From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Enjoyment
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-02-28 · 2:25:50 · 25,642 words
psychoanalysisideologycapitalismhegel-dialecticsreligion-theologyecology-climatefascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnesstechnology-ai-cyberspacecinema-art-culturerace-antisemitismcommunism-socialismdemocracygeopolitics-warsubjectivity
Žižek delivers a lecture at what appears to be a US college campus (circa early 2017, Trump's first months in office), ostensibly titled 'From Surplus Value to Surplus Enjoyment.' The talk traces Lacan's concept of objet petit a through three registers, ideology (Pokémon Go / anti-Semitism), desire (TV series Castle / obstacle as cause), and surplus enjoyment (Walmart shopping-cart ritual / Goebbels's Total War speech), arguing that the same libidinal structure links Marxist surplus value to Lacanian jouissance. The second half ranges across contemporary political crises: Trump, the failure of the liberal-left, ecology, AI and post-humanity, immigration, and bureaucratic socialism, with Žižek arguing that global capitalism is approaching a series of structural limits that neither market reform nor localist self-organization can address. A Q&A covers religion/Christian atheism, bureaucracy, and ecology.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The object-cause of desire: not the object you desire but what makes you desire; a surplus entity you add to reality to make it meaningful and engage your longing.
as “obstacle as cause of desire”
Lacan's paradox of objet a: what appears as an obstacle to desire is actually what constitutes and sustains it; remove the obstacle and you lose the desire itself.
as “augmented reality of ideology”
Žižek's formulation that ideology functions like Pokémon Go: it adds a fantasy frame onto grey reality so that hidden figures (Jews, immigrants, capitalists) become visible and one becomes an engaged observer.
Žižek's term for the new right's combination of pro-Israel Zionism and domestic anti-Semitism: Jews are fine if they are 'there' (in Israel) but should not have too much influence 'here.'
as “the Aufhebung of fears”
Ideology's trick: replacing many inconsistent everyday fears with one object (the shark, the Jew) in which they are all 'sublated', preserved and canceled, into a single readable threat.
as “zero signifier”
Lacan's signifier without signified: 'the Jew' in anti-Semitism is an empty name onto which all inconsistent everyday fears are projected, giving a semblance of unified meaning.
as “signifier falls into the signified”
The Lacanian moment when the name does not merely designate a thing but performatively constructs it, as in anti-Semitism, where the name 'Jew' creates the anti-Semitic figure.
Freud's 'gain of pleasure': the additional surplus pleasure produced by the formal detours and obstacles in the subject's pursuit of satisfaction, which Žižek links to Lacanian surplus enjoyment.
as “left-Fukuyamaists”
Žižek's ironic label for mainstream left thinkers (including Paul Krugman) who accept liberal-democratic global capitalism as the final horizon and merely try to make it more humane.
as “from profit to rent”
Žižek's diagnosis of late capitalism: companies no longer generate profit by selling products but by privatizing the commons themselves (seeds, software, language, platforms) and extracting rent.
as “surplus power”
For any power structure to retain authority, it must emit an implicit superego message between the lines, 'we can do whatever we want', a potential omnipotence that must remain latent but operative.
Modern science functions like capitalist surplus value: it is the first form of knowledge that constantly perceives itself as self-revolutionizing and never finished, perpetually generating more unknowns.
Lacan's plus-de-jouir, linked here to Marx's surplus value: the excess pleasure produced by the very formal detours and obstacles in the pursuit of satisfaction, not the satisfaction itself.
Fighting Trump while ignoring what produced him: treating the symptom (the pain) with a pill rather than diagnosing the underlying disease (the failure of liberal-left politics).
as “feel-good ecologism”
The dominant ideological management of ecology: guilt is individualized and then discharged through easy acts (recycling, buying green, Starbucks charity) that avoid addressing structural causes.
The social mechanism by which catastrophic situations (Beijing smog, Trump's vulgarity) are quickly absorbed back into ordinary life, oscillating between panic and normalization.
Žižek's self-description: taking seriously the death of God on the Cross as liberation into human freedom, and the Holy Spirit as an earthly emancipatory community, without any theistic resurrection.
as “negative theology (Žižek's version)”
Not 'God is beyond our knowledge' but: God is a pure negative opening, the basic existentialist experience that this world is out of joint and we do not fully belong here.
as “bureaucratic socialism”
Žižek's paradoxical political ideal: a society with alienated, anonymous state mechanisms that handle collective tasks (health, utilities, child care), freeing individuals from permanent self-organization.
as “fetishist denial”
The split attitude 'I know very well but still I don't believe it,' which Žižek diagnoses as the dominant attitude toward the ecological crisis.
Stories he reaches for 13
At the end of V for Vendetta, the crowd storms Parliament, but Žižek would sell his (dead) mother to see a sequel called 'V for Vendetta Part 2: What Will They Do Next Day?', representing the left's failure to think beyond spectacular revolt.
“I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery... to see a movie called V for Vendetta: Part But what will they do then, next day?”
A Native American friend told Žižek he prefers 'Indian' to 'Native American': 'I love to be called Indian because at least my name is then a monument to white man's stupidity who thought they were in India.'
“'I love to be called Indian because at least my name is then a monument to white man's stupidity who thought they are in India.'”
Malcolm X rejected Alex Haley's Roots solution (finding your African origins); he saw the X, the erasure of roots, as a new opening. Precisely because Blacks were tragically deprived of their roots, they have a unique chance to be more authentically universalist than white people.
“the genius of Malcolm X was that he saw this X as a new opening. Precisely because we are in a tragic situation of deprived of our roots, we blacks have a unique chance of being more authentically universalist.”
The Politburo debates whether communism will have money. Right says yes; left says no. Stalin: 'Both are wrong, the dialectical synthesis is that there will be money and there will be no money.' Asked to explain: 'Some people will have money, others will not.'
“The true solution is the dialectical synthesis of both. There will be money and there will be no money... some people will have money, others will not have money.”
A patient in a hotel restaurant accidentally said 'a bed for two please' instead of 'a table for two.' The standard Freudian reading would be that dinner was a pretext for sex; Darian Leader's Lacanian reading is the opposite: the patient feared enjoying dinner too much and the slip was a reminder not to let the pretext eclipse the goal.
“it was the opposite. The guy was afraid that he will enjoy dinner too much... 'Don't enjoy the pretext too much.'”
At his coronation Napoleon snatched the crown from the Pope. The Pope's reported reply: 'I know you wanted to destroy Christianity, but you will not succeed; we, the Church, have been trying to do this for years.' The Church's real enemy is its own radical core.
“'We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet.' The church is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting the radical core of Christianity itself.”
Cultural theorists debated what Jaws's shark represents: the left said bourgeois paranoia / immigrants; Fidel Castro said big capital. Žižek's answer: both are right and neither is, because ideology replaces many inconsistent fears with one object (the shark) in which they are all aufgehoben.
“the trick of ideology is to replace all this inconsistent multitude of fears with one object. You fear the shark and all other fears are somehow almost in the Hegelian sense aufgehoben, sublated in this fear.”
Near closing time, shopping carts full of items are found abandoned by newly impoverished middle-class families who went through the entire shopping ritual, picking items off shelves, but then left everything at the exit without buying anything, obtaining the surplus enjoyment of shopping in pure form, detached from purchasing.
“they obtain the surplus enjoyment of shopping in its pure isolated form without buying anything.”
After Stalingrad, Goebbels held a mass rally at the Sportpalast and promised the crowd not victory but ever greater suffering, deprivation, and total war, and the crowd shouted 'Yes!' Žižek reads this as surplus enjoyment at its purest: consent to suffering as a form of libidinal excess.
“Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total will it be?... And the crowd shout 'Yes, yes, yes.' This is surplus pleasure at its purest.”
