For a Left that Dares Speak its Name
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2019-10-09 · 1:55:27 · 14,802 words
with Cathy Newman
ideologyliberalism-political-correctnessecology-climatesexuality-gendercapitalismfascism-populismcommunism-socialismrace-antisemitismhegel-dialecticstechnology-ai-cyberspacedemocracygeopolitics-warsubjectivitypsychoanalysis
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture addressing political misunderstandings of his positions on Trump, LGBT+, refugees, and identity politics. He argues that the left's main failure is liberal nostalgia and fixation on individuals rather than systemic critique, and proposes a universalist politics, drawing on Hegel, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X, as the only genuine alternative to both liberal centrism and right-wing populism. The talk covers ecological ideology, surveillance capitalism, the Trump phenomenon, the impeachment debate, and concludes with a defense of universality over identity politics, illustrated with a Jewish joke about self-abasement.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Kierkegaard's distinction invoked to argue that the political moment needs apostles (bearers of a truth they repeat obsessively) rather than geniuses; Greta Thunberg is offered as the contemporary apostle.
The form of multiculturalism exemplified by Kurosawa's transpositions of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky: a work's greatness is proven when it survives transplantation into a totally different cultural context.
as “Mother Nature ecology”
A false anti-anthropocentric ideology that mystifies nature as a benevolent maternal whole we have disturbed, concealing that 'nature' is indifferent and violent and that ecological concern is really about human survival conditions.
as “everyday anti-consumerist consumerism”
The ideological operation by which consumers are given easy ethical tasks (recycling, buying organic, Starbucks charity pricing) that make them feel good while allowing consumption to continue unchanged.
The situation in which incompatible apocalyptic discourses, ecological catastrophism on the left and civilizational decline on the right, confront each other, making any single 'rational' resolution impossible.
as “radical decision”
A decision that is not a choice between pre-given options but where you choose yourself, experienced as necessity rather than freedom, illustrated by joining a resistance movement or falling in love.
A new political figure (Trump as exemplar) who deploys shameless vulgarity not to subvert authority but to reinforce it, making obscenity a sign of solidarity with 'ordinary people'.
as “Hegelian recognition”
Cited via a National Review article's Hegelian reading of Trump: Trump's politics works as the politics of recognition, telling ordinary people 'I see you', in contrast to liberal establishment dismissal.
Implicit in Žižek's treatment of institutional evil: the systemic criminal logic inscribed into state and corporate institutions, independent of the moral intentions of individuals executing it.
Zuboff's concept cited approvingly: the coordination of big tech (Facebook, Google) with intelligence agencies to produce new forms of control experienced as freedom.
Hegel's concept invoked to argue that in any given historical moment one specific form of oppression (e.g., anti-Black police violence today) stands as the concrete embodiment of universality, not merely a particular grievance.
as “the plus of LGBT+”
The 'plus' in LGBT+ read not as an open empirical list of identities but as the name for subjectivity itself, the excess over any fixed identity, the non-identical remainder that is today's subject.
as “hysteria as highest subjectivity”
Lacan's claim, endorsed by Žižek, that hysteria, the questioning of one's assigned identity ('why am I what you say I am?'), is the highest mode of subjectivity and the ground of creative science.
The practice of white liberals competing in self-abasement ('we are guilty of everything') which paradoxically reserves for them the universal position as guardians of political correctness.
The name X read not as loss of African roots but as a positive opportunity: being deprived of a particular identity becomes the unique chance to propose a new, more authentic universality.
Fredric Jameson's concept applied to The Handmaid's Tale: by projecting a near-future dystopia it makes the liberal present feel safe, foreclosing the self-critical question of how the dystopia arose from liberalism itself.
The idea (raised by a questioner and endorsed by Žižek) that the ecological catastrophe is already real for third-world populations while the developed world still treats it as a future threat.
German idealist concept of the moment a scene folds back to inscribe the viewer's gaze within itself; Žižek uses it to explain ideological interpellation and the breakdowns of the fourth wall in film and pornography.
as “universalism beyond sovereign state”
Žižek's minimal definition of communism: a transnational collective agency that can act where both the market and sovereign states are structurally inadequate, on ecology, migration, and digital control.
A contemporary mode of domination that replaces overt repression with medical/psychological framing, gang violence becomes a mental health problem, political conformism is enforced via 'care'.
Stories he reaches for 5
At Starbucks, the price of a cappuccino used to include a charitable donation (to save a Guatemalan forest, feed Somali orphans); the ideological message is that you can keep consuming because the ethical cost is pre-included in the commodity price.
“You can go on consuming because the price for consuming...the way by consuming you hurt environment...is included into the price of our commodity.”
Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese corporate-setting adaptation of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) is the best cinema version of Hamlet precisely because it transposes it to a totally different cultural context, proving the work's universal greatness.
“The best cinema version of Hamlet that I know—it's not Laurence Olivier—it's Akira Kurosawa did in '61 a Japanese version of Hamlet set in a big corporate company.”
A rabbi and a rich merchant both declare before God that they are nothing; a poor Jew then also says he is nothing, whereupon the rabbi indignantly asks who this nobody thinks he is to claim he is also a nothing. Applied to white liberals competing in self-humiliation while denying minorities the right to the same gesture.
“The rich rabbi says, 'But who this guy think that he is? He thinks—how dares he also to claim that he is a nothing?'”
In standard heterosexual hardcore pornography the male performer is a faceless instrument; the camera ensures the woman looks into it, seeking signs of her enjoyment. This is not objectification but a doubly humiliating forced subjectivization.
“The woman is not just turned into a passive object. The woman is doubly humiliated: she is fucked, but at the same time she...you as a viewer are looking for...signs that the woman really enjoys.”
A Mexican town using indigenous elder councils to adjudicate crimes sentenced a rapist to give the victim's father a package of beer, defending it as traditional custom. Feminists' outrage collided with indigenous community autonomy, illustrating genuine irresolvable conflict between feminist and multiculturalist claims.
“A guy raped his best friend's daughter...the council decided that the punishment should be that this guy should buy to the father of the raped girl a big package of bottles of beer.”
Works invoked 8
The Handmaid's Tale book
Described as a work of 'nostalgia for the present' (Jameson): its near-future dystopia reassures readers they are still in a liberal society rather than prompting self-criticism of how liberalism generated the dystopia.
Žižek's own book on 9/11; cited as the one attacked simultaneously as antisemitic and Zionist, a sign, via Sartre, of being on the right path.
The Bad Sleep Well film
Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese corporate-setting Hamlet adaptation; described as the best cinema version of Hamlet and an example of authentic multiculturalism.
Hamlet play
Shakespeare's play cited as the paradigm case of a work that proves its greatness by surviving transposition into alien cultural contexts (Kurosawa's Japanese version).
Kill All Normies book
Angela Nagle's analysis of online right-wing culture; cited approvingly for its analysis of the rise of shameless public obscenity.
A Higher Loyalty book
Comey's memoir; described as probably truthful at the factual level but whose 'higher loyalty' to US values leaves the criminal logic of state institutions untouched.
The Lives of Others film
Described as false: by locating Stasi evil in a corrupt minister's personal lust, the film fails to be radical enough, the real horror is systemic institutional evil by honest bureaucrats.
The Idiot (film) film
Kurosawa's 1951 adaptation of Dostoevsky, cited as the best version of The Idiot; another example of authentic multiculturalism.
People invoked 36
Mentioned as having also used the synagogue self-humiliation joke.
Edward Snowden positive
Described as a heroic figure who correctly diagnosed the impeachment strategy's focus on individual over institutional crime; his exile in Russia is unwilling.
Shoshana Zuboff positive
Cited approvingly (with minor reservations) for 'surveillance capitalism' as the correct framework for understanding digital control.
James Comey negative
Used as the model of the 'honest patriotic bureaucrat', probably truthful at the factual level but whose 'higher loyalty' leaves untouched the criminal logic of US institutions.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited on hysteria as the highest mode of subjectivity; Lacanian concept of the subject used to explain transgender radical decisions and the plus of LGBT+.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' / liberal democracy as Hegelian telos cited as an earlier right-wing appropriation of Hegel.
Steven Pinker negative
Described as a 'so-called rational optimist' whose statistics about declining war may be correct but whose optimism ignores the structural parallel with the pre-WWI period.
Richard Rorty negative
Otherwise respected but his liberal universalism (particular identities + liberal law = tolerance) is described as catastrophic.
Judith Butler negative
Her performative/historicist gender theory ('Judith Butler historicism') is named as the official LGBT+ ideology that is contradicted in practice by transgender essentialism.
Donald Trump positive
Emblematic figure of the new obscene populist master; Žižek finds him personally repellent but uses him as the central analytical object, his success reveals the failure of liberal ideology.
Mentioned as potentially worse than Trump, a reason to doubt simple impeachment as the solution.
Chelsea Manning positive
Mentioned alongside Snowden and Assange as whistleblowers who revealed systemic institutional criminal activity.
Fredric Jameson positive
'Nostalgia for the present' concept applied to The Handmaid's Tale.
Mentioned in a self-deprecating aside, Žižek compares himself to Khrushchev on Crimea being deposed, during a momentary confusion about the microphone.
Bernie Sanders positive
Quoted approvingly warning against impeachment obsession at the expense of healthcare, wages, climate; his coalition with 'The Squad' is described as the politically winning formation.
Julian Assange positive
Žižek visited him; says character assassination campaign is fraudulent; Assange's actions (though some deplorable) represent new universalist politics; defends him against media distortions.
Huey P. Newton positive
Quoted at length from his dialogue with Erikson; admired for seeing that national liberation is impossible within the American empire and for rejecting 'decolonization' as an inadequate concept.
Mentioned as a friend; Žižek gently disagrees with his claim that people support anti-immigrant politics only because they are manipulated.
Malcolm X positive
Praised as a true universalist: his X was a Hegelian stroke of genius, transforming rootlessness into the positive opportunity for a new universality.
Mentioned as an example of black racism, cited to make the point that minority groups also have their own forms of chauvinism.
Angela Nagle positive
Kill All Normies cited as having well analyzed the rise of shameless public obscenity in the new right.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as evidence that 'socialist' has become meaningless, Gates calls himself a socialist, meaning only minor social welfare measures.
Greta Thunberg positive
Described as an apostle in Kierkegaard's sense, not a genius but a bearer of truth who repeats the same ecological point obsessively; stands for new universal ethics.
Angela Merkel positive
Her decision to admit one million refugees briefly had 80% German support, cited as a short miracle of leadership acting against majority opinion.
The Freudian psychoanalyst who conducted a dialogue with Huey Newton; described as a 'white guy from Europe deeply sympathetic to the Black Panthers'.
Walter Benjamin positive
'Historical openness' / 'unfinished character' of works of art invoked to explain why later readers understand Shakespeare better than Shakespeare himself.
Jordan Peterson negative
Named as exemplar of the ideological counter-move that shifts ecological blame from corporations to individual consumer behavior ('what did YOU do to prevent pollution?').
Hillary Clinton negative
Her marginalization of Bernie Sanders and the left is identified as the real cause of her 2016 defeat.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Apostle vs. genius distinction deployed to frame what kind of political figure is needed today.
Mentioned for a National Review article arguing Trump practices 'Hegelian politics of recognition', used as evidence of right-wing attempts to appropriate Hegel.
Mentioned in the context of the right-wing conspiracy theory that the Frankfurt School was secretly funded by Stalin to corrupt the West.
Akira Kurosawa positive
The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet) and The Idiot (Dostoevsky) cited as the best versions of these works, exemplifying authentic multiculturalism.
Hugo Chávez negative
Described as ultimately Fidel Castro with money, throwing money at problems rather than inventing a new model.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the insight that truly free decisions are not conscious ones, used to explain transgender essentialism.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central reference throughout: concrete universality, Aufhebung, reflexivity, ethical function of war, recognition, all deployed; Žižek says we must move beyond Hegel on the ethics of sovereign states.
Jean-Paul Sartre positive
Invoked for the maxim that being attacked from both sides simultaneously is a good sign.
What it argues
critique of liberal identity politics and its hidden universalismthe antinomies of apocalyptic discourse (ecological vs. reactionary)Trump as obscene populist master and the left's failure to responduniversality versus particular identity: Hegel, Malcolm X, Huey Newtonsurveillance capitalism and impersonal institutional eviltransgender essentialism and the paradox of radical free decisionscommunism as transnational collective agency beyond market and state
Dialectical moves 11
“The shameless obscenity that was once subversive has become the very tool of reinforcing master authority—we are getting obscene masters.”
What traditionally worked to undermine power (vulgarity, transgression) has been captured by power itself in Trump's populism.
“Trump is not truly obscene when he uses vulgar sexist terms; he is truly obscene when he talks about America as the greatest country in the world.”
The apparent obscenity is a smokescreen; the real obscenity is his nationalist-ideological earnestness.
“Nature is deeply unnatural—nature itself is the source of repeated catastrophes; it is not a homeostatic mother but an indifferent, self-destroying process.”
The reversal collapses the nature/culture opposition: what we call 'unnatural' destruction is actually how nature has always operated.
“The more you do what feels most free—surf the web, consume freely—the more tightly you are controlled.”
Digital freedom is its own opposite: the experience of liberation is the mechanism of surveillance.
“White liberals who humiliate themselves most—'we are nothing, we are guilty of everything'—are actually reserving for themselves the universal position, which is the subtlest form of racism.”
The performance of maximal self-abasement paradoxically consolidates the position of universal subject.
“The 'plus' of LGBT+ is not an open empirical list of more identities—it is the name for subjectivity itself as irreducibly non-identical.”
What looks like an addendum (plus) is actually the whole point: the subject exceeds all identity categories.
“The highest free act is always experienced as necessity—you do it because you cannot do otherwise.”
Radical freedom, unlike superficial consumer choice, takes the form of felt inevitability: the decision has already been made before your conscious deliberation.
“X (Malcolm X) does not mean the theft of African roots—it is the positive chance to propose a new universality more authentic than white universality.”
The deprivation of particular identity is recast as the privileged position from which genuine universalism can be articulated.
“We are the universal species—the only species who can claim 'we are just one of the species'—which means our very self-effacement reinstates us as the universal subject.”
Any claim to mere species-membership paradoxically requires the universal self-awareness that singles humans out.
“Betraying the interest of your country when your country is wrong is the greatest ethical act—not loyalty.”
The standard patriotic ethics is inverted: the truly ethical universal act is treason against particularity.
“Far from being a sign of empathy, treating third-world people's violence as always caused by colonialism is the worst racism—it denies them the capacity to be evil on their own.”
The ostensibly anti-racist refusal to attribute agency to former colonies is itself a form of infantilizing racism.
