened. A kind of a de facto—of course not formal—suspension of democracy in the sense that all, the entire political class—Bush, Obama, McCain, all of them—went in panic to the Congress and basically told them what: "Listen, no bullshit, we need this money, it has to be done now. Now there is no place for democratic debates, it has to be done, no debate." And the Congress was blackmailed, you remember. One week later, the money was there. We don't kid here. It's really true what my good friend Fredric Jameson told me once, referring to all these catastrophic movies, the last one being where, you know, that you disappeared there, up to Himalaya, you know, that big wave... that how it's much easier for us today to imagine—to imagine the end of the life on the entire earth—we have every year at least two-three films imagining this—than to imagine an even modest but nonetheless strong change in capitalism. It is as if, you know—to put it in ironic terms—maybe the life of earth will end and so on, but capitalism is always here. And can you imagine this change? How, I remember when I was young, unfortunately I'm old enough, that there were still debates like, "Is capitalism here to stay? Will it be socialism? Will it be some other new authoritarianism?" or all those debates. "Is the state here to stay? Can we have another organization?" But we supposed life will go on and we have alternatives. Now, nobody even debates all this. I mean, even the left is becoming, at least in the West—with you, I hope it is at least a little bit different—the left more and more is becoming, let's call it, ethico-legal left. Focusing on cultural problems, formulated already in the ideological terms of victimization, harassment, and then how to legally solve the problem. What does this show? I want to make a first more theoretical proposal here. The conflict between capitalism and ecology may appear to be a typical conflict between egotistic, short-term interests and the properly ethical care for the common good of humanity. It may appear that, you know, on the one hand this short-term profit, hedonism, whatever, this idea of "let's just profit, we'll see whatever happens happens," and long-term ethical concerns. But I claim, upon a closer look, it immediately becomes clear that the situation is exactly the opposite one. It is our ecological concerns which are grounded in the utilitarian sense of survival and as such they lack the properly ethical dimension. In the sense—I mean they are ethical, but you know what I want to say—when you care for ecology you don't say: "This is my conditional, unconditional duty, independently of consequences," you know, this heroic attitude of, to put it in Latin, fiat justitia, pereat mundus—let the justice be done even if the whole world falls apart. No, the problem is here precisely how to prevent the world from falling apart. That is to say, ecological concerns can be put in the terms of enlightened self-interest. If we look in this opposition between ecology and continuing explosion of capitalism for the ethical dimension, it is, I claim, to be found in capitalism's unconditional commitment to its own ever-expanding reproduction. A capitalist who dedicates himself unconditionally to the capitalist self-expansion is effectively ready to put everything, including the survival of humanity, at stake. Like, you know, the system, it must go on even if we all die. This is a strange ethical motto, but I claim it is in a... in what sense is it ethical? To understand this, and here is another thing I would like to understand in your tradition, what would have been in your tradition counterpoint—do you have something that would correspond, Immanuel Kant's notion of radical evil? It's a complex problem in the sense that Kant oscillated and so on, but his basic insight, which was then too radical for Kant, he withdrew—was that—I mean Kant is a genius for me, even in details, you know? Kant is maybe the most perverse philosopher. In the sense that, for example, look at his definition of marriage. Kant. You know how he defines marriage? "A contract between two adults, a contract regulating the mutual use of sex organs for pleasure." No sublimity, that's marriage for Kant. And then he brings this to the end. On the next page—this is from his Metaphysics of Morals, Sitten, customs—he asks: "If a husband escapes the wife, does she have the right to bring him back through police?" His answer is yes, but not of any sentimentality, because legally he ran away with of course his penis which was legally co-owned by the wife, no? So it's purely a matter of getting back property and so on and so on. So Kant developed this pretty terrifying notion of radical evil. What is radical evil? It is, how should I put it, evil for the sake of evil. Evil which is not done for any, what Kant calls pathological reasons—profit, wealth, pleasure or whatever. It's done just for the sake of it. You must know this, that the first one to formulate this—although it's more complex—is the Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost. You know that famous phrase, "Evil, be thou my good." This means precisely: you follow it even if everything falls apart. And the most beautiful example from classical European culture that I know of this is Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni. If you know it, you know what happens towards the end: that stone statue, Il Commendatore, comes and confronts Don Giovanni, telling him, "Now you will die. But you have the time to repent. If you repent, you still can go to heaven. If you don't renounce your sins before you die, you will burn forever in hell." So look at the position of Don Giovanni. His position is clear: from the utilitarian choice he should have renounced, he doesn't—he knows he will die. He doesn't profit anything by remaining faithful to his sins. From any utilitarian logic you should say, "I renounce it, so at least..." No, you know, that's this demonic greatness. Heroically he says, "No, I renounce nothing." This is diabolical evil. Evil you don't do it—incidentally, but that's my experience with my monsters called children—children between four and five are very close to this diabolical evil, although I claim—but that's another point. Okay, so what I want to say is that if this looks—seems to you a kind of a crazy speculation—look at capitalism. It has this dimension of a perverted demonic ethics: self-expansion must go on unconditionally. And I'm not blaming people here. Here I took a lesson from Hannah Arendt apropos of Holocaust, you know? It's not—this doesn't mean that capitalists are some kind of a Byron-esque demonic larger-than-life evil heroes. You concede to them too much. It's in the system. Which is why, apropos of the last crisis, ongoing financial, I hope—probably of course they did—yours... incidentally, I started to love your newspapers. I think they are much better organized than the Western press. It must have been reported, you know, that the biggest scam—maybe you are coming close to it, now comes the evil moment, I will tell you—you know that Bernard Madoff who stolen through that Ponzi scheme or whatever billions, no? And incidentally, I didn't quite get it, but what you were saying here, you know, like "become paid this, become this"—it sounded as your own Bernard Madoff scheme, you know? I hope you will succeed, how should I put it, no? I'm good, see, I am this traditional paid ideologist, corrupted by him. "Do this, yes, buy his books" and so on. Okay, sorry, let's go on. So you know why I didn't like this focus on Madoff. They are—as if everybody liked to demonize him in this way—even one, another one of the most disgusting ethical figures, an old pervert living in a castle in Rome who calls himself Pope, you know. Of course, they joined this game, claiming, "This crisis is not the crisis of capitalism, of our system, it's the crisis of values," you know? It's exactly not the crisis of values. Madoff was just doing in a little bit more radical way where the system is—he was following where the system is pushing you. So okay, this—the reason I—the reason I talked so much about this dimension is to let you know how strong ideology is. This madness of expansion must go on, this is the reality of ideology today. Anyone who tells you we no longer live in ideology, look at this. What ideology is—one of the names of ideology today—is the very force, this compulsion, which you don't even feel as a pressure, compulsion, which makes you act in this sense of: capitalist reproduction must go on, we cannot even imagine and so on and so on. So a little bit, if you allow me to improvise about ideology now here. How does ideology work? Ideology is—you know, forget all those simple definitions, ideology confuses things, mystifies... No, the force of ideology is that it does deal with real problems. But it mystifies them, so ideology is something which mystifies a real problem. What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example of a joke, one story from some of my earlier books that you know, then another story. I remember from socialist times, the greatest cultural catastrophe of the fall of communism was for me the disappearance of wonderful political jokes. One of them, it's a wonderful, maybe you know it, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, it's a joke from Poland about "What is Socialism?". You must—the only thing you must know to understand the joke is that communists in power boasted that our system is the synthesis of all the greatest achievements of humanity, no? So the joke goes: "Socialism is a synthesis of all great results of the past humanity. From prehistoric societies it took barbarism. From slave society it took slavery. From medieval society it took domination. From capitalism it took exploitation. And from socialism it took the name." You see? This is ideology. Now you will say, what has this to do with ideology? Ah, let me apply this to a film which, I hated it, but it's well known, maybe you are too young to see it, all of you, you must have... this film about sharks attacking a small American city, Jaws, the first mega-hit by Steven Spielberg. I claim Jaws, in the Jaws shark functions—sharks function exactly like socialism. Namely, when I was young, people were debating: what does this figure of the killing shark symbolize? There were right-wingers who claimed: "This is American protective racist ideology. Sharks are the threat of the immigrants, third world invading United States and so on." Then there were the opposite guys, Fidel Castro himself, who likes the film, strangely—he said it's clear: sharks attacking the small city is big capital exploiting small American—ordinary... But you know what's my point? That this is the wrong question. The reality for me, the way I read it, it's very simple reading, is the following one: an ordinary American in his daily life experiences a whole series of inconsistent fears. You are afraid of immigrants. But you are afraid of nature, natural catastrophes. You are afraid of being exploited by big banks. You are afraid of state control, whatever. And what the ideological turn, reversal, trick, is to, as it were, exchange all these fears for one fear which kind of stands for all of them. It brings, in a way, consistency into it. And now I hope you get my point, which is that, for example, with anti-Semitism Hitler did exactly the same. An ordinary German in the '20s experienced what? On the one hand fear of banks, fear of the corrupted, he perceived this media, on the other hand decay of morality, moral crisis, promiscuity and so on and so on. And what Hitler did—or general Nazism—and it's precisely from rich bankers he got, he took profit-making, from—from law, legal class he took this corruption of the law, from poor people he took this dirtiness, violence and so on, and from Jews he took the name. You got it? It's exactly the same logic in this reversal. Now you will tell me—let's make a step further here, this—things here are becoming really interesting—because now you will tell me, "But this no longer functions today, we live in a cynical era." I mean even if you have—okay, taking—ignoring fundamentalists here and there—the predominant society—the predominant attitude in democratic countries is one of cynical distrust. There is some truth in it. For example, I report about this in one of my again early books, I'm sure unknown to you, one of my formative experiences—I still think it was shocking—was in the early—throughout the '90s there were many racist outbursts against immigrants in all around Europe. For example, these so-called skinheads, violent youth, they were for example in Germany they usually targeted Turkish immigrants or the Vietnamese; in England—more than you Indians, you were good guys—when they discovered that the majority of Indians voted for Margaret Thatcher, this was you were... Pakistanis were considered more—it was more noble to beat a Pakistani, how should I put it there, no? And so on. And I read or I saw on German TV an interview which really impressed me. Namely, they interviewed a skinhead after they caught him beating foreigners, like with a simple question: "Why are you doing it?" You know what he did? He all of a sudden started to talk like a social theorist. He said: "Our societies have a crisis of values. When I was young I lacked properly paternal authority and in our society..." like the whole primitive social science and—and that's the formula of cynicism. You mentioned it I think or—or should I mention this—Marxist formula of ideology: "They don't know it, but they are doing it." And how Peter Sloterdijk in his book on cynical reason turned it around. He said today the formula is not "They don't know what they are doing, but they are doing it," it's "They know well what they are doing, but still they are doing it," no? And this is I think a perfect example. He gives you the whole theory why he beats foreigners, nonetheless he beats foreigners. This may appear a very tragic situation. And incidentally, this may amuse you: the same goes—at least they are telling me—my psychoanalysts. Not like me, those who bluff in theory. Real one who deal with people. I mean, I—there was a pressure on me to become a practicing analyst, but there are two problems. First one is: I talk all the time. Can you imagine me listening to someone there? And the second problem is... okay, there are many problems. I don't go... Me, psychoanalyst, never. But what I want to say is that friends who really do it are telling me that something strange is going on today where not only the narrow educated classes, but already the average middle classes, the usual candidates for psychoanalytic patients—they no longer come with—in this naive way with the symptom, you know. They tell like my own naive ironic brutal example: a patient tells you a dream—like, "I was penetrating a thick forest, I killed a dragon, then I entered a castle." And then the analyst says: "Yeah, of course, the dragon is your father, you killed him to enter your mother." And then the patient says: "Oh my god, really, ooh, what a shock," whatever. They—they usually come to you already with an interpretation, how should I put it? You know what I mean, they say: "I think I'm an obsessional neurotic" and you cannot surprise the patients. Like, you know, one of the famous phrases of Freud is that—the example of verneinung, negation. How he asked one of his patients, "Who is that woman in your dream?" The patient said, "I don't know who she is, I'm sure of one thing: it's not my mother." And then Freud says, "Okay, of course, through negation." But a friend of mine told me, practicing analyst in France this time, that he had the same experience and you know what—how the patient presented the dream? He said, "I don't know who is this woman, but I'm sure it has something to do with my mother, you know?" Like they concede it in advance. And this is a very strange logic. So some of my friends—here I want to praise theory a little bit—Fredric Jameson even up to a point or Noam Chomsky, whom I don't know personally but I consider him in a wider sense a colleague—they think we live in such a cynical era that we no longer need a theory of ideology. You know, those in power are openly cynically corrupted, so as Chomsky put in a conversation recently, "We just need to tell people what really goes on." I—I don't agree. Why not? Ah, let's go a little bit further. And you have this more widely developed in the book, like to tease you a little bit about the book that you published. I think that today more and more ideology functions no longer in the mode of what in psychoanalysis we call symptom, but in the mode of a fetish. What is the difference? To be extremely simple: symptom is the moment of truth which breaks up the global lie. Let's say you try to repress something—a traumatic experience, a lie, horrible thing you did—but symptoms are the cracks in your edifice, you know? It returns. Like to give you a ridiculous example—consciously ridiculous. Let's say you are an adolescent who is afraid of sexuality. So you say, "I don't want anything to have with sex, I escape into pure mathematics or physics." But then, you know, whatever you do, like then all of a sudden you have a task: "How much energy is released when two bodies hit each other?" My god, you are lost, you know? You know what I mean? This is symptom. It comes back to haunt you in the cracks. But—and of course, in Marx's terms, the symptomal