Our Polish socialism is the synthesis of all human history: it took barbarian primitivism from pre-class society, slavery from antiquity, brutal domination from the Middle Ages, exploitation from capitalism, and from socialism, it took the name.
“from socialism it took the name. But you see the point? Socialism in this sense empty signifier.”
Hitchcock describes to Truffaut a scene he never shot: two men watch a car assembled piece by piece on a Ford production line, then open the door and find a corpse inside. Žižek uses this as the purest image of surplus value / objet petit a: the corpse drops out of nowhere from the production process.
“They open the door of the car and out drops a corpse... the corpse is the surplus object at its purest.”
Pokémon Go adds a digital fantasy frame to grey reality so players see virtual creatures superimposed on real locations. Žižek uses this to illustrate how ideology does exactly this: it adds a fantasy entity (the Jew, the Arab rapist) that makes confused reality readable and meaningful.
“ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality... did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology which made them see a specific Pokémon, the Jew?”
Varoufakis thought threatening Grexit would be his blackmail card against Schäuble; Schäuble responded 'Fine, do it, do you need more money?' The plan was to push Greece into chaotic exit and use the suffering to enable a soft coup. Žižek uses this to illustrate the left's dangerous fascination with suffering-as-authenticity.
“Varoufakis almost got a heart attack. You know what was Schäuble's answer? 'Fine, do it. Do you need help?'”
Works invoked 18
Capital book
Foundational reference: Marx's analysis of capitalist dynamics is described as fully actual today, and Lacan's late elaboration of objet petit a is presented as a direct response to returning to Capital.
V for Vendetta film
Criticized for ending with spectacular crowd takeover of Parliament without addressing 'what next?', exemplifies the left's fetish for the event over the morning after.
Elysium film
Cited alongside Hunger Games as Hollywood's acknowledgment of approaching class bifurcation between those who control technology and those who are controlled.
The Hunger Games film
Cited alongside Elysium as evidence that Hollywood already knows we are approaching a new class society, it is the best-case scenario if we are lucky.
Roots book
Mentioned as the Hollywood solution Malcolm X rejected: searching for African origins as remedy for dispossession, whereas Malcolm X saw the X as a new universalist opening.
The Idiot (novel) book
Rowan Williams's reading, the idiot as terrifying rather than innocent, is praised as the best reading Žižek knows, used to articulate the experience of 'this world is out of joint.'
Brazil film
Called 'one of the greatest movies of all times'; screened in the lecture to illustrate bureaucratic surplus enjoyment, the group imitating hyper-efficiency while accomplishing nothing.
North by Northwest film
The unshot assembly-line/corpse scene (described in Hitchcock/Truffaut conversations) is used as the purest illustration of surplus value as objet petit a.
Jaws film
Used to illustrate how ideology replaces a multitude of inconsistent fears with one object (the shark) in which they are all aufgehoben.
The Castle tv
A 'guilty pleasure' Žižek got caught in; he screens a scene to demonstrate objet petit a: the murder investigation is the obstacle-cause sustaining desire between the two leads.
Disparities book
Žižek's own 'last theoretical book,' mentioned for its chapter 'Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual,' where he elaborates his Christian atheism.
Silver Blaze book
The 'curious incident of the dog in the night-time' (nothing happened) is used to frame Trump's non-event in Sweden: the absence of incident is itself the significant fact.
Les non-dupes errent other
Key seminar in which Lacan, in his 'typical arrogant way,' identified objet petit a as his true invention; Žižek uses it as the primary theoretical source linking surplus enjoyment to surplus value.
October journal
Žižek mentions he was once a member; the journal takes its name from the October Revolution but treats it as a purely aesthetic/academic reference, exemplifying academic left that performs radicalism without content.
Examined Life film
A questioner mentions that Žižek appeared in this documentary with criticisms of environmentalism as dogma, Žižek confirms and elaborates.
The source from which Žižek quotes Hitchcock's description of the unshot North by Northwest corpse-from-car scene.
Recommended for its argument that capitalism's apologists are right that it is 'natural' in the sense of expressing desire's constitutive instability, a point Žižek builds on.
Fifty Shades Darker film
Mentioned as an extreme 'guilty pleasure' that almost caused his wife to divorce him, deployed self-deprecatingly to illustrate compulsive desire despite knowing better.
People invoked 44
Mentioned as proposing the Marxist reading of Jaws (the shark as big capital / bankers), used by Žižek to illustrate how ideology enables multiple coherent readings of the same object.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'my good friend,' futurologist and theorist of catastrophes at Stanford; shared with Žižek the near-evacuation scenario from Fukushima, illustrating the need for mega-scale thinking on ecological catastrophe.
Todd McGowan positive
Žižek recommends his book Capitalist Desire for the argument that capitalism's defenders are right that it is 'natural' in the sense of expressing the constitutive instability of desire.
Cited as the only French politician openly advocating workers' interests, but doing so in a 'half-fascist way'; part of the European paradox where radical right adopts leftist economic positions.
Paul Krugman negative
Cited as a 'left-Fukuyamaist' who immediately and brutally attacked Bernie Sanders, thereby revealing himself as a 'pure Hillary Clinton liberal' accepting capitalism's basic framework.
The 'central bad guy' in the Greek debt crisis; Žižek recounts his offer to help fund Grexit as evidence of a planned destabilization/soft coup against Greece.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical anchor of the talk; Žižek elaborates Lacan's objet petit a, plus-de-jouir, and the seminar Les Non-dupes errent as the key framework linking surplus value to surplus enjoyment.
John Oliver negative
Mentioned alongside Jon Stewart as representatives of the comedy-against-Trump approach that Žižek finds counterproductive.
Nancy Pelosi negative
Criticized for attempting to re-normalize the Trump situation ('we had Reagan for eight years, we came back...'), which Žižek sees as dangerous failure to recognize the exceptional rupture.
Mentioned as an example of brain-computer interface: Hawking no longer uses his finger but controls his wheelchair by thought alone.
Alan Dershowitz negative
Criticized for advocating the legalization and proceduralization of torture, Žižek argues that precisely the normalization of torture (not its occurrence) is the true horror.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Met at a debate; Žižek noted the irony that Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis may be half-right (global capitalism won) but that communist China survived as capitalism's best manager. Mainstream left thinkers are diagnosed as 'left-Fukuyamaists.'
Toussaint Louverture positive
Cited alongside Malcolm X as a hero who exemplified universalism from within dispossession, the Haitian Revolution as paradigm of genuine Enlightenment universalism.
Cited for coining the 'properly Freudian' word 'mis-underestimate', used to warn against underestimating Trump.
Jon Stewart negative
Cited as emblematic of the 'comicalization' approach to Trump, Žižek warns that laughing at Trump while he keeps winning is self-defeating.
Žižek treats Trump as a symptom of the liberal-left's failure, a wrong reaction to a real problem; he warns against both laughing at him and normalizing him. Personally revolted by Trump's vulgarity and degradation of public discourse.
Terry Gilliam positive
Director of Brazil, called 'one of the greatest movies of all times'; used extensively to illustrate bureaucratic surplus enjoyment.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Cited alongside Robespierre for the image of revolutionaries as captains entering uncharted territory: they are not fulfilling historical necessity but improvising in unknown waters.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Criticized for the singularity vision: Žižek says Kurzweil imagines we all merge into one collective intelligence while secretly assuming we still remain human communicating, he doesn't see how radical the change would be.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek notes with satisfaction that Negri conceded the multitude thesis doesn't work and that leadership and vertical power must be rehabilitated.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited in agreement that Marxist critique of political economy is still actual today, and that one must make a step further.
George Orwell positive
An early passage from the late 1930s is cited: leftist intellectuals like to talk about revolution to make sure nothing will really change, used to criticize the American academic left.