Claims 22
rejects
Trump's followers are not irrationally manipulated victims voting against their interests; they rationally support a narrative that addresses their safety, employment, and dignity concerns.standard liberal critique of Trump voters as dupes
asserts
The left must psychoanalyze not Trump's success but its own irrational liberal reactions to it, which are making his re-election more likely.left strategy vs. Trump
reframes
Trump's obscenity is a decoy: he is truly obscene not when using vulgar sexist language but when he proclaims American greatness and imposes his economic policies.Trump's obscenity and populism
rejects
The impeachment campaign errs by focusing on Trump as a corrupt individual, leaving untouched the systemic criminal logic inscribed in US state institutions (NSA, CIA, etc.).Trump impeachment discourse
asserts
The true enemy is not idiosyncratic individuals like Trump but honest patriotic bureaucrats (Comey as model) who perpetuate institutional evil while believing they serve a higher cause.institutional vs. individual evil
asserts
The real reason for Clinton's defeat was her ruthless marginalization of Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party, not Russian meddling.2016 US election outcome
rejects
Nature is not a primordial homeostatic balance disturbed by humans; it is indifferent and self-destroying, and ecology is properly about securing human survival conditions.Mother Nature / deep ecology ideology
asserts
Consumer eco-practices like recycling and organic shopping are an ideological operation that makes people feel virtuous while perpetuating consumption.green consumerism and ecological ideology
asserts
Ecological, refugee, and digital-control problems are by definition transnational and cannot be solved by the market or by sovereign states alone; they require a communist-type collective agency.communism as transnational agency
reframes
Refugees in Europe are primarily a result of Western military interventions (Iraq, Syria, Yemen), not an autonomous migration wave, making it a geopolitical-economic problem, not a humanitarian one.refugee crisis in Europe
asserts
White liberal identity politics subtly reinforces white privilege: by monopolizing self-humiliation, liberals covertly reserve for themselves the universal position of arbiters of correct politics.white liberal identity politics
asserts
The true struggle is the struggle for universality, not between particular identities; liberals mystify this by transforming it into a negotiation among coexisting particularities.universality vs. identity politics
reframes
The 'plus' in LGBT+ names not a residual empirical list but subjectivity itself—the non-identical excess over any fixed gender identity.LGBT+ subjectivity
asserts
Transgender essentialism ('I was born in the wrong body') is not false ideology; it correctly expresses how radical decisions are experienced as necessity even when contingent.transgender identity and essentialism vs. constructivism
rejects
The Handmaid's Tale is a work of nostalgia for the present that makes readers comfortable in liberal society rather than prompting the self-critical question of how liberalism itself generated the dystopia.The Handmaid's Tale as political fiction
rejects
The only way to defeat Trump electorally is to move further left and win back dispossessed working-class voters, not to adopt centrist moderation.Democratic electoral strategy
asserts
Sanders's programme is, by the standards of European social democracy fifty years ago, extremely modest; calling it socialist or Venezulan is ideological mystification.Bernie Sanders and the US political spectrum
reframes
Authentic leaders are not masters who think for you but figures who open up a space for you to be more radical than your everyday ideological inertia allows.political leadership
rejects
The category 'toxic masculinity' ideologically converts a politico-social phenomenon into a medical/psychological one, enabling pharmaceutical commodification of what is really a class and ideological problem.toxic masculinity as category
asserts
There is no automatic unity between emancipatory struggles; class politics and feminist politics can be in genuine tension and this must be openly acknowledged rather than papered over.coalition politics and intersectionality
asserts
To understand great literature (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky), later readers with historical distance often understand the work better than its author did.historical reception of art (Walter Benjamin / unfinished character of works)
asserts
Huey Newton was right that decolonization is no longer possible because today's American empire integrates all territories into a single global system with no exterior.decolonization and American empire
Quotes 15
“The only thing to psychoanalyze is the irrational stupidity of the left-liberal reactions to Trump. The stupidity which makes it more and more probable that Trump will be re-elected.”Slavoj Žižek · left's failure to understand Trump
“Through all his shocking vulgarities, he is providing his followers with a narrative which makes sense. Of course, a very limited, twisted sense, but nonetheless a sense which obviously does a better job than the left-liberal narrative.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump's populist sense-making
“Trump is not truly obscene when he uses vulgar sexist terms. He is truly obscene when he talks about America as the greatest country in the world.”Slavoj Žižek · real vs. apparent obscenity
“The true enemy are not idiosyncratic figures which act as a disturbance for the establishment. The true enemy are honest patriotic bureaucrats ruthlessly pursuing the United States goals.”Slavoj Žižek · institutional vs. individual evil
“Nature is not our mother. If—sorry for the provocation—nature is our mother, it's a dirty bitch of a mother. Totally indifferent. Don't mystify it.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Mother Nature ideology
“Nature is deeply unnatural. That's the beginning of for me leftist materialist ecology.”Slavoj Žižek · leftist materialist ecology
“The more you do this [surf the web freely], the more you are tightly controlled. We live in—un-freedom which is experienced as freedom, which is not even experienced as un-freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · digital freedom as surveillance
“The only true struggle is the struggle for universality itself.”Slavoj Žižek · universality over identity politics
“Today subjectivity is this 'plus' itself, non-identical. This idea that you can be 'plus' in the sense of excess over identity. And this is today's subjectivity: the 'plus' itself.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectivity as non-identity / the LGBT+ plus
“The greatest ethical act imaginable is betraying the interest of your country when your country is wrong. This is the actual universalism.”Slavoj Žižek · universalist ethics vs. patriotic ethics
“I think that *Handmaid's Tale* is basically a work of what Fredric Jameson called 'nostalgia for the present.' It paints a near future of fundamentalist rule, and it makes us feel well: 'You see, haha, we are not yet there.'”Slavoj Žižek · nostalgia for the present / ideological comfort of dystopian fiction
“We need women who display toxic masculinity. That's why I like that girl—she is not totally manipulated, she is not a fake—Greta Thunberg. She is an apostle.”Slavoj Žižek · apostle figure / Greta Thunberg
“I want alienation! I want anonymous alienated state apparatuses to take care of that.”Slavoj Žižek · defence of alienation over small-community direct democracy
“This is the worst racism he can imagine, they treat us like children, we are not even allowed to be evil on our own. If we are evil, it must be effect of colonialism.”Slavoj Žižek · white liberal paternalism as racism
“Bernie Sanders is a very, very modest social democrat. Sweden years ago was incredibly more radical. So this tells us a lot about our predicament.”Slavoj Žižek · rightward shift of Overton window
Transcript 44 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I will do something probably very risky. I know that many so-called leftists—I don't consider them true leftists—are disturbed by what I wrote about Donald Trump as if I have even a minimal sympathy for him, or some of my critical remarks on LGBT+ and so on, which incidentally I absolutely unconditionally support. I just think that the ideology, the terms in which this discourse is presented, are often suspicious. So please, at any point either interrupt me or criticize me or whatever, and I will try precisely to address here in my introductory, whatever you call it, speech or whatever, these most problematic topics which brought me a lot of hatred and so on. But I think there is a good sign in what I'm doing because I noticed that, for example, when my book on September *Welcome to the Desert of the Real*, was published, my friends in Israel and of course on the West Bank in Palestine or in Egypt told me that it was attacked from both sides at the same time. In *Jerusalem Post*, they claimed it's the most perfidious antisemitic propaganda. *Al-Ahram* wrote in a review that it's a deeply Zionist book. I remembered Jean-Paul Sartre who said if for the same short book you are attacked from both sides, it's a good sign. Maybe you are on the right path. So allow me, hopefully, to clarify some misunderstandings or to make things even further, just feel free to attack me and so on. So I would like to begin with an—just another sorry introductory point. I'm so sad that I didn't risk to go more into a philosophical topic because that's how I got to know him. Who was it, Butch Riley? Yeah, Butch Riley, who wrote to me and I loved his book on echoes in art of the Haiti Revolution, Toussaint Louverture and so on, which I always—this is the permanent point that I repeat obsessively. And I think that's what we need today in our political moment. We don't need geniuses. There are enough of geniuses. Your president, beloved Donald Trump, he regularly designates himself as a stable genius, I think you know. We need what Kierkegaard called the opposition to genius: apostle. You are just a bearer of truth, you repeat again and again the same point. We need women who display toxic masculinity. That's why I like that girl—she is not totally manipulated, she is not a fake—Greta Thunberg. She is an apostle. She doesn't pretend she's a genius, she just repeats the same point, the same point in this wonderfully aggressive way. She proudly displays her illness and—but let not get lost in it. What I like—allow me a little bit to improvise in your book—how you connect Haiti Revolution, echoes in—you mention Eisenstein who planned to do a movie on Toussaint Louverture and so on, all that topics. Because I think that against this identity politics misunderstanding of multiculturalism, I think we should learn to respect, to reassert true authentic multiculturalism. For—as you demonstrate it there in your book. And I love this—I'm sorry we don't have time to debate it here—but for example, this is why I think true Marxists are not cheap historicists. It's not, "Oh, to understand Shakespeare you have to know all the Elizabethan history and so on and so on." No. It's if anything is the other way around, I claim. To understand Elizabethan England, read Shakespeare. You will learn more than reading some boring histories. But you know what fascinated me? How often the best movie versions of a great work of art—novel, play—are the ones which transpose this work of art, the story (if it's a novel or whatever), into a totally different cultural context. This is for me authentic multiculturalism. For example, *Hamlet*. Yeah, we all like *Hamlet*. The best cinema version of *Hamlet* that I know—it's not Laurence Olivier, this or that—it's, do you know that Akira Kurosawa did in '61 a Japanese version of *Hamlet* set in a big corporate company? Hamlet is a student, Toshiro Mifune played by—who comes from the West, discovers his father was killed, uncle, blah blah blah. With a beautiful title, it's an ingenious title: *The Bad Sleep Well*. You can download it for free. Or the best Dostoevsky that I know is *The Idiot*, I think, again Kurosawa, '47. I think that this is the true greatness of a work of art, that it survives transposition into a totally different culture. This—what Walter Benjamin would have called this historical openness, unfinished character—when we come too late, later than the original work of art, this is a privilege for us. I claim we can understand Shakespeare today better than Shakespeare himself understood himself and so on. But let's not get lost. Just to tell you that I would so much like to debate more about your topic, the philosophy, works of art and so on, but let me do the boring political stuff. Okay. Allow me to begin. Today, apocalyptic visions abound. And we are confronting a true antinomy of apocalypsism or apocalyptic reason. The predominant rightist reaction to the warnings about the looming apocalypse is that these warnings are part of the desperate radical leftist strategy to sustain the revolutionary zeal. That's—but also here I think, especially in Europe, this is the usual mantra: that leftists feel betrayed by history—where is the revolution and so on—so they cannot accept that at least in the developed Western country we live relatively comfortable lives. So they need to invent a—or to construct some threat of a final apocalyptic catastrophe. And that's why they focus, for example, that's their reading of ecological threat. Nothing really great or dangerous is happening; it's just the leftist—the leftists' trick to keep the momentum. Of course, I radically disagree with it. The only thing I do agree with is that—and here if we want to be true leftists, we must always emphasize this point—that ecology is today a great field of ideological investments, of ideological battles. For me, at least, the most dangerous ones, apart from obvious ones which are "just leave it to the market, tax the polluters, everything will be okay" or "leave it to the science," are (a) this—let's call it the Mother Nature ecology, this falsely anti-anthropocentric self-humiliating perspective. There was once, I don't know when, some kind of homeostatic balance on Earth. Then we humans come with our hubris, exploiting Earth natural resources too much. We hurt Mother Nature. Mother Nature is taking revenge now with global warming and so on and so on. So we should return to our modest role and so on and so on. I think this is catastrophic. First, I cannot imagine a worse version of anthropocentrism than this fake anti-anthropocentrism. When all these Mother Nature ecologists claim we should accept that we are once tiny species on Earth. What they are really interested is not nature—let's accept it, nature is, if we even should talk like this, I doubt—nature is brutal, totally indifferent. They claim we may destroy life of on Earth. As we know now from geological history and so on, nature itself was ruining itself repeatedly all the time. I always make this point: just think about our still main sources of energy, which are coal and oil. Can you even imagine what type of total catastrophes had to happen on our Earth so that we got oil reserves and coal and so on and so on? Nature doesn't care. So it's not nature that we worry about. We just want a safe environment for us. When they talk about a balanced environment, it means *we* want to survive in a safe environment and so on and so on. Nature is not our mother. If—sorry for the provocation—nature is our mother, it's a dirty bitch of a mother. Totally indifferent. Don't mystify it. And especially accept that nature is not some primordial homeostatic stability that we disturb. No. Nature is—I consciously use this term—nature is deeply unnatural. That's the beginning of for me leftist materialist ecology. But there is another version of ecological ideology that I hate even more. It is this—how should I call it—everyday anti-consumerist consumerism. Because what's our usual predicament when—how does society—I'm not a paranoiac, there is not some central committee hidden in the depths of Manhattan with all those—they are what fascinates me most. I would like to join them. I heard that deep in the tunnels beneath Manhattan there are around people who live all the time. They are mole—mole—they know what happens there. But maybe they—the idea—I'm not saying there is the central committee of reaction there, but how does society address us with eco... (audience: they are called the mole people). Really? That's wonderful because you know what Marx wrote about moles in history and so on. Okay. No. So what I want to say is that the typical movement of those in power, counter-move, is—this is Jordan Peterson applied to ecology, if I can put it—is, "But who are you to just criticize big companies and so on? What did *you* do to prevent pollution?" And then they give you a set of easy tasks to make you feel well, like, "Did you recycle all your newspapers? Did you put aside all Coca-Cola cans?" and so on and so on. This is, I think, a wonderful ideological operation. They prescribe you the role to play: recycle and so on and so on. It makes you feel well, and you can go on consuming and so on. My ideal capitalist, ecological capitalist here is—it was years ago, now it's different—it's Starbucks, the company, no? I remember years ago when I entered the Starbucks coffee store—I hate it, just to meet friends there—you always had big posters like something like every of all our profit from cappuccino goes to save some Guatemala forest, to feed orphans in Somalia, whatever you want. And this is a wonderful ideological operation. The message is: you can go on consuming because the price for consuming, the price in the sense of the way by consuming you hurt environment, you hurt other people, is included into the price of our commodity. So, you know, like you are threatened, feel threatened by our commodification, no problem, the price for this is included, you can do it. And this brings me to another aspect of ecological ideology, which is this false sense of quantification. You know, like you take now even on plane tickets I think, they give you how much monoxide you produced, how much carbon—all that stuff and so on. I think the function of this is strictly—to be brutal, don't underestimate ideology here—to make you feel well. Now I will be repeated—an old joke of mine, very vulgar, but it's true. I think that—and I even read an analysis done in my own country, maybe we are especially perverted, Slovenia, where they proved that they asked people who are buying organic apples, you know, those rotten apples which cost double the nice chemically manipulated apples, why they are doing it, do they trust it? And they got a shocking answer. The answer was, "Of course it's probably manipulated, these apples are even worse. But it makes me feel well that if I buy those apples, I did something for Mother Nature, for the sense of solidarity and so on and so on." So just don't underestimate all this stuff. But let me go on. So nonetheless, in spite of all this, I think ecology is a mega-problem. And but return to my main line, that the right-wing narrative today of global warming deniers is precisely: no, it's a leftist plot. The same as LGBT+ and all that stuff. The idea is this one: the left is aware, or was aware already from early 1920s, that there will not be a big expected revolution. So they knew they first have to demoralize our Christian societies, to ruin us from within. So they—it's a wonderful, I like conspiracy theories—the idea is that the money that enabled Max Horkheimer to organize Frankfurt School was not from an Argentinean student of Horkheimer, but it really came from Moscow. Stalin personally decided that we have to first corrupt the West intellectually. We need psychoanalysis and so on. So they financed from the very beginning Frankfurt School and so on and so on. But okay, you know what's my answer to this right-wing guys who want to dismiss ecology as pseudo-apocalyptic vision? That unfortunately they have their own apocalypse, which is double, their own apocalyptic vision. One is, of course, the one that I already mentioned: European civilization is under threat now, immigrants and so on. And the other aspect of the apocalyptic vision that I already mentioned: LGBT, feminism and so on and so on, all that stuff. So they also speak the language of apocalypse. So again, we don't get one apocalyptic discourse; we have a conflict of apocalypses. And here I remain a classical Marxist: this, when every phenomenon that you analyze, always try to isolate in what sense it includes its own contradiction—because it's a very precise term—let's call it—it's antagonistic, its own opposite tendency. And I even—and this what I will improvise on now is not a criticism in any sense. I think that this would be my point, for example—allow me a brief improvisation and this is my dream, as you know maybe, to do just this introductory improvisation and to skip the talk itself then, you know. So it's like to have a burger but only with lettuce and so on with no meat, you know. Okay. Let me go on. They tell you that. Sorry? They can tell you that now. They're already doing it? I was told that Burger King already had now a hamburger without meat and so on. Okay. Let's not get lost. You know why am I for LGBT+ or transgender? Precisely what fascinates me so much is a certain immanent antagonism. The official, let's call it, ideology of LGBT+ is something that I without any irony, benevolently, would have called Judith Butler historicism. Gender identities are not biologically determined; it's socially, historically constructed through performative discursive games and so on and so on. Okay. But what fascinates me so much is that—and I know many of them—all those guys who actually make transgender operations, they speak a language which is exactly the opposite one, which is an—it's brutally openly—I use this term prohibited by today's discourse theory, historicism—essentialist language. Repeatedly, persons who, for example, underwent this painful operation from man to woman, I noticed how almost always they use this term: "I am so grateful that now finally I live in a body into which I should have been born." The language they speak is one of pure essentialism in the sense of: it is as if there is a basic sexual orientation inscribed into my, whatever we call it, soul, but there was just an—in my birth, an ontological mistake, as it were, I was born in a wrong sex. Now, I don't think this is simply ideology. That's crucial. I think that precisely the reference to psychoanalysis, German idealism and so on, allows us to explain in a materialist way how something which is contingent can nonetheless be experienced as your predestination, as a necessity. As we learned from Freud or from great German idealists, your truly free decisions are not conscious decisions. Your conscious decisions are rather superficial. You're—am I doing something wrong? No. No. I thought you are—no. I thought I felt like Khrushchev on Crimea when—wait—making to depose me. Sorry. No, no. Sorry. Let me go quickly on. What I want to say is that just—if this sounds to you something abstract and so on, allow me to use my eternal old examples. Isn't it that the highest free acts are precisely always experienced as necessity? For example, let's say your country is occupied. You have to join resistance. You do it because you feel that you would betray yourself by not doing it. It's not a choice in the sense of strawberry cake or vanilla cake or whatever. It's, "I do it because I cannot do it otherwise." Or a more pathetic example: think about love. You fall in love. You never fall in love in the sense of "I'm looking around, nice lady or nice man, here, there, let me make a choice." No. All of a sudden you realize that you are in love. The decision is never made in the present term. And what I am saying is that this LGBT essentialism makes this clear. If you want to—in a trans operation or just in a more superficial way by cross-dressing and so on—if you want to change your sexual identity, it is—we can account for it nicely how—it is still a contingent free decision of yours, but it has to appear to you as a necessity. Why? Because it's a radical decision. Usual decisions like "do I choose, I don't know, this type of water or Coke or whatever," there you are already constituted as a subject and you just make choices. But radical decision is where in a pathetic sense you choose yourself. And again, that's all I am trying to—to do. What I don't buy in the usual LGBT+ ideology is this happy free-floating identities, you know, like "I can be multiple identities, today I'm gay, tomorrow I'm heterosexual, then I jump here and there and so on and so on." No. They underestimate terribly the pain, the traumatic decision of assuming a certain sexual identity. And