logic is the logic of false universality. Which is very correctly Jacques Lacan, my psychoanalytic master, said paradoxically that Marx invented the notion of the symptom. Symptom is when you look at a universality, symptom—every, let's say, universal order is based on a lie. A symptom is a point where this lie appears, a... Like let me be open here. In Marx himself you have symptoms. Which one? You were also the center of these debates at the beginning of 20th century and later about so-called Asian mode of production. You know, the first Marxist dogma was: pre-class, primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever will follow, I prefer not to... Then, okay, we know in Grundrisse fragments Marx introduces between the first and the second Asian mode of production. But I agree with those who claim that this Asian mode of production appears to be a positive category. But if you look at it closely, how it effectively function, it really means it's a kind of a container for all that doesn't fit others. You know, there is something which, because of maybe Eurocentric limitation of Marxist edifice, precisely, no wonder that Asian modes of production are non-European, don't—don't fit his general scheme. So he pretends just to add a category which neatly fits the series. But in reality there is no positive substance in this category. This category is an empty container. It means everything that doesn't fit in my as it were my official line. And in sciences you often have this. And I claim that this is also—if I may make a jump towards the end—the problem with castes, no? That the untouchables are your Asian mode of production, how should I put it, no? The whole point of ideology is to claim there is a place for everyone in the social edifice. But their place is a no place. They—they don't fit in. Okay, so this is the symptomal logic. General lie, you have to isolate the element where the crack in the false edifice where the truth breakthrough... breaks through. Fetishism is something opposite and much more interesting theoretically. Fetishism is at its most elementary a lie, not the moment of truth which breaks the edifice of lie, but a lie which enables you to sustain, to endure the truth. Why? You know, fetishists are not crazy people who have some fixation—foot, whatever and... fetishists are usually very strong realists. But how do they manage? Let me, I think I even quote it in the book, a wonderful story—wonderful again in the terrifying sense—which effectively happened to a friend of mine in Slovenia some years ago. The story is so ridiculous that it is true, how should I put it. It was a guy who was totally dedicated, happy with his wife and so on. Wife died of a cancer. He, on the surface, accepted it totally. He didn't play a game, like, "Wife is still with me." No, he organized the funeral, everything was fine. But nonetheless, everybody noted—noticed something strange. He was always carrying with himself his old socks or what, some—something absolutely minimal thing which belonged to the wife. He could accept the reality of the wife's death only insofar as he had this fetish. You know, the logic was: "I know well that she is dead, but I have the socks." This is the logic of fetish. You have a small thing which enables you to accept the truth which would otherwise be unbearable. And I think that today ideology functions in this way. I mean, do you really—who today believes in those big things, democracy, whatever? We all know politicians are corrupted, it's all a scam, blah blah blah. But we need a fetish, something which enables us to endure. For me, charity is today the ultimate fetish. You know, you are—you are a ruthless exploiter and so on, but then you give some money to—whatever—a local university, orphanage, whatever—and this fetish enables you to maintain the image of yourself as a good person. You know, you don't really have to change. You know what I mean? Fetish is what—it is not the lie which misrepresents the truth, it is the truth, it's the lie which enables you to endure the truth. Okay, so now I really must start towards the end. I am fascinated by what John Carpenter, do you know that guy, American movie director? My god, you know, American movies were much better in the '70s and early '80s. He made a wonderful movie, They Live. It's a wonderful, silly, short movie. Story: a guy in Los Angeles enters an abandoned church and finds there strange sunglasses. So that... and then he goes to the city, puts them on, and what he sees? He sees the real message, how should I put it. Like, you know, it's wonderfully naive. You have the big publicity poster, like: "Go to Hawaii, have the—have the holidays of your lifetime, enjoy," and so on. Then you put glasses on, it says: "Don't think, spend money, obey," or whatever. Like in a naive way you see the true message. And it's important to—when you buy things or when you read publicity—to try to put these glasses on a little bit, no? I claim whenever you see—it's very popular in the West, this hypocritical charity business, you know—like you find it almost every day in American newspapers—a figure of some usually African starved black child with, I don't know, twisted lips, some terrifying disease, and then the message is: "You see, for a price of a couple of cappuccinos or what, you can make a difference, you can save this child's life," or whatever. True, but what do we see if we put the glasses on? I claim something like: "We live nice lives ruining others, poor and so on. For a price of a couple of cappuccinos, we offer you a way out. You can feel good going on living the way you live," and so on and so on. Ideology is here. You know where, my god, now I'm around into my talk and I will have to... no, no, no. To tell you, you know if you want another example of ideology. Is it popular here? In my country it is and I hate it. All those nature documentaries on channels like National Geographic, Animal Planet and so on. What is really happening there? A French psychoanalyst, Gérard Wajcman, wrote a wonderful text where he isolated many details there. Like why is it when you see... he first starts with his experience in safari. Where he said they went to see with trucks, jeeps, some lions, and lions just ignored them, went on and so on. And claim: "We were invisible for lions." Then he goes on claiming, and this is—okay, now I'm simplifying his reading, it's much more elaborate—but that, did you notice something which happens also in this, always in this animal life documentaries? It's the original Veda. Everybody is at his, her, their proper place, things function there. I think it's basically a—a social utopia, a kind of a good, beautiful fascist utopia. Our lives are a mess, there everyone knows what to do, how to do and so on. Even when they make a documentary—National Geographic often does—about human life. A small Indian railways, there was a report, or a small city in—in North—in North of United States. They treat it, I claim, as an animal community. It's like a big nest of ants or whatever, everybody knows what to do. And this is I think especially important with regard to sexuality. You know our sexual life are a mess, you never know how to do it, it doesn't work, you are impotent, you are too potent, whatever. And what is even more crucial: we need stories. We humans, as this guy Gérard Wajcman put so nicely, we cannot have ahistorical sex, how should I put it, no? We need a story to arouse us, a narrative background. That's, incidentally, this is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. It's not everything is about sex. It's that, on the contrary, even sex is not sex. You need a fantasy, a story, for the sex to function. You must imagine your partner as someone and so on, whatever. So the point is that animals are presented as once where, when it's a mating season, you feel horny, you do it, it functions. Rabbits just screw like crazy, they don't have to tell stories and so on, no? And that's the dream is of ahistorical sex, how should I put it, no? So again, you see how even in this pure escape to nature you can see ideology. Now to really, just to start to conclude, I'm so sad it looks bad for Manu, how should I put it, no? It will not happen. How did we in the West come—come to this? I claim the biggest ideological triumph of capitalism in the West was how it reacted to when I was young, you know, that big contestation, protest movement of '68. This movement targeted three institutions: factories, schools and families. Factories as alienated labor, schools oppressive universities—this is why students were... family as, you know, patriarchal family oppression and so on. The triumph of capitalism was to integrate this critique. In today's cultural capitalism, they say, "No, we outsource it" or "It's intellectual capitalism, no longer this hierarchic standard Fordist work." Family: they say, "No, we are pluralists." I claim that even today, more and more in the West, the ideal sexuality is no longer even a single partner. It's more and more a kind of experimenting with yourself, if it you are bisexual it's even better, no? The idea is: let's have a plastic identity, don't get fixed to one identity, experiment with yourself. School: it's the same. We have all these private schools, quick specialized courses, nobody wants to take the big university and so on and so on. In other words, all this anti-alienation, authentic life, anti-consumerism protest of the young generation in '68, the ruling ideology and capitalist system in a triumphant way integrated it. And this is furthermore, I claim, connected, linked to a very important change in—about this you can read a little bit in the book, but more in my next book—in capitalist relations. You know, I try to be an old-fashioned Marxist, but it's difficult. Like let's take exploitation. I don't think we can simply apply to explain inequalities today the old Marxist notion of exploitation. If we do it, we arrive to a crazy result that, for example, today Venezuela is exploiting United States. Because for Marx explicitly natural resources are not the source of value. I think something is happening which Marx suspected but draw the wrong conclusion. You know, Marx—and this is Marx at his most perceptive but at the same time most naive—in his manuscripts for Capital, usually referred to as Grundrisse, Marx plays with the idea of what he calls General Intellect. Claiming that more and more the productive factor is not work, measured by time, but knowledge. Not only knowledge in the sense of theory, knowledge in the sense of practical knowledge and so on. And he thought, wrongly from this, I think, that the moment knowledge will become absolutely predominant, capitalism will have to somehow disintegrate in itself. What Marx didn't take into account is the possibility of this what he refers to as General Intellect, the collective productive knowledge, being reprivatized again. And I think, to put it in very simple terms, this is what happens today with a figure like, like Bill Gates. He is not as rich as he is because of his—because of super-exploitation or what. He reprivatized something which is the substance of us all. Windows, his language, whatever, is what? It's General Intellect in the sense of: it's the very substance, the space which we all share within which we communicate. And we pay him a rent. It's not profit, it's a rent. And some economists already developed this idea in a nice way: that how capitalism is as it were moving backwards in postmodern societies from profit back to rent. Rent as rent for natural resources is being rehabilitated, exploiting oil and so on; rent for intellectual services; even some—and this is for me the ultimate capitalist social-democratic utopianism—even the problem of unemployed to be solved by paying them a rent. Do you know this theory which is now fashionable among some leftists, of the so-called basic rent or basic income? But typically in Brazil where they made it a law, they call it Renta Básica, basic rent. The idea is that every citizen of a state, independently of his status, whatever, has to get from the state a minimum of money enabling him a dignified survival. So now, rent all around. I—I think that this all this brings us to mystification of our lives. One of the prices—and here if you allow me just five minutes, I would like to return to nonetheless to Ambedkar and to India—the result of this is that we in the West are approaching to a kind of—our own caste society, I claim. The result of all this is that—they say working class is disappearing. It's not, I think it's separating—separating into three. We have whatever remained of the old manual working class, we have so-called intellectual workers, programmers or whatever, but I include here all that aspect of services: psychologists, babysitters, whatever. And we then have the outcasts, those living in slums and so on. And I think these three, I call them ironically castes, are basically three sub-castes of the working class and they are more and more developing their own, not even sub-culture—I'm tempted to say simply culture. And the whole social logic. As a rule, working class—and this is a very sad fact—is as a rule more patriotic, nationalist, religiously conservative. Intellectual workers—I mean in United States you can see if you go to a restaurant: working class eats fat hamburgers and so on; middle class likes these disgusting politically correct dishes, you know, one slice of salmon with two carrots and so on—I'm not that. And then you have the excluded who are usually either religious fanatics or gangsters, whatever—not only. But what I'm saying is that—is that this is the crucial: it's not only from profit to rent, it's from a clear class distinction back to our own form of castes. And the temptation we face is the same as is the same as is the same as yours. And here I think we again just to conclude should return to Ambedkar, Gandhi and so on. It's extremely important. The way I see it—now I feel a little bit stupid, I'm teaching you—but take this more as a kind of exam, you are all my collective professors. I will try to give—what I see in Ambedkar. I think they both were probably, I never know, honest men who sincerely tried to do something for the untouchables. But what Gandhi did is nonetheless a kind of—to put it ironically—untouchable identity politics. His idea is that hierarchy is just a later corruption of the original Hindu system, which is more a kind of—I call it ironically—soft fascism. In the sense of everyone organically at his, her, their own place, and the point is not to abolish the system but to give dignity to each of its components. Like, you know, Dalits are still Dalits but they are children of God, oh we should admire them and so on, all that stuff. While Ambedkar saw the problem where it is. As he puts it, this is I think one of the—in a wonderful playing with words—one of the ultimate statements of the critique of ideology, worthy of the greatest formulas of Marx and others. This, you know, famous saying by Ambedkar: "There are no castes without outcasts." You cannot have a complete caste system. There are some who, exactly in the parallel to the Asian mode of production, no matter how you try to convince them, "But you have your organic place within society"... You also did translate Rancière. But then you should translate his wonderful book La Mésentente, Disagreement, where he develops wonderfully this logic of what he calls "the part of no part." There is always a part of society which appears to be organic part of society but it's really a place—those with no proper place. This was the basic Marxist idea of proletarians: you know, those who are necessary for the system but don't really fit into it. And—and what also Ambedkar saw, this is endlessly important, this is the true way to fight Eurocentrism. He also saw what all radical critics East or West see: that the point is not this liberal inclusion—"Oh my god, it breaks my heart seeing Dalits to suffer, let's bring them in, giving them their space." No, they should be our standard, in the formal sense that they, without proper specific place, they stay—they stand for the dimension of universality. Precisely, you know, this is the biggest lesson of critique of ideology. As Marx put it, proletarians precisely because they have no proper place in society, they stand for the universal dimension of humanity. To see in the outcast the universal dimension, not just the marginals who, "Oh we have to be good to include them" and so on and so on. Okay, I will now really stop just with one, I claim, very ironic—and I cannot resist finishing with—this dimension of where to locate these outcasts. You know, let me make a short detour referring to all these pro—ah, first another point. From here also I claim that one what one should do, if one really—the first gesture of—in dealing with Dalits or even the lowest among them, manual scavengers and so on, is to—not to say, "But they are children of God, oh oh," but on the contrary: we are—not they are not shit by dealing with shit, but we are all shit. And Luther said this—this is why I like European Protestantism, you know—Luther has this wonderful theory in his—Martin Luther, not black anti-racist, the German guy—that—that he said that God is—sorry—man is divine shit. Man was created falling out of God's anus. Man is excremental, excessive. We have—and in a way, in a way Veda already knew it. You know, this is what I discovered with