Bernie Sanders positive
Praised for reconnecting the left with 'mythic disappointed, desperate ordinary people' that politically correct left had abandoned; Žižek says he has no illusions about Bernie but credits his historical importance.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Described as 'my friend'; shared with Žižek the story of Schäuble's 'Fine, do Grexit' response, which Žižek uses to illustrate both the structural plan against Greece and the left's dangerous fascination with suffering.
Cited as having organized the Totaler Krieg Sportpalast speech as a masterclass in surplus enjoyment, promising mass suffering and getting enthusiastic consent; Žižek notes his contorted face betrayed 'a very weird perverted pleasure.'
Malcolm X positive
Called 'a Hegelian genius': his insight was to see the X (erasure of Black roots) not as loss to be repaired by finding origins but as a new opening for a more authentic universalism than white people can achieve.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited alongside Saint-Just for the metaphor of the ship and uncharted territory; Žižek expresses ongoing love for the French Revolution.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Former friend with whom Žižek had a conflict: Laclau argued that everyday positive experience of Jews (kind neighbors) undermines anti-Semitism. Žižek disagrees: a true anti-Semite will read kindness as further evidence of concealed evil.
Rowan Williams positive
The ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, described as 'my friend' and 'a wonderful guy, a good theorist'; praised for the best reading of Dostoevsky's Idiot and for articulating the elementary form of religious experience as 'this world is out of joint.'
Featured in the anecdote about snatching the crown from the Pope, which leads to the Pope's line about the Church trying to destroy Christianity itself.
Darian Leader positive
Called a 'British half-okay Lacanian'; his counter-intuitive reading of the 'bed for two please' slip, that it was a control mechanism against enjoying the pretext too much, is praised as displaying 'Lacanian genius.'
Mentioned as Hitchcock's interlocutor whose conversations with Hitchcock contain the North by Northwest assembly-line scene.
Che Guevara negative
Žižek expresses respect but diagnoses the 'most tragic passage' in Guevara's writings: his disturbance at Yugoslavia's prosperity revealed a dangerous equation of suffering with revolutionary authenticity.
Mao Zedong positive
Žižek quotes approvingly: 'Heaven is under disorder, the situation is excellent', used to argue that chaotic times are also moments when something genuinely new can emerge.
Quoted from an SS history book praising Jewish productivity while advocating emigration to Palestine, illustrating the historical roots of 'Zionist anti-Semitism' in fascism.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
The unshot scene from North by Northwest (described in Hitchcock's conversations with Truffaut) is used as the purest image of surplus value / objet petit a as the corpse from the assembly line.
Used to illustrate that Venezuela's pseudo-local self-organization was entirely dependent on a strong state with a charismatic leader, the two were absolutely co-dependent.
Featured in the joke about money under communism ('dialectical synthesis: some will have money, others will not'); also invoked approvingly for the Stalinist terror being directed against the bureaucracy itself rather than the people.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek argues Marx's critique of political economy is fully actual today, but one must go beyond him, his analysis of capitalism was correct but he did not go far enough.
Michael Hardt negative
Co-author with Negri; mentioned in the same concession about the limits of the multitude thesis.
Sigmund Freud positive
Lustgewinn (gain of pleasure) is invoked as the Freudian predecessor to Lacanian surplus enjoyment; George Bush's 'mis-underestimate' is called 'properly Freudian.'
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the dialectical principle that the moment of realization is always also the moment of defeat; also cited on what dies on the Cross being God himself.
Max Weber positive
Invoked for the proper definition of bureaucracy as efficient state machinery, against which Žižek argues Stalinism precisely failed (it needed permanent emergency rather than stable administration).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
The Idiot is cited via Rowan Williams's reading: the idiot is not innocent but terrifying, a sincere pure person who causes devastation around him in his immediate environment.
What it argues
objet petit a as the structure of ideology, desire, and surplus enjoymentPokémon Go as the mechanism of ideology made visiblethe Lacanian-Marxist link: surplus value and surplus enjoymentTrump, vulgarity, and the failure of the liberal-leftanti-Semitism and Zionist anti-Semitism as ideological formsglobal capitalism approaching ecological, technological, and social limitsChristian atheism and the Holy Spirit as emancipatory community
Dialectical moves 12
“The very things perceived as Trump's final mistakes helped him—what we caught him on, many people saw as 'he is one of us.'”
The standard liberal weapon (exposing gaffes) inverted: each attack on Trump became evidence of identification with him against arrogant liberals.
“It's time for the left to claim: we are the silent moral majority, the ones who stand for simple dignity and good manners—they are the vulgar guys.”
A reversal of the culture-war script: vulgarity now belongs to those in power, so the left reclaims decorum rather than transgression.
“Object a is not the object of your desire but what makes you desire—and it appears directly as an obstacle to it.”
The classic Lacanian inversion: what looks like the barrier to desire is actually its condition; remove the obstacle and desire collapses.
“In capitalism we also see where Marx did not go far enough—the moment of triumph is always also the moment of defeat.”
Hegelian self-undermining: global capitalism has realized Marx's description, but that very realization reveals Marx's limitations.
“Even if his wife really is sleeping around, the pathologically jealous man's jealousy is no less pathological—the question is never 'are the facts true?' but 'why do you need the jealousy?'”
Structural truth vs. empirical truth: ideology's grip is not weakened by facts because facts are not the site of its operation.
“If you take away the two or three pounds too much, you also lose the perfection—the disturbing element retroactively creates the beauty it appears to spoil.”
The imperfection is constitutive: what seems to ruin the ideal is in fact what generates it.
“The true purpose of bureaucracy is not to solve problems but to reproduce them—yet organized as such, with terror directed at bureaucrats, it can do things as an excess.”
Bureaucracy's irrationality is not a bug to be fixed but a structure to be harnessed: accept the self-reproduction, then redirect the excess.
“The church is not fighting paganism—it is fighting its own radical core, the excess of Christianity itself.”
The institution is always the enemy of the truth it claims to embody; the church's real opponent is authentic Christianity.
“God's death on the Cross is not a tragedy but the greatest gift: God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom.”
Abandonment inverted: divine absence is not deprivation but liberation, the precondition for a truly free emancipatory community.
“The most politically correct leftists have the fewest actual black friends—anti-racist discourse substitutes for real engagement.”
Political correctness as a mode of avoidance: the more you perform anti-racism discursively, the less you need to enact it relationally.
“European tradition is threatened not by Muslim immigrants but by Europeans themselves—Le Pen's Europe would no longer be Enlightenment Europe.”
The threat to European values comes from inside: the defenders of 'European civilization' are precisely its destroyers.
“Stalin's synthesis on money under communism: there will be money and there will be no money—some people will have money, others will not.”
The dialectical synthesis turns out to be the crudest class division: the joke exposes how 'synthesis' can mask new hierarchy.