the greatness of transgender is for me precisely that it brings us very close to this radical level of freedom. Okay, but let's not get lost into this. Just let me go back to apocalypse and to the choice of—sorry, to the antinomies. We get antinomic apocalypse. We get ecological apocalypse, we get reactionary versions of the apocalypse and so on and so on. Why this? Why should we not trust these so-called—I hate them mostly, probably—so-called rational optimists, Steven Pinker and so on, who claim "but wait a minute, we are living in wonderful times, there were never so little wars" and so on and so on. Maybe they are right. A lot of their data are probably true. But you know what's my fear there? I wonder if you would agree. Today with the rise of the new right, we often hear this idea that we are like in late or early 1930s. Fascism is coming back. No, I think the situation is more dangerous. We are kind of a—again in the—the best historical parallel would have been the decades before World War I. Because don't forget the true catastrophe of Western or at least European history was World War I. Before that, we had years of, in Western Europe—not around the world—unimpeded progress. Women more or less in some countries at least got vote rights, universal—universal vote rights, retirement plans, and it was an immense progress. But nonetheless, people were more and more aware already from I think around that a catastrophe is coming. And they were right. Although people didn't believe that it could happen. And at least in our developed part of the world, let's face it, from till about years ago, this was at least in the developed countries with social democratic hegemony, these were relatively happy times. That era is coming to an end. And when my right-wing—I don't have friends—enemies tell me, tell me, "but communism brought just ruin" and so on and so on, I tell—tell—tell them, "okay, many horrible things happened, but the original catastrophe was World War I." And for that, sorry, you cannot blame communism in any way. It was pure imperialist capitalist matter. We cannot even imagine what shock it was for Western Europe how from that ideal of years of progress we approach cat—and we are in that type of a situation. So let me now finally approach my proper topic. So where are we today? What is the meaning of Trump phenomenon? Let me do it slowly, systematically. Not such a long time ago in a galaxy that now appears far, far away, of course—you know to what I refer to, to the movie series successfully destroyed when Disney bought it over—the public space was clearly distinguished from the obscenities of private exchanges. Politicians, journalists, and other media personalities were expected to address us with a minimum of dignity, talking and acting as if the common good is their main preoccupation, avoiding vulgar expressions and reference to personal intimacies. There were, of course, rumors about their private vices, but they that remained—they remained that: private matters mentioned only in the yellow press. Today, however, not only we can read in the mass media about the intimate details of public personalities, populist politicians themselves often regress to shameless obscenities. One should not lose sight of what is so surprising about this rise of shameless obscenity of the old right, as so well noted and analyzed among others by Angela Nagle in her *Kill All Normies*. Traditionally, or in our retroactive view of tradition at least, shameless obscenity worked as subversive, as an act of undermining traditional domination, as depriving the master of his false dignity. I remember from my own youth how in the 1960s protesting students liked to use obscene words or make obscene gestures to embarrass figures of power and, so they claimed, denounce their hypocrisy. However, what we are getting today with the exploding public obscenity is not the disappearance of authority, of master figures, but its forceful reappearance. We are getting something unimaginable decades ago: obscene masters. Of course, Donald Trump is the emblematic figure of this new type of obscene populist master. And the usual argumentation against him, that his populism worry for the well-being of the poor ordinary people is a fake, that his actual politics protect the interests of the rich, is I think all too short. The followers of Trump do not act irrationally. They are not victims of primitive ideological manipulations which made them vote against their interests. They are quite rational in their own terms. They vote for Trump because in the patriotic vision he is selling around, he also addresses their ordinary everyday problems: safety, permanent job, and so on and so on. When Trump was elected president, I was asked by a couple of publishers to write a book which would submit the Trump phenomenon to a psychoanalytic critics, claiming that "this is something so crazy that is happening, we need psychoanalysis, how could people buy Trump?" My answer was that we do not need psychoanalysis to explore the pathology of Trump's success. The only thing to psychoanalyze is the irrational stupidity of the left-liberal reactions to it. The stupidity which makes it more and more probable that Trump will be re-elected. To use what is perhaps the lowest point of Trump's vulgarities, the left has not yet learned how to grab Trump by his p—[unintelligible]. Trump is not winning because just by shamelessly bombarding us with messages which generate obscene enjoyment at how he dares to violate the elementary norms of decency. Of course, that's the basic operation of Trump. We are shocked all the time, how dares he do this, he violates all the unwritten rules of decency. But through all his shocking vulgarities, he is providing his followers with a narrative which makes sense. Of course, a very limited, twisted sense, but nonetheless a sense which obviously does a better job than the left-liberal narrative. His shameless obscenities serve—serve as signs of solidarity with so-called ordinary people. "You see, I'm the same as you, we are all red under our skin." And this solidarity also signals the point at which Trump's obscenity reaches its limit. Trump is not truly obscene when he talks about the greatness of America, when he dismisses his opponents as enemies of the people and so on. He intends to be taken seriously. And his obscenities are meant to precisely emphasize by contrast the level at which he is serious. They are meant to function as an obscene display of his belief in the greatness of America. And incidentally, I read a couple of days ago how—it's incredible, these turns and twists of American right-wingers—how they try to reappropriate Hegel. First it was Fukuyama, no, justifying liberal democracy in pseudo, of course, Hegelian terms as the end of history, the ultimate, the best possible, or at least the least worst, social order. Now, a couple of days ago—check it up, please—in *National Review*, Ralph Peters again claimed to understand Trump we must go to Hegel. That Trump practices Hegelian politics of recognition. His message to ordinary people is, in contrast to liberal establishment, "I recognize you." This is why, in order to undermine Trump, one should begin by displacing the site of his obscenity and treat as obscene precisely his serious statements. Trump is not truly obscene when he uses vulgar sexist terms. He is truly obscene when he talks about America as the greatest country in the world, when he imposes his economic measures and so on and so on. The obscenity of his speech masks this more basic obscenity. So let me go on to elaborate this point a little bit more. Now even some—a point which may be more problematic for you: my doubts, although I would like to see him deposed, of course, my doubts about the campaign for the impeachment of Trump. Okay, my first problem is, of course, Trump at least talks a lot, but then he nonetheless—it looks so afraid to go to war—North Korea, Iran and so on—while frankly, if you ask me, if you get rid of Trump, you get Mike Pence. And I have my doubts who would be worse. But my point is another one here. You see, here we have to look for ideology. Again, as they say in politically correct jargon, trigger warning: you may find problematic what I will say now, and I'm open here for you to counterattack. Trump is portrayed in this—calls for his impeachment—as an individual pursuing his own private interests, not as the representative of a state and its apparatuses. The guy whom we should trust, Edward Snowden, from his Moscow exile, immediately got this point, commenting that—a quote from a recent interview by Snowden. And incidentally, I think Snowden is quite a heroic figure. He makes it again and again clear the point that he doesn't *like* to be in Russia; he would much prefer to be in Sweden, in Germany and so on. They just don't want him, they're afraid of the United States. Okay. Snowden wrote, commented that, quote: "A whistleblower's complaint, which triggered Trump's impeachment inquiry, is strategically quite wise in its focus on the president versus an institution. Congress could be more than happy to throw an individual abusing its office under the bus in a way that these individuals are not willing to do when they themselves are implicated by the same allegations. This whistleblower is doing something that's a little bit unusual. They are—their claim is that an individual is breaking the law who of course happens to be the president." End of quote. So the way I read Snowden's complaint is the following one: it is acceptable to criticize an individual which breaks the law while he pursues his private interests—or pathological inclinations: revenge, lust for power, and so on. But it is much more difficult to discern a crime in the activity of state institutions, a criminal activity which is performed by personally honest individuals dedicated to their job. Evil and crime are here not individualized but inscribed into the very functioning of institutions. That's why I find, again, problematic the calls just to impeach Trump. Trump is undoubtedly a repelling person lacking a basic moral compass. However, what about the systematic violations of human rights in the continuous activities of the US intelligence agencies? The true enemy are not idiosyncratic figures which act as a disturbance for the establishment. The true enemy are honest patriotic bureaucrats ruthlessly pursuing the United States goals. To name names, the model of such patriotic bureaucrat is, as far as I can judge, James Comey. You remember, the FBI director deposed by Trump. Although at the level of facts, Comey was probably mostly truthful in his critique of Trump in his bestseller *A Higher Loyalty*. One should nonetheless admit that his "higher loyalty" to the principles and values of the United States leaves untouched what one cannot but call the criminal tendency inscribed into the US state institutions, all that was revealed by Assange, Snowden, Chelsea Manning and so on. One should also not forget that the movement to impeach Trump is mostly motivated by the desire to prove that Russia influenced the last presidential elections, enabling Trump to win. While there undoubtedly was Russian meddling—incidentally, in the same way that the United States tried to influence elections all around the world, just in that case they call it a defense of democracy, of course—the focus on this prospect obfuscates the true reason of Hillary Clinton's defeat: her ruthless struggle against Bernie Sanders and the leftist wing of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders was right to warn that—and I quote him here—that "if for the next year, year and a half, going right into the heart of the election, all that the Congress is talking about is impeaching Trump and Trump, Trump, Trump and Mueller, Mueller, Mueller, and we are not talking about healthcare, we are not talking about raising the minimum wage, we are not talking about combating climate change, we are not talking about sexism and racism and homophobia, what I worry about is that it that works in Trump's advantage." End of quote. You see, that's my point here. I don't have time to develop it but that—don't be fascinated by individuals. The horror of today's global capitalism is—and this is always what fascinated me in my analysis even of traumatic parts of the left's inheritance, Stalinism and so on. Don't fall into this trap of portraying the executors even of Stalinist crimes as evil-sneering individuals pursuing private goals. No, the most horrible evil is the evil, again, inscribed into the basic functioning of institutions themselves. For example, all that we learn again from Snowden, Manning, Assange. All that was, I guess, mostly performed by people who thought that they are doing a good thing, their patriotic duty and so on and so on. And if you want a historical—no, historical means cinematic for me—not Hollywood but German example that gave me this idea. You know which one I like here, the idea? It's the—which movie—did you see the movie which was a hit some years ago, *The Lives of Others*? I claim that movie is false. And paradoxically, although it wants to be fanatically anticommunist, it's not radical enough. Why? You know the story. To cut long story short, a corrupted minister of culture, it looks, in German Democratic Republic wants to screw the wife, beautiful wife of a famous playwright. And to get rid of him, he orders the secret police to follow him to find some problematic points so that he can get rid of him. But you see, it's the same problem as now with Trump. You—the movie locates the evil into—in a typical liberal way into—an individual person who pursues his dirty private sexual interests or whatever, it could be something else. But I claim the reality of East Germany was that even if all Stasi members and so on were just honest Stasi members, not doing it for their private satisfaction of their vices but just to do what they saw as their duty, control anti-socialist forces, all the oppression would have stayed there. So again, don't—with all the absolute disgust I feel for Trump—don't make this mistake of locating the evil into private person—into private person with vices and so on and so on. The true evil is the evil of how our state machineries work. The true evil, the true problem for me is what was disclosed by all the whistleblowers and so on: how a new type of control is developing, where big private corporations like Facebook, Google and so on, closely coordinate their activities with NSA and we are getting today new forms of control of which we are not even aware. Usually, our media when they report on this, they refer safely to China. Oh, the Chinese, they have that each of us has a certain patriotic number, how high it stands. We are doing the same thing, just in a little bit more subtle way. The true problem of freedom today is precisely un-freedom which is experienced as freedom, which is not even experienced as un-freedom. I'm almost getting nostalgic for the good old times when you looked back, oh my God, is somebody following me? I'm not free. No. Today, what is the—the most free thing that you can do? You surf on the web, you do whatever you want. A little bit of hardcore, a little bit of—my son taught me, my son can enter the dark web and so on. You do this, what can be more free than this? You just do what you want. The more you do this, the more you are tightly controlled. We—we live in—okay, I don't totally agree with that lady, but she's on the right path: Shoshana Zuboff with surveillance capitalism and so on. That's the problem today. Again, don't—don't—don't personalize evil. Okay, I want really to leave the time for debate. So let me just add two more points. This is why, if you ask me, I think as you already hinted at quoting that an African philosopher, that—the question of at this level of a political project—the question of universalism is crucial. What I admire—although they are making stupid mistakes, like what Assange was doing is deplorable, but it doesn't in any way just justify what is now happening to him. This was maybe the most successful in the last decades character assassinations. I know, I visited him regularly. All the stuff that you maybe read in the newspaper that he was painting with his shit coloring the walls of the embassy of Ecuador in London and so on—that's complete madness and so on. But what I want to say is that a new form of universalist politics is emerging there. On the one hand, we have ecological politics which is, again, by definition universalist. If there is anything that—if there is something clear about ecology is that we have to move beyond sovereign states. We need some kind of international mobilization. It's global. And the same goes for these new forms of digital control, and the same goes for the third problem today: refugees and so on and so on. I'm often accused for being ambiguous, racist even, about refugees and so on. No, my point is a different one here. My point is that refugees—okay, I fully admit, I wrote about it—that refugees—I know more about Europe than about your situation here. In Europe, refugees are clearly the result of the activity of Western powers. Without American attack on Iraq, without what is happening now in Syria, without what is happening now, now, now in Yemen, where a new wave of refugees is created, and there wouldn't have been refugees. So we are absolutely responsible for it. The ultimate example for me is the Republic of Congo, Congo Kinshasa. It's a state which is usually portrayed as a rogue state, central power doesn't function—yes, but precisely as such. A nightmare of a state with around child warriors. You know, they discovered you take a child of years, you put him on drugs, years later you have a perfect killing machine and so on. But as such, Congo is fully integrated into world economy. Coltan, all other precious mines. Just local warlords are dealing directly with our companies and so on and so on. So what I want to say is that about this is that what—with refugees, yes, that don't get caught into liberal humanist topic of treating refugees as a humanitarian problem. It's an economic socio-political problem. The moment you formulate it in this way—"Oh my God, thousands of people waiting on the border there. Will we open our hearts to them or not?"—you are mystifying the situation. You are turning this into a humanitarian problem and more and more I suspect this in Europe, that this fits perfectly the ruling liberal elite. In this way, they stir up a conflict between one and another group of underprivileged poor people: refugees and our own poor people. Who, of course it's also part of ideological manipulation, feel threatened by refugees and so on. And so it's a very comfortable position. At the same time, you dismiss your own poor people, oh they are primitive racists and so on. You have a conflict there, but your position is safe here. So for me it's absolutely crucial to insist we should make a step backwards and change our geopolitical stance, the economic politics and so on and so on. There is the solution. Don't turn it—because it's ridiculous if we reduce it to a humanitarian problem, then the point is simply what? That all the poor from third-world countries will move to the developed countries? First, this is not happening now. The truly underprivileged remain there in horrible conditions. I read a very good analysis in Europe about who from Syria, Iraq and so on, who comes to Europe? Mostly, large majority, brutal, half-criminal young people. Why? Not because they are bad, because they are the only ones who are strong enough to do it. First, you need a couple of thousands of euros to get there, you know, and the truly poor ones remain there. This is just breeding—breeding a catastrophe. More radical—much more radical economic measures are—we need them here. Next, even more problematic part. Now I will do—now I will do something to really annoy you. That's why, although I, of course, totally support black liberation, in the precise sense of as a Hegelian I support it. For example, you know "Black Lives Matter," I totally, precisely as a Hegelian universalist, I totally reject the stupid white liberal counterpoint made among others by Trump himself: "No, why only black lives matter? All lives should matter." No, it's a lie because that—we are dealing here with what Hegel calls concrete universality. In every concrete historical situation, a certain type of racism, of state violence, is the concrete type which stands for universality. Today, you have a lot of violence in the United States. But you cannot say, "Let's just look at at all of it." What happens by the state apparatus police to black people is the emblematic figure. You know, it's the same paradox, maybe I exaggerate a little bit, as if to research racism in Germany in 1930s and ignore antisemitism. No, if you talked about race in there, you had to mention—that's why. But nonetheless, I—now I come to my final point, maybe problematic to you but it's crucial—my reference here will be, and I say this to provoke you, I think these lines are more actual than ever: the black activist that I really appreciate is those who are aware of the traps of identity politics. White liberals love identity politics because if you look closely at how it functions, it reduces the other, underprivileged, to a particular identity. White liberals love Native Americans who dance their folkloric dances, who have some shit deep inside into how we shouldn't objectivize nature, you know, before you mine a mountain, you should ask the spirit of the mountain and do it if you are allowed—all that stuff. They love it. What they don't like is if those underprivileged don't just play the game, "We want to assert our particular identity," but "No, sorry guys, what—we are oppressed in a much more radical way, we want to oppose you at the level of a different universality." The only true struggle is the struggle for universality itself. And I would go to the end here—and now I slowly am coming to an end, just one quote surprising for you and then one wonderful Jewish joke. With this I will finish. First the quote, it will maybe surprise you who is it from. He should be remembered today: Huey Newton, the founder and theorist of the Black Panther Party. He so clearly saw, half a century ago, the limitation of local national resistance to the global reign of capital. He even made a step further and rejected the term decolonization as inappropriate. His point was that one cannot fight global capitalism from the position of national unities. Here is his statement from a unique dialogue—this was a beautiful sublime moment—in Huey Newton had a dialogue with Erik Erikson, the Freudian psychoanalyst who was deeply sympathetic—white guy, old white guy from Europe—but deeply sympathetic to the Black Panthers and here is what Huey Newton said—I admire this—quote: "We in the Black Panther Party saw that the United States was no longer a nation. It was something else, it was more than a nation. It had not only expanded its territorial boundaries, but it had expanded all of its control as well. We called it an empire. Now, at one time the world had an empire in which the conditions of rule were different: the Roman Empire. The difference between the Roman and the American empires is that other nations were able to exist external to and independent of the Roman Empire, because their means of exploitation, conquest and control was all relatively limited. But what we—when we say empire today, we mean precisely what we say: an empire is a nation-state that has transformed itself into a power controlling all the world's lands and people. We believe that there are no more colonies or neo-colonies. If a people is colonized, it must be possible for them to decolonize and become what they formerly were. But what happens when the raw materials are extracted and labor is exploited within a territory dispersed over the entire globe? When the riches of the whole Earth are depleted and used to feed a gigantic industrial machine? Then the people and the economy are so integrated into the imperialist empire that it's impossible to decolonize, to return to the former conditions of existence. If colonies cannot decolonize and return to their original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist, nor we believe will they ever exist again," and so on and so on. That's where we are today. The problem of identity politics where I have a problem with it is that it presupposes that—how should I put it—that identities exist. I don't think they exist. And that's why problem even with, for example, certain versions of LGBT—to make a jump—I'm approaching the end—yeah, yeah—of LGBT+. My—it perceives again and again that they still accept the fact that we have gender identities, they just want to expand the list. It's not just the traditional binary masculine-feminine, it's—and then you get 40—butch, bisexual, multisexual, asexual, whatever