such pleasure in reading the background of the Laws of Manu, no? How—what's the scheme? You know what's the old Veda scheme, you must know it better than me. It's this cycle of life where the stronger eats the less strong. You have this circle, no? Gods eat humans, humans eat animals, animals eat plants, plants eat earth and water and of course within them. But then the idea is that we humans don't want to be eaten by God. And here then priests enter. The function of the priest is to offer ersatz victims, no? So you admit this famous circle of life and then you say, "No, no, but we humans want to cheat," no? "We will bribe gods to—to bypass us in the chain of eating and..." This makes us the excrement. We are effectively... if you—of course this is only the first step towards saying: "There is no Mother Earth." Nature—there is no harmony, cycle of life to which we should return. Nature is one big shitty mess. If you don't believe me, just make a simple reflection. Oil. Can we even imagine what kind of a mega-catastrophe must have happened on our earth to have so much oil? Nature is not harmony, homeostasis. Nature is crazy, catastrophes all the time and so on and so on. It's difficult to accept this. So to conclude: what are then these shit places of shit, invisible places? Again, maybe I should learn here from you, but maybe it's universal. In typical European buildings—this is what always fascinated me—how a wall in a building is never a simple dividing line between inside and outside. There is always a third place created between the walls where strange things happen. A mysterious place where, for example, shit disappears or electricity comes and so on. Because I challenge you: of course rationally you know, canalization and so on. But after you go to the flush toilet, shit disappears from your life. In the sense that it's all hidden beneath. Which is why one of the most terrifying experiences—it's like vampires, the return of the living dead—is that when it gets stuck and shit come—shit come up... comes back. The return of the shit, how should I put it. So what I'm saying is that this is why I like horror movies, you remember, where always in this space between the two walls or what, where there is electricity, sewage, canalization, there are living dead, monsters, vampires or whatever, they are there. Like you remember one of the great Stephen King—and I quite like him, I must say—Stephen King novels—the big one, I didn't read it too long—It. It's these evil monsters are hiding precisely in canalization down there, no? And so this is difficult thing to accept. Not just this exclusion, inclusion, but every inclusion-exclusion creates a third space. And this is our place. This space has to be—has to become visible. Not visible in the simple rational sense. You know the problem with us humans is that, how should I put it, of course we see things. But often we see them but nonetheless, emotionally, symbolically, whatever—like that husband who was able to talk about his deceased wife—we ignore them. To—to look into these interspaces, to see what's going on there. Every society has its own interspaces. This is maybe the first task today. Because this is what I got from you: of course you all know about manual scavengers and so on and so on. You see them but in a way, by way of dealing with shit, they are shit. In the sense of they just do their work. Of course rationally you know, you may even see them, but they are not, how should I put it, part of your space. What I'm saying is that one should do even more than ordinary liberalism. The point is not just to graciously include them, giving them their space. To take there, them as the minimal level of universal humanity. So when you see a scavenger, always remember: the way you deal with him is the way you treat your universal humanity. I'm sorry if I was too long, but that's my nature. Thank you very much. Oh, no... wait. Ah yeah, now works. Okay. You also should... Ah, you go there, okay. This guy. I was actually struck by the fact that Slavoj thinks this guy should be going out with the daughters of older ladies. I notice he did not think that he might want to—older ladies might be quite happy to go out with that guy, Slavoj. You might want to give them a try. Oh no, no, I am here on your side. When I was in the high school, my ideal was to screw the teacher. I don't... I think this is the most authentic sexual experience of our life. You are the teacher now though. You are the teacher now, that's the problem. Sorry, what? You are the teacher now, that's the problem. Let's make it problematic, that's true. So a jinn, a jinn appeared to a man and offered him three wishes. The man was very excited. First of all he said, "I want to be Slavoj Žižek." "Idiot," the jinn said, "you are Slavoj Žižek." Now this is just one of the many jokes and stories that emerge from the internet about this eminent Slovenian Lacanian whom it has been our pleasure to listen to today. And his own jokes and anecdotes are, of course, legendary—the medium through which he makes complex theoretical points, as we saw. Of course, this means that it becomes the burden of every unfortunate person writing about him or commenting on his work to tell a few jokes themselves. Often they are Professor Žižek's own. So it struck me that the truth of the joke with which I began is that Slavoj Žižek longs to be Slavoj Žižek. He never quite makes it though, because Žižeks keep escaping himself. In an interview to the Guardian a couple of years ago he was asked, "What do you most dislike about your appearance?" and he replied, "That it makes me appear the way I really am." Having followed Professor Žižek's work for a while now in growing bewilderment, I understand his predicament. There are at least two Žižeks in there. Several, I suspect, but at least two, and whichever one manifests himself, Slavoj is taken aback and rather dissatisfied. "Is this me?" he seems to ask. This evening in my brief 18-minute intervention, I will focus on this book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. So in the first part, there's the Žižek who we encountered today, whose analysis and critique of capitalism, free-market logic, capitalist media and American imperialism are dazzling and exhilarating. Breathlessly you bowl along encountering such insightful gems as—it is—he says this in one of—in the book: "It is indeed true that we live in a society of risky choices, but it is one in which only some do the choosing, while others do the risking." For his relentless exposure of capitalism's exploitativeness and hypocrisy, his robust espousal of communism, for his sharp critique of America and his explicitly anti-Zionist critique of Israeli policy towards Palestine, conservative opinion has dubbed Žižek the most dangerous philosopher in the West. In October this year when he spoke on this book in New York, there was a bomb threat. We only had like crowds of people struggling to get in—there was an actual bomb threat, despite which the hall remained packed until he concluded a characteristic bravura performance. The only difference was he completed it in minutes flat. With a lot of difficulty. You can see this on Democracy Now!. You can see the minutes ticking away and he actually concludes it in minutes because security guys are busy evacuating the hall. Now the pro—let's say you're not pro-capitalist, anti-communist, Zionist or an admirer of America's war on terror. Let's say you're in fact enthralled, as I am, by Žižek's analysis, by his promise that communism is to be reinvented in each era, his recognition that truth is partial, accessible only when one takes sides. Through the idea of the commons he reaches communism. He says it enables us to see the progressive enclosure of the commons as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance. However, this idea of the proletariat is to be radicalized to a level beyond Marx's imagination. And so the emancipatory subject is no longer a particular social agent but an explosive combination of different agents. "What unites us," Žižek says, "is that in contrast to the classic image of the proletariat who have nothing to lose but their chains, we're in danger of losing everything. We are all potentially a homo sacer and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure." The proper political act today would be to interrupt, he says, the present predominant movement; in short, to pull the emergency cord on the train of historical progress. The task is to castrate those in power and thereby hangs a joke involving a raped woman and some testicles, which you can find on page But the castration is not to be conducted in a direct climactic confrontation; rather, he says, the task is to, I quote, "undermine those in power with patient ideological critical work, so that although they are still in power, all of a sudden one notices that the powers that be are afflicted with unnaturally high-pitched voices." So there you are, you know, willingly seduced by the Žižek—older lady though one is—with his promises of a new reinvented communism, a non-masculinist, castrated, emasculated communism for the 21st century, democratic, fluid, a heterogeneous communism located in and arising from the experiences of different kinds of communities all over the world. Beguiled by this dazzling androgynous figure, you don't notice that you're being led deeper and deeper into a dark alley. Until you realize with a sudden shock, waiting at the end of it with a smug smile, twirling his moustachios, casually tapping his bludgeon against a beefy palm, is that tough guy: 20th-century Marxism. This other Žižek, not the big other which he agrees does not exist, but the big self, as it turns out, proceeds to spell out a radical left politics constituted explicitly by Eurocentrism extolled as a virtue, Christianity, not merely religion in general, and a universalism that necessarily then is surreptitiously coded as European and Christian. This other Žižek asserts the very specific European experience of modernity as the norm to be emulated, colonialism as the cleansing force that brought this modernity to benighted and backward societies, and revolutionary terror as sacred and unavoidable. This communism holds in contempt all the lively subversive political currents of today—queer politics, race politics, feminism—dismissed as political correctness and mere identity politics. So I really don't think Žižek's reading of Ambedkar takes into account the fact that the architect of the Constitution and passionate advocate of modern citizenship, Ambedkar entered the space of citizenship not as someone who merely left Hinduism behind but as one who had entered Buddhism. He entered citizenship with an identity. Ecological movements are rejected because either because capitalism has appropriated the ecological vocabulary—Starbucks is the exemplar—while political movements, as you saw, that invoke Mother Earth, such as that led by Evo Morales, are reactionary because they reiterate, he says, the sexualized cosmology of a maternal order of nature. Why do you think that traditional families are less susceptible to capitalist domination? He doesn't explain and I'm a little afraid to ask. Again, as an example of what he calls the growing privatization of the social, he says children are increasingly cared for not by parents but by paid nurses or child minders. So this is the growing privatization of the social. So this was a little puzzling because childcare was a social responsibility and carried out by people called parents till the late 20th century? That's a nice little puzzle for women who have not found much sociality in the lonely grueling business of childcare which has been their singular responsibility and not of parents. If society and the state and fathers do not consider childcare to be their business and the market does because it is business, then that's how the patriarchal sexual division of labor will be bypassed and a left politics that is still insensitive to this is, as they quaintly say in the US, toast. In short, Professor Žižek appears to be contemptuous of any political movement that is not a formal political party seeking to take state power. This is the one point on which he disagrees even with his friend Alain Badiou, who advocates subtraction—that is, politics at a distance from state power. Žižek holds that the state is to be taken over and made to act in a non-statal way. Surely this is an impossibility, just as much as a capitalism that acts in a non-capitalist way? Such a project assumes the separation of the state from its social environment, the critique of which assumption surely is the starting point of revolutionary politics. I don't mean capitalism is inevitable or omnipotent. The point is that the state is fully integrated into the network of capitalist social relations, which is why every Marxist revolutionary takeover of the state in the 20th century eventually ended up building capitalism. Now, the point is I suspect that Žižek attributes omnipotence to capitalism. Because he sees every single political development as capitalism's triumph. Queer politics arose out of capitalism's needs, ecological movements are co-opted by Starbucks and helps it make more bucks and so on. There seems to be no outside to capitalism. Foucault, of course, has been accused of this kind of wall-to-wall view of power, but even he acknowledged that at the heart of the power relationship and constantly provoking it are recalcitrants of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Foucault reads phenomena like Starbucks environmentalism like this in one of his interviews: "For each move by one adversary, there is an answering one by another. One has to recognize the indefiniteness of the struggle." For Žižek on the other hand, as he wrote elsewhere, resistance is surrender. The other piece of news is that God is back. And not just God in some general sense, but the Christian God, reconciled with Judaism via St. Paul and the Holy Ghost. Now this is a perfectly legitimate project and it—to bring religion back into an emancipatory politics of the left. But this project has to be placed in the context of Professor Žižek's insistence that communism refers to singular universality bypassing particular determinations. Add to this his dismissal of Buddhism as a fetish for corporate CEOs, of
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Islam which is fatally limited internally by its resistance to the universalist emancipatory project. And apart from something breezy about Kali the famous bloodthirsty goddess, as he put it in an interview last week to Time Out Delhi, his evident lack of knowledge of any other religion, it would seem that the singular universality of communism is necessarily
Islam which is fatally limited internally by its resistance to the universalist emancipatory project. And apart from something breezy about Kali the famous bloodthirsty goddess, as he put it in an interview last week to Time Out Delhi, his evident lack of knowledge of any other religion, it would seem that the singular universality of communism is necessarily
Slavoj Žižek
Christian. The Eurocentrism is quite explicit, including a resurrection of an earlier Eurocentric Marx's British rule in India and future results of British rule in India. The recognition of colonialism's positive effects, that it was the vehicle that transported these societies out of their age-old sleep
Christian. The Eurocentrism is quite explicit, including a resurrection of an earlier Eurocentric Marx's British rule in India and future results of British rule in India. The recognition of colonialism's positive effects, that it was the vehicle that transported these societies out of their age-old sleep
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and their repressive traditions. This recognition is the
and their repressive traditions. This recognition is the
Slavoj Žižek
sign, he says, of mature independence. It is, in fact, the left proudly
sign, he says, of mature independence. It is, in fact, the left proudly
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claiming its emancipatory heritage. Colonialism, the European left's emancipatory heritage, Professor Žižek really? The modernity that colonialism brought was in any case by no means a clearing away of the old bad ways. As a large body of careful scholarship in Africa and South Asia has documented, it merely reconstituted something called tradition in new and equally, often more oppressive ways. It seems to me that the only consistent way of claiming colonialism as emancipatory is that of some Dalit intellectuals who then see capitalism itself as emancipatory. Again, a political project that one may not agree with but then at least one can understand it. Earlier, referring to the incident of the Haitian revolutionary singing the Marseillaise, Žižek says that the message of this—of their singing the Marseillaise was this: "We are more French than you the Frenchman. We stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology." He adds first that this would not be the message of those who today might sing the