Claims 24
asserts
Ideology at its most elementary functions like Pokémon Go: it adds a fantasy frame to reality that makes hidden entities (the Jew, the immigrant) visible and reality meaningful.the mechanism of ideology
asserts
Lacan's key invention is objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, which he elaborated in the late 1960s–70s precisely in connection with his return to reading Marx's Capital.Lacan's contribution to psychoanalysis
asserts
It is only today, with global capitalism, that reality has arrived at its Marxist notion—but this moment of triumph is simultaneously the moment when Marx's limitations become visible.the relevance of Marx and the need to go beyond him
asserts
Anti-Semitic debate must never be engaged at the level of empirical facts, because the real question is not 'are Jews really like that?' but 'why does fascism need the figure of the Jew?'the proper critique of anti-Semitism
asserts
Even if a pathologically jealous man's suspicions are empirically true, his jealousy remains pathological—and the same logic applies to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.the structural nature of racist ideology
asserts
A new entity is emerging around Trump: 'Zionist anti-Semitism'—simultaneously pro-Israel and domestically anti-Semitic, with deep roots in a strand of fascism.the new right's attitude toward Jews
rejects
Muslim immigrants and Jews are not structurally equivalent: immigrants are perceived as 'all too visible and chaotic,' whereas the classic anti-Semitic Jew is the hidden master pulling strings.the left-wing claim that 'Muslim immigrants are today's Jews'
asserts
Surplus enjoyment is not a simple intensification of pleasure but the additional pleasure generated by the formal detours and obstacles in pursuing pleasure—remove the obstacle and you lose the pleasure itself.the structure of surplus enjoyment / Lustgewinn
asserts
Goebbels's Totaler Krieg speech is the purest example of surplus enjoyment: the crowd enthusiastically consents to promises of extreme suffering, not pleasure.surplus enjoyment in fascist political mobilization
asserts
The left's fetish for spectacular mass events (Tahrir Square, Occupy) is a form of surplus enjoyment; the real test is 'the morning after'—what ordinary people feel when things return to normal.the left's relationship to revolutionary enthusiasm and suffering
asserts
The true danger for the left is not right-wing populism per se but the surplus pleasure of self-torture (anti-Eurocentrism, guilt) that substitutes for real political engagement.political correctness and anti-Eurocentrism as surplus enjoyment
asserts
The most radical pro-working-class measures in Europe were recently enacted by the nationalist-conservative Polish government, not by any socialist party—this is the madness of our times.the paradox of European right-wing parties adopting left policies
asserts
Global capitalism is approaching limits it cannot solve from within: ecology, intellectual property, financial capital, biogenetic engineering, and artificial intelligence all require forms of collective mega-organization beyond the market.the structural limits of global capitalism
asserts
Artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces will not produce a happy post-human singularity but a new class society: some will control the machine, the rest will merely be controlled.post-humanism and AI
asserts
Trump is a wrong reaction to a real problem; fighting him symptomatically while ignoring the failures of the liberal-left that produced him is insufficient.Trump and the liberal-left's responsibility
rejects
The dominant response to the ecological crisis—individual culpabilization plus easy green consumerism—is ideological feel-good ecologism that avoids the structural problem.mainstream environmentalism / feel-good ecologism
asserts
There is no pre-given natural balance we can return to: nature itself is a history of catastrophes, and the ecological crisis requires collective large-scale thinking, not local sustainability projects.the myth of natural balance / local ecologism
asserts
The message of Christianity, correctly read, is not a second coming but the death of God liberating humanity into freedom, with the Holy Spirit as an earthly emancipatory community.Christian theology and atheism
asserts
Political anti-Eurocentrism often masks anti-democratic resentment precisely at the moment when what was worth fighting for in the European Enlightenment tradition is threatened by Europeans themselves.anti-Eurocentrism on the left
asserts
Bureaucracy's true goal is to reproduce itself, not solve problems—but accepted and organized as such, with 'a little bit of terror' directed at bureaucrats, it can function productively as an excess.bureaucracy and bureaucratic socialism
asserts
Venezuela demonstrates that local self-organization is illusory without a strong state with a charismatic leader—Chavismo required both simultaneously.local self-organization vs. the state
asserts
Writing thick books about revolution is one way to ensure it will not happen—the academic left's discourse on revolution and political correctness substitutes for real engagement.academic left and symbolic politics
reframes
The refugee crisis is not a humanitarian problem but a geopolitical one rooted in neocolonialism, and the failure of wealthy Sunni states to accept Sunni refugees reveals its political structure.the European refugee crisis
asserts
Bernie Sanders did something historically important by reconnecting with the 'disappointed ordinary people' that the politically correct left had lost contact with.Bernie Sanders and the American left
Quotes 20
“In crazy times like this, the whole point is to maintain, sustain the dignity of theory.”Slavoj Žižek · theory as political act
“At its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as augmented reality
“The way ideology functions is this one: you have many fears, obsessions. And the trick of ideology is to replace all this inconsistent multitude of fears with one object.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as condensation of fears onto one object
“The moment I accept the debate at the level of facts, 'Are Jews really like that?', I sold my soul to the devil.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-Semitism cannot be fought at the level of facts
“Even if all the man's fears are true, even if his wife is really sleeping around, his jealousy is no less pathological.”Slavoj Žižek · structural nature of ideology: facts are irrelevant
“Object a is not the object of your desire but what makes you desire. And it usually appears directly as an obstacle to it.”Slavoj Žižek · objet petit a as obstacle-cause of desire
“If you take back the disturbing element, you also lose the perfection of what this element was disturbing. You don't get pure beauty.”Slavoj Žižek · the constitutive function of the obstacle / objet a
“This is surplus pleasure at its purest. Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total will it be? And the crowd shout 'Yes, yes, yes.'”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment / jouissance in fascist mobilization
“Don't laugh too much. We will be laughing on and on and Trump will be winning. Doesn't this tell you something?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of comicalization of politics
“Trump was a wrong reaction to a real problem. You have to stop me. Now comes my surplus pleasure.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as symptom; self-awareness of surplus pleasure
“I more and more think that the true test is the morning after. Forget about these big events. How will ordinary people feel the change when things return to normal?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of spectacular left politics
“The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian atheism / God's death as liberation
“What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community.”Slavoj Žižek · Holy Spirit as earthly emancipatory community
“There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of the myth of natural balance
“Our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of fetishist denial: 'I know very well but still I don't believe it.'”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist denial as ecological attitude
“If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen.”Slavoj Žižek · academic left discourse as substitute for action
“My political ideal? Without joking: bureaucratic socialism. Because I want to have time to do my stupid work, watch movies, write books.”Slavoj Žižek · bureaucratic socialism as personal political ideal
“Heaven is under disorder, the situation is excellent. — Mao. You should never forget that chaotic times like others are also times when something new can emerge.”Slavoj Žižek · chaos as opportunity; Maoist optimism
“Lacan defines the real as that which always returns to the same place. I hope this is real and that I will return here.”Slavoj Žižek · the Real / closing joke on returning
“We are not fulfilling some big historical necessity. We are like captains on a ship entering uncharted unknown territories. We have to improvise.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of historical determinism; political improvisation