you want. But the way—to repeat my old joke, maybe some of you know it—the way I would approach LGBT is as a Hegelian: my favorite moment of it is the "plus." LGBT+. What is this "plus"? There is the wrong British empiricist reading of it: that "plus" simply means maybe there are some identities that we didn't yet discover, so we should keep a mind open, what if tomorrow a guy comes who said "I am a trigender butch" or whatever, "Oh, sorry guy, you were not in the list, we will add you to the list." But if there is a lesson is that today subjectivity is this "plus" itself, non-identical. This idea that you can be "plus" in the sense of excess over identity. And this is today's subjectivity: the "plus" itself. The psychoanalytic name for it is hysteria, feminine hysteria. Which, we should not read it in a male-chauvinist way as "hysterical women." For Jacques Lacan, this is the highest mode of subjectivity. Lacan emphasized that all creative science—not university science where you just report on the results—but creative science is hysterical. Hysterical in the sense of what? What is hysteria at its most fundamental? It's precisely questioning your identity. Even at the most primitive level, I'm sorry to be so vulgar. But if you are heterosexual and love a woman, and the woman asks you this eternal stupid question—it can be annoying—"Tell me why do you love me?" Of course, there is no answer to this one. The moment you answer it, you are not truly in love. But you know what is—this is the basic hysterical question: you, the discourse of the master, society, you are telling me what I am: a wife, a servant, whatever. Why am I what you are saying that I am? This basic doubt of your identity, which precisely opens up a universal—a universal dimension. Okay, let me stop that and to leave some time for debate. Just the concluding joke, which will make the point. It's a well-known, I'm sorry if you know it, I used it two, three times in my—in my books. It was also used already by many philosophers, even Derrida, I know Derrida used it. A joke about Jews gathered in a synagogue on Sabbath to publicly declare their failures or whatever. And first a mighty rabbi says, "Forgive me, oh God, I'm nothing, not worthy of your attention." After him, a rich Jewish merchant says, "Forgive me, oh God, I'm a worthless nothing." Then a poor ordinary Jew steps forward and says, "Forgive me, God, I'm also nothing." At that point, the—it doesn't matter who—the rich merchant says—rich rabbi—and says, "But who this guy think that he is? He thinks—how dares he also to claim that he is a nothing?" We—that's the white liberal life today. I literally experienced the same situation already years ago at a very politically correct conference where white liberals were excelling each other into who will humiliate himself more. "We are to blame everything, oh, Eurocentrism, we brought slavery, it's nightmare, we are guilty of everything. Christianity, the worst one, it was invented to screw other races and so on and so on." And then a black friend of mine, not to embarrass him I will not mention his name, and said, "Wait a minute, guys, we are not so innocent. We also had our own Louis Farrakhan, black racism and so on." And I noticed that the mighty white liberal professors exchanged these embarrassed gazes precisely, "No, sorry guy, *we* are to blame, *we* are nothing, who are you to say that you are also nothing?" The message was clear. Precisely when white liberals humiliate themselves—like, and I noticed this again and again, like "we are worthless, we don't have the right"—like if a—that's a subtle racism expressed in this form. If you are an exotic nation, like if Native Americans dance their tribal dances and so on, that's perfect, they are asserting their particular identity. If I say "let's assert German identity," oh, you are a Nazi, you are a fascist. Okay, I know in what sense this is true. But nonetheless there is something false in it. Why? Because denying you the right to your particular identity in this false sense humiliating yourself means that in a much more subtle way you reserve for yourself the universal position. I noticed again and again how these same white liberals who are ready again and again to humiliate themselves, "we are the worst, we are guilty of everything," and they like to play this game, like whenever some—something horrible goes on in third-world countries, it must be a consequence of colonialism, you know. Which, as a black friend that I have from Nigeria once he exploded and said that "this is the worst racism he can imagine, they treat us," he told me, "like children, we are not even allowed to be evil on our own. If we are evil, it must be effect of colonialism and so on and so on." And that's why I claim white liberals love identity politics. It means minorities can have their particular identities, but we renounce our identity, but we keep this role of guardians of universality. Which is why I wonder if this is also your experience. It's my regular experience that these same self-humiliating white liberals have no problem of correcting minorities if they perceive their position as wrong, like "Sorry guys, you fall into colonialist trap here, this is not the right way to talk about it" and so on and so on. So that's why my advice is the one already elaborated, I've written about this a lot, I will not repeat myself, it's the one for of Malcolm X. He was a true universalist, I'm sorry if I repeat myself here. Malcolm X, it was a Hegelian stroke of a genius. He emphasized: X doesn't mean "Oh, white people stole from us our roots." Yes, but his point is not "So let's regain our roots and look for some original tribal identity in Africa." No, he saw this being deprived of roots, X, like we don't have our particular identity, as a unique chance for the black people to propose a new universality which will be much more authentic and radical than white people's universality, which is still—which is still a false universality. Always remember this: the true struggle is the struggle for universality. And liberals like to transform, mystify this struggle into the struggle of particular identities, where then they can play their game, you know, of "your particular identity, my particular identity, let them coexist and so on and so on." No, the—again, the problem today is the struggle of universalities. We have traditional liberal universality, which is the universality of particular modes of—but the problem is how do you define the universal dimension? The problem with particular identity politics is that it never can be all of your position. Every particular identity politics implies a universal dimension of how you construct the space in which particular identities coexist. Traditional version is the one of legal illusion. This was, I otherwise respect him, Richard Rorty's position: that people should be allowed their particular identities and the only universal frame is liberal law which—which organizes society in such such a way that we all tolerate each other and so on and so on. I find this vision of particular identities and universality catastrophic. I think that precisely—here I remain a Marxist—what interests me is not my particular identity against your particular identity. It's the antagonism of my particular identity, the antagonism of your particular identity. And can we link our struggle against our own oppression, domination, with yours? Can we link my antagonism with your antagonism? That's why, to conclude, in spite of all his failures and so on, I see something nonetheless unique. I don't have any great hopes of it, probably it will all turn wrong, but I like this idea of Bernie Sanders plus "The Squad," The Squad. Because we get what? We get young non-white women, radical, relatively radical politics, and then we get Bernie Sanders, an old white man. It's a winning coalition I think. What Bernie Sanders got—I know, I was not in contact with him but in Burlington I often go there with his people and they said his obsession was for long years: for us, we should precisely also aim to get the votes of those disappointed poorer white people who would have otherwise voted for Trump or whoever there. That's the winning coalition today. Don't sacrifice any of the—any of the two sides. If you do sacrifice old white men—not in the racist way, but in the sense of all those who feel betrayed and so on—then you will—you will get with all your political correctness and so on, you will get Trump re-elected again and again. Again, I want to get not just rid of Trump. My message, and this is what caused so many misunderstandings, is that: don't just fight Trump. Ask the crucial question: we lived till years ago, maybe even less, in something like liberal hegemony. We had right-wing version, leftist version: Republicans, Democrats. But basically it was a very homogeneous space. Then Trump happened. How could this have happened? What was wrong with the white liberal hegemony? The only way to really defeat Trump is to ask this self-critical question. If you just focus on Trump, you get caught into liberal nostalgia for the good old principles and so on. Just to conclude with my usual story. That's why I don't agree, I find it deeply problematic, *The Handmaid's Tale*, the novel. It's I think what—of course I am also horrified by this convincing depiction of male fundamentalist terror and so on. But what bothers me is this one, is this thing. I think that *Handmaid's Tale* is basically a work of what Fredric Jameson called "nostalgia for the present." It paints a near future of fundamentalist rule, and it makes us feel well: "You see, haha, we are not yet there, we are still in a liberal society." No, the true question is—and it's never addressed in the novel—but how comes that out of this liberal paradise, Republic of Gilead exploded? Or for us, how comes that Trump exploded? We should be critical towards ourselves, otherwise Trump, if there will not be some catastrophe which would be a nightmarish new World War or whatever, Trump will get re-elected. So my paradox is that it's not what Democratic establishment is telling us: "The only way to win Trump is to be more moderate, to get centrist votes." No. This was what Hillary tried, Clinton, and she lost. The paradox is that the only way to really win over Trump is to get the votes of all those, metaphorically called, old white men, poor guys who feel dispossessed and so on. And we only can get their voices by moving more to the left. It's not even—forget about those stupidities, "Do you want Venezuela?" and so on. We live in very strange times where—look at Bernie Sanders' program. Measured by the standards of European social democracy half a century ago, Bernie Sanders is a very, very modest social democrat. Sweden years ago was incredibly more radical and so on. So this tells us a lot about our predicament, where to—to claim what was absolute standard, normal for Western Europe years ago, now you're accused of wanting Venezuela or whatever you want and so on and so on. No, we should not be afraid of it. And that's what all I mean with that unfortunate statement "Trump can be put to good use" and so on. Trump did something. It was horrible, I admit. But something that we should not be afraid to use. He seriously disturbed the hegemonic ideological establishment predicament. He introduced a crack there. And we the left have to make a choice. Will we react in a panic—"Oh my God, it's horrible, so let's join hand with centrist liberals and so on"—or will we say, "Why don't we do the same and use this opening, this open situation where we shouldn't use—lose—nerves?" Where, again, it's a crack in hegemony. United States are approaching a kind of ideological civil war. Don't be afraid of it, use it. Thank you very much for your attention. All right, now that Slavoj cleared up everything, we're going to have a Q&A session and a discussion and, you know. Was it Stalinist? Did you do what's your duty? Did you distribute the question? No, no, no. This was pure bourgeois. Yeah, yeah. I mean, either way. But yeah, I mean, you know, please feel free to share your thoughts. Please, you know, try to—you know, if you have to frame your question, that's fine, I'm, you know, but try to ask a question. It would be helpful for—you know that I am getting old and senile. Would it be possible please if you ask me a question and I answer it immediately as short as possible? Because I am getting a little bit old and senile and when there are too many questions, I forget one and then I am accused, "Oh, why did you avoid that question?" We've got like a good minutes, half hour. So we're good. Thank you, guys. Thank you for your patience. So I'm going to try to defend Gaia because I think for someone should defend Gaia, the concept of Mother Nature as mother. And I think you talked very accurately about sort of the personal universalism in identity. And I feel like you are drawing the line on the identity of us as a species when really there isn't that much unique about us as a species. And as long as we keep drawing that line, we are never going to have the sort of change that we need in order to survive that—I mean, there's another apocalypse coming, it's a climate apocalypse. And I don't think we're—we're never going to have the sort of change that we need in behavior and in thinking and then ultimately in the way we operate to survive. And I think in order to have that change, don't you think that we need to sort of abolish that identity and embrace the thought of us as being part of nature and nature as mother or lover or whatever we want to see nature as? No, but again, okay, what—please, please remain here, I want to engage in a brief dialogue with you. You know, I am a Stalinist policeman, you will not just provoke Comrade Stalin and get away. Sorry. You know what I mean. But okay, but why, why, why—I agree this is a very serious problem, what we are doing with nature, catastrophes and so on and so on. But for me even to use these terms, Mother Nature and so on and so on—this resuscitates a certain picture again which I find problematic. How then do you react to what I said then? What kind of a mother is this fucking nature? Destroying itself all the time. It's incredible catastrophes and so on. Why call it Mother Nature? Why not simply brutally tell—say: we need, we humanity, certain conditions to survive. And we must—it's very brutal statement, egotist even—we can only survive, at least for the time being, who knows how we will genetically modify ourselves—and we need to make sure that these conditions will persist. Why, I don't see that need into all this pathetic of Mother Nature and so on, you know. It brings a false safety for me. Yeah, Mother Nature, who knows what will happen? There may be a volcanic explosion, what will you do then? Which will ruin us all, what will you do then? Oh, Mother, why did you betray us or what? Catastrophe. You see what I mean? Mother Nature, the term substantializes too much nature into some global, basically benevolent power. Yeah, but I mean, that's the thing. Like mothers are not necessarily benevolent. Mothers can also spank you, and my mother certainly did. Even when she spanks you, she's nonetheless, you know, good mother spanks you to make you better. But I mean—but I think it's still a very sort of human perspective to see everything from the—from the point of view of our survival and from the point of view of our pain and what we like. So even if we define it this way, even if we say: these are the conditions that we need to survive, that actually is no guarantee of survival. We can be hit by a comet tomorrow. And there's no—there's no—there's no sort of getting out of the uncertainty of life. There's no way to get out of it. The—at some point we have to perhaps embrace the fact that we live in an uncertain universe and then there's going to be pain and there's going to be catastrophe and there's going to be bad things. But there are more reasons to embrace what we are as natural beings. Those reasons include the fact that we come from the Earth and we are a part of it. And it doesn't matter whether it always gives us good things or bad things. So that's one reason. The other reason of course is the very practical reason that if we needed to have the kind of revolutionary change we need, we sort of need to imagine ourselves as different from what we have so far imagined ourselves—you know, we imagine ourselves as separate from nature. And I don't think that's something that's going to sort of work for us. This, what you said now, is perfect. I just have two points—not against it even, but just I will try maybe I am wrong to draw the consequences from it. First, when you say "but we are part of nature," no? Yes, we are part of nature precisely when we are destroying nature. And that's nature. You know, don't paint us as there is Mother Nature there, "oh my God, we are violating Mother Nature in our most destructive," we are part of nature. Second thing, when you—you know what surprises me is that when I hear this argument, it's not only like—you know, this is why some radical ecologists or deep ecologists even talk about now, it's very fashionable to talk about not human rights but rights not only of animals—and incidentally for maybe sentimental reasons I totally underline this, agree with it, like I mean, for example when I was young, I had the misfortune of visiting in Slovenia a—a—a chicken factory and so on. I mean it's unimaginable what happens with this industrial agriculture and so on. But what I'm saying is that this idea that we humans should also admit, acknowledge—I wouldn't call them human rights—some kind of spiritual
I will do something probably very risky. I know that many so-called leftists—I don't consider them true leftists—are disturbed by what I wrote about Donald Trump as if I have even a minimal sympathy for him, or some of my critical remarks on LGBT+ and so on, which incidentally I absolutely unconditionally support. I just think that the ideology, the terms in which this discourse is presented, are often suspicious. So please, at any point either interrupt me or criticize me or whatever, and I will try precisely to address here in my introductory, whatever you call it, speech or whatever, these most problematic topics which brought me a lot of hatred and so on. But I think there is a good sign in what I'm doing because I noticed that, for example, when my book on September *Welcome to the Desert of the Real*, was published, my friends in Israel and of course on the West Bank in Palestine or in Egypt told me that it was attacked from both sides at the same time. In *Jerusalem Post*, they claimed it's the most perfidious antisemitic propaganda. *Al-Ahram* wrote in a review that it's a deeply Zionist book. I remembered Jean-Paul Sartre who said if for the same short book you are attacked from both sides, it's a good sign. Maybe you are on the right path. So allow me, hopefully, to clarify some misunderstandings or to make things even further, just feel free to attack me and so on. So I would like to begin with an—just another sorry introductory point. I'm so sad that I didn't risk to go more into a philosophical topic because that's how I got to know him. Who was it, Butch Riley? Yeah, Butch Riley, who wrote to me and I loved his book on echoes in art of the Haiti Revolution, Toussaint Louverture and so on, which I always—this is the permanent point that I repeat obsessively. And I think that's what we need today in our political moment. We don't need geniuses. There are enough of geniuses. Your president, beloved Donald Trump, he regularly designates himself as a stable genius, I think you know. We need what Kierkegaard called the opposition to genius: apostle. You are just a bearer of truth, you repeat again and again the same point. We need women who display toxic masculinity. That's why I like that girl—she is not totally manipulated, she is not a fake—Greta Thunberg. She is an apostle. She doesn't pretend she's a genius, she just repeats the same point, the same point in this wonderfully aggressive way. She proudly displays her illness and—but let not get lost in it. What I like—allow me a little bit to improvise in your book—how you connect Haiti Revolution, echoes in—you mention Eisenstein who planned to do a movie on Toussaint Louverture and so on, all that topics. Because I think that against this identity politics misunderstanding of multiculturalism, I think we should learn to respect, to reassert true authentic multiculturalism. For—as you demonstrate it there in your book. And I love this—I'm sorry we don't have time to debate it here—but for example, this is why I think true Marxists are not cheap historicists. It's not, "Oh, to understand Shakespeare you have to know all the Elizabethan history and so on and so on." No. It's if anything is the other way around, I claim. To understand Elizabethan England, read Shakespeare. You will learn more than reading some boring histories. But you know what fascinated me? How often the best movie versions of a great work of art—novel, play—are the ones which transpose this work of art, the story (if it's a novel or whatever), into a totally different cultural context. This is for me authentic multiculturalism. For example, *Hamlet*. Yeah, we all like *Hamlet*. The best cinema version of *Hamlet* that I know—it's not Laurence Olivier, this or that—it's, do you know that Akira Kurosawa did in '61 a Japanese version of *Hamlet* set in a big corporate company? Hamlet is a student, Toshiro Mifune played by—who comes from the West, discovers his father was killed, uncle, blah blah blah. With a beautiful title, it's an ingenious title: *The Bad Sleep Well*. You can download it for free. Or the best Dostoevsky that I know is *The Idiot*, I think, again Kurosawa, '47. I think that this is the true greatness of a work of art, that it survives transposition into a totally different culture. This—what Walter Benjamin would have called this historical openness, unfinished character—when we come too late, later than the original work of art, this is a privilege for us. I claim we can understand Shakespeare today better than Shakespeare himself understood himself and so on. But let's not get lost. Just to tell you that I would so much like to debate more about your topic, the philosophy, works of art and so on, but let me do the boring political stuff. Okay. Allow me to begin. Today, apocalyptic visions abound. And we are confronting a true antinomy of apocalypsism or apocalyptic reason. The predominant rightist reaction to the warnings about the looming apocalypse is that these warnings are part of the desperate radical leftist strategy to sustain the revolutionary zeal. That's—but also here I think, especially in Europe, this is the usual mantra: that leftists feel betrayed by history—where is the revolution and so on—so they cannot accept that at least in the developed Western country we live relatively comfortable lives. So they need to invent a—or to construct some threat of a final apocalyptic catastrophe. And that's why they focus, for example, that's their reading of ecological threat. Nothing really great or dangerous is happening; it's just the leftist—the leftists' trick to keep the momentum. Of course, I radically disagree with it. The only thing I do agree with is that—and here if we want to be true leftists, we must always emphasize this point—that ecology is today a great field of ideological investments, of ideological battles. For me, at least, the most dangerous ones, apart from obvious ones which are "just leave it to the market, tax the polluters, everything will be okay" or "leave it to the science," are (a) this—let's call it the Mother Nature ecology, this falsely anti-anthropocentric self-humiliating perspective. There was once, I don't know when, some kind of homeostatic balance on Earth. Then we humans come with our hubris, exploiting Earth natural resources too much. We hurt Mother Nature. Mother Nature is taking revenge now with global warming and so on and so on. So we should return to our modest role and so on and so on. I think this is catastrophic. First, I cannot imagine a worse version of anthropocentrism than this fake anti-anthropocentrism. When all these Mother Nature ecologists claim we should accept that we are once tiny species on Earth. What they are really interested is not nature—let's accept it, nature is, if we even should talk like this, I doubt—nature is brutal, totally indifferent. They claim we may destroy life of on Earth. As we know now from geological history and so on, nature itself was ruining itself repeatedly all the time. I always make this point: just think about our still main sources of energy, which are coal and oil. Can you even imagine what type of total catastrophes had to happen on our Earth so that we got oil reserves and coal and so on and so on? Nature doesn't care. So it's not nature that we worry