claiming its emancipatory heritage. Colonialism, the European left's emancipatory heritage, Professor Žižek really? The modernity that colonialism brought was in any case by no means a clearing away of the old bad ways. As a large body of careful scholarship in Africa and South Asia has documented, it merely reconstituted something called tradition in new and equally, often more oppressive ways. It seems to me that the only consistent way of claiming colonialism as emancipatory is that of some Dalit intellectuals who then see capitalism itself as emancipatory. Again, a political project that one may not agree with but then at least one can understand it. Earlier, referring to the incident of the Haitian revolutionary singing the Marseillaise, Žižek says that the message of this—of their singing the Marseillaise was this: "We are more French than you the Frenchman. We stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology." He adds first that this would not be the message of those who today might sing the
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stars and stripes when confronting the US army, but then within parenthesis immediately afterwards, "although as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so." Do my eyes fail me or are the upturned moustachios of that tough guy lounging at the end of the alley transmogrifying into the suave mustache of Thomas Friedman? Of course the problem precisely is that those confronting the US army today refuse the universal emancipatory project, refuse to claim ownership of the stars and stripes. The Haitian claim to the emancipatory French heritage was certainly a deeply unsettling message to send the colonizers, but historically another response to colonialism has been the repudiation of the Western heritage as flawed, not just contingently flawed but constitutively flawed. But Žižek's Kant is forever the pure philosopher of universality, even as he draws Kant's legacy directly from Christianity and St. Paul. While Kant the anthropologist, with his pseudo-scientific theory of hierarchically ordered racial difference, we will inevitably and always have to discover through African and Caribbean scholarship. Of course the elites of the global South are fully complicit today in corporate capitalist exploitation of their societies and colonialism is not the reason for all the ills of the third world, but there are solid Marxist traditions from the global South that offer a simultaneous critique of both. But then the plain fact is that Professor Žižek relies almost entirely on European and American scholarship to make these arguments. Of course that I would make this point is already suspect because it's identity politics to refer to this factor at all, while a Eurocentric Christian perspective is by definition universalist. Žižek rejects what he calls the politics of identity by inviting them, us, into the universal. "Refuse the pact with power," he says. "Refuse to be who power says you must be: woman, African American, peasant." Yesterday he talked at—at Sarai he talked about Bertolucci's film in which in a gesture of defiance a peasant cuts off one of his own ears and hands it over to the tyrannical plantation manager. Žižek said that this is the proper gesture of refusal to power: you refuse to be who it wants you to be. The problem is that in his understanding you have to refuse who it wants you to be by singing the Marseillaise, as it were. The banquet hall of the universal, elegant, spacious, awaits us. It's filled with charming Europeans, there's fine wine, the best cheese. "They smiling welcomingly do come in," they say, "just leave your ears outside." As for revolutionary terror, Professor Žižek justifies it in the name of the deep-rooted structural violence that it must counter, but surely in this 21st century we have enough reason to be suspicious of this understanding that defined 20th-century Marxism. In any case I get nervous about Žižek making a considered argument for revolutionary terror when his response to a question, "What makes you depressed?" was: "Seeing stupid people happy." Okay, look, if there are no stupid people in the revolution I won't know part of it. That train of stupid speeding to Gulag, I'm not sure I won't be there. Professor Žižek, if Stalinism was communism as farce in the 20th century, Stalinism's return in a new guise in the 21st century can only be a tragedy. You of course frequently and vehemently deny that you're a
stars and stripes when confronting the US army, but then within parenthesis immediately afterwards, "although as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so." Do my eyes fail me or are the upturned moustachios of that tough guy lounging at the end of the alley transmogrifying into the suave mustache of Thomas Friedman? Of course the problem precisely is that those confronting the US army today refuse the universal emancipatory project, refuse to claim ownership of the stars and stripes. The Haitian claim to the emancipatory French heritage was certainly a deeply unsettling message to send the colonizers, but historically another response to colonialism has been the repudiation of the Western heritage as flawed, not just contingently flawed but constitutively flawed. But Žižek's Kant is forever the pure philosopher of universality, even as he draws Kant's legacy directly from Christianity and St. Paul. While Kant the anthropologist, with his pseudo-scientific theory of hierarchically ordered racial difference, we will inevitably and always have to discover through African and Caribbean scholarship. Of course the elites of the global South are fully complicit today in corporate capitalist exploitation of their societies and colonialism is not the reason for all the ills of the third world, but there are solid Marxist traditions from the global South that offer a simultaneous critique of both. But then the plain fact is that Professor Žižek relies almost entirely on European and American scholarship to make these arguments. Of course that I would make this point is already suspect because it's identity politics to refer to this factor at all, while a Eurocentric Christian perspective is by definition universalist. Žižek rejects what he calls the politics of identity by inviting them, us, into the universal. "Refuse the pact with power," he says. "Refuse to be who power says you must be: woman, African American, peasant." Yesterday he talked at—at Sarai he talked about Bertolucci's film in which in a gesture of defiance a peasant cuts off one of his own ears and hands it over to the tyrannical plantation manager. Žižek said that this is the proper gesture of refusal to power: you refuse to be who it wants you to be. The problem is that in his understanding you have to refuse who it wants you to be by singing the Marseillaise, as it were. The banquet hall of the universal, elegant, spacious, awaits us. It's filled with charming Europeans, there's fine wine, the best cheese. "They smiling welcomingly do come in," they say, "just leave your ears outside." As for revolutionary terror, Professor Žižek justifies it in the name of the deep-rooted structural violence that it must counter, but surely in this 21st century we have enough reason to be suspicious of this understanding that defined 20th-century Marxism. In any case I get nervous about Žižek making a considered argument for revolutionary terror when his response to a question, "What makes you depressed?" was: "Seeing stupid people happy." Okay, look, if there are no stupid people in the revolution I won't know part of it. That train of stupid speeding to Gulag, I'm not sure I won't be there. Professor Žižek, if Stalinism was communism as farce in the 20th century, Stalinism's return in a new guise in the 21st century can only be a tragedy. You of course frequently and vehemently deny that you're a
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Stalinist, but we saw you in the film about yourself with a poster of a resplendent Stalin on the wall of your home. You say, "This is just for people who come to be shocked and hopefully they get out." But don't you always insist, good Lacanian that you are, that the idea of the richness of inner life is fundamentally fake? You say the story we tell—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is thus a lie. The truth lies rather outside in what we do. Professor Žižek, I'm worried. Stalin is your poster boy. That's what we see you do. Okay, okay, okay. I hope I have some time to answer. I'm just—I go there rather. I'm just sad that we don't have more time. This convinced me more than ever that—yeah, yeah, absolutely less than one hour, yeah, absolutely. No, no, serious, I will be brief. That you know that absolutely I stand where I am. Let me try to go... First this Stalin poster boy and so on and so on and so on. Look at how you fetishize the image of Stalin there. Look at how it really functions. It doesn't—why do you automatically assume it functions as: "I admire Stalin and so on and so on." It's a reminder that especially those who criticize Stalin today didn't do their job properly. For me Stalin is still the big trauma, ethical catastrophe, as I've written again and again, of the West. And what shocks me utterly is to what extent we don't really have—how should I put it—we don't really know what was Stalinism. I don't buy simply this story, "Oh it was crime blah blah blah." Give tell me one good theory of Stalinism, my god. It's just condemned. I think my—the message of that poster is: "Sorry, Stalin is still a challenge." Not a challenge in the sense of model to be copied and so on. But a challenge of—this is what shocks me again and again—how was it possible? Take the most creative, feminist, sensitive aspect of Western Marxism, Frankfurt School. Read all of Habermas. You were never have guessed that there was something like Stalinism in the 20th century. Isn't this symptomatic? You have Frankfurt School. What is their big point? Dialectic of Enlightenment. As you said, dialectic of enlightenment means—the horrors of 20th century were not simply part of some remains of the past but were generated by the very dialectic of inherent dialectic of modernity. But isn't Stalinism a much more radical example of dialectic of enlightenment than fascism? Why then... that's for me one of the big intellectual enigmas of 20th century. All the left play one of the two games: either you politely ignore Stalinism—of course you pay lip service to it, it's bad and so on. But look, in the whole Frankfurt School, it's only Marcuse who wrote that book, Soviet Marxism, but which is in no way a general analysis of Stalinism, is just a very ambiguous disengaged analysis of the consequences of Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech. Again, take Habermas. The world was falling around, communism disintegrated—I'm not—the only intervention of Habermas that I am aware of, significant, was a polemics with East German half-dissident writer Christa Wolf when she said like, "We don't want to be we East Germans simply integrated to the West, to the West Germany, West should also maybe learn something from us." Habermas reacted in an
Stalinist, but we saw you in the film about yourself with a poster of a resplendent Stalin on the wall of your home. You say, "This is just for people who come to be shocked and hopefully they get out." But don't you always insist, good Lacanian that you are, that the idea of the richness of inner life is fundamentally fake? You say the story we tell—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is thus a lie. The truth lies rather outside in what we do. Professor Žižek, I'm worried. Stalin is your poster boy. That's what we see you do. Okay, okay, okay. I hope I have some time to answer. I'm just—I go there rather. I'm just sad that we don't have more time. This convinced me more than ever that—yeah, yeah, absolutely less than one hour, yeah, absolutely. No, no, serious, I will be brief. That you know that absolutely I stand where I am. Let me try to go... First this Stalin poster boy and so on and so on and so on. Look at how you fetishize the image of Stalin there. Look at how it really functions. It doesn't—why do you automatically assume it functions as: "I admire Stalin and so on and so on." It's a reminder that especially those who criticize Stalin today didn't do their job properly. For me Stalin is still the big trauma, ethical catastrophe, as I've written again and again, of the West. And what shocks me utterly is to what extent we don't really have—how should I put it—we don't really know what was Stalinism. I don't buy simply this story, "Oh it was crime blah blah blah." Give tell me one good theory of Stalinism, my god. It's just condemned. I think my—the message of that poster is: "Sorry, Stalin is still a challenge." Not a challenge in the sense of model to be copied and so on. But a challenge of—this is what shocks me again and again—how was it possible? Take the most creative, feminist, sensitive aspect of Western Marxism, Frankfurt School. Read all of Habermas. You were never have guessed that there was something like Stalinism in the 20th century. Isn't this symptomatic? You have Frankfurt School. What is their big point? Dialectic of Enlightenment. As you said, dialectic of enlightenment means—the horrors of 20th century were not simply part of some remains of the past but were generated by the very dialectic of inherent dialectic of modernity. But isn't Stalinism a much more radical example of dialectic of enlightenment than fascism? Why then... that's for me one of the big intellectual enigmas of 20th century. All the left play one of the two games: either you politely ignore Stalinism—of course you pay lip service to it, it's bad and so on. But look, in the whole Frankfurt School, it's only Marcuse who wrote that book, Soviet Marxism, but which is in no way a general analysis of Stalinism, is just a very ambiguous disengaged analysis of the consequences of Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech. Again, take Habermas. The world was falling around, communism disintegrated—I'm not—the only intervention of Habermas that I am aware of, significant, was a polemics with East German half-dissident writer Christa Wolf when she said like, "We don't want to be we East Germans simply integrated to the West, to the West Germany, West should also maybe learn something from us." Habermas reacted in an
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extremely brutal West European-centric way, claiming: "No, no, this opens already the space for some kind of a German nationalism whatever. Basically his message was: you have to adapt to us, you are verspätete demokratisierung, late... we have..." So no, I claim okay, it's a tasteless provocation, but it's a provocation very much up to the point. I don't want to bore you here too much, but another proof of this failure. Did you see the film which got Oscar, Life of—Lives of Others? It's a fanatical anti-communist film. My approach is: it's too soft towards Stalin, it's a Stalinist system. You know the story: a top East German writer, theater writer, a corrupted minister is in love, wants to screw, he does, but wants more, his wife. So the minister takes over, orders the writer to be totally controlled, to find something to put him away so that he can enjoy the wife. Sorry, this is ridiculous. Something like this can happen also in every democratic party, I claim. If you are a powerful person you can always misuse power, especially in the shady non-controlled world of secret services of secret services. You can always use power for this private principles. You know the true horror of East German Stalinist communist regime was that even if there were to be no minister who wants to fuck your wife, this kind of a writer would have been under total observation. You see this is the naivety of the film. It thinks to explain this you need a there a corrupted, sex-promiscuous person. It's a naive liberal attitude. We don't yet know, that's my point, and I insist on it. Let's go back to... you know what would be my main counter-argument against all that stuff, Eurocentrism and singing Marseillaise and so on and so on. Well, every good liberal, Bill Gates type, universal humanitarian blah blah, loves nothing more than to say: "Yes, you Indians should"—he wouldn't put it in this terms, he would put it in opposite terms—like "How great is it. You should sing your stupid local songs and so on and so on" and they would admire it and so on and so on. My formative experience here is Aldous Huxley, a very nice, his travelogue from 1920s, Jesting Pilate. Where he gives—he says how his visit—travel to India—how a typical British colonizer was always ready to admire traditional British wisdom: "Oh, we are vulgar Westerners, vulgar pragmatic materialists, how deep they are." The true horror was an Indian who wants to sing Marseillaise. Who wants to prove that as Indian he can be more Western than—that he can as it were beat the West as its own game. This is for me eternal essence, to put it in totally ironic essentialist way, of—of Western cultural imperialism. Imperialism is not: "You must become like us." Imperialism is multicultural differentiation. Imperialism is: "Please keep your cultural identity, it's precious," and so on and so on. My formative experience was in South Africa. You remember apartheid. The infinite greatness of African National Congress was to reject any way of playing the black identity card. You know who played this card? That King Buthelezi who was paid by them. He said: "My daughter will not marry a white guy, we have to keep our identity," and so on and so on. And as I was told here by my some friends, you know who were the inventors of apartheid? Anthropologists