Transcript 66 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. Sorry, I will have probably to do it like this. I'm really glad to be here. I'm just afraid to maybe disappoint you. No, no, no, I know this is also what I always say, but this time really because I think this talk was announced as dealing with actual political situation and so on and so on. But I prefer precisely not to do this. I think that in crazy times like this, the whole point is to maintain, sustain the dignity of theory, you know? And even I'm even ready to draw a political consequence of this. I remember when I was young, after '68 and so on, it was that those in power, at that point the moderate right, where politicians, people of power, were using this kind of a pseudo-dignified language, nice words and so on, while the radical left, to provoke, used in their public appearances f-words and so on, vulgarities. Now, I hope you noticed it, it's the opposite. You get all the vulgarity already from those in power. And I wouldn't be afraid to say that maybe it's time, if we still want to be leftists, for us, the left, because it's in a way true, to change the rules and to claim, which is in a way again true, my God, we are the ones who stand for silent moral majority, simple dignity, good manners and so on and so on. They are the vulgar guys. They break all the rules and so on. It's a... that's why I appreciate Bernie Sanders. He entered a territory... you know, before Bernie's, I don't have any illusions about Bernie, but he did something extremely important. Before him, the left was this politically correct left, fighting for marginals and so on, it's okay, it's okay, but they lost contact with all this mythic disappointed, desperate ordinary people and so on. And I think now we have a unique chance to connect with those people. And if we miss this chance, it will be very sad. That's why, for example, if I talk, if I use your beloved president's language, one of the enemies of the people now is Nancy Pelosi, I think. You know why? In her last... no, no, nothing against her, she is a liberal blah-blah, but instead of maintaining this emergency state which should be... did you notice how in all her latest interventions, she is trying to re-normalize the situation? Already a month ago, at some public debate or what, she said, "Okay, things happen. We had Ronald Reagan for eight years, then we came back. We had Bush for eight years, we came back. And it will be the same here." I'm afraid it will not be the same here. Something extraordinary happened. The rules are changing. So... okay, I will not get lost into that. I could... I just want to tell you that to begin with a small joke, you remember when your beloved president said about that the strange Sweden, attack in Sweden the last night, no? I was immediately... I immediately remembered, you know, the most famous line from Sherlock Holmes stories, from *Silver Blaze*, when Sherlock Holmes asks Inspector Lestrade, his idiot companion, "Do you remember the incident with the dog last night?" Lestrade, who says, "But nothing happened with the dog last night." And then Sherlock Holmes answers, "That was the curious incident," no? Like I... wasn't something like this with Trump? Like, do you remember the strange incident in Sweden like last night? Nothing happened in Sweden last night. That was the curious incident and so on, you know. Okay, but not to lose time here, I must tell you something and I'm not alone, surprisingly. You know what I'm also afraid of? Of two things at least with Trump. One thing, don't underestimate this possibility, is that for a couple of years he may succeed. What if there will not be an economic catastrophe? What if he will show enough flexibility to somehow patch relations with China, with Russia and so on? And there are even signs that with immigrants, that he will do something very dirty. After all the big talk, he will throw some of them out, but not to disturb your beloved middle classes who like to have cheap Mexican immigrant workers. He will just allow enough of them so that you will still have the cheap... So he may relatively succeed for a couple of years. You know, don't... That's why, here I will say something which is maybe not popular, although I love them, I follow their shows, but all this... how should I call it, comicalization, comedization, you know. Who is... at least academic intellectuals, what do they usually follow against Trump? It's mostly, you know, Jon Stewart and all that comedy and so on. Well, don't laugh too much, you know. I don't like this approach of just making fun of Trump because, you know, then we will be laughing on and on and Trump will be winning. Doesn't this tell you something? This is for me, since we are here, at least both of us are card-carrying Lacanians, more or less, yeah... that the big... just my God, you have to think what happened with the... think about it, with the election of Trump. For example, do you remember a couple of months ago, how... how often, almost every week towards the end, the press declared Trump just committed public suicide? When he did some alleged mistake, "It's over." And then they got it that it only helped him. So they totally... if I may use that wonderful, I almost respect George Bush the younger, he coined that properly Freudian word, you remember, "Don't mis-underestimate" or whatever. "Don't mis-underestimate" Trump. The very thing that... the very thing that were perceived as final mistakes, finally he killed himself, he off... helped him. And it tells a lot about how people identified with him. Precisely when we thought we caught him, many people perceived this as "He is one of us, liberals arrogant attacking him" and so on and so on. So again, it's hard work to be done. It's not enough to laugh at Trump. It's easy to do that. Now it's no longer Jon Stewart, although he reappears, returns from the dead from time to time, it's more John Oliver and all the others. But I always feel that there is something terribly wrong in that approach, because we will be dying laughing and he will be doing better and better. But okay, enough of this, I'm sorry, you will have to go through a serious talk. Precisely... I mean, it's almost something in my nature resists it, that I will this time really do something that fits the title, no? Which is from surplus value to surplus enjoyment or what, no? Okay. Surplus value, obviously Marxist reference. So I would like to begin with a short remark of the relevance of Marxist critique of political economy in our era of global capitalism. I agree with Alain Badiou that not only is Marxist critique of political economy, his outline of the capitalist dynamics, still actual, one should even make a step further and claim that it is only today with global capitalism that reality arrived at its notion, the notion of Marx. That is to say, it is as if Marx was writing for today's time. But as we learned from Hegel, at this very moment when reality is at the level of Marxist capital, this moment of triumph is always also the moment of defeat. We also see where Marx did not go far enough, what were his limitations. That's the nice paradox. Now we are in the times described abstractly by Marx, full capitalist reality, and it's with wonderful ironies. For example, I once met Fukuyama at some debate and he laughed, I told him, "Listen, maybe you were right, no? Global capitalism. But do you admit that communists where they are still in power, China, Vietnam, nonetheless survived as the best managers of capitalist economy?" So what I want to say is that precisely today, to remain faithful to Marx, we have to go further. We have to clearly identify the limitations of Marx and so on and so on. In this sense, it is in this spirit that I want to combine Marx and Jacques Lacan. And in the first part of my talk, and I doubt if there will be time for the second part, we will see, I would like to begin with some very elementary things about what is Lacan's basic conceptual contribution, what new thing did he bring, Lacan in his reading of psychoanalysis. In his seminar, *Les Non-dupes errent* from '73-'74, and it's typically Lacanian title, *Les Non-dupes errent*, it means, the non-dupes, those who are not taken into illusion, *errent*, they are in the wrong. Like, it's a wonderful dialectical thought, that sometimes to see how things really are, you err the most, you don't see the point. As always with Lacan, there is here already also a wordplay, because if you pronounce it quickly in French, *Les Non-dupes errent* also means names of the father. Okay, but let's not go into that. At the... in his typical arrogant way, Lacan asks the question... he speaks of course, he was a megalomaniac, in the third person about himself. He said, "He, Lacan, what was it that Lacan who is here present invented?" Then he answers, he says like that to get things going, "Object A," *l'objet petit a*. He said... so it's typical that when he is pressed to isolate what did he really bring new, it's not any of the usual phrases like "desire is the desire of the other," "the unconscious is structured like a language," "there is no sexual relation." He says, "My true invention is *objet petit a*," the object small a, the object cause of desire. And as we can immediately see, anyone who knows Lacan, although he uses this term from the very beginning of his teaching, this term gets really elaborated only from the late '60s, '70s, when Lacan massively returns to reading capital. It's a clear connection between Lacan's object small a as the so-called *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment, and Marxist surplus *Mehrwert*, surplus value. So to begin with, I would simply like to elaborate on this link. I will treat you as idiots, but don't be afraid, the real idiot here is me, in the sense of I'm obsessed with this idea that one should state things as clearly as possible. So to explain what is object a, I would like to begin... I'm sorry if some of you know this example of mine already... with Pokémon Go, the game. I think there we can see not only object a, but how it is useful for our everyday ideology. As you know... I'm sorry if I treat you like idiots now... Pokémon Go is a location-based augmented reality game, typically played on mobile phones. So players use the device's GPS and camera to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, Pokémon, who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player. As players travel the real world, their avatar moves along with... along the game's map. This augmented reality mode is what makes Pokémon Go different from other PC games. Instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into artificial virtual space, it combines the two. We look at reality and we interact with reality through the fantasy frame of the digital screen. And this frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, pushing us to look for them in reality which without this frame would leave us indifferent. Sounds familiar, this simple description? Of course it does. What the technology of Pokémon Go externalizes is simply, I claim, the basic mechanism of ideology. At its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality. Again, to simplify things to the utmost, did Hitler not offer the Germans in 1930s the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology which made them see a specific Pokémon, the Jew of course? You know, just imagine what do you do with Pokémon game. You again, that's the crucial thing, that's the