about. We just want a safe environment for us. When they talk about a balanced environment, it means *we* want to survive in a safe environment and so on and so on. Nature is not our mother. If—sorry for the provocation—nature is our mother, it's a dirty bitch of a mother. Totally indifferent. Don't mystify it. And especially accept that nature is not some primordial homeostatic stability that we disturb. No. Nature is—I consciously use this term—nature is deeply unnatural. That's the beginning of for me leftist materialist ecology. But there is another version of ecological ideology that I hate even more. It is this—how should I call it—everyday anti-consumerist consumerism. Because what's our usual predicament when—how does society—I'm not a paranoiac, there is not some central committee hidden in the depths of Manhattan with all those—they are what fascinates me most. I would like to join them. I heard that deep in the tunnels beneath Manhattan there are around people who live all the time. They are mole—mole—they know what happens there. But maybe they—the idea—I'm not saying there is the central committee of reaction there, but how does society address us with eco... (audience: they are called the mole people). Really? That's wonderful because you know what Marx wrote about moles in history and so on. Okay. No. So what I want to say is that the typical movement of those in power, counter-move, is—this is Jordan Peterson applied to ecology, if I can put it—is, "But who are you to just criticize big companies and so on? What did *you* do to prevent pollution?" And then they give you a set of easy tasks to make you feel well, like, "Did you recycle all your newspapers? Did you put aside all Coca-Cola cans?" and so on and so on. This is, I think, a wonderful ideological operation. They prescribe you the role to play: recycle and so on and so on. It makes you feel well, and you can go on consuming and so on. My ideal capitalist, ecological capitalist here is—it was years ago, now it's different—it's Starbucks, the company, no? I remember years ago when I entered the Starbucks coffee store—I hate it, just to meet friends there—you always had big posters like something like every of all our profit from cappuccino goes to save some Guatemala forest, to feed orphans in Somalia, whatever you want. And this is a wonderful ideological operation. The message is: you can go on consuming because the price for consuming, the price in the sense of the way by consuming you hurt environment, you hurt other people, is included into the price of our commodity. So, you know, like you are threatened, feel threatened by our commodification, no problem, the price for this is included, you can do it. And this brings me to another aspect of ecological ideology, which is this false sense of quantification. You know, like you take now even on plane tickets I think, they give you how much monoxide you produced, how much carbon—all that stuff and so on. I think the function of this is strictly—to be brutal, don't underestimate ideology here—to make you feel well. Now I will be repeated—an old joke of mine, very vulgar, but it's true. I think that—and I even read an analysis done in my own country, maybe we are especially perverted, Slovenia, where they proved that they asked people who are buying organic apples, you know, those rotten apples which cost double the nice chemically manipulated apples, why they are doing it, do they trust it? And they got a shocking answer. The answer was, "Of course it's probably manipulated, these apples are even worse. But it makes me feel well that if I buy those apples, I did something for Mother Nature, for the sense of solidarity and so on and so on." So just don't underestimate all this stuff. But let me go on. So nonetheless, in spite of all this, I think ecology is a mega-problem. And but return to my main line, that the right-wing narrative today of global warming deniers is precisely: no, it's a leftist plot. The same as LGBT+ and all that stuff. The idea is this one: the left is aware, or was aware already from early 1920s, that there will not be a big expected revolution. So they knew they first have to demoralize our Christian societies, to ruin us from within. So they—it's a wonderful, I like conspiracy theories—the idea is that the money that enabled Max Horkheimer to organize Frankfurt School was not from an Argentinean student of Horkheimer, but it really came from Moscow. Stalin personally decided that we have to first corrupt the West intellectually. We need psychoanalysis and so on. So they financed from the very beginning Frankfurt School and so on and so on. But okay, you know what's my answer to this right-wing guys who want to dismiss ecology as pseudo-apocalyptic vision? That unfortunately they have their own apocalypse, which is double, their own apocalyptic vision. One is, of course, the one that I already mentioned: European civilization is under threat now, immigrants and so on. And the other aspect of the apocalyptic vision that I already mentioned: LGBT, feminism and so on and so on, all that stuff. So they also speak the language of apocalypse. So again, we don't get one apocalyptic discourse; we have a conflict of apocalypses. And here I remain a classical Marxist: this, when every phenomenon that you analyze, always try to isolate in what sense it includes its own contradiction—because it's a very precise term—let's call it—it's antagonistic, its own opposite tendency. And I even—and this what I will improvise on now is not a criticism in any sense. I think that this would be my point, for example—allow me a brief improvisation and this is my dream, as you know maybe, to do just this introductory improvisation and to skip the talk itself then, you know. So it's like to have a burger but only with lettuce and so on with no meat, you know. Okay. Let me go on. They tell you that. Sorry? They can tell you that now. They're already doing it? I was told that Burger King already had now a hamburger without meat and so on. Okay. Let's not get lost. You know why am I for LGBT+ or transgender? Precisely what fascinates me so much is a certain immanent antagonism. The official, let's call it, ideology of LGBT+ is something that I without any irony, benevolently, would have called Judith Butler historicism. Gender identities are not biologically determined; it's socially, historically constructed through performative discursive games and so on and so on. Okay. But what fascinates me so much is that—and I know many of them—all those guys who actually make transgender operations, they speak a language which is exactly the opposite one, which is an—it's brutally openly—I use this term prohibited by today's discourse theory, historicism—essentialist language. Repeatedly, persons who, for example, underwent this painful operation from man to woman, I noticed how almost always they use this term: "I am so grateful that now finally I live in a body into which I should have been born." The language they speak is one of pure essentialism in the sense of: it is as if there is a basic sexual orientation inscribed into my, whatever we call it, soul, but there was just an—in my birth, an ontological mistake, as it were, I was born in a wrong sex. Now, I don't think this is simply ideology. That's crucial. I think that precisely the reference to psychoanalysis, German idealism and so on, allows us to explain in a materialist way how something which is contingent can nonetheless be experienced as your predestination, as a necessity. As we learned from Freud or from great German idealists, your truly free decisions are not conscious decisions. Your conscious decisions are rather superficial. You're—am I doing something wrong? No. No. I thought you are—no. I thought I felt like Khrushchev on Crimea when—wait—making to depose me. Sorry. No, no. Sorry. Let me go quickly on. What I want to say is that just—if this sounds to you something abstract and so on, allow me to use my eternal old examples. Isn't it that the highest free acts are precisely always experienced as necessity? For example, let's say your country is occupied. You have to join resistance. You do it because you feel that you would betray yourself by not doing it. It's not a choice in the sense of strawberry cake or vanilla cake or whatever. It's, "I do it because I cannot do it otherwise." Or a more pathetic example: think about love. You fall in love. You never fall in love in the sense of "I'm looking around, nice lady or nice man, here, there, let me make a choice." No. All of a sudden you realize that you are in love. The decision is never made in the present term. And what I am saying is that this LGBT essentialism makes this clear. If you want to—in a trans operation or just in a more superficial way by cross-dressing and so on—if you want to change your sexual identity, it is—we can account for it nicely how—it is still a contingent free decision of yours, but it has to appear to you as a necessity. Why? Because it's a radical decision. Usual decisions like "do I choose, I don't know, this type of water or Coke or whatever," there you are already constituted as a subject and you just make choices. But radical decision is where in a pathetic sense you choose yourself. And again, that's all I am trying to—to do. What I don't buy in the usual LGBT+ ideology is this happy free-floating identities, you know, like "I can be multiple identities, today I'm gay, tomorrow I'm heterosexual, then I jump here and there and so on and so on." No. They underestimate terribly the pain, the traumatic decision of assuming a certain sexual identity. And the greatness of transgender is for me precisely that it brings us very close to this radical level of freedom. Okay, but let's not get lost into this. Just let me go back to apocalypse and to the choice of—sorry, to the antinomies. We get antinomic apocalypse. We get ecological apocalypse, we get reactionary versions of the apocalypse and so on and so on. Why this? Why should we not trust these so-called—I hate them mostly, probably—so-called rational optimists, Steven Pinker and so on, who claim "but wait a minute, we are living in wonderful times, there were never so little wars" and so on and so on. Maybe they are right. A lot of their data are probably true. But you know what's my fear there? I wonder if you would agree. Today with the rise of the new right, we often hear this idea that we are like in late or early 1930s. Fascism is coming back. No, I think the situation is more dangerous. We are kind of a—again in the—the best historical parallel would have been the decades before World War I. Because don't forget the true catastrophe of Western or at least European history was World War I. Before that, we had years of, in Western Europe—not around the world—unimpeded progress. Women more or less in some countries at least got vote rights, universal—universal vote rights, retirement plans, and it was an immense progress. But nonetheless, people were more and more aware already from I think around that a catastrophe is coming. And they were right. Although people didn't believe that it could happen. And at least in our developed part of the world, let's face it, from till about years ago, this was at least in the developed countries with social democratic hegemony, these were relatively happy times. That era is coming to an end. And when my right-wing—I don't have friends—enemies tell me, tell me, "but communism brought just ruin" and so on and so on, I tell—tell—tell them, "okay, many horrible things happened, but the original catastrophe was World War I." And for that, sorry, you cannot blame communism in any way. It was pure imperialist capitalist matter. We cannot even imagine what shock it was for Western Europe how from that ideal of years of progress we approach cat—and we are in that type of a situation. So let me now finally approach my proper topic. So where are we today? What is the meaning of Trump phenomenon? Let me do it slowly, systematically. Not such a long time ago in a galaxy that now appears far, far away, of course—you know to what I refer to, to the movie series successfully destroyed when Disney bought it over—the public space was clearly distinguished from the obscenities of private exchanges. Politicians, journalists, and other media personalities were expected to address us with a minimum of dignity, talking and acting as if the common good is their main preoccupation, avoiding vulgar expressions and reference to personal intimacies. There were, of course, rumors about their private vices, but they that remained—they remained that: private matters mentioned only in the yellow press. Today, however, not only we can read in the mass media about the intimate details of public personalities, populist politicians themselves often regress to shameless obscenities. One should not lose sight of what is so surprising about this rise of shameless obscenity of the old right, as so well noted and analyzed among others by Angela Nagle in her *Kill All Normies*. Traditionally, or in our retroactive view of tradition at least, shameless obscenity worked as subversive, as an act of undermining traditional domination, as depriving the master of his false dignity. I remember from my own youth how in the 1960s protesting students liked to use obscene words or make obscene gestures to embarrass figures of power and, so they claimed, denounce their hypocrisy. However, what we are getting today with the exploding public obscenity is not the disappearance of authority, of master figures, but its forceful reappearance. We are getting something unimaginable decades ago: obscene masters. Of course, Donald Trump is the emblematic figure of this new type of obscene populist master. And the usual argumentation against him, that his populism worry for the well-being of the poor ordinary people is a fake, that his actual politics protect the interests of the rich, is I think all too short. The followers of Trump do not act irrationally. They are not victims of primitive ideological manipulations which made them vote against their interests. They are quite rational in their own terms. They vote for Trump because in the patriotic vision he is selling around, he also addresses their ordinary everyday problems: safety, permanent job, and so on and so on. When Trump was elected president, I was asked by a couple of publishers to write a book which would submit the Trump phenomenon to a psychoanalytic critics, claiming that "this is something so crazy that is happening, we need psychoanalysis, how could people buy Trump?" My answer was that we do not need psychoanalysis to explore the pathology of Trump's success. The only thing to psychoanalyze is the irrational stupidity of the left-liberal reactions to it. The stupidity which makes it more and more probable that Trump will be re-elected. To use what is perhaps the lowest point of Trump's vulgarities, the left has not yet learned how to grab Trump by his p—[unintelligible]. Trump is not winning because just by shamelessly bombarding us with messages which generate obscene enjoyment at how he dares to violate the elementary norms of decency. Of course, that's the basic operation of Trump. We are shocked all the time, how dares he do this, he violates all the unwritten rules of decency. But through all his shocking vulgarities, he is providing his followers with a narrative which makes sense. Of course, a very limited, twisted sense, but nonetheless a sense which obviously does a better job than the left-liberal narrative. His shameless obscenities serve—serve as signs of solidarity with so-called ordinary people. "You see, I'm the same as you, we are all red under our skin." And this solidarity also signals the point at which Trump's obscenity reaches its limit. Trump is not truly obscene when he talks about the greatness of America, when he dismisses his opponents as enemies of the people and so on. He intends to be taken seriously. And his obscenities are meant to precisely emphasize by contrast the level at which he is serious. They are meant to function as an obscene display of his belief in the greatness of America. And incidentally, I read a couple of days ago how—it's incredible, these turns and twists of American right-wingers—how they try to reappropriate Hegel. First it was Fukuyama, no, justifying liberal democracy in pseudo, of course, Hegelian terms as the end of history, the ultimate, the best possible, or at least the least worst, social order. Now, a couple of days ago—check it up, please—in *National Review*, Ralph Peters again claimed to understand Trump we must go to Hegel. That Trump practices Hegelian politics of recognition. His message to ordinary people is, in contrast to liberal establishment, "I recognize you." This is why, in order to undermine Trump, one should begin by displacing the site of his obscenity and treat as obscene precisely his serious statements. Trump is not truly obscene when he uses vulgar sexist terms. He is truly obscene when he talks about America as the greatest country in the world, when he imposes his economic measures and so on and so on. The obscenity of his speech masks this more basic obscenity. So let me go on to elaborate this point a little bit more. Now even some—a point which may be more problematic for you: my doubts, although I would like to see him deposed, of course, my doubts about the campaign for the impeachment of Trump. Okay, my first problem is, of course, Trump at least talks a lot, but then he nonetheless—it looks so afraid to go to war—North Korea, Iran and so on—while frankly, if you ask me, if you get rid of Trump, you get Mike Pence. And I have my doubts who would be worse. But my point is another one here. You see, here we have to look for ideology. Again, as they say in politically correct jargon, trigger warning: you may find problematic what I will say now, and I'm open here for you to counterattack. Trump is portrayed in this—calls for his impeachment—as an individual pursuing his own private interests, not as the representative of a state and its apparatuses. The guy whom we should trust, Edward Snowden, from his Moscow exile, immediately got this point, commenting that—a quote from a recent interview by Snowden. And incidentally, I think Snowden is quite a heroic figure. He makes it again and again clear the point that he doesn't *like* to be in Russia; he would much prefer to be in Sweden, in Germany and so on. They just don't want him, they're afraid of the United States. Okay. Snowden wrote, commented that, quote: "A whistleblower's complaint, which triggered Trump's impeachment inquiry, is strategically quite wise in its focus on the president versus an institution. Congress could be more than happy to throw an individual abusing its office under the bus in a way that these individuals are not willing to do when they themselves are implicated by the same allegations. This whistleblower is doing something that's a little bit unusual. They are—their claim is that an individual is breaking the law who of course happens to be the president." End of quote. So the way I read Snowden's complaint is the following one: it is acceptable to criticize an individual which breaks the law while he pursues his private interests—or pathological inclinations: revenge, lust for power, and so on. But it is much more difficult to discern a crime in the activity of state institutions, a criminal activity which is performed by personally honest individuals dedicated to their job. Evil and crime are here not individualized but inscribed into the very functioning of institutions. That's why I find, again, problematic the calls just to impeach Trump. Trump is undoubtedly a repelling person lacking a basic moral compass. However, what about the systematic violations of human rights in the continuous activities of the US intelligence agencies? The true enemy are not idiosyncratic figures which act as a disturbance for the establishment. The true enemy are honest patriotic bureaucrats ruthlessly pursuing the United States goals. To name names, the model of such patriotic bureaucrat is, as far as I can judge, James Comey. You remember, the FBI director deposed by Trump. Although at the level of facts, Comey was probably mostly truthful in his critique of Trump in his bestseller *A Higher Loyalty*. One should nonetheless admit that his "higher loyalty" to the principles and values of the United States leaves untouched what one cannot but call the criminal tendency inscribed into the US state institutions, all that was revealed by Assange, Snowden, Chelsea Manning and so on. One should also not forget that the movement to impeach Trump is mostly motivated by the desire to prove that Russia influenced the last presidential elections, enabling Trump to win. While there undoubtedly was Russian meddling—incidentally, in the same way that the United States tried to influence elections all around the world, just in that case they call it a defense of democracy, of course—the focus on this prospect obfuscates the true reason of Hillary Clinton's defeat: her ruthless struggle against Bernie Sanders and the leftist wing of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders was right to warn that—and I quote him here—that "if for the next year, year and a half, going right into the heart of the election, all that the Congress is talking about is impeaching Trump and Trump, Trump, Trump and Mueller, Mueller, Mueller, and we are not talking about healthcare, we are not talking about raising the minimum wage, we are not talking about combating climate change, we are not talking about sexism and racism and homophobia, what I worry about is that it that works in Trump's advantage." End of quote. You see, that's my point here. I don't have time to develop it but that—don't be fascinated by individuals. The horror of today's global capitalism is—and this is always what fascinated me in my analysis even of traumatic parts of the left's inheritance, Stalinism and so on. Don't fall into this trap of portraying the executors even of Stalinist crimes as evil-sneering individuals pursuing private goals. No, the most horrible evil is the evil, again, inscribed into the basic functioning of institutions themselves. For example, all that we learn again from Snowden, Manning, Assange. All that was, I guess, mostly performed by people who thought that they are doing a good thing, their patriotic duty and so on and so on. And if you want a historical—no, historical means cinematic for me—not Hollywood but German example that gave me this idea. You know which one I like here, the idea? It's the—which movie—did you see the movie which was a hit some years ago, *The Lives of Others*? I claim that movie is false. And paradoxically, although it wants to be fanatically anticommunist, it's not radical enough. Why? You know the story. To cut long story short, a corrupted minister of culture, it looks, in German Democratic Republic wants to screw the wife, beautiful wife of a famous playwright. And to get rid of him, he orders the secret police to follow him to find some problematic points so that he can get rid of him. But you see, it's the same problem as now with Trump. You—the movie locates the evil into—in a typical liberal way into—an individual person who pursues his dirty private sexual interests or whatever, it could be something else. But I claim the reality of East Germany was that even if all Stasi members and so on were just honest Stasi members, not doing it for their private satisfaction of their vices but just to do what they saw as their duty, control anti-socialist forces, all the oppression would have stayed there. So again, don't—with all the absolute disgust I feel for Trump—don't make this mistake of locating the evil into private person—into private person with vices and so on and so on. The true evil is the evil of how our state machineries work. The true evil, the true problem for me is what was disclosed by all the whistleblowers and so on: how a new type of control is developing, where big private corporations like Facebook, Google and so on, closely coordinate their activities with NSA and we are getting today new forms of control of which we are not even aware. Usually, our media when they report on this, they refer safely to China. Oh, the Chinese, they have that each of us has a certain patriotic number, how high it stands. We are doing the same thing, just in a little bit more subtle way. The true problem of freedom today is precisely un-freedom which is experienced as freedom, which is not even experienced as un-freedom. I'm almost getting nostalgic for the good old times when you looked back, oh my God, is somebody following me? I'm not free. No. Today, what is the—the most free thing that you can do? You surf on the web, you do whatever you want. A little bit of hardcore, a little bit of—my son taught me, my son can enter the dark web and so on. You do this, what can be more free than this? You just do what you want. The more you do this, the more you are tightly controlled. We—we live in—okay, I don't totally agree with that lady, but she's on the right path: Shoshana Zuboff with surveillance capitalism and so on. That's the problem today. Again, don't—don't—don't personalize evil. Okay, I want really to leave the time for debate. So let me just add two more points. This is why, if you ask me, I think as you already hinted at quoting that an African philosopher, that—the question of at this level of a political project—the question of universalism is crucial. What I admire—although they are making stupid mistakes, like what Assange was doing is deplorable, but it doesn't in any way just justify what is now happening to him. This was maybe the most successful in the last decades character assassinations. I know, I visited him regularly. All the stuff that you maybe read in the newspaper that he was painting with his shit coloring the walls of the embassy of Ecuador in London and so on—that's complete madness and so on. But what I want to say is that a new form of universalist politics is emerging there. On the one hand, we have ecological politics which is, again, by definition universalist. If there is anything that—if there is something clear about ecology is that we have to move beyond sovereign states. We need some kind of international mobilization. It's global. And the same goes for these new forms of digital control, and the same goes for the third problem today: refugees and so on and so on. I'm often accused for being ambiguous, racist even, about refugees and so on. No, my point is a different one here. My point is that refugees—okay, I fully admit, I wrote about it—that refugees—I know more about Europe than about your situation here. In Europe, refugees are clearly the result of the activity of Western powers. Without American attack on Iraq, without what is happening now in Syria, without what is happening now, now, now in Yemen, where a new wave of refugees is created, and there wouldn't have been refugees. So we are absolutely responsible for it. The ultimate example for me is the Republic of Congo, Congo Kinshasa. It's a state which is usually portrayed as a rogue state, central power doesn't function—yes, but precisely as such. A nightmare of a state with around child warriors. You know, they discovered you take a child of years, you put him on drugs, years later you have a perfect killing machine and so on. But as such, Congo is fully integrated into world economy. Coltan, all other precious mines. Just local warlords are dealing directly with our companies and so on and so on. So what I want to say is that about this is that what—with refugees, yes, that don't get caught into liberal humanist topic of treating refugees as a humanitarian problem. It's an economic socio-political problem. The moment you formulate it in this way—"Oh my God, thousands of people waiting on the border there. Will we open our hearts to them or not?"