extremely brutal West European-centric way, claiming: "No, no, this opens already the space for some kind of a German nationalism whatever. Basically his message was: you have to adapt to us, you are verspätete demokratisierung, late... we have..." So no, I claim okay, it's a tasteless provocation, but it's a provocation very much up to the point. I don't want to bore you here too much, but another proof of this failure. Did you see the film which got Oscar, Life of—Lives of Others? It's a fanatical anti-communist film. My approach is: it's too soft towards Stalin, it's a Stalinist system. You know the story: a top East German writer, theater writer, a corrupted minister is in love, wants to screw, he does, but wants more, his wife. So the minister takes over, orders the writer to be totally controlled, to find something to put him away so that he can enjoy the wife. Sorry, this is ridiculous. Something like this can happen also in every democratic party, I claim. If you are a powerful person you can always misuse power, especially in the shady non-controlled world of secret services of secret services. You can always use power for this private principles. You know the true horror of East German Stalinist communist regime was that even if there were to be no minister who wants to fuck your wife, this kind of a writer would have been under total observation. You see this is the naivety of the film. It thinks to explain this you need a there a corrupted, sex-promiscuous person. It's a naive liberal attitude. We don't yet know, that's my point, and I insist on it. Let's go back to... you know what would be my main counter-argument against all that stuff, Eurocentrism and singing Marseillaise and so on and so on. Well, every good liberal, Bill Gates type, universal humanitarian blah blah, loves nothing more than to say: "Yes, you Indians should"—he wouldn't put it in this terms, he would put it in opposite terms—like "How great is it. You should sing your stupid local songs and so on and so on" and they would admire it and so on and so on. My formative experience here is Aldous Huxley, a very nice, his travelogue from 1920s, Jesting Pilate. Where he gives—he says how his visit—travel to India—how a typical British colonizer was always ready to admire traditional British wisdom: "Oh, we are vulgar Westerners, vulgar pragmatic materialists, how deep they are." The true horror was an Indian who wants to sing Marseillaise. Who wants to prove that as Indian he can be more Western than—that he can as it were beat the West as its own game. This is for me eternal essence, to put it in totally ironic essentialist way, of—of Western cultural imperialism. Imperialism is not: "You must become like us." Imperialism is multicultural differentiation. Imperialism is: "Please keep your cultural identity, it's precious," and so on and so on. My formative experience was in South Africa. You remember apartheid. The infinite greatness of African National Congress was to reject any way of playing the black identity card. You know who played this card? That King Buthelezi who was paid by them. He said: "My daughter will not marry a white guy, we have to keep our identity," and so on and so on. And as I was told here by my some friends, you know who were the inventors of apartheid? Anthropologists
unknown
formulated it, very tolerant there. I mean, it's interesting to read justifications of apartheid. I know it's a scam, but it's a scam which socially functions as discourse. It wasn't "they are less." It was vaguely something like this: "What a precious pearl of humanity are these native tribal society with their organic wisdom. Do we have the right to—to—to accept them so that this wonderful wisdom will be lost and so on and so on? Isn't it our duty to protect their difference?" Now you will say this is pure hypocrisy. Yes and no. Because I claim the worst form of white racism is then when we come to third world countries and tell them: "Don't become vulgar consumers like us, retain your authentic self," and so on and so on. This is the... this is my big lesson. But let me go on here. Just concerning feminism and so on. Where did you get that I oppose it? Explicitly in polemics with Ernesto Laclau and all of them, all of them. I emphasize, of course I'm not saying we should wait for big class struggle and don't do to all these particular struggles. All I am saying is that all these particular struggles are, here I insist, I'm sorry, basically progressive but at the same time inherently ambiguous. In the sense that, for example, take today's United States feminism. It's for me an ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand when it's dealing with real women's rights, abortion, especially when—and they do it very rarely—it approaches truly traumatic points of exploitation of those dispossessed Mexican women whatever blah blah. I totally support it. But how is it not possible to see, I claim really—it's not marginal—predominant class dimension of American feminism. Whenever I talked with them, I can hear upper-middle classes making fun of stupid patriarchal lower classes. This dimension is irreducible in American feminism. And I want feminism who doesn't play this game. It's the same with gay... this is what shocks me. That's my aversion to American all this sex class and so on: how the implicit target is as a rule the stupid redneck ordinary working-class patriarchal... that's—that's my all problem. I'm the first who is aware—incidentally, this is why, this is my problem with identity politics, or this translation of racist problems, problems of racism, into tolerance. That's where I draw my gun. Tolerance. Why? No, nothing against tolerance, you see, not that I'm for intolerance. What I am for is that we should question why is it that today in the developed West, problems of racism, sexism and so on—this for me ideology—are automatically translated more or less into problems of tolerance. And then you have this bullshit. Like a typical American cultural studies: how does it deal with racism? They claim it's aversion towards the foreign. It's as if—to caricaturize a little bit but just a little bit—if you read some American cultural criticism you would have thought that Americans are exploiting Mexican immigrant workers because they don't tolerate their otherness. And then you have
formulated it, very tolerant there. I mean, it's interesting to read justifications of apartheid. I know it's a scam, but it's a scam which socially functions as discourse. It wasn't "they are less." It was vaguely something like this: "What a precious pearl of humanity are these native tribal society with their organic wisdom. Do we have the right to—to—to accept them so that this wonderful wisdom will be lost and so on and so on? Isn't it our duty to protect their difference?" Now you will say this is pure hypocrisy. Yes and no. Because I claim the worst form of white racism is then when we come to third world countries and tell them: "Don't become vulgar consumers like us, retain your authentic self," and so on and so on. This is the... this is my big lesson. But let me go on here. Just concerning feminism and so on. Where did you get that I oppose it? Explicitly in polemics with Ernesto Laclau and all of them, all of them. I emphasize, of course I'm not saying we should wait for big class struggle and don't do to all these particular struggles. All I am saying is that all these particular struggles are, here I insist, I'm sorry, basically progressive but at the same time inherently ambiguous. In the sense that, for example, take today's United States feminism. It's for me an ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand when it's dealing with real women's rights, abortion, especially when—and they do it very rarely—it approaches truly traumatic points of exploitation of those dispossessed Mexican women whatever blah blah. I totally support it. But how is it not possible to see, I claim really—it's not marginal—predominant class dimension of American feminism. Whenever I talked with them, I can hear upper-middle classes making fun of stupid patriarchal lower classes. This dimension is irreducible in American feminism. And I want feminism who doesn't play this game. It's the same with gay... this is what shocks me. That's my aversion to American all this sex class and so on: how the implicit target is as a rule the stupid redneck ordinary working-class patriarchal... that's—that's my all problem. I'm the first who is aware—incidentally, this is why, this is my problem with identity politics, or this translation of racist problems, problems of racism, into tolerance. That's where I draw my gun. Tolerance. Why? No, nothing against tolerance, you see, not that I'm for intolerance. What I am for is that we should question why is it that today in the developed West, problems of racism, sexism and so on—this for me ideology—are automatically translated more or less into problems of tolerance. And then you have this bullshit. Like a typical American cultural studies: how does it deal with racism? They claim it's aversion towards the foreign. It's as if—to caricaturize a little bit but just a little bit—if you read some American cultural criticism you would have thought that Americans are exploiting Mexican immigrant workers because they don't tolerate their otherness. And then you have
Slavoj Žižek
one step further, pseudo-Freudian, where they say: "We don't tolerate their otherness because
one step further, pseudo-Freudian, where they say: "We don't tolerate their otherness because
unknown
we don't tolerate—Julia
we don't tolerate—Julia
Slavoj Žižek
Kristeva move—the
Kristeva move—the
unknown
otherness of myself." In other words, to solve problem we have
otherness of myself." In other words, to solve problem we have
Slavoj Žižek
to go deep into ourselves and all that stuff and so on and so on. So no, I'm for all these struggles. And what only I claim is that it gets complex. And I'm not even all the time on the side of the oppressed. For example, now I'm concretely engaged, I was there, in a very curious obscure phenomenon in Netherlands, Amsterdam, Rotterdam. The Dutch gay people started to join right-wing nationalist parties because some of them were attacked by Muslim immigrants. And this is a very touchy problem. They claim: "We would be for their rights, but my god, they—they are not only theoretically claiming we are sinners, they are attacking us" and so on and so on. What to do here? I think both direct choices are wrong. One shouldn't simply say in patronizing way to Muslims: "Sorry, first become multicultural tolerant like us, then we can talk." But for me absolutely the this nationalist gay position is not the whole truth. You should also say, "But are we really innocent? Didn't we treating them like, you know, excluding them, treating them like underprivileged and so on and so on? Where—where were we there?" My miracle, my ideal, to give you an example, is what my friend Udi Aloni is doing in Israel. Magic, magic can happen here. It's something so wonderful. He organized among others a group of Tel Aviv lesbians, you know, like really radical with all the chains, whatever, whatever he'll do. Sorry for caricature, but they went there and joined very conservative covered Muslim Palestinian women. And a miracle happened. These women for whom lesbians should be the horror of the horror, whatever. They were so—they—they—they—they—they—they—they—they—they started to appreciate it, you know, in the common struggle. It worked. Here I—here I locate—here I locate the problem. So of course I—no, not only this, as I developed often explicitly, for example among other places in my introduction to the choice of Mao Zedong's texts. I follow a Mao—I'm very critical there of Mao Zedong, I don't idealize him—where I apply this wonderful Mao's insight that to be a true Marxist doesn't mean you should always privilege economic class struggle. There is a certain way there are constellations when if you focus on class struggle in the long term you do the greatest you—you—you hurt class struggle itself. So it's not even a question that always the traditional exploitation working-class struggle is the ultimate horizon and so on and so on. My problem with identity politics itself is where it's—its horizon for me is too much that of tolerance, understanding. You know, there is one big difference between racism, sexism and so on, and class struggle. Formal difference. With racism, sexism, the horizon is usually mutual tolerance. Like I don't know: I'm this, you are that. The idea is: "Let's respect each other. I can be gay, you can be whatever you want, let's create a space where our relations are no longer that of antagonism but that of tolerating peacefully coexisting differences." But the proper logic of radical politics is in a way exactly the opposite one. Our vision is not: upper class should tolerate us, we should tolerate... No, sorry, we want, not physically but socially, to annihilate them. It's a different logic. The logic is the radical antagonistic one. It's not tolerance, it's us against them. And you see, this dimension somehow disappears for me. Ah, to go further on. Capitalism, family and so on and so on. Sorry, but for me, my first constatation here is that, I'm sorry to tell you, maybe we live in a different country, I mean it without irony, maybe I'm wrong. My unambiguous impression is that the predominant ideology today, the predominant—I don't mean even necessarily majority—I mean the—the set trending, not in a superficial sense, in the sense all others are reaction to it, is this kind of a sexual liberation tolerant ideology. I claim that all those moral majority are reacting to it. The—the predominant ideological interpellation today—maybe we agree here, it's a matter of fact, I mean can be judged—is not: "Be a patriarchal father, obey... women should obey you." And then you protect... No, I claim no, and you know what would have been my proof? Like if you look closely at how this moral majority fundamentalists act. They are not even true fundamentalists. I can make even a further provocation. For me there is one measure of true fundamentalists, and they are quite honorable, I don't have anything against them. I don't idealize neither Amish nor Tibetan Buddhists. But something I met both of them, members of group, something I admire them in: they don't have towards the other the relation of envy. They are usually very benevolent: "Oh you live what you live, for us you are a little bit crazy but blah blah." But a true fundamentalist is like this. American religious fundamentalists, their basic fact is envy. They are obsessed what horrible things are homosexuals doing, what horri... you know, you are fascinated. Which is why no wonder that half of them they discovered, all those preachers were secretly visiting prostitutes or whatever. One of the most disgusting among them, Jimmy Swaggart, even openly said when he was caught visiting a prostitute: "To fight a sin you have to know it," so and so on and so on, whatever, no? So I'm saying that my problem with American fundamentalists is not that they are fundamentalists, it is that they are not fundamentalists. That the very way they deliver their message is in tension with their message. Isn't it clear if you saw a TV preacher that what he is doing there is one big ego trip? They're—the form is exactly the—the opposite one. As to colonialism and so on. Sorry, maybe I'm wrong here, but I read Ambedkar. I agree with him here, not Marx, he says this. That British were not simply bad for India and so on and so on. Sorry, I'm Ambedkar here. Sorry, but they also then think of capitalism as emancipatory. Yeah, but that—I don't think, wait a minute, now you are going a little bit too fast for me. I don't think there is a necessary conclusion here. And this brings me to the fundamental problem when you said subtraction, state and so on and so on. What I meant by non-statal use of the state, and this is for me the only—I'm not saying it's a universal model—who—you said it's impossible. My god, now you are an essentialist. I think state is an instrument which can be used against itself. My god, now you are in this sense essentialist. No, state is not simply state which functions in the same way. For example, there are models here and there. I wonder, I would like to learn more, how Maoists are doing in Nepal. Model for me is Aristide in—Aristide in Haiti. He used the state, but at the same time he kept the popular mobilization at his side and in this way you can say that up to a point state didn't simply function as a state and so on. So just back to that capitalism, family. No, I am not saying we should return to family. I'm just saying it's an elementary critical move that of course it is good. I'm the first to admit great results of '68 and so on, which are: that if nothing else we became, you know, the first step towards liberation is that you see that slavery even exists, you know? The first step of feminism for me is that you perceive your situation not as a natural situation but as an unnatural oppression. So I admit all this, but I think we should remain critical and also see the whatever you call them, alienating blah blah aspects of so-called sexual tolerance in which we live today. For example, this may sound horrible to you but I claim that today more and more the true transgression is no longer sexuality but love. I notice how in France, in United States and so on, you have agencies multiplying which tell you: "We