greatness of this game. It's not you are drawn into some imaginary world. You are there but you see more than it is. And that's, in a very vague parallel, the achievement, if I may use this obscene word, of Nazism. You walk along the street and you see Pokémons. You see Jewish plot and so on and so on. The Jew was popping up all around and provided the clue to what one has to fight against. And I think the same holds for all other ideological pseudo-entities which have to be added to reality in order to make it complete and meaningful. For example, one can easily imagine, and a friend told me that they already exist, they are pirated bad copies but nonetheless in Germany, anti-immigrant versions of Pokémon Go, where you wander around a German city and then you have a Muslim immigrant popping up, an Arab rapist popping up and so on and so on. Now, of course, you will immediately counter-attack. Is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which makes us see the Jewish plot as the source of our troubles, not radically different from the Marxist approach which observes social life as a battleground of economic and other power struggles? Because, of course, in Germany's left already tried to answer this with constructing the leftist version of Pokémon Go, like you see rich bankers, you see capital behind... But I think there is a big difference. In Marxism, the secret beneath all the confusion of social life are social antagonisms, not individual agents which can be personalized in the guise of Pokémon figures. Pokémon Go does... does in an inherent way tend towards ideologically personalized perception of social antagonisms. In the case of bankers threatening us from all around, it is easy to see how such a figure can easily be appropriated by a fascist populist ideology of plutocracy as opposed to honest productive capitalists and so on and so on. So let's not go into it. I only want to say this, that isolate the basic mechanism of Pokémon Go. We live in grey boring reality. You add a fantasy frame which makes you see something more, hidden figures in reality, which also triggers your desire. All of a sudden, you become an engaged observer, you look for Pokémon and so on. And this would be, again, ideology at its most elementary and at the same time the function of object small a. Object small a is precisely, in very elementary sense, the object cause of your desire, what you add to reality to be vulgar to make it interesting. And here also we see in what sense object a functions. Because the whole point is that this object a for the Nazis, the Jew, should remain unseen. It is hidden behind but you shouldn't see it too clearly. If object a becomes is perceived as directly part of reality, you become a psychotic, you know. The point is that it should remain unseen, a mystery and so on and so on. But you get the point. It is something which allows you to read confused reality. It makes it readable. We should never forget, propos anti-Semitism, this wonderful ambiguity of the... of the English word "plot". It's at the same time plot in the narrative sense and plot in the sense of Jewish plot. That's what Hitler did. By adding the Jew in the sense of the Jewish plot, he allowed to ordinary Germans to make the situation readable. You know, you are confused, inflation whatever, economic chaos, but then Hitler said "Jewish plot," "Ah, now I see it clearly." And we don't have time for it today, but it would be so interesting to read the transformation of anti-Semitism today. That's why I'm telling to my Jewish friends: beware of the people like Donald Trump because around Trump especially, they exemplify what I call, and I thought I was exaggerating, as they usually say, "Oh, Žižek is provocative" or whatever, but it's more and more true, namely a new entity is emerging, getting stronger and stronger. It's called... I call it Zionist anti-Semitism. There is no contradiction in what people around Trump are doing. They are at the same time pro-Zionist, in the sense of supporting Israel, and anti-Semitic in the sense of but Jews here shouldn't have too much influence and so on. There is a long line in fascism of this ambiguous attitude. Just when we were driving here, I told, and you probably knew about it, to Henry in an... in a history thick book of SS, the Nazi SS, I found a wonderful quote from Reinhard Heydrich, you know, the architect of Holocaust, who wrote that Jewish people are wonderful productive people. We should have good relations with them. We just cannot mix with them. And then he elaborates a plan of helping them to emigrate to Palestine, supporting them even, just they should be there, not here. If they are there, Heydrich says, we can have wonderful economic relations and so on and so on. And this is the predominant line. There is no contradiction when some people say "But many guys around Trump are anti-Semitic, how can be pro-Israeli?" That's the... that's the strategy of the... of the new right today. This paradox of Jews are good if they are there protecting us against the Arab... although it's even more interesting. I always loved conspiracy theories. This is today's even moderate right. Now we have radical right, all around Europe, it's we really living in crazy times, which go... who they go a step further. The theory is this one: the Arab or Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a fake. It's just staged to blur the fundamental thing happening. Jews are organizing mass Arab migration to Europe to ruin European Christianity. They literally use the word "Muslim-Zionist plot". This is why in Slovenia, my country, we have some right-wing commentators who claim George Soros is incarnation of the devil today, because he is a Jew who is helping the immigrants. There you see the truth and so on. I don't have time to go into this, I just say this to make you aware how with all the horrors at Trump immigration and so on, don't forget about the basic things that he is doing at the level of form. As a good Marxist, I'm always a formalist. Form matters. Like, did you notice how Trump destroyed or lowered the level of public debate? Things that it was possible to say them publicly... sorry, it was not possible to say them publicly some years ago. He just does it. Like this terrible regression of public speech is something terrifying. Now you will say, "But I'm just concerned with forms and so on." No, forms matter. You know, and that was my point I was misunderstood propos torture. I am... I think form matters there. I can well understand, I always say this to provoke people and so on, I in a totally desperate situation, I cannot promise you that I wouldn't torture someone. I can... I'm not saying that I will. Let's imagine this ridiculous scenario, you know, somebody kidnaps my daughter and I know that the guy that I have in my hands knows where the dog... my daughter is kept. Oh, well, out of pure despair, again, I would try not to do it, but I cannot guarantee to you that I will not do it. But for that very reason, it's important not to legalize it, you get the point. If I do it, I should be all the time aware that out of pure despair I'm doing something absolutely terrifying. The horror is the normalization of it. That, you know, Alan Dershowitz's vision: we legalize it, before you are tortured doctor examines you, you shall be tortured in this way, in that way or whatever. And here is the problem with Trump. Let me give you a vulgar example which I think clarifies in what sense he is really vulgar. Once he was praising his wife Melania, and you know, she is extra-popular in Slovenia, you know why? She is from there, you know. We already have a Melania cake, a Melania wine and so on, big tourist industry projects. But and to show how refined a refined lady she is, Trump says that in all the time that they are living together... I will not use the vulgar f-word... he said that not once did he hear her emit the sound of flatulence or whatever. But you see what is wrong here? Although he wanted to praise her as a noble girl, sorry, but you don't talk about this in the public. You know what I mean? The very fact that he mentions it was an incredible vulgarity. You don't talk about this in public. I mean. I mean, what would you say if to... to... to describe to you what a refined person I am, I would now start to go into detail how I shit, how I do it. You don't do this. Okay, let's go on. And and the sad thing is that it's not only Trump. You know what is now, I will propose another crazy idea for the left. We need more dogmatism, I claim. There is a very good sense of dogmatism, which is I think one way to measure the relative progress of society is how certain moral norms are simply dogmatically accepted. For example, I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to debate again and again why women shouldn't be raped. I want to live in a society where this is dogmatically accepted as a fact, so that if you get some crazy guy who says, "Eh, but women really like it, they just are too hypocritical to admit, blah blah," you don't even argue. The guy disqualifies himself, is perceived as an idiot. So when we start to debate things which should be absolutely clear, it's always a critical point. You see at some point we precisely shouldn't debate everything. Again, the fact that we started to debate torture again, it's a bad sign. But okay, let's not get lost here. This was just the first idea of object a, that mysterious surplus entity that you add and which allows you to perceive reality in a meaningful way. If I may use some of my old jokes to explain to you, maybe some of you know it, I'm sorry, this how this surplus object in the case of anti-Semitism the Jew functions... let me give you an example. When I was young, I saw of course, it was played everywhere, you remember Spielberg first big hit, the *Jaws*. Okay, it was a livid debate among cultural theorists: what does the shark stand for? What does it mean? We had majority of left cultural theorists read the shark as the embodiment of bourgeois paranoia, anti-immigrant fears. Shark stands for the attack of natural disasters, immigrants, whatever, the threat from outside onto American life. Now, Fidel Castro, I remember, proposed the opposite theory. Fidel Castro loved the movie and he said, "It's clear, shark is the big capital... the power of big capital and bankers who are exploiting ordinary people