—you are mystifying the situation. You are turning this into a humanitarian problem and more and more I suspect this in Europe, that this fits perfectly the ruling liberal elite. In this way, they stir up a conflict between one and another group of underprivileged poor people: refugees and our own poor people. Who, of course it's also part of ideological manipulation, feel threatened by refugees and so on. And so it's a very comfortable position. At the same time, you dismiss your own poor people, oh they are primitive racists and so on. You have a conflict there, but your position is safe here. So for me it's absolutely crucial to insist we should make a step backwards and change our geopolitical stance, the economic politics and so on and so on. There is the solution. Don't turn it—because it's ridiculous if we reduce it to a humanitarian problem, then the point is simply what? That all the poor from third-world countries will move to the developed countries? First, this is not happening now. The truly underprivileged remain there in horrible conditions. I read a very good analysis in Europe about who from Syria, Iraq and so on, who comes to Europe? Mostly, large majority, brutal, half-criminal young people. Why? Not because they are bad, because they are the only ones who are strong enough to do it. First, you need a couple of thousands of euros to get there, you know, and the truly poor ones remain there. This is just breeding—breeding a catastrophe. More radical—much more radical economic measures are—we need them here. Next, even more problematic part. Now I will do—now I will do something to really annoy you. That's why, although I, of course, totally support black liberation, in the precise sense of as a Hegelian I support it. For example, you know "Black Lives Matter," I totally, precisely as a Hegelian universalist, I totally reject the stupid white liberal counterpoint made among others by Trump himself: "No, why only black lives matter? All lives should matter." No, it's a lie because that—we are dealing here with what Hegel calls concrete universality. In every concrete historical situation, a certain type of racism, of state violence, is the concrete type which stands for universality. Today, you have a lot of violence in the United States. But you cannot say, "Let's just look at at all of it." What happens by the state apparatus police to black people is the emblematic figure. You know, it's the same paradox, maybe I exaggerate a little bit, as if to research racism in Germany in 1930s and ignore antisemitism. No, if you talked about race in there, you had to mention—that's why. But nonetheless, I—now I come to my final point, maybe problematic to you but it's crucial—my reference here will be, and I say this to provoke you, I think these lines are more actual than ever: the black activist that I really appreciate is those who are aware of the traps of identity politics. White liberals love identity politics because if you look closely at how it functions, it reduces the other, underprivileged, to a particular identity. White liberals love Native Americans who dance their folkloric dances, who have some shit deep inside into how we shouldn't objectivize nature, you know, before you mine a mountain, you should ask the spirit of the mountain and do it if you are allowed—all that stuff. They love it. What they don't like is if those underprivileged don't just play the game, "We want to assert our particular identity," but "No, sorry guys, what—we are oppressed in a much more radical way, we want to oppose you at the level of a different universality." The only true struggle is the struggle for universality itself. And I would go to the end here—and now I slowly am coming to an end, just one quote surprising for you and then one wonderful Jewish joke. With this I will finish. First the quote, it will maybe surprise you who is it from. He should be remembered today: Huey Newton, the founder and theorist of the Black Panther Party. He so clearly saw, half a century ago, the limitation of local national resistance to the global reign of capital. He even made a step further and rejected the term decolonization as inappropriate. His point was that one cannot fight global capitalism from the position of national unities. Here is his statement from a unique dialogue—this was a beautiful sublime moment—in Huey Newton had a dialogue with Erik Erikson, the Freudian psychoanalyst who was deeply sympathetic—white guy, old white guy from Europe—but deeply sympathetic to the Black Panthers and here is what Huey Newton said—I admire this—quote: "We in the Black Panther Party saw that the United States was no longer a nation. It was something else, it was more than a nation. It had not only expanded its territorial boundaries, but it had expanded all of its control as well. We called it an empire. Now, at one time the world had an empire in which the conditions of rule were different: the Roman Empire. The difference between the Roman and the American empires is that other nations were able to exist external to and independent of the Roman Empire, because their means of exploitation, conquest and control was all relatively limited. But what we—when we say empire today, we mean precisely what we say: an empire is a nation-state that has transformed itself into a power controlling all the world's lands and people. We believe that there are no more colonies or neo-colonies. If a people is colonized, it must be possible for them to decolonize and become what they formerly were. But what happens when the raw materials are extracted and labor is exploited within a territory dispersed over the entire globe? When the riches of the whole Earth are depleted and used to feed a gigantic industrial machine? Then the people and the economy are so integrated into the imperialist empire that it's impossible to decolonize, to return to the former conditions of existence. If colonies cannot decolonize and return to their original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist, nor we believe will they ever exist again," and so on and so on. That's where we are today. The problem of identity politics where I have a problem with it is that it presupposes that—how should I put it—that identities exist. I don't think they exist. And that's why problem even with, for example, certain versions of LGBT—to make a jump—I'm approaching the end—yeah, yeah—of LGBT+. My—it perceives again and again that they still accept the fact that we have gender identities, they just want to expand the list. It's not just the traditional binary masculine-feminine, it's—and then you get 40—butch, bisexual, multisexual, asexual, whatever you want. But the way—to repeat my old joke, maybe some of you know it—the way I would approach LGBT is as a Hegelian: my favorite moment of it is the "plus." LGBT+. What is this "plus"? There is the wrong British empiricist reading of it: that "plus" simply means maybe there are some identities that we didn't yet discover, so we should keep a mind open, what if tomorrow a guy comes who said "I am a trigender butch" or whatever, "Oh, sorry guy, you were not in the list, we will add you to the list." But if there is a lesson is that today subjectivity is this "plus" itself, non-identical. This idea that you can be "plus" in the sense of excess over identity. And this is today's subjectivity: the "plus" itself. The psychoanalytic name for it is hysteria, feminine hysteria. Which, we should not read it in a male-chauvinist way as "hysterical women." For Jacques Lacan, this is the highest mode of subjectivity. Lacan emphasized that all creative science—not university science where you just report on the results—but creative science is hysterical. Hysterical in the sense of what? What is hysteria at its most fundamental? It's precisely questioning your identity. Even at the most primitive level, I'm sorry to be so vulgar. But if you are heterosexual and love a woman, and the woman asks you this eternal stupid question—it can be annoying—"Tell me why do you love me?" Of course, there is no answer to this one. The moment you answer it, you are not truly in love. But you know what is—this is the basic hysterical question: you, the discourse of the master, society, you are telling me what I am: a wife, a servant, whatever. Why am I what you are saying that I am? This basic doubt of your identity, which precisely opens up a universal—a universal dimension. Okay, let me stop that and to leave some time for debate. Just the concluding joke, which will make the point. It's a well-known, I'm sorry if you know it, I used it two, three times in my—in my books. It was also used already by many philosophers, even Derrida, I know Derrida used it. A joke about Jews gathered in a synagogue on Sabbath to publicly declare their failures or whatever. And first a mighty rabbi says, "Forgive me, oh God, I'm nothing, not worthy of your attention." After him, a rich Jewish merchant says, "Forgive me, oh God, I'm a worthless nothing." Then a poor ordinary Jew steps forward and says, "Forgive me, God, I'm also nothing." At that point, the—it doesn't matter who—the rich merchant says—rich rabbi—and says, "But who this guy think that he is? He thinks—how dares he also to claim that he is a nothing?" We—that's the white liberal life today. I literally experienced the same situation already years ago at a very politically correct conference where white liberals were excelling each other into who will humiliate himself more. "We are to blame everything, oh, Eurocentrism, we brought slavery, it's nightmare, we are guilty of everything. Christianity, the worst one, it was invented to screw other races and so on and so on." And then a black friend of mine, not to embarrass him I will not mention his name, and said, "Wait a minute, guys, we are not so innocent. We also had our own Louis Farrakhan, black racism and so on." And I noticed that the mighty white liberal professors exchanged these embarrassed gazes precisely, "No, sorry guy, *we* are to blame, *we* are nothing, who are you to say that you are also nothing?" The message was clear. Precisely when white liberals humiliate themselves—like, and I noticed this again and again, like "we are worthless, we don't have the right"—like if a—that's a subtle racism expressed in this form. If you are an exotic nation, like if Native Americans dance their tribal dances and so on, that's perfect, they are asserting their particular identity. If I say "let's assert German identity," oh, you are a Nazi, you are a fascist. Okay, I know in what sense this is true. But nonetheless there is something false in it. Why? Because denying you the right to your particular identity in this false sense humiliating yourself means that in a much more subtle way you reserve for yourself the universal position. I noticed again and again how these same white liberals who are ready again and again to humiliate themselves, "we are the worst, we are guilty of everything," and they like to play this game, like whenever some—something horrible goes on in third-world countries, it must be a consequence of colonialism, you know. Which, as a black friend that I have from Nigeria once he exploded and said that "this is the worst racism he can imagine, they treat us," he told me, "like children, we are not even allowed to be evil on our own. If we are evil, it must be effect of colonialism and so on and so on." And that's why I claim white liberals love identity politics. It means minorities can have their particular identities, but we renounce our identity, but we keep this role of guardians of universality. Which is why I wonder if this is also your experience. It's my regular experience that these same self-humiliating white liberals have no problem of correcting minorities if they perceive their position as wrong, like "Sorry guys, you fall into colonialist trap here, this is not the right way to talk about it" and so on and so on. So that's why my advice is the one already elaborated, I've written about this a lot, I will not repeat myself, it's the one for of Malcolm X. He was a true universalist, I'm sorry if I repeat myself here. Malcolm X, it was a Hegelian stroke of a genius. He emphasized: X doesn't mean "Oh, white people stole from us our roots." Yes, but his point is not "So let's regain our roots and look for some original tribal identity in Africa." No, he saw this being deprived of roots, X, like we don't have our particular identity, as a unique chance for the black people to propose a new universality which will be much more authentic and radical than white people's universality, which is still—which is still a false universality. Always remember this: the true struggle is the struggle for universality. And liberals like to transform, mystify this struggle into the struggle of particular identities, where then they can play their game, you know, of "your particular identity, my particular identity, let them coexist and so on and so on." No, the—again, the problem today is the struggle of universalities. We have traditional liberal universality, which is the universality of particular modes of—but the problem is how do you define the universal dimension? The problem with particular identity politics is that it never can be all of your position. Every particular identity politics implies a universal dimension of how you construct the space in which particular identities coexist. Traditional version is the one of legal illusion. This was, I otherwise respect him, Richard Rorty's position: that people should be allowed their particular identities and the only universal frame is liberal law which—which organizes society in such such a way that we all tolerate each other and so on and so on. I find this vision of particular identities and universality catastrophic. I think that precisely—here I remain a Marxist—what interests me is not my particular identity against your particular identity. It's the antagonism of my particular identity, the antagonism of your particular identity. And can we link our struggle against our own oppression, domination, with yours? Can we link my antagonism with your antagonism? That's why, to conclude, in spite of all his failures and so on, I see something nonetheless unique. I don't have any great hopes of it, probably it will all turn wrong, but I like this idea of Bernie Sanders plus "The Squad," The Squad. Because we get what? We get young non-white women, radical, relatively radical politics, and then we get Bernie Sanders, an old white man. It's a winning coalition I think. What Bernie Sanders got—I know, I was not in contact with him but in Burlington I often go there with his people and they said his obsession was for long years: for us, we should precisely also aim to get the votes of those disappointed poorer white people who would have otherwise voted for Trump or whoever there. That's the winning coalition today. Don't sacrifice any of the—any of the two sides. If you do sacrifice old white men—not in the racist way, but in the sense of all those who feel betrayed and so on—then you will—you will get with all your political correctness and so on, you will get Trump re-elected again and again. Again, I want to get not just rid of Trump. My message, and this is what caused so many misunderstandings, is that: don't just fight Trump. Ask the crucial question: we lived till years ago, maybe even less, in something like liberal hegemony. We had right-wing version, leftist version: Republicans, Democrats. But basically it was a very homogeneous space. Then Trump happened. How could this have happened? What was wrong with the white liberal hegemony? The only way to really defeat Trump is to ask this self-critical question. If you just focus on Trump, you get caught into liberal nostalgia for the good old principles and so on. Just to conclude with my usual story. That's why I don't agree, I find it deeply problematic, *The Handmaid's Tale*, the novel. It's I think what—of course I am also horrified by this convincing depiction of male fundamentalist terror and so on. But what bothers me is this one, is this thing. I think that *Handmaid's Tale* is basically a work of what Fredric Jameson called "nostalgia for the present." It paints a near future of fundamentalist rule, and it makes us feel well: "You see, haha, we are not yet there, we are still in a liberal society." No, the true question is—and it's never addressed in the novel—but how comes that out of this liberal paradise, Republic of Gilead exploded? Or for us, how comes that Trump exploded? We should be critical towards ourselves, otherwise Trump, if there will not be some catastrophe which would be a nightmarish new World War or whatever, Trump will get re-elected. So my paradox is that it's not what Democratic establishment is telling us: "The only way to win Trump is to be more moderate, to get centrist votes." No. This was what Hillary tried, Clinton, and she lost. The paradox is that the only way to really win over Trump is to get the votes of all those, metaphorically called, old white men, poor guys who feel dispossessed and so on. And we only can get their voices by moving more to the left. It's not even—forget about those stupidities, "Do you want Venezuela?" and so on. We live in very strange times where—look at Bernie Sanders' program. Measured by the standards of European social democracy half a century ago, Bernie Sanders is a very, very modest social democrat. Sweden years ago was incredibly more radical and so on. So this tells us a lot about our predicament, where to—to claim what was absolute standard, normal for Western Europe years ago, now you're accused of wanting Venezuela or whatever you want and so on and so on. No, we should not be afraid of it. And that's what all I mean with that unfortunate statement "Trump can be put to good use" and so on. Trump did something. It was horrible, I admit. But something that we should not be afraid to use. He seriously disturbed the hegemonic ideological establishment predicament. He introduced a crack there. And we the left have to make a choice. Will we react in a panic—"Oh my God, it's horrible, so let's join hand with centrist liberals and so on"—or will we say, "Why don't we do the same and use this opening, this open situation where we shouldn't use—lose—nerves?" Where, again, it's a crack in hegemony. United States are approaching a kind of ideological civil war. Don't be afraid of it, use it. Thank you very much for your attention. All right, now that Slavoj cleared up everything, we're going to have a Q&A session and a discussion and, you know. Was it Stalinist? Did you do what's your duty? Did you distribute the question? No, no, no. This was pure bourgeois. Yeah, yeah. I mean, either way. But yeah, I mean, you know, please feel free to share your thoughts. Please, you know, try to—you know, if you have to frame your question, that's fine, I'm, you know, but try to ask a question. It would be helpful for—you know that I am getting old and senile. Would it be possible please if you ask me a question and I answer it immediately as short as possible? Because I am getting a little bit old and senile and when there are too many questions, I forget one and then I am accused, "Oh, why did you avoid that question?" We've got like a good minutes, half hour. So we're good. Thank you, guys. Thank you for your patience. So I'm going to try to defend Gaia because I think for someone should defend Gaia, the concept of Mother Nature as mother. And I think you talked very accurately about sort of the personal universalism in identity. And I feel like you are drawing the line on the identity of us as a species when really there isn't that much unique about us as a species. And as long as we keep drawing that line, we are never going to have the sort of change that we need in order to survive that—I mean, there's another apocalypse coming, it's a climate apocalypse. And I don't think we're—we're never going to have the sort of change that we need in behavior and in thinking and then ultimately in the way we operate to survive. And I think in order to have that change, don't you think that we need to sort of abolish that identity and embrace the thought of us as being part of nature and nature as mother or lover or whatever we want to see nature as? No, but again, okay, what—please, please remain here, I want to engage in a brief dialogue with you. You know, I am a Stalinist policeman, you will not just provoke Comrade Stalin and get away. Sorry. You know what I mean. But okay, but why, why, why—I agree this is a very serious problem, what we are doing with nature, catastrophes and so on and so on. But for me even to use these terms, Mother Nature and so on and so on—this resuscitates a certain picture again which I find problematic. How then do you react to what I said then? What kind of a mother is this fucking nature? Destroying itself all the time. It's incredible catastrophes and so on. Why call it Mother Nature? Why not simply brutally tell—say: we need, we humanity, certain conditions to survive. And we must—it's very brutal statement, egotist even—we can only survive, at least for the time being, who knows how we will genetically modify ourselves—and we need to make sure that these conditions will persist. Why, I don't see that need into all this pathetic of Mother Nature and so on, you know. It brings a false safety for me. Yeah, Mother Nature, who knows what will happen? There may be a volcanic explosion, what will you do then? Which will ruin us all, what will you do then? Oh, Mother, why did you betray us or what? Catastrophe. You see what I mean? Mother Nature, the term substantializes too much nature into some global, basically benevolent power. Yeah, but I mean, that's the thing. Like mothers are not necessarily benevolent. Mothers can also spank you, and my mother certainly did. Even when she spanks you, she's nonetheless, you know, good mother spanks you to make you better. But I mean—but I think it's still a very sort of human perspective to see everything from the—from the point of view of our survival and from the point of view of our pain and what we like. So even if we define it this way, even if we say: these are the conditions that we need to survive, that actually is no guarantee of survival. We can be hit by a comet tomorrow. And there's no—there's no—there's no sort of getting out of the uncertainty of life. There's no way to get out of it. The—at some point we have to perhaps embrace the fact that we live in an uncertain universe and then there's going to be pain and there's going to be catastrophe and there's going to be bad things. But there are more reasons to embrace what we are as natural beings. Those reasons include the fact that we come from the Earth and we are a part of it. And it doesn't matter whether it always gives us good things or bad things. So that's one reason. The other reason of course is the very practical reason that if we needed to have the kind of revolutionary change we need, we sort of need to imagine ourselves as different from what we have so far imagined ourselves—you know, we imagine ourselves as separate from nature. And I don't think that's something that's going to sort of work for us. This, what you said now, is perfect. I just have two points—not against it even, but just I will try maybe I am wrong to draw the consequences from it. First, when you say "but we are part of nature," no? Yes, we are part of nature precisely when we are destroying nature. And that's nature. You know, don't paint us as there is Mother Nature there, "oh my God, we are violating Mother Nature in our most destructive," we are part of nature. Second thing, when you—you know what surprises me is that when I hear this argument, it's not only like—you know, this is why some radical ecologists or deep ecologists even talk about now, it's very fashionable to talk about not human rights but rights not only of animals—and incidentally for maybe sentimental reasons I totally underline this, agree with it, like I mean, for example when I was young, I had the misfortune of visiting in Slovenia a—a—a chicken factory and so on. I mean it's unimaginable what happens with this industrial agriculture and so on. But what I'm saying is that this idea that we humans should also admit, acknowledge—I wouldn't call them human rights—some kind of spiritual