will enable you to be in love without falling in love. We will find you the ideal partner." In a perverse way they are reimagining old arranged marriages, but instead of parents it's experts who... so I think again that this is not the right choice for me. This is a passage. Now we come to the truly, truly problematic point, which is universalit—universality, Christianity and so on and so on. First the problem of universality. No, I'm the first to admit that one should fight Western universality and so on and so on. But I like, yes, I like to complicate things here. First, you know, you should be what do you—like to me to me instantly things get complicated in itself. For example, whenever you tell me Congress Party, my first association is, "Yeah, yeah, those raised by liberals in Oxford there and so on and so on." For me the ultimate triumph of Eurocentrism is when in anti-colonialist struggle, precisely you become independent by adopting that state form. So if you want to criticize Western cultural imperialism, criticized the nationalism of—of Congress Party and so on. Start there. Second point. You know, I—I absolutely don't tolerate this idea of, you know, univer—every universalism is oppressive, we all, you know, it violates our particular life worlds or whatever you want. I claim that capitalism is in a way actually universal. That's why we have today nationalist populism in the West. I claim that today in global capitalism we are genuinely becoming multi-centric. In the sense that you cannot any longer play the game, "Oh, it's in reality American imperialism." No, we no longer have—we have less and less—I'm still—I still—still have them, I'm not... differences between colony and because some of the metropolises or parts of them themselves are also treated like colonies. Here I understand almost the anti-colonialist rhetoric of American populist right-wingers like Pat Buchanan and so on, who said, "But we are also colonized by international capital, we are" and so on and so on. In other words, let me put it in very simplistic terms: let's say we come from totally different cultures and we collaborate on the market. I claim now you can play this multiculturalist game and say, "But we cannot universalize it, each of us understands it from his, her, their life world in a totally different way." But what if—what if this dimension is not the crucial one? What if the truth is in the very act of social exchange which universalizes our position and imperceptibly changes the assertion of our identity into what we poetically call the—the choice of a—of a lifestyle or whatever and so on and so on. So I think that the first thing to say is that capitalist globalization means that universalism is a fact. And universalism, capitalist universalism, is not something that is to be opposed to your particular cultures and so on and so on. It fits them perfectly. But now comes the really difficult point: Christianity. First let me state it absolutely unequivocally: I am an extreme atheist. I—and I repeat this again and again. So when you say, "But you praise Christianity," yes, for a very precise reason. Because the way I read Christianity is that it's maybe you're Eurocentric, I'm not afraid. Because I think in a way that the true non-racism is not to fight against my Eurocentrism. You must feel this, that how should I put it, you know what's my message here? My experience is American politically correct guys. I'm always shocked by their racism. How, you know, on the one hand you can say they are excessively tolerant: the further the culture is from their universe, the more you are allowed to admit your identity. If Native Americans, Indians, whatever you call them, make say: "We must assert our culture is superior, it's wonderful, you have multiple orgasm," if blacks do it, it's okay. If Mexicans do it, so-so, it starts to get problematic. If Italians, Irish do it, uh-oh, we have to be careful. If white Protestants do it, fascism, racism and so on. Now, it's not that I don't agree with this. What I'm saying is that this self-depreciation is inherently hypocritical. It always is combined with another dark subterranean of thought which says: "Yes, my particular identity is prohibited, if I assert my white English Protestant identity I'm a fascist. Which means that my true identity, precisely because my particular identity is prohibited, is universal." Which is why these same people who prohibit to themselves asserting their particular identity love to teach others how to be authentic and so on and so on. Their denial of their particular identity is always a sig—here you should fear Western—Western imperialist universalism. Which is why I think the only way to be truly universal is to simply accept: "Yes, here I am Eurocentric," which means I admit I'm here particular and I leave you a space to be particular in your way. I don't expect—I don't pretend to talk from a neutral space. All I can tell you is why within my culture I prefer my reading of Christianity and then let's start to see where I find, maybe I hope so, echoes in your culture of it. Why Christianity? Let me start very briefly with a brief sermon and so on, if you want ironically. I like the Book of Job, you know that guy who was screwed up by God. Because you know what then happens: three friends come when everything goes wrong for him, he loses his—it's enumerated in the Bible in this order: his goats, his house, his wives and so on, they come afterwards, no? And then three friends come. And each of them tries to convince him that God somehow must be right, that his—his suffering has some deeper meaning. One tells him basically, "Even if you don't know what you did wrong, God is just, so you must have done something wrong." The other tells him, "Maybe God is testing you," or whatever. Their message is simply: your suffering must have some deeper meaning. And the greatness of Job is to say no. And the beautiful thing is that when God appears, he says, "Job is right, all those ideologists, the three idiots, are wrong." Next step, then comes the most beautiful moment: nonetheless when Job asks God, "But why did you screw me up so much, why this?" God's answer is very ambiguous. Usually it's read as divine arrogance. God says, "But where were you when I was creating those monsters blah—like who are you, piece of shit, to even talk about this?" But there are some radical Christian theologians who read it in a wonderful, intuitively—I sympathize it, I don't know if it's theologically correct—way, where they claim: God's true answer is, "You think your life is a mess, look at the whole creation, I created one big mess," and so on. It's a kind of a divine abdication. And from here we come to how I read Christianity. Following Chesterton, I focus on that precise point on the cross where
to go deep into ourselves and all that stuff and so on and so on. So no, I'm for all these struggles. And what only I claim is that it gets complex. And I'm not even all the time on the side of the oppressed. For example, now I'm concretely engaged, I was there, in a very curious obscure phenomenon in Netherlands, Amsterdam, Rotterdam. The Dutch gay people started to join right-wing nationalist parties because some of them were attacked by Muslim immigrants. And this is a very touchy problem. They claim: "We would be for their rights, but my god, they—they are not only theoretically claiming we are sinners, they are attacking us" and so on and so on. What to do here? I think both direct choices are wrong. One shouldn't simply say in patronizing way to Muslims: "Sorry, first become multicultural tolerant like us, then we can talk." But for me absolutely the this nationalist gay position is not the whole truth. You should also say, "But are we really innocent? Didn't we treating them like, you know, excluding them, treating them like underprivileged and so on and so on? Where—where were we there?" My miracle, my ideal, to give you an example, is what my friend Udi Aloni is doing in Israel. Magic, magic can happen here. It's something so wonderful. He organized among others a group of Tel Aviv lesbians, you know, like really radical with all the chains, whatever, whatever he'll do. Sorry for caricature, but they went there and joined very conservative covered Muslim Palestinian women. And a miracle happened. These women for whom lesbians should be the horror of the horror, whatever. They were so—they—they—they—they—they—they—they—they—they started to appreciate it, you know, in the common struggle. It worked. Here I—here I locate—here I locate the problem. So of course I—no, not only this, as I developed often explicitly, for example among other places in my introduction to the choice of Mao Zedong's texts. I follow a Mao—I'm very critical there of Mao Zedong, I don't idealize him—where I apply this wonderful Mao's insight that to be a true Marxist doesn't mean you should always privilege economic class struggle. There is a certain way there are constellations when if you focus on class struggle in the long term you do the greatest you—you—you hurt class struggle itself. So it's not even a question that always the traditional exploitation working-class struggle is the ultimate horizon and so on and so on. My problem with identity politics itself is where it's—its horizon for me is too much that of tolerance, understanding. You know, there is one big difference between racism, sexism and so on, and class struggle. Formal difference. With racism, sexism, the horizon is usually mutual tolerance. Like I don't know: I'm this, you are that. The idea is: "Let's respect each other. I can be gay, you can be whatever you want, let's create a space where our relations are no longer that of antagonism but that of tolerating peacefully coexisting differences." But the proper logic of radical politics is in a way exactly the opposite one. Our vision is not: upper class should tolerate us, we should tolerate... No, sorry, we want, not physically but socially, to annihilate them. It's a different logic. The logic is the radical antagonistic one. It's not tolerance, it's us against them. And you see, this dimension somehow disappears for me. Ah, to go further on. Capitalism, family and so on and so on. Sorry, but for me, my first constatation here is that, I'm sorry to tell you, maybe we live in a different country, I mean it without irony, maybe I'm wrong. My unambiguous impression is that the predominant ideology today, the predominant—I don't mean even necessarily majority—I mean the—the set trending, not in a superficial sense, in the sense all others are reaction to it, is this kind of a sexual liberation tolerant ideology. I claim that all those moral majority are reacting to it. The—the predominant ideological interpellation today—maybe we agree here, it's a matter of fact, I mean can be judged—is not: "Be a patriarchal father, obey... women should obey you." And then you protect... No, I claim no, and you know what would have been my proof? Like if you look closely at how this moral majority fundamentalists act. They are not even true fundamentalists. I can make even a further provocation. For me there is one measure of true fundamentalists, and they are quite honorable, I don't have anything against them. I don't idealize neither Amish nor Tibetan Buddhists. But something I met both of them, members of group, something I admire them in: they don't have towards the other the relation of envy. They are usually very benevolent: "Oh you live what you live, for us you are a little bit crazy but blah blah." But a true fundamentalist is like this. American religious fundamentalists, their basic fact is envy. They are obsessed what horrible things are homosexuals doing, what horri... you know, you are fascinated. Which is why no wonder that half of them they discovered, all those preachers were secretly visiting prostitutes or whatever. One of the most disgusting among them, Jimmy Swaggart, even openly said when he was caught visiting a prostitute: "To fight a sin you have to know it," so and so on and so on, whatever, no? So I'm saying that my problem with American fundamentalists is not that they are fundamentalists, it is that they are not fundamentalists. That the very way they deliver their message is in tension with their message. Isn't it clear if you saw a TV preacher that what he is doing there is one big ego trip? They're—the form is exactly the—the opposite one. As to colonialism and so on. Sorry, maybe I'm wrong here, but I read Ambedkar. I agree with him here, not Marx, he says this. That British were not simply bad for India and so on and so on. Sorry, I'm Ambedkar here. Sorry, but they also then think of capitalism as emancipatory. Yeah, but that—I don't think, wait a minute, now you are going a little bit too fast for me. I don't think there is a necessary conclusion here. And this brings me to the fundamental problem when you said subtraction, state and so on and so on. What I meant by non-statal use of the state, and this is for me the only—I'm not saying it's a universal model—who—you said it's impossible. My god, now you are an essentialist. I think state is an instrument which can be used against itself. My god, now you are in this sense essentialist. No, state is not simply state which functions in the same way. For example, there are models here and there. I wonder, I would like to learn more, how Maoists are doing in Nepal. Model for me is Aristide in—Aristide in Haiti. He used the state, but at the same time he kept the popular mobilization at his side and in this way you can say that up to a point state didn't simply function as a state and so on. So just back to that capitalism, family. No, I am not saying we should return to family. I'm just saying it's an elementary critical move that of course it is good. I'm the first to admit great results of '68 and so on, which are: that if nothing else we became, you know, the first step towards liberation is that you see that slavery even exists, you know? The first step of feminism for me is that you perceive your situation not as a natural situation but as an unnatural oppression. So I admit all this, but I think we should remain critical and also see the whatever you call them, alienating blah blah aspects of so-called sexual tolerance in which we live today. For example, this may sound horrible to you but I claim that today more and more the true transgression is no longer sexuality but love. I notice how in France, in United States and so on, you have agencies multiplying which tell you: "We will enable you to be in love without falling in love. We will find you the ideal partner." In a perverse way they are reimagining old arranged marriages, but instead of parents it's experts who... so I think again that this is not the right choice for me. This is a passage. Now we come to the truly, truly problematic point, which is universalit—universality, Christianity and so on and so on. First the problem of universality. No, I'm the first to admit that one should fight Western universality and so on and so on. But I like, yes, I like to complicate things here. First, you know, you should be what do you—like to me to me instantly things get complicated in itself. For example, whenever you tell me Congress Party, my first association is, "Yeah, yeah, those raised by liberals in Oxford there and so on and so on." For me the ultimate triumph of Eurocentrism is when in anti-colonialist struggle, precisely you become independent by adopting that state form. So if you want to criticize Western cultural imperialism, criticized the nationalism of—of Congress Party and so on. Start there. Second point. You know, I—I absolutely don't tolerate this idea of, you know, univer—every universalism is oppressive, we all, you know, it violates our particular life worlds or whatever you want. I claim that capitalism is in a way actually universal. That's why we have today nationalist populism in the West. I claim that today in global capitalism we are genuinely becoming multi-centric. In the sense that you cannot any longer play the game, "Oh, it's in reality American imperialism." No, we no longer have—we have less and less—I'm still—I still—still have them, I'm not... differences between colony and because some of the metropolises or parts of them themselves are also treated like colonies. Here I understand almost the anti-colonialist rhetoric of American populist right-wingers like Pat Buchanan and so on, who said, "But we are also colonized by international capital, we are" and so on and so on. In other words, let me put it in very simplistic terms: let's say we come from totally different cultures and we collaborate on the market. I claim now you can play this multiculturalist game and say, "But we cannot universalize it, each of us understands it from his, her, their life world in a totally different way." But what if—what if this dimension is not the crucial one? What if the truth is in the very act of social exchange which universalizes our position and imperceptibly changes the assertion of our identity into what we poetically call the—the choice of a—of a lifestyle or whatever and so on and so on. So I think that the first thing to say is that capitalist globalization means that universalism is a fact. And universalism, capitalist universalism, is not something that is to be opposed to your particular cultures and so on and so on. It fits them perfectly. But now comes the really difficult point: Christianity. First let me state it