and so on." But who was right? I claim, and that's the mystery of ideology, they were all right and nobody was right. The way ideology functions is this one: ordinary people in their everyday lives have many fears, obsessions and so on. You fear nature, you fear big capital, you fear immigrants, whatever. And the trick of ideology is to replace all this inconsistent multitude of fears with one object. You fear the shark and all other fears are somehow almost in the Hegelian sense *aufgehoben*, sublated in this fear. That's how ideology works. And my point is it's exactly in the same way that anti-Semitism works. This is why you can notice it how in classical anti-Semitism, how contradictory the figure of the Jew is. Jews are at the same time... at least in European anti-Semitism... oh, they work too much, you know, it's this fear, "My God, we have ordinary fun, Jews just work all the night, no wonder they beat us at exams or whatever." And they're supposed to be lazy exploiting us. They're supposed to be too intellectual, at the same time too vulgar, seducing our girls and so on and so on. You see it's the same operation. You have many fears as a small bourgeois. You fear big finances, you fear vulgar guys raping your daughter, whatever. But all these fears are projected onto the figure of the Jew. And Jew in this sense Jew is the Pokémon. You see? You add a Jew and then you have all these mysteries of object small a. The more... This is also why, I don't have time to go into it, this is also why I don't believe this simplistic leftist dogma that Muslim immigrants are today's Jews. No, it's more complex. I'm not in any way trying to take sides, claim that one is less dangerous than the other, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism. But I think it was that Chicago... Marxist, I forgot his name, who is doing the reading of capital in detailed books... Chicago... it's... my name will come to me... who draw attention to one thing: whatever you think about immigrants coming here to the United States, Mexican, or in Europe from Middle East, nobody claims that they are invisible among us and that they really pull the strings. No, they are perceived precisely as all too visible and chaotic. They are... nobody claims that they are the hidden masters. If they are hidden masters, they are the ones who pull the strings behind the immigrants. And they they start to function as Jews again. So we have to be very careful here. But back to anti-Semitism, the crucial thing here is to see how the Jew, although it's supposed to be the name of that mysterious agent behind all our troubles... sexual depravity, finances, press liberal press is lying and so on, oh Jews control it. At the same time this Jew has nothing to do, at least directly not, with empirical Jews. It's precisely like Pokémon what we add to reality. And this is crucial in... sorry, I'm repeating another of my old lines of thought, but I think it's important today... in to analyze racism. We should always apply to it, I claim, Lacan's wonderful saying, Jacques Lacan of course, that even... let's say we have a man, it can also be a woman but okay, I will use Lacan's example which is a little bit sexist... he says that when a man is pathologically jealous about his wife, that she is sleeping around serially with other men, Lacan says, even if all the man's fears are true, even if his wife is really sleeping around with other men, his jealousy is no less pathological. Because you see, the true problem of pathological jealousy is not is my wife really doing it? And then if yes, then okay I'm normal. No, the true question is why do I cling, why do I need jealousy to assert my identity? Why do I need jealousy? And exactly the same holds for anti-Semitism. If you debate with an anti-Semitic guy or with a... here the logic is the same... or with a... or with an Islamophobe and so on, you should never accept the debate at the level of facts. Okay, we should openly admit the facts. And I here I go very far here. I claim that the big mistake in Europe is that liberal leftists practically prohibited the topic of openly confronting the serious problem of cultural clashes with immigrants. The price we are paying is now that the right-wing immigrant parties are winning. But I'm saying something else. Okay, my other plastic example, I'm sorry if some of you know it. Imagine... let's say we are in the mid-'30s in Germany. I am debating anti-Semitism with a guy who is not my friend who is a Nazi. The moment I accept the debate at the level of facts, like "Are Jews really like that?", I sold my soul to the devil. What would have been the result? "Jews are," he claims, "Jews are seducing our girls." What can I say? I hope they do, and I hope we are seducing Jewish girls and so on. Of course there is always something true in it. You know what I mean? You and then the conclusion will just be "Okay, anti-Semitism maybe exaggerated a little bit but there is something in it." Or "Jews are exploiting us." Well, some of the Jews were rich, and of course in some formal sense they did exploit Germans. "Jews control the press." Well, it is a statistic fact that the percentage of Jews among lawyers and journalists was higher than their percentage in general population. But this is not, my God, what anti-Semitism is about. What anti-Semitism is about is precisely why does the... why do the fascist need the figure of the Jew to define their project? Why do they need the Jew? Not "Are Jews really like that?". In this sense, Jew is what Jacques Lacan called the zero signifier, the signifier without signified. In what sense? All signification, actual signification in the of course anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, is our everyday inconsistent fears. You just add the name Jew. And it's the same as... I'm sorry if I repeat myself, it's my favorite joke from... a wonderful joke from Poland. It's although I'm a leftist but I love this joke... an anti-communist joke, or rather anti-socialist. It goes like this... you must remember that the official ideology of really existing socialism was that socialism is the synthesis of all the highest achievements of humanity, no? And okay, the joke goes like this: our Polish socialism is the achievement synthesis of all the highest elements from human history, no? From from pre-class tribal societies it took barbarian primitivism; from ancient slave societies it took slavery; from medieval times it took brutal domination; from capitalism it took exploitation; and now comes the beauty, from socialism it took the name. But you see the point? Socialism the in this sense empty signifier. As Lacan puts it in a very precise way, at some point as Lacan puts it signifier falls into the signified. The name just don't doesn't just designate a thing, but you need the name to... like, you know, it's in a way the name Jew, the anti-Semitic name, which performatively constructs the anti-Semitic... the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew. This is why again, you cannot fight any racism effectively... of course we should do it, my God, we should openly confront the problem, show that these are all lies and so on. But don't get too much into illusions. For example, I had here already a conflict years ago with my friend, but things turned back towards the end, Ernesto Laclau, who said that there is a tension between ideological figure of a Jew or any other racist entity like the racist of course anti-Semitic figure of the Jew and everyday experience. He says, "Look, let's say I live in Germany in the '30s. I see the Jew... I know, I follow ideology, Jews horror bankers, they control everything. But then my neighbor is a good old Jewish couple. And I see they are ordinary kind people, and this limits my anti-Semitism. It's difficult to combine the two. I mean, every day when I met them, when I go to pick up my newspaper or whatever, I have to admit but look they are nice people and so on." I totally disagree with this view. I told him in a very evil way, "You don't know what anti-Semitism is. Because if you are true... a truly anti-Semitic guy, you say, let's say you are my neighbor, 'You see? He pretends to be kind. That's why they are dangerous! They hide their evil by being over-kind and so on.' You know, if you are really in ideology, even the facts which seem to... which seem to undermine it ultimately help you do it... help you doing... help you doing it." So okay, let's not get lost. This would be the first element, object a as think about again the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism, this mythic entity which you... it's like Pokémon, you add it to reality to make it meaningful. But this is not all. At the same time what Lacan calls object a is something that... it's an object, a surplus object, something that as it were falls into our reality from nowhere. I will quote you a scene from Hitchcock's conversation... Alfred Hitchcock's conversations with François Truffaut. There is a wonderful passage where Hitchcock describes to Truffaut the quintessential scene that he wanted to insert into *North by Northwest*. He never Hitchcock shot this scene, and he was right because precisely it's too open, too direct in the sense of it lays bare the ideological mechanism precisely of surplus enjoyment in a too clear way. I will describe this scene, a brief quote: "I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers at a Ford car plant as they walk along the assembly line. Behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece. Finally the car they've been being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' They open the door of the car and out drops a corpse." You know, it's pure surplus. Like, you see everything how it was combined, but out of nowhere the corpse comes. I think for the Marxist reading of this scene, it's very important that what we see here is something that we see very rarely in a Hollywood movie: the production process. And the corpse that mysteriously drops out from nowhere is a perfect stand-in for the surplus value which is generated out of nowhere through the production process. This corpse is the surplus object at its purest. Let me use another example of this surplus. I I have I must confess to my guilty pleasures. I watch many dirty TV series and among others, I don't really like it but I got caught into this compulsion. You know, this