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rights or whatever
rights or whatever
Slavoj Žižek
you call them of not only of animals and plants but even of habitats. For example, in Nordic countries, I have a friend in Iceland—Reykjavik, yeah—they have this idea that habitats also have the right. Yes, but habitats don't know this. The paradox—the beautiful Hegelian paradox—is that when we are claiming this, we again exempt us from humanity into the only universal species. Other species are just stupid, caught into themselves. We are the universal species. We are ready to talk about the rights of all others and—which is nice. But you know, the paradox is that whenever we talk we are just, we say "we are just one of the species." Yes, but we are at the same time the only species who knows this, who is the universal species. And so this doesn't complicate things for me. Although, you know what would interest me, the last provocative counterpoint to you: is, maybe we agree more than it may appear because what does this—maybe I'm too much caught into my Hegelian philosophy because—practically probably we would have agreed, you know. We would have agreed and I'm even going to the end here and we would say—that's why, to provoke people, I know, I still remain faithful to the term communism. Of course not the communism of 20th century, but look: what we urgently need to deal with the digital threat of control, to deal with immigrants, to deal with ecological threat. I will call it in very neutral terms: it's clear that market cannot do the job here. It's clear that
you call them of not only of animals and plants but even of habitats. For example, in Nordic countries, I have a friend in Iceland—Reykjavik, yeah—they have this idea that habitats also have the right. Yes, but habitats don't know this. The paradox—the beautiful Hegelian paradox—is that when we are claiming this, we again exempt us from humanity into the only universal species. Other species are just stupid, caught into themselves. We are the universal species. We are ready to talk about the rights of all others and—which is nice. But you know, the paradox is that whenever we talk we are just, we say "we are just one of the species." Yes, but we are at the same time the only species who knows this, who is the universal species. And so this doesn't complicate things for me. Although, you know what would interest me, the last provocative counterpoint to you: is, maybe we agree more than it may appear because what does this—maybe I'm too much caught into my Hegelian philosophy because—practically probably we would have agreed, you know. We would have agreed and I'm even going to the end here and we would say—that's why, to provoke people, I know, I still remain faithful to the term communism. Of course not the communism of 20th century, but look: what we urgently need to deal with the digital threat of control, to deal with immigrants, to deal with ecological threat. I will call it in very neutral terms: it's clear that market cannot do the job here. It's clear that
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state intervention alone, especially if we are dealing with sovereign state, cannot do the job. There has to be some transnational universal agency. That's
state intervention alone, especially if we are dealing with sovereign state, cannot do the job. There has to be some transnational universal agency. That's
Slavoj Žižek
all that communism means for me. Beyond sovereign state. I think and that's why I like, with all their ridiculous stuff, people like Greta Thunberg, like Snowden and so on, they stand for a new universal ethics where it's no longer the point of ethics where Trump and Putin agree: the patriotic ethics. It
all that communism means for me. Beyond sovereign state. I think and that's why I like, with all their ridiculous stuff, people like Greta Thunberg, like Snowden and so on, they stand for a new universal ethics where it's no longer the point of ethics where Trump and Putin agree: the patriotic ethics. It
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shocked me how Putin in a recent interview for BBC, he said, "betraying your country is the greatest crime imaginable." No, I claim the greatest ethical act imaginable is betraying the
shocked me how Putin in a recent interview for BBC, he said, "betraying your country is the greatest crime imaginable." No, I claim the greatest ethical act imaginable is betraying the
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interest of your country when your country is wrong. This is the actual universalism. This is what people like Edward Snowden did. We need this new universalist ethics which is a very difficult thing to do because as I developed in my last books, our entire ethics—Hegel saw this way but we must move here beyond Hegel—remains the ethics of sovereign state. Our ethical idea is this one, Hegel developed it: we in our daily life when there is peace, we live in civil society, we pursue our private interests—money, fame, love, whatever—but then the true test is the war, when your country is in danger and Hegel saw clearly the point is not just the enemy—that war has an ethical function for Hegel—it's the point where you have to, as it were, confront, assume the basics: that you are also
interest of your country when your country is wrong. This is the actual universalism. This is what people like Edward Snowden did. We need this new universalist ethics which is a very difficult thing to do because as I developed in my last books, our entire ethics—Hegel saw this way but we must move here beyond Hegel—remains the ethics of sovereign state. Our ethical idea is this one, Hegel developed it: we in our daily life when there is peace, we live in civil society, we pursue our private interests—money, fame, love, whatever—but then the true test is the war, when your country is in danger and Hegel saw clearly the point is not just the enemy—that war has an ethical function for Hegel—it's the point where you have to, as it were, confront, assume the basics: that you are also
Slavoj Žižek
the individual ready to risk your life, the highest ethical task, which is nonetheless grounded in the necessity of war. The only way you are actually a universal citizen when you move beyond your particular identity, it's war. Which is precisely grounded in patriotism. We have to move beyond this into new universalism. Otherwise, I can well understand how why Trump and Kim, the North Korean Kim, are close friends now, so I read. They are both still—what's so charming in a terrifying sense about North Korea is that it brings this logic of state sovereignty to its absurdity, you know, like state sovereignty, sacrifice for your country is the absolute—we have to move beyond this. And why don't I use simply the term socialism? Because it's too discredited today. My God, I read an interview with Bill Gates where he says "I am a socialist." Everybody is a socialist today. It just means we need a little more social care and so on and so on. And now don't tell me, "do I want Venezuela or Stalinism and so on?" No, these were nightmares, I admit. I am just saying a new form of
the individual ready to risk your life, the highest ethical task, which is nonetheless grounded in the necessity of war. The only way you are actually a universal citizen when you move beyond your particular identity, it's war. Which is precisely grounded in patriotism. We have to move beyond this into new universalism. Otherwise, I can well understand how why Trump and Kim, the North Korean Kim, are close friends now, so I read. They are both still—what's so charming in a terrifying sense about North Korea is that it brings this logic of state sovereignty to its absurdity, you know, like state sovereignty, sacrifice for your country is the absolute—we have to move beyond this. And why don't I use simply the term socialism? Because it's too discredited today. My God, I read an interview with Bill Gates where he says "I am a socialist." Everybody is a socialist today. It just means we need a little more social care and so on and so on. And now don't tell me, "do I want Venezuela or Stalinism and so on?" No, these were nightmares, I admit. I am just saying a new form of
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collective agency will have to be invented. And I hope here we do agree. I agree. I think we just really quick, I think that—oh my God, all you guys are waiting to talk. Oh my God, I am sorry. You should let them go, because we don't have that much time. I am sorry. I will try to be shorter, I apologize. No, it's all good. Hi, thank you. I'm just coming as a creator, content creator, film creator, and in—and on the topic of antinomies of apocalypse, I wonder—I have it written—I wonder if you see a correlation between what you've always brought up about the ever-increasing and new forms of apartheid, and like—such as the—the border wall... ecological apartheid, that's what I like. How ecological threat, we are clearly—you know we talk about—sorry for the interruption—we talk about the threat of apocalypse. In many third-world countries, it's not a threat, it's already happening, my God. Sorry, go on, I apologize. Yes, and—and I guess this is more along the lines of the refugees with the border wall and the—the parade
collective agency will have to be invented. And I hope here we do agree. I agree. I think we just really quick, I think that—oh my God, all you guys are waiting to talk. Oh my God, I am sorry. You should let them go, because we don't have that much time. I am sorry. I will try to be shorter, I apologize. No, it's all good. Hi, thank you. I'm just coming as a creator, content creator, film creator, and in—and on the topic of antinomies of apocalypse, I wonder—I have it written—I wonder if you see a correlation between what you've always brought up about the ever-increasing and new forms of apartheid, and like—such as the—the border wall... ecological apartheid, that's what I like. How ecological threat, we are clearly—you know we talk about—sorry for the interruption—we talk about the threat of apocalypse. In many third-world countries, it's not a threat, it's already happening, my God. Sorry, go on, I apologize. Yes, and—and I guess this is more along the lines of the refugees with the border wall and the—the parade
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marching from—from South America. But—and the correlation between that and what I think of as the content creator, the dissipation of the fourth wall. How in media—it would be—from the outside in, it would be shows like *The Office* or *House of Cards* or a show like *Deadpool*, the characters where they talk to the camera, and then how we also have our culture from the—from the selfie culture, from into out, and how people are more and more addressing something in front of them or some other—the other in Lacan I think who would be just the resemblant other or somebody who's kind of your
marching from—from South America. But—and the correlation between that and what I think of as the content creator, the dissipation of the fourth wall. How in media—it would be—from the outside in, it would be shows like *The Office* or *House of Cards* or a show like *Deadpool*, the characters where they talk to the camera, and then how we also have our culture from the—from the selfie culture, from into out, and how people are more and more addressing something in front of them or some other—the other in Lacan I think who would be just the resemblant other or somebody who's kind of your
Slavoj Žižek
peer other. But you've—this illusion of this wall increasing... This is a wonderful point that you make, I don't have enough time also to—too tired to answer it in detail. I would just like to give you an example which will probably disgust and shock you but it's in my nature to be with. You know where it's a very crucial, important function of this breaking the fourth wall, addressing and so on, which I think we can draw a deep feminist message from it. Don't kill me. Trigger warning. Hardcore pornography. If you had the misfortune of ever watching the standard heterosexual hardcore pornography, did you notice that the ultimate iconic scene—first they break the rule but that's why it's antifeminist—did you notice how in a standard heterosexual hardcore pornography—I haven't seen almost none of them, my friends—okay, we are getting—none of us has seen any of it, we just talk about—yeah, the actor, the guy who screws the lady, to be vulgar, is a pure objectified instrument. Often you don't even see his face. He just bang-bang does it. The usual—the standard iconic archetypal scene is: camera is in front of the lady laying on a couch, on a bed, her legs spread, you see in close-up the guy penetrating her. But then between the legs they took—they take great care that you see at the same time her face and she looks into the camera and—(gasps)—I will not do it, I cannot. You know why this point, something very important? That there is—it's not simply a problem of objectifying the woman. It's an enforced humiliating subjectivization. The woman is not just turned into a passive object. The woman is doubly humiliated: she is fucked, but at the same time she what—you as a viewer are looking for—you don't, that's crucial mistake that many analysts make, you don't identify with the poor guy who is screwing the lady. He is a pure instrument, usually a guy, poor guy with tattoos, some cheap sailor they got and so on. The—you just are desperately looking for the signs that the woman really enjoys. You are a pure gaze and I think this enforced fake subjectivization is the true humiliation of the woman. She is not just objectified, she is at the same time falsely subjectified. But again, what interests me—and here is my crazy association linked to your point—is that—and I deeply agree with you, I immediately explain why—is that—it's how this—the points where the fourth wall is broken are absolutely crucial in every ideological edifice. And even in movies and so on, it often happens that you don't even notice this but the fourth wall breaks down. Or I would put it in terms of German idealism: this is the point of what they, German idealists, called reflexivity, where you are not just witnessing a scene but you are inscribed into the scene. Your gaze is part of the scene. And that's the typical ideological manipulation: that you are not aware of how you are already inscribed into the scene. That's why this often happens in good detective novels. Like, I will confess you a private sin. When I was young, I quite liked those good old black-and-white—black-and-white, not yet colored—*Perry Mason* TV series. And I read almost all Erle Stanley Gardner's novels. In one of them there is a wonderful moment of this reflexivity when a couple is suspected of murder and they're questioned by police together, husband and wife, and the husband tells in detail what happened. And Perry Mason is surprised, like, why is the guy, even although he is not put under any pressure by police, why is he describing in such a detailed way what allegedly happened? And then he gets the solution. Of course they did the murder, the couple, but the true addressee, you see, to whom is—is not the police, it's his wife. They were kept in separate cells, and his narrative—the function of his narrative—is to tell his wife the lie to which they should both stick. He is informing—you see the beauty—the solution to it is ask who is the addressee of it, to whom—and these mechanisms I agree with you are absolutely crucial for ideology. Okay, let's get to—some more—you want to go? You want to go? I'll try to be shorter, I apologize. These people just keep coming out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Hi, so I was going to bring up your point on communism, about how it changes the social order and I think that was what you were saying, that you
peer other. But you've—this illusion of this wall increasing... This is a wonderful point that you make, I don't have enough time also to—too tired to answer it in detail. I would just like to give you an example which will probably disgust and shock you but it's in my nature to be with. You know where it's a very crucial, important function of this breaking the fourth wall, addressing and so on, which I think we can draw a deep feminist message from it. Don't kill me. Trigger warning. Hardcore pornography. If you had the misfortune of ever watching the standard heterosexual hardcore pornography, did you notice that the ultimate iconic scene—first they break the rule but that's why it's antifeminist—did you notice how in a standard heterosexual hardcore pornography—I haven't seen almost none of them, my friends—okay, we are getting—none of us has seen any of it, we just talk about—yeah, the actor, the guy who screws the lady, to be vulgar, is a pure objectified instrument. Often you don't even see his face. He just bang-bang does it. The usual—the standard iconic archetypal scene is: camera is in front of the lady laying on a couch, on a bed, her legs spread, you see in close-up the guy penetrating her. But then between the legs they took—they take great care that you see at the same time her face and she looks into the camera and—(gasps)—I will not do it, I cannot. You know why this point, something very important? That there is—it's not simply a problem of objectifying the woman. It's an enforced humiliating subjectivization. The woman is not just turned into a passive object. The woman is doubly humiliated: she is fucked, but at the same time she what—you as a viewer are looking for—you don't, that's crucial mistake that many analysts make, you don't identify with the poor guy who is screwing the lady. He is a pure instrument, usually a guy, poor guy with tattoos, some cheap sailor they got and so on. The—you just are desperately looking for the signs that the woman really enjoys. You are a pure gaze and I think this enforced fake subjectivization is the true humiliation of the woman. She is not just objectified, she is at the same time falsely subjectified. But again, what interests me—and here is my crazy association linked to your point—is that—and I deeply agree with you, I immediately explain why—is that—it's how this—the points where the fourth wall is broken are absolutely crucial in every ideological edifice. And even in movies and so on, it often happens that you don't even notice this but the fourth wall breaks down. Or I would put it in terms of German idealism: this is the point of what they, German idealists, called reflexivity, where you are not just witnessing a scene but you are inscribed into the scene. Your gaze is part of the scene. And that's the typical ideological manipulation: that you are not aware of how you are already inscribed into the scene. That's why this often happens in good detective novels. Like, I will confess you a private sin. When I was young, I quite liked those good old black-and-white—black-and-white, not yet colored—*Perry Mason* TV series. And I read almost all Erle Stanley Gardner's novels. In one of them there is a wonderful moment of this reflexivity when a couple is suspected of murder and they're questioned by police together, husband and wife, and the husband tells in detail what happened. And Perry Mason is surprised, like, why is the guy, even although he is not put under any pressure by police, why is he describing in such a detailed way what allegedly happened? And then he gets the solution. Of course they did the murder, the couple, but the true addressee, you see, to whom is—is not the police, it's his wife. They were kept in separate cells, and his narrative—the function of his narrative—is to tell his wife the lie to which they should both stick. He is informing—you see the beauty—the solution to it is ask who is the addressee of it, to whom—and these mechanisms I agree with you are absolutely crucial for ideology. Okay, let's get to—some more—you want to go? You want to go? I'll try to be shorter, I apologize. These people just keep coming out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Hi, so I was going to bring up your point on communism, about how it changes the social order and I think that was what you were saying, that you
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move things with change and that is how you define communism almost, I think. No, my point was only we need a collective agency outside the limits of market and state.
move things with change and that is how you define communism almost, I think. No, my point was only we need a collective agency outside the limits of market and state.
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Yeah, I agree. How would you suggest that we achieve that? What are your views for change? Okay, now I will give you a very desperate answer, which is: I don't—I cannot give
Yeah, I agree. How would you suggest that we achieve that? What are your views for change? Okay, now I will give you a very desperate answer, which is: I don't—I cannot give
Slavoj Žižek
you a precise formula how. I only know if we don't do it, we are lost. But if you ask me how do we achieve it, now I will say something that you told me
you a precise formula how. I only know if we don't do it, we are lost. But if you ask me how do we achieve it, now I will say something that you told me
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Costa Douzinas said you disagreed, but in a very modest way I would repeat what he said: you know miracles, not in the sense of miracle, but in the sense of unexpected things do happen. Before they made a compromise, nobody would have even imagined years ago that something like Syriza could have happened. Nobody would have even imagined years ago that the word—and this is the great result of the last years of United States politics—that the word socialism was rehabilitated and so on and so on. So I don't—I think, first, I don't have any problems with strong state power. I'm here a good old-fashioned totalitarian.
Costa Douzinas said you disagreed, but in a very modest way I would repeat what he said: you know miracles, not in the sense of miracle, but in the sense of unexpected things do happen. Before they made a compromise, nobody would have even imagined years ago that something like Syriza could have happened. Nobody would have even imagined years ago that the word—and this is the great result of the last years of United States politics—that the word socialism was rehabilitated and so on and so on. So I don't—I think, first, I don't have any problems with strong state power. I'm here a good old-fashioned totalitarian.
Slavoj Žižek
One thing, I will only give you some negative answers. Now it's very problematic but I'm here to provoke you. I don't believe in this bullshit of local democracy, you know, like "oh, we live in a small community and we debate common matters like blah blah blah." That would be even personally a nightmare. No, I want to live my happy alienated life. I wouldn't like to live in a small community where in the afternoon I would have to debate how to—how to organize distribution of water, how to organize education of children. I want alienation! I want anonymous alienated state apparatuses to take care of that. The—the thing that I think can be done—I don't know how but I see elements of it—that's the reason it's answer which is deeply unsatisfactory and so on. But I have no illusions about Europe. But the progressive element in European Union is that it is at least a very vague idea of such a transnational universal body which nonetheless, in spite of all criticism, guarantees all around—in all countries of European Union—certain basic rights like against racism, the rights of women, and so on and so on. Although now all this is falling
One thing, I will only give you some negative answers. Now it's very problematic but I'm here to provoke you. I don't believe in this bullshit of local democracy, you know, like "oh, we live in a small community and we debate common matters like blah blah blah." That would be even personally a nightmare. No, I want to live my happy alienated life. I wouldn't like to live in a small community where in the afternoon I would have to debate how to—how to organize distribution of water, how to organize education of children. I want alienation! I want anonymous alienated state apparatuses to take care of that. The—the thing that I think can be done—I don't know how but I see elements of it—that's the reason it's answer which is deeply unsatisfactory and so on. But I have no illusions about Europe. But the progressive element in European Union is that it is at least a very vague idea of such a transnational universal body which nonetheless, in spite of all criticism, guarantees all around—in all countries of European Union—certain basic rights like against racism, the rights of women, and so on and so on. Although now all this is falling
unknown
apart when they
apart when they
Slavoj Žižek
re-normalize Hungary and Poland who are openly breaking this rule. But what I'm saying is that I see different elements here and there and I don't have an easy answer to your question. In the sense that I—I think that this is even the mega-problem. And here I get in trouble with some leftists who claim, "oh, Venezuela, horror, Guaido, how is he called, American puppet" and so on and so on. Yes, I agree with all of this. But as all Chavistas with whom I spoke privately—they just don't want to tell it publicly—privately they admitted to me: look, whatever you can attribute many reasons for deep troubles in Venezuela, to of course American intervention, extremely brutal pressure and so on and so on. But the fact remains that they really did not invent a new model. Chavez was for me nonetheless ultimately Fidel Castro with a lot of money. And he was not really solving problems; he had enough money to throw money at problems. So—so my idea would be precisely to be very pragmatic here: cooperation within state, international police forces—I love the idea of international police forces—which can intervene here, there, when there is violence against immigrants and so on and so on and so on. I just don't believe in populism. I don't believe in popular mobilization, why not? All—you know, I'm here against Maoism if by Maoism you mean we alienated intellectuals we should turn to ordinary people and listen to their wisdom. Well if you do this today in Europe, the message is unambiguous: throw the immigrants out! And of course when I mention this to my friends like even Varoufakis, he said, "yes, because the people are manipulated and so on and so on." Then I ask him but how will you de-manipulate the people, no? Only through strong state I claim and so on and so on. So the point is that—and that's my horrible position—I believe in—I wouldn't say, that's too much, now I'm consciously provoking you—in some kind of—dictatorship is not a good word, but a true progressive leader should not be afraid to consciously act against the majority. Majority is simply often wrong, of the people. It's clear in Europe today. The only bright spot was when Angela Merkel invited one million people. This was a short miracle where even percent of Germans at that point supported her. Now it's over. What should a
re-normalize Hungary and Poland who are openly breaking this rule. But what I'm saying is that I see different elements here and there and I don't have an easy answer to your question. In the sense that I—I think that this is even the mega-problem. And here I get in trouble with some leftists who claim, "oh, Venezuela, horror, Guaido, how is he called, American puppet" and so on and so on. Yes, I agree with all of this. But as all Chavistas with whom I spoke privately—they just don't want to tell it publicly—privately they admitted to me: look, whatever you can attribute many reasons for deep troubles in Venezuela, to of course American intervention, extremely brutal pressure and so on and so on. But the fact remains that they really did not invent a new model. Chavez was for me nonetheless ultimately Fidel Castro with a lot of money. And he was not really solving problems; he had enough money to throw money at problems. So—so my idea would be precisely to be very pragmatic here: cooperation within state, international police forces—I love the idea of international police forces—which can intervene here, there, when there is violence against immigrants and so on and so on and so on. I just don't believe in populism. I don't believe in popular mobilization, why not? All—you know, I'm here against Maoism if by Maoism you mean we alienated intellectuals we should turn to ordinary people and listen to their wisdom. Well if you do this today in Europe, the message is unambiguous: throw the immigrants out! And of course when I mention this to my friends like even Varoufakis, he said, "yes, because the people are manipulated and so on and so on." Then I ask him but how will you de-manipulate the people, no? Only through strong state I claim and so on and so on. So the point is that—and that's my horrible position—I believe in—I wouldn't say, that's too much, now I'm consciously provoking you—in some kind of—dictatorship is not a good word, but a true progressive leader should not be afraid to consciously act against the majority. Majority is simply often wrong, of the people. It's clear in Europe today. The only bright spot was when Angela Merkel invited one million people. This was a short miracle where even percent of Germans at that point supported her. Now it's over. What should a
Cathy Newman
politician who want to be a good leftist and wants to address the problem of immigrants do today? You should gather the courage to
politician who want to be a good leftist and wants to address the problem of immigrants do today? You should gather the courage to
Slavoj Žižek
act against the will of the majority. And what all authentic politicians are doing, to
act against the will of the majority. And what all authentic politicians are doing, to
Cathy Newman
hope that through the success of your politics, retroactively
hope that through the success of your politics, retroactively
Slavoj Žižek
your acts will be redeemed. You have to take the risk. I—I know it's very problematic, I know that I didn't answer your question, but that's my point. Thank you. Hegelian stuff. Although another point—I hear this—I never in my life did I take any drugs. But I'm not celebrating it. You know why? Because in my—I'm a kind of a Stalinist fascist, I know the paradox, my idea is this one: it's horrible, it's a joke, but it's a serious joke, that's how I feel. If I take drugs, I will become like beatific passive and then enemies can attack me. I am absolutely—I want to be control, you know. Okay, let's go on. Sorry. Sorry, thank you. You guys try to get everybody in. Sorry. I apologize. No, no, no, it's good. It's been great. That's why my friends call me Fidel. Not for politics but, you know, comrades, five minutes and then you regain. If you, would you come on that microphone. I'm sorry, I worry about like a—what I see as like an essentialist or depoliticized rhetoric surrounding like mental health, and how people say that it's like, oh, my brain chemistry is why I'm suffering, not because people like political hierarchies or oppression. So how is it that we can advocate for people who are like, oh, I'm depressed, I have anxiety, I'm bipolar, without like reifying that it's this ontological like... A very brief answer: I deeply agree with the point of your question. You know in what sense? That's why, not that I am for male violence, fuck it, I'm ready to advocate death penalty for rapists. But that's why I find suspicious the category of toxic masculinity. Because it changes what is clearly a politico-ideological phenomenon, male violence, into a medical category. The moment this category was introduced, big companies are already making drugs for—for—against toxic masculinity. No, toxic—what we call toxic masculinity—it's a complex socio-ideological phenomenon, it's not a form of social illness and so on. So maybe we agree here. But let's—we have to—thank you guys for your patience. Hey, I've got one criticism and then a question. I think there's a bit of contradiction between your views on black liberation and the time of peace. You spoke about roughly through as these good times. In—in my opinion, I think those were good for the left and the right, but through those times you still had segregation, Jim Crow laws, and through that produced radicalism, people like Malcolm X, Black Panthers, and then a lesser degree MLK—excuse me, MLK. Now all those people were killed and assassinated. Now we fast-forward now and you say things are crazy. But from the black experience, things haven't truly changed in a way. We have no leaders really speaking up. Obama in a sense but through the institution of, you know, being a president. We don't have any true leaders anymore. So it seems this hysteria is just based off the left and the right not agreeing anymore and not truly taking in the experiences of everybody. Would you agree or not? I—I do agree but I think that—okay, I can only give you a very brief answer. First, I totally agree in a very non-traditional way that good leaders are needed. We need leaders. I'm here again for—because you know, leader is not necessarily that master figure and so on. In our daily lives when we are just individuals following our instincts or cravings and so on, we are not really free. We are just in—slaves of our spontaneous ideology. And for me, the true function of an authentic leader is to pull you out of this inertia of everyday ideology, to tell you, "no, you can reach beyond yourself, you can do it." And the leader in this sense is not the one who knows things for you. It's more the one who opens up the space to be more radical for you. We need an external push. Why is this not happening? Ah, I don't have time, I will
your acts will be redeemed. You have to take the risk. I—I know it's very problematic, I know that I didn't answer your question, but that's my point. Thank you. Hegelian stuff. Although another point—I hear this—I never in my life did I take any drugs. But I'm not celebrating it. You know why? Because in my—I'm a kind of a Stalinist fascist, I know the paradox, my idea is this one: it's horrible, it's a joke, but it's a serious joke, that's how I feel. If I take drugs, I will become like beatific passive and then enemies can attack me. I am absolutely—I want to be control, you know. Okay, let's go on. Sorry. Sorry, thank you. You guys try to get everybody in. Sorry. I apologize. No, no, no, it's good. It's been great. That's why my friends call me Fidel. Not for politics but, you know, comrades, five minutes and then you regain. If you, would you come on that microphone. I'm sorry, I worry about like a—what I see as like an essentialist or depoliticized rhetoric surrounding like mental health, and how people say that it's like, oh, my brain chemistry is why I'm suffering, not because people like political hierarchies or oppression. So how is it that we can advocate for people who are like, oh, I'm depressed, I have anxiety, I'm bipolar, without like reifying that it's this ontological like... A very brief answer: I deeply agree with the point of your question. You know in what sense? That's why, not that I am for male violence, fuck it, I'm ready to advocate death penalty for rapists. But that's why I find suspicious the category of toxic masculinity. Because it changes what is clearly a politico-ideological phenomenon, male violence, into a medical category. The moment this category was introduced, big companies are already making drugs for—for—against toxic masculinity. No, toxic—what we call toxic masculinity—it's a complex socio-ideological phenomenon, it's not a form of social illness and so on. So maybe we agree here. But let's—we have to—thank you guys for your patience. Hey, I've got one criticism and then a question. I think there's a bit of contradiction between your views on black liberation and the time of peace. You spoke about roughly through as these good times. In—in my opinion, I think those were good for the left and the right, but through those times you still had segregation, Jim Crow laws, and through that produced radicalism, people like Malcolm X, Black Panthers, and then a lesser degree MLK—excuse me, MLK. Now all those people were killed and assassinated. Now we fast-forward now and you say things are crazy. But from the black experience, things haven't truly changed in a way. We have no leaders really speaking up. Obama in a sense but through the institution of, you know, being a president. We don't have any true leaders anymore. So it seems this hysteria is just based off the left and the right not agreeing anymore and not truly taking in the experiences of everybody. Would you agree or not? I—I do agree but I think that—okay, I can only give you a very brief answer. First, I totally agree in a very non-traditional way that good leaders are needed. We need leaders. I'm here again for—because you know, leader is not necessarily that master figure and so on. In our daily lives when we are just individuals following our instincts or cravings and so on, we are not really free. We are just in—slaves of our spontaneous ideology. And for me, the true function of an authentic leader is to pull you out of this inertia of everyday ideology, to tell you, "no, you can reach beyond yourself, you can do it." And the leader in this sense is not the one who knows things for you. It's more the one who opens up the space to be more radical for you. We need an external push. Why is this not happening? Ah, I don't have time, I will
unknown
very briefly finish it, but my point would have been that—that's the problem today, that a new form of social
very briefly finish it, but my point would have been that—that's the problem today, that a new form of social
Slavoj Žižek
conformism is emerging where those in power even subtly manipulate the new role for women. Today women are not just still oppressed, but the new functioning of power, which is no longer the old oppressive power but the more, let's call it, therapeutic power. You know, like problems like gang violence are treated like medical problems, you need help and so on and so on. It's all—and this spontaneous ethics where there is no place for leaders, then you get leaders like Trump who are the return of the repressed and so on and so on. So I—I don't have a simple answer how to do it. But I agree with your point that
conformism is emerging where those in power even subtly manipulate the new role for women. Today women are not just still oppressed, but the new functioning of power, which is no longer the old oppressive power but the more, let's call it, therapeutic power. You know, like problems like gang violence are treated like medical problems, you need help and so on and so on. It's all—and this spontaneous ethics where there is no place for leaders, then you get leaders like Trump who are the return of the repressed and so on and so on. So I—I don't have a simple answer how to do it. But I agree with your point that
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leaders
leaders
Slavoj Žižek
are necessary. A leader is the one who simply resuscitates you. Following him doesn't mean "I obey you." It means, as it were, you open up the space for my
are necessary. A leader is the one who simply resuscitates you. Following him doesn't mean "I obey you." It means, as it were, you open up the space for my
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freedom. Sorry, I know I didn't answer,
freedom. Sorry, I know I didn't answer,
Slavoj Žižek
but... Thank
but... Thank
unknown
you. Appreciate
you. Appreciate
Slavoj Žižek
it. Thank you, thank you.
it. Thank you, thank you.
unknown
Ah, the last guy. So um, growing up,
Ah, the last guy. So um, growing up,
Slavoj Žižek
uh, watching politics become politicized, um, I noticed uh, class wasn't a very prominent topic um, in the late 2000s and early 2010s to me, and now we're starting to have a conversation about it. Um, now in one of your other interviews you also said that men are—that—that certain kinds of feminism perhaps uh, attack um, men who are in full
uh, watching politics become politicized, um, I noticed uh, class wasn't a very prominent topic um, in the late 2000s and early 2010s to me, and now we're starting to have a conversation about it. Um, now in one of your other interviews you also said that men are—that—that certain kinds of feminism perhaps uh, attack um, men who are in full
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retreat. Um,
retreat. Um,
Slavoj Žižek
I'm wondering as a male um, of color and of uh, low income background, um, how um, certain kinds of um, social movements create antagonism between um, oppressed people. No, it's a—I don't have time again to go into it,
I'm wondering as a male um, of color and of uh, low income background, um, how um, certain kinds of um, social movements create antagonism between um, oppressed people. No, it's a—I don't have time again to go into it,
unknown
but at some point if I got
but at some point if I got
Slavoj Žižek
correctly the thrust of your question, I tend to agree: the prohibited topic in left circles is precisely how there is no guarantee that automatically all emancipatory struggles automatically then tend in the same direction. You have many so-called lower-income lower-class groups of people for whom feminism is an upper-class
correctly the thrust of your question, I tend to agree: the prohibited topic in left circles is precisely how there is no guarantee that automatically all emancipatory struggles automatically then tend in the same direction. You have many so-called lower-income lower-class groups of people for whom feminism is an upper-class
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upper-middle-class invention to screw them. You also have feminism which clearly is in a subtle way denigrating lower classes. They will not say it publicly, but the idea is: "we intellectual middle classes are, know about women's rights and so on and so on, the lower classes, oh look what the
upper-middle-class invention to screw them. You also have feminism which clearly is in a subtle way denigrating lower classes. They will not say it publicly, but the idea is: "we intellectual middle classes are, know about women's rights and so on and so on, the lower classes, oh look what the
Slavoj Žižek
Mexican immigrants are doing to—to their women and so on and so on and so on." So we have to be very brutal and open here. Just two examples to make it clear, my favorite example, it's so brutal I love it. Friends from Mexico informed me about it. In some Mexican small town, they decided that we should listen to old pre-modern wisdom. So they have a kind of a council of old people well versed in local indigenous tradition, and when there are smaller conflicts like
Mexican immigrants are doing to—to their women and so on and so on and so on." So we have to be very brutal and open here. Just two examples to make it clear, my favorite example, it's so brutal I love it. Friends from Mexico informed me about it. In some Mexican small town, they decided that we should listen to old pre-modern wisdom. So they have a kind of a council of old people well versed in local indigenous tradition, and when there are smaller conflicts like
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not—not crime but rape or whatever, they decide. So it happened that a guy raped his best friend's daughter. Okay, this council decided that the punishment should be that this guy should buy to the father of the raped girl a—a big package of bottles of beer and so on, you know. Feminists exploded and so on and they said, "sorry, these are our old customs, that's what
not—not crime but rape or whatever, they decide. So it happened that a guy raped his best friend's daughter. Okay, this council decided that the punishment should be that this guy should buy to the father of the raped girl a—a big package of bottles of beer and so on, you know. Feminists exploded and so on and they said, "sorry, these are our old customs, that's what
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our old spirit." So again, don't mystify it that we can return. Or another example, and with this I finish immediately, my favorite one. I don't know the place but I have it written in my next book. There was a place somewhere in a campus where this is
our old spirit." So again, don't mystify it that we can return. Or another example, and with this I finish immediately, my favorite one. I don't know the place but I have it written in my next book. There was a place somewhere in a campus where this is
Slavoj Žižek
what happened. It was a rich campus, rich students, they had a swimming pool. The girls there were not naked but barely dressed just in their bathing suits swimming. And then nearby was a house where Mexican workers, lowly paid, were re—reno—how do you call it—replastering the wall or whatever. And seeing those girls, they were of course doing what I think in Spain they call it or in Latin America el piropo, these erotic remarks... [audience shout: cat-calling] Yeah, yeah, yeah. The girls protested and it developed into an interesting conflict because the girls claimed, "we were harassed sexually." The guys said, "no, it was class, we were too low for them, they reacted like this." And what the university did—I love this—is the worst apartheid politically correct solution you can imagine. They covered this whole building in front with an additional wall of plastic and they constructed a tunnel under plastic for the workers to approach this building so that they totally separated them. What they don't want to accept is that here you get simply, to put it very simply, a—a—a point where what is perceived as a class distinction is openly in conflict with what you would perceive as a feminist struggle.
what happened. It was a rich campus, rich students, they had a swimming pool. The girls there were not naked but barely dressed just in their bathing suits swimming. And then nearby was a house where Mexican workers, lowly paid, were re—reno—how do you call it—replastering the wall or whatever. And seeing those girls, they were of course doing what I think in Spain they call it or in Latin America el piropo, these erotic remarks... [audience shout: cat-calling] Yeah, yeah, yeah. The girls protested and it developed into an interesting conflict because the girls claimed, "we were harassed sexually." The guys said, "no, it was class, we were too low for them, they reacted like this." And what the university did—I love this—is the worst apartheid politically correct solution you can imagine. They covered this whole building in front with an additional wall of plastic and they constructed a tunnel under plastic for the workers to approach this building so that they totally separated them. What they don't want to accept is that here you get simply, to put it very simply, a—a—a point where what is perceived as a class distinction is openly in conflict with what you would perceive as a feminist struggle.
unknown
And I simply claim that the conflict is genuine. Of course abstractly you can say, "oh they should have realized they are fighting the same struggle," but you know, it's an empty phrase if you don't show how to do it then and so on and so on. So what—my only answer to this abstract level to you is: the first
And I simply claim that the conflict is genuine. Of course abstractly you can say, "oh they should have realized they are fighting the same struggle," but you know, it's an empty phrase if you don't show how to do it then and so on and so on. So what—my only answer to this abstract level to you is: the first
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step towards solution is
step towards solution is
Slavoj Žižek
not to mystify things but to openly admit tensions, antagonisms, conflicts and so on. Nobody has clean hands. You can be a feminist and be involved deeply in class politics. Don't forget that great part of American feminism supported American invasion of Iraq claiming it will liberate women. I'm sorry to tell you but whatever you say and I do say many things against Saddam Hussein, the role of women under his rule was incredibly better than now in Iraq. So you know, nobody is clean. We should criticize feminism, we should criticize primitive ra—there it also exists something called primitive—Trump is mobilizing it—primitive white lower-class politics. Trump's image is precisely: rich liberal elite to screw up your own American working class are importing Mexicans and so on and so on and so on. The situation is complex, let's admit it. Let's not paint this easy picture of "yay-yay progressive struggle, we will all be united" and so on. Sorry, I cannot do more now. I'm sorry if I disappointed you. Well, now that everything has been cleared up, let's thank Slavoj Zizek.
not to mystify things but to openly admit tensions, antagonisms, conflicts and so on. Nobody has clean hands. You can be a feminist and be involved deeply in class politics. Don't forget that great part of American feminism supported American invasion of Iraq claiming it will liberate women. I'm sorry to tell you but whatever you say and I do say many things against Saddam Hussein, the role of women under his rule was incredibly better than now in Iraq. So you know, nobody is clean. We should criticize feminism, we should criticize primitive ra—there it also exists something called primitive—Trump is mobilizing it—primitive white lower-class politics. Trump's image is precisely: rich liberal elite to screw up your own American working class are importing Mexicans and so on and so on and so on. The situation is complex, let's admit it. Let's not paint this easy picture of "yay-yay progressive struggle, we will all be united" and so on. Sorry, I cannot do more now. I'm sorry if I disappointed you. Well, now that everything has been cleared up, let's thank Slavoj Zizek.