absolutely unequivocally: I am an extreme atheist. I—and I repeat this again and again. So when you say, "But you praise Christianity," yes, for a very precise reason. Because the way I read Christianity is that it's maybe you're Eurocentric, I'm not afraid. Because I think in a way that the true non-racism is not to fight against my Eurocentrism. You must feel this, that how should I put it, you know what's my message here? My experience is American politically correct guys. I'm always shocked by their racism. How, you know, on the one hand you can say they are excessively tolerant: the further the culture is from their universe, the more you are allowed to admit your identity. If Native Americans, Indians, whatever you call them, make say: "We must assert our culture is superior, it's wonderful, you have multiple orgasm," if blacks do it, it's okay. If Mexicans do it, so-so, it starts to get problematic. If Italians, Irish do it, uh-oh, we have to be careful. If white Protestants do it, fascism, racism and so on. Now, it's not that I don't agree with this. What I'm saying is that this self-depreciation is inherently hypocritical. It always is combined with another dark subterranean of thought which says: "Yes, my particular identity is prohibited, if I assert my white English Protestant identity I'm a fascist. Which means that my true identity, precisely because my particular identity is prohibited, is universal." Which is why these same people who prohibit to themselves asserting their particular identity love to teach others how to be authentic and so on and so on. Their denial of their particular identity is always a sig—here you should fear Western—Western imperialist universalism. Which is why I think the only way to be truly universal is to simply accept: "Yes, here I am Eurocentric," which means I admit I'm here particular and I leave you a space to be particular in your way. I don't expect—I don't pretend to talk from a neutral space. All I can tell you is why within my culture I prefer my reading of Christianity and then let's start to see where I find, maybe I hope so, echoes in your culture of it. Why Christianity? Let me start very briefly with a brief sermon and so on, if you want ironically. I like the Book of Job, you know that guy who was screwed up by God. Because you know what then happens: three friends come when everything goes wrong for him, he loses his—it's enumerated in the Bible in this order: his goats, his house, his wives and so on, they come afterwards, no? And then three friends come. And each of them tries to convince him that God somehow must be right, that his—his suffering has some deeper meaning. One tells him basically, "Even if you don't know what you did wrong, God is just, so you must have done something wrong." The other tells him, "Maybe God is testing you," or whatever. Their message is simply: your suffering must have some deeper meaning. And the greatness of Job is to say no. And the beautiful thing is that when God appears, he says, "Job is right, all those ideologists, the three idiots, are wrong." Next step, then comes the most beautiful moment: nonetheless when Job asks God, "But why did you screw me up so much, why this?" God's answer is very ambiguous. Usually it's read as divine arrogance. God says, "But where were you when I was creating those monsters blah—like who are you, piece of shit, to even talk about this?" But there are some radical Christian theologians who read it in a wonderful, intuitively—I sympathize it, I don't know if it's theologically correct—way, where they claim: God's true answer is, "You think your life is a mess, look at the whole creation, I created one big mess," and so on. It's a kind of a divine abdication. And from here we come to how I read Christianity. Following Chesterton, I focus on that precise point on the cross where
unknown
Christ says, "Father,
Christ says, "Father,
Slavoj Žižek
father, why have you abandoned me?" and so on. As Chesterton put it, at that point God stops to believe in himself. God himself becomes—Chesterton's words—for a moment a blasphemous atheist. And this is how I read it: Holy Ghost. In which God dies. In which God dies on the cross. I don't read it in this sense of: God is there, we are here, God sends a messenger, his boy, we screw it up, God says, "Okay son, come back to me, maybe in thousand years again." No, as Hegel put it, God who dies on the cross is the big God himself. And the way I read the death of Christ—and I'm not alone—is not we trust God but God has to trust us. In what sense? The message is, you know, this most disgusting for me justification of transcendent theology, which goes something like—I hate this metaphor—that the world is like a painting. What you perceive as evil is, you know, when you look at a painting too close you see a stain. And you think this is like evil, but then when you look at it from a proper distance you see that this stain really contributes to universal harmony and so on and so on. I found this theory repulsive, disgusting. This is like saying to the Jews or Gulag victims, you know, like "It may appear to you, but withdraw and from a proper perspective it contributes to the harmony." This God, the good old guy who sits back and pulls the strings so that while we live our confused lives we can see that it will end well, this guarantee of somehow the good father is pulling the strings—this God abdicates, dies. For me, Christ's embodiment means: I abdicate. I cannot hold that position. I die, I throw myself and what will follow me is Holy Ghost. The statement of radical atheism. Radical atheism in the sense in which even Stalinism was not atheist. You know, in Stalinism they always played with this category of objective responsibility. Which means: we lived in confused times but the party knows what are the true meanings of your a—like there is a global order where all your acts has a certain meaning and there is a privileged historical subject, for example Communist Party, which knows this objective truth and acts upon it. The true atheism is for me precisely: there is no global order, there is no guarantee of meaning. And for me Holy Ghost is in this sense a community which is as it were in the open. Let me conclude—I will now, don't be afraid—with a wonderful joke which I think makes this point. The joke of precisely God falling into—this is for me the proper Christian joke—like I will tell now a different version so that I don't repeat myself too much. I... there is a nice joke from Stalinist Soviet Union about in '35 in the horrible prison Lubyanka three prisoners meet. And they present to each other in the same cell. One says, "I'm here condemned to five years and I was condemned for criticizing Popov. Popov is the some great nomenclature." The second guy says, "Where I got ten years for supporting Popov, because the party line changed and..." You know what the third one says? "I'm here for life and I am Popov," you know like. This was for me, you know, God up falls into... or to tell you another version, just for the sake of the logic, which I quote in one of my books. This is one of those wonderful jokes from the '60s: big leaders meet God, like Christ... no, sorry not Christ... Nixon, Brezhnev and Honecker, East Germany boss, meet God and first can ask him a question. First, Nixon, Richard, asks God, "What will happen with United States years from now?" God answers, "Well, it will be a Soviet Republic." Nixon turns around in despair and starts to cry. Then Brezhnev asks him, "Ha ha, so it will be. What will be with Soviet Union in years from now?" The answer is, God's answer is, "It will be a Chinese colony. Okay." Brezhnev turns around in despair starts to cry. Then Honecker, East Germany, ask, "Okay, so what will be with my beautiful German Democratic Republic in years from now?" You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. This is the Christological gesture when God abandons this—God as it were falls into his own picture. It's for me a very radical atheism and I'm not saying there is any privilege here. I'm very—very confused still by Buddhism and incidentally when I criticize Buddhism I explicitly criticized A: Western Buddhism, point two: I am just raising a question and I think I have the full right—like, you know, how did Buddhism when it came to power—and don't forget it did come to power here and there—effectively function? Was there really less killing and so on and so on? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's not, you know, it's not and I think there is a necessity in it. I don't—I think that the paradox is that it doesn't really help if you proclaim life is sacred, don't kill and so on and so on. No, wait, it's not so much—no, I wouldn't like to use here the terms good, bad. The what I do apropos Christianity is that I claim that the whole history of Christianity is one big attempt to contain, to nullify the subversive edge of Christianity itself. And it is clear how: the first big movement is then—here I agree with Fredric Jameson—St. Augustine is the great institutionalizer, no, of Christianity. The problem was: take a Christianity which was at the beginning relatively radical, egalitarian—how to combine it with what? Okay, the way I read it, I simplify: first you have Veda, then you have this more radical emancipatory Buddhist moment, and then the mature Hinduism did the trick through vegetarianism and all that shit to somehow incorporate this lesson of anti-life, poverty of life, more egalitarian and make it nonetheless function so that it justifies the very hierarchy it opposed. And Christianity is doing exactly the same. For example, the most beautiful example I know is in 13th century, you know, the great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. He is embarrassed by this problem: how the church is wealthy, we church support princes, wealthy people, but in the Bible it says, you know, it's easier for the camel to pass through the eagle's—sorry, eye of a needle then—than for a rich man to go to heaven. And he does an ingenious sophistry worthy of the Laws of Manu, I claim there. He says the fact that it's better to be poor, no private property, it's good in principle if you are a saint. But for us ordinary people, if you as an ordinary man who are not a saint want to live in a communist way, you are pretending to be what you are not and it's even a greater sin than to be rich. You know, this is typical Laws of Manu sophistry, how through this trickery you—you even justify wealth differences as the only appropriate thing for our real lives, but you even proclaim those who want more equality in actual terrestrial life to be the greatest sinners and so on and so on. And this brings us—maybe we should learn can learn in perversity, Kantian ideological cunning, a lot from Laws of Manu, but maybe you can also use learn some dirty tricks—in this sense some dirty tricks from us in Europe. How masterfully you can make—how this is the greatest ideological... okay, so I hope I made my point clear. Let me be absolutely unambiguous here: I am a radical atheist. I—what I like in Christianity is not Christianity as belief, belief doesn't interest me. What interests me is Holy Spirit in the sense of new type of collective, an egalitarian collective. You know which is not—I don't like the choice of either real life with its hierarchies or this total submersion into some primordial void and so on. I like those who want to enforce, realize in actual life equality, those who don't accept this wisdom but in real life they're always... and this is the only thing what interests me. Which is exactly the opposite Holy Ghost of this standard Communist Party position which is, as I already said, this "we know the big other" or to put it in a different way "we ride the train of history," through us historical necessity realizes itself. One of the big changes we have to do today is to claim that: no, the train of history is not on our time. Here I agree with you, I think you were indicating although... like, you know, it's not that we see the tendency of history—no, the tendency of history is rather towards catastrophe, how should I put it, no? We—it's not that we can rely on any higher historical necessity and so on and so on. But again, my fundamental and just to really finish, all that problem of state, subtraction and so on and so on. You know my problem with Badiou is the following one: that's my problem with that "resistance is surrender" and so on and so on. Badiou's position is the following one: the state is here to stay, but the state as such is corruptive, so the only authentic way is to keep a distance towards the state. I claim there is at least a liminal hypocrisy in this position. Which means that you leave to the others what—like how should I put it—what right do you have then to criticize those in power? I hate this easy moralistic position: "I want out, to be outside power, my hands clean and comfortably to criticize." I rather like heroic figures like Aristide and so on who say: "Maybe the situation is hopeless, but let's—we know we will probably fail, but let's desperately try to do whatever can be done to change something." I'm here even very—very—very modest in some sense. Again, that's my point: if you think the state is here to stay, then for me the only position is: "Okay, let's deal with state, let's try to use it. Then we must accept state." I hate this comfortable position of, you know, politics—how should I put it—at a distance from the state. It's so comfortable to play this game of subtraction, remove your small authentic—your small authentic place outside and so on and so on. Again, the key question, and here I find Badiou and all others who play this game ambiguous: sometimes they sound as if, "Now we live in an era where we cannot contest state," but more often they claim the whole idea of abolishing the state was a utopia, we simply have to accept that the state is here to stay and so on and so on. I, again, I'm too much of a Hegelian to accept this comfortable logic of a critical intellectual who don't want his hands dirty, who wants to play at a safe distance and so on and so on. My idea of resistance is surrender is that there is a certain type of being critical which fits perfectly even if it apparently criticizes power relations. And my problem with American cultural studies is that more often than not they play this game. For example, whenever I mention "but what about exploitation of workers here and there?", I always get a hysterical response: "You are a vulgar Marxist essentialist" and so on and so on. As if, you know, the only thing you can do is to read some Jane Austen novel and detect how in some little bit of a dialogue you can see male chauvinism, whatever and so on and so on. No, I think that a little bit of vulgar Marxism is needed. I proudly accept it. But I'm sorry that we don't have more time, my god, because I think nonetheless—no, no, not as I would talk longer—because I think that maybe our differences are not as big as they may appear, how should I put it, because I'm much more pragmatic. For example, I'm not saying I totally agree with them, but Maoists in Nepal. It interest me very much. You know what I like about them? They probably know the situation is pretty desperate and so on, but nonetheless they didn't say we subtract or whatever, no? They also didn't say we will simply do a revolu—do a proletarian dictatorship or war. No, they simply play a principled but nonetheless pragmatic game. And I think from what I know what they are doing till now is the good thing. You play, not in a hypocritical way, but you play—that is to say you function—within the state logic, party elections and so on, but you keep your organization outside for pressure intact. That would be, if you want, my formula, which was also in at least some countries, also the formula of Aristide and so on. Play the state game but have a popular movement to—how should I put it—with all the cynical threat in it, to give a little bit of push, you know, to the state mechanisms and so on. I think that we in the West are discovering it: that state—there is something so frustrating in, for example, in England. What depressed me is this: take Tony Blair. I remember when I was there, he was systematically voted the most hated person in United Kingdom, and then two weeks afterwards he won the elections. What does this mean? This means that electoral system simply fails to articulate a certain discontent and so on and so on. And for the sake of democracy itself, I think this is dangerous. Because I think that this then opens up the space for so-called irrational explosions and so on and so on. So just now really to conclude: my position is much more pessimist and modest than it may appear. I simply think we are confronting today some problems—ecology, new poverty, biogenetics and so on—which cannot be solved within the horizon of the liberal democratic capitalism. And I'm honest here: the last thing I think is that we need a new Leninist Party and so on. But I claim nonetheless the system cannot do it. And we have simply to start to think. That's all I'm basically claiming. I'm more of a pessimist. My point is not proletarian revolution. My point is the system cannot solve this contradiction, we have to start to think. It's a very modest position. I don't know what will happen and so on and so on. I'm the first to say no, Stalinist communists if anything today in China and so on, they function as even better, more ruthless capitalists than Western capitalists themselves, no? I mean, I have there friends who told me: every Chinese capitalist will tell you if you don't mess with politics, the best place in the world today to be a capitalist is in China. Because you can ruthlessly exploit the workers and the state takes care that the workers will not protest. No, literally. You know, to conclude, a wonderful... Sorry? That's my point, that's the state's job. That's it. Yeah, but was then your conclusion? Okay, where do you stand here? Sorry, I had minutes. No, nonetheless, can you give us a formula? Sorry, what is your formula? Over a drink later because I do not have two hours like you did Professor Žižek. I do have, I'm taking your arguments very seriously. I do not have a formula. I also... No, I know that. And my point is simply this: that there are two Žižeks. There is one Žižek who is someone whom I, as I said, was seduced by. There is another Žižek and that emerges in your work. I follow your work, I can see it emerging even here off and on. The point is that I thorough—I thoroughly enjoyed your being here, I did, I mean... [Speaker's voice obscured by crowd noise] Sorry, I didn't get... I don't think it's appropriate. I like the other Žižek, you know? I like this Žižek. But I just want to say that I... I really enjoyed your—absolutely scintillating. I have very serious differences with you, but this is not the place for me to just be... No, I hope you will take this as an act of friendship, irony please. You know what I think? I'm becoming a great friend of you, but as a friend, when we will take power, wouldn't you agree it would be good for her own good—two years of, not Gulag, re-education camp? Sure! You know, like to
father, why have you abandoned me?" and so on. As Chesterton put it, at that point God stops to believe in himself. God himself becomes—Chesterton's words—for a moment a blasphemous atheist. And this is how I read it: Holy Ghost. In which God dies. In which God dies on the cross. I don't read it in this sense of: God is there, we are here, God sends a messenger, his boy, we screw it up, God says, "Okay son, come back to me, maybe in thousand years again." No, as Hegel put it, God who dies on the cross is the big God himself. And the way I read the death of Christ—and I'm not alone—is not we trust God but God has to trust us. In what sense? The message is, you know, this most disgusting for me justification of transcendent theology, which goes something like—I hate this metaphor—that the world is like a painting. What you perceive as evil is, you know, when you look at a painting too close you see a stain. And you think this is like evil, but then when you look at it from a proper distance you see that this stain really contributes to universal harmony and so on and so on. I found this theory repulsive, disgusting. This is like saying to the Jews or Gulag victims, you know, like "It may appear to you, but withdraw and from a proper perspective it contributes to the harmony." This God, the good old guy who sits back and pulls the strings so that while we live our confused lives we can see that it will end well, this guarantee of somehow the good father is pulling the strings—this God abdicates, dies. For me, Christ's embodiment means: I abdicate. I cannot hold that position. I die, I throw myself and what will follow me is Holy Ghost. The statement of radical atheism. Radical atheism in the sense in which even Stalinism was not atheist. You know, in Stalinism they always played with this category of objective responsibility. Which means: we lived in confused times but the party knows what are the true meanings of your a—like there is a global order where all your acts has a certain meaning and there is a privileged historical subject, for example Communist Party, which knows this objective truth and acts upon it. The true atheism is for me precisely: there is no global order, there is no guarantee of meaning. And for me Holy Ghost is in this sense a community which is as it were in the open. Let me conclude—I will now, don't be afraid—with a wonderful joke which I think makes this point. The joke of precisely God falling into—this is for me the proper Christian joke—like I will tell now a different version so that I don't repeat myself too much. I... there is a nice joke from Stalinist Soviet Union about in '35 in the horrible prison Lubyanka three prisoners meet. And they present to each other in the same cell. One says, "I'm here condemned to five years and I was condemned for criticizing Popov. Popov is the some great nomenclature." The second guy says, "Where I got ten years for supporting Popov, because the party line changed and..." You know what the third one says? "I'm here for life and I am Popov," you know like. This was for me, you know, God up falls into... or to tell you another version, just for the sake of the logic, which I quote in one of my books. This is one of those wonderful jokes from the '60s: big leaders meet God, like Christ... no, sorry not Christ... Nixon, Brezhnev and Honecker, East Germany boss, meet God and first can ask him a question. First, Nixon, Richard, asks God, "What will happen with United States years from now?" God answers, "Well, it will be a Soviet Republic." Nixon turns around in despair and starts to cry. Then Brezhnev asks him, "Ha ha, so it will be. What will be with Soviet Union in years from now?" The answer is, God's answer is, "It will be a Chinese colony. Okay." Brezhnev turns around in despair starts to cry. Then Honecker, East Germany, ask, "Okay, so what will be with my beautiful German Democratic Republic in years from now?" You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. This is the Christological gesture when God abandons this—God as it were falls into his own picture. It's for me a very radical atheism and I'm not saying there is any privilege here. I'm very—very confused still by Buddhism and incidentally when I criticize Buddhism I explicitly criticized A: Western Buddhism, point two: I am just raising a question and I think I have the full right—like, you know, how did Buddhism when it came to power—and don't forget it did come to power here and there—effectively function? Was there really less killing and so on and so on? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's not, you know, it's not and I think there is a necessity in it. I don't—I think that the paradox is that it doesn't really help if you proclaim life is sacred, don't kill and so on and so on. No, wait, it's not so much—no, I wouldn't like to use here the terms good, bad. The what I do apropos Christianity is that I claim that the whole history of Christianity is one big attempt to contain, to nullify the subversive edge of Christianity itself. And it is clear how: the first big movement is then—here I agree with Fredric Jameson—St. Augustine is the great institutionalizer, no, of Christianity. The problem was: take a Christianity which was at the beginning relatively radical, egalitarian—how to combine it with what? Okay, the way I read it, I simplify: first you have Veda, then you have this more radical emancipatory Buddhist moment, and then the mature Hinduism did the trick through vegetarianism and all that shit to somehow incorporate this lesson of anti-life, poverty of life, more egalitarian and make it nonetheless function so that it justifies the very hierarchy it opposed. And Christianity is doing exactly the same. For example, the most beautiful example I know is in 13th century, you know, the great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. He is embarrassed by this problem: how the church is wealthy, we church support princes, wealthy people, but in the Bible it says, you know, it's easier for the camel to pass through the eagle's—sorry, eye of a needle then—than for a rich man to go to heaven. And he does an ingenious sophistry worthy of the Laws of Manu, I claim there. He says the fact that it's better to be poor, no private property, it's good in principle if you are a saint. But for us ordinary people, if you as an ordinary man who are not a saint want to live in a communist way, you are pretending to be what you are not and it's even a greater sin than to be rich. You know, this is typical Laws of Manu sophistry, how through this trickery you—you even justify wealth differences as the only appropriate thing for our real lives, but you even proclaim those who want more equality in actual terrestrial life to be the greatest sinners and so on and so on. And this brings us—maybe we should learn can learn in perversity, Kantian ideological cunning, a lot from Laws of Manu, but maybe you can also use learn some dirty tricks—in this sense some dirty tricks from us in Europe. How masterfully you can make—how this is the greatest ideological... okay, so I hope I made my point clear. Let me be absolutely unambiguous here: I am a radical atheist. I—what I like in Christianity is not Christianity as belief, belief doesn't interest me. What interests me is Holy Spirit in the sense of new type of collective, an egalitarian collective. You know which is not—I don't like the choice of either real life with its hierarchies or this total submersion into some primordial void and so on. I like those who want to enforce, realize in actual life equality, those who don't accept this wisdom but in real life they're always... and this is the only thing what interests me. Which is exactly the opposite Holy Ghost of this standard Communist Party position which is, as I already said, this "we know the big other" or to put it in a different way "we ride the train of history," through us historical necessity realizes itself. One of the big changes we have to do today is to claim that: no, the train of history is not on our time. Here I agree with you, I think you were indicating although... like, you know, it's not that we see the tendency of history—no, the tendency of history is rather towards catastrophe, how should I put it, no? We—it's not that we can rely on any higher historical necessity and so on and so on. But again, my fundamental and just to really finish, all that problem of state, subtraction and so on and so on. You know my problem with Badiou is the following one: that's my problem with that "resistance is surrender" and so on and so on. Badiou's position is the following one: the state is here to stay, but the state as such is corruptive, so the only authentic way is to keep a distance towards the state. I claim there is at least a liminal hypocrisy in this position. Which means that you leave to the others what—like how should I put it—what right do you have then to criticize those in power? I hate this easy moralistic position: "I want out, to be outside power, my hands clean and comfortably to criticize." I rather like heroic figures like Aristide and so on who say: "Maybe the situation is hopeless, but let's—we know we will probably fail, but let's desperately try to do whatever can be done to change something." I'm here even very—very—very modest in some sense. Again, that's my point: if you think the state is here to stay, then for me the only position is: "Okay, let's deal with state, let's try to use it. Then we must accept state." I hate this comfortable position of, you know, politics—how should I put it—at a distance from the state. It's so comfortable to play this game of subtraction, remove your small authentic—your small authentic place outside and so on and so on. Again, the key question, and here I find Badiou and all others who play this game ambiguous: sometimes they sound as if, "Now we live in an era where we cannot contest state," but more often they claim the whole idea of abolishing the state was a utopia, we simply have to accept that the state is here to stay and so on and so on. I, again, I'm too much of a Hegelian to accept this comfortable logic of a critical intellectual who don't want his hands dirty, who wants to play at a safe distance and so on and so on. My idea of resistance is surrender is that there is a certain type of being critical which fits perfectly even if it apparently criticizes power relations. And my problem with American cultural studies is that more often than not they play this game. For example, whenever I mention "but what about exploitation of workers here and there?", I always get a hysterical response: "You are a vulgar Marxist essentialist" and so on and so on. As if, you know, the only thing you can do is to read some Jane Austen novel and detect how in some little bit of a dialogue you can see male chauvinism, whatever and so on and so on. No, I think that a little bit of vulgar Marxism is needed. I proudly accept it. But I'm sorry that we don't have more time, my god, because I think nonetheless—no, no, not as I would talk longer—because I think that maybe our differences are not as big as they may appear, how should I put it, because I'm much more pragmatic. For example, I'm not saying I totally agree with them, but Maoists in Nepal. It interest me very much. You know what I like about them? They probably know the situation is pretty desperate and so on, but nonetheless they didn't say we subtract or whatever, no? They also didn't say we will simply do a revolu—do a proletarian dictatorship or war. No, they simply play a principled but nonetheless pragmatic game. And I think from what I know what they are doing till now is the good thing. You play, not in a hypocritical way, but you play—that is to say you function—within the state logic, party elections and so on, but you keep your organization outside for pressure intact. That would be, if you want, my formula, which was also in at least some countries, also the formula of Aristide and so on. Play the state game but have a popular movement to—how should I put it—with all the cynical threat in it, to give a little bit of push, you know, to the state mechanisms and so on. I think that we in the West are discovering it: that state—there is something so frustrating in, for example, in England. What depressed me is this: take Tony Blair. I remember when I was there, he was systematically voted the most hated person in United Kingdom, and then two weeks afterwards he won the elections. What does this mean? This means that electoral system simply fails to articulate a certain discontent and so on and so on. And for the sake of democracy itself, I think this is dangerous. Because I think that this then opens up the space for so-called irrational explosions and so on and so on. So just now really to conclude: my position is much more pessimist and modest than it may appear. I simply think we are confronting today some problems—ecology, new poverty, biogenetics and so on—which cannot be solved within the horizon of the liberal democratic capitalism. And I'm honest here: the last thing I think is that we need a new Leninist Party and so on. But I claim nonetheless the system cannot do it. And we have simply to start to think. That's all I'm basically claiming. I'm more of a pessimist. My point is not proletarian revolution. My point is the system cannot solve this contradiction, we have to start to think. It's a very modest position. I don't know what will happen and so on and so on. I'm the first to say no, Stalinist communists if anything today in China and so on, they function as even better, more ruthless capitalists than Western capitalists themselves, no? I mean, I have there friends who told me: every Chinese capitalist will tell you if you don't mess with politics, the best place in the world today to be a capitalist is in China. Because you can ruthlessly exploit the workers and the state takes care that the workers will not protest. No, literally. You know, to conclude, a wonderful... Sorry? That's my point, that's the state's job. That's it. Yeah, but was then your conclusion? Okay, where do you stand here? Sorry, I had minutes. No, nonetheless, can you give us a formula? Sorry, what is your formula? Over a drink later because I do not have two hours like you did Professor Žižek. I do have, I'm taking your arguments very seriously. I do not have a formula. I also... No, I know that. And my point is simply this: that there are two Žižeks. There is one Žižek who is someone whom I, as I said, was seduced by. There is another Žižek and that emerges in your work. I follow your work, I can see it emerging even here off and on. The point is that I thorough—I thoroughly enjoyed your being here, I did, I mean... [Speaker's voice obscured by crowd noise] Sorry, I didn't get... I don't think it's appropriate. I like the other Žižek, you know? I like this Žižek. But I just want to say that I... I really enjoyed your—absolutely scintillating. I have very serious differences with you, but this is not the place for me to just be... No, I hope you will take this as an act of friendship, irony please. You know what I think? I'm becoming a great friend of you, but as a friend, when we will take power, wouldn't you agree it would be good for her own good—two years of, not Gulag, re-education camp? Sure! You know, like to
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get
get
Slavoj Žižek
up at five, do a little bit
up at five, do a little bit
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of singing, digging. That would help you, maybe. This is the other Žižek talking. Thank you very
of singing, digging. That would help you, maybe. This is the other Žižek talking. Thank you very
Slavoj Žižek
much.
much.