is being a being of desire at its lowest. Sometimes you watch a show and you know you shouldn't do it, it's disgusting and so on, but you cannot help it, you have to go on. Okay, one of my guilty pleasures was the TV series *Castle*, maybe some of you saw it. Sorry. No, no, I have many many dark secrets. One my wife wanted to divorce me for watching Shades Darker*, you know, so you cannot imagine how low I can go, you know. So you know what the story is about, the premise of the series. Richard Castle, a best-selling detective writer, collaborates with Kate Beckett, a New York Police Department homicide detective, in solving various murder cases in New York City. Beckett is initially infuriated at the thought of working with a writer, but the two of course soon start developing feelings for each other and as expected, the overarching plot of the series focuses on the growing romance between the two. The ongoing murder investigation is thus clearly the object a, the object cause of their mutual desire, a pretext which compels them to spend a lot of time together. The problem is of course what will happen when they finally admit their love for each other and enter a full erotic relationship? Will they still need the pretext of murder investigations? You know, this is for me in a very elementary way the most interesting aspect of what Lacan calls object small a. It's what causes your desire, but what is usually directly experienced as an obstacle to it. For example, maybe you know this joke, I used it one of my books, I'm sorry if you do but it's perfect. My friend the British half-okay Lacanian, we Lacanians are the last Stalinists, you know, everybody you included are suspicious, you know, "Are you really?" and so on. He told me it's a wonderfully simple example but it makes the point clear. He told me that once he had a patient who told him of a slip of tongue he made. He invited a lady to a rich restaurant in a hotel, and of course standard scenario, he wanted to take her to dinner and then maybe later we will get a room up there. But something weird happened: when they entered the restaurant, he said instead "a table for two please", "a bed for two please." No, no, no. Now comes Lacanian genius of Darian Leader. He told me it's totally wrong to interpret this slip of tongue as the standard Freudian notion that you know, dinner was just a pretext, he was already thinking at what will happen later. Darian Leader told me no, it was the opposite. The guy was afraid that he will enjoy dinner too much, and it was more a control like "I should never forget that really my duty will be..." like the message was "Don't enjoy the pretext too much," you know. "Remember your..." and it's literally true. If I can make a little confession, I'm not embarrassed because it's years ago, even more. But a similar thing happened to me. When I was in high school, I had a girlfriend and Slovenia was slightly conservative, that is to say at that point to gain free access to the girl, she was still part of the family. She hinted at me "Visit my father, talk to him." Okay, I did that. But her father was a wonderful intellectual. And although officially I thought "Okay, I just have to go through this nightmare of talking with her father," I noticed that I started to enjoy too much the conversation with the father, you know. And she got it and I lost her. She said, "Okay, fuck off, if you want talk directly to my father, don't leave me out of it." This is the in... so here I claim you I will now in a second... just second... I will show you the beginning of it is I think it is episode four of the fifth... fifth season, I'm not sure, where they already live together. So and he Richard Castle invites her to his Hampton, in Hampton Court villa and so on, and just when they are about to make love, she provocatively drops off her bathrobe and... Then, okay, they look at each other with desire, now we'll do it. But I claim, maybe it's my projection, if you look at it closely you can see how this pure desire to do it is already mixed with some "My God, will we really have simply to do it?", you know. And then at that point a corpse enters near the swimming pool, and "Oh, they got their object of desire." Please let's do it, please. [Video plays] Okay, you can even stop. Nonetheless. But you see this is... again, I think they shouldn't have shot this scene because it's too vulgar, too direct. That's the mystery of the series. You need an obstacle. The object a is not her, the object a, as Lacan puts it, is not the object of your desire which is usually at least another human being, but it's what makes you desire. And that's the nice part, although it's a pretty boring repetitive series, how you know, you can see when they are together like and they have to spend later in the series when they live together, it's like "Oh where is the phone call they discovered a corpse?", you know, nothing works without without the corpse. So again... and here we can dwell on this. I used another example in some of my books, I hope you don't know it. A lady whom I met in Latin America, she was still very beautiful in the 40s and I don't know was she flirting with me, I'm a total idiot here, but the point is what she told me. She told me that when her last lover saw her naked, he told her that if she just were to lose two, three pounds her body would have been perfect. And I think I did the right Lacanian intervention when I told her, "Just don't lose two, three pounds." Because you know, this is the paradox of object a. It's that things which appear to spoil your beauty but retroactively it creates it. You have to have two... I'm sorry for this, but we can make other examples, I'm sorry I am aware I make politically correct self-criticism for this macho-chauvinist example, but you see I hope the logic in it. That what seems to disturb her perfect beauty, two, three pounds more too much, is what retroactively creates it. If you take it back, you also... you know, if you take back the disturbing element, you also lose the perfection of what this element was disturbing. You don't get pure beauty. So this would be the second functioning of object a. First that like Jew Jewish plot narrative, then the obstacle which appears as an obstacle but has as such a positive function. You take away the obstacle, you lose the thing itself. The third aspect, now we do a little bit more theoretical work. The third aspect of object a is this object a as surplus enjoyment, in parallel with Marxist notion of *Mehrwert*, surplus value. And this is again the great motive of Lacan's teaching in the '70s, this link between surplus enjoyment and surplus value. I mean, I should only point out here to a good book by the guy who is here, Todd McGowan. What's the title of your stupid book? *Capitalist Desire*? *Capitalist Desire* where he points out in a wonderful way how in a way the the apologue of capitalism are right when they claim capitalism is natural and so on. In the sense that there is a certain paradox of desire. You always need a surplus constitutive instability. Whatever you get it's never that, which is covered in all other ethico-religious libidinal economies. You think there is a god, some supreme being where you reach the balance. But but this truth about the constitutive instability, this mixture of lack and surplus, in capitalism it it breaks open and capitalism through this consumerist paradox or paradox of of capitalist circulation which is basically unstable. You know, in contrast to other systems, capitalism is always in an imbalance. It doesn't have any natural balance state. It can reproduce itself only through self-expansion and so on and so on. So again, the crucial point here is the Freudian notion of what he calls *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure. which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure, but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject effort in the subject's effort to attain pleasure. Think about how much a process of seduction gains with its intricate innuendos, false denials and so on and so on. It's it's not simply that we have a zero pleasure, me and my partner jump onto each other and do it, and then we complicated it through poetry, seduction, presents or whatsoever. In a way, if we want to target pure pleasure without these surpluses, we lose the pleasure itself. Paradoxically, you need an excess to construct what this excess is an excess is an excess to. And so this is why I am so interested in those phenomena where you can get the difference between standard pleasure and this gain in pleasure at its purest. Let me tell you an example. I don't know if in this part of the United States it's also happening, but a friend of mine, a Slovene who lives in in Ithaca, Cornell, told me what happened to him. He visited one evening a Walmart store when the store mega-store was almost closing. And he saw near the exit many shopping carts full of items thrown into them, items that are usually found among in the shelves. So again, close to the exit you had shopping carts abandoned just close to the exit. Then he asked one guy there from Walmart, "What does this mean?" And he got a wonderful explanation. These carts were mostly abandoned by members of the newly impoverished middle classes, middle-class families, who were no longer able to buy thing. So they usually the whole family, they visit the store, go through the ritual of shopping, just throwing things in, and then they just abandon the full cart and leave the store. In this set way they obtain the surplus enjoyment of shopping in its pure isolated form without buying anything. But you know, and I claim this is not an exception. I know it holds, okay I will not now be anti-feminist, not only for my wife but for me also. Often the the pleasure of shopping is the pleasure of the act of shopping itself. It's not really what... which is why many of my friends don't want to do digital shopping and so on. Like, where is the experience? So we do something including shopping itself with a clear purpose. You want to buy something. But we are really indifferent towards this purpose since the true satisfaction is brought about by the activity itself. And I claim... now we will finally... sorry, wait a minute, that the same holds for bureaucracy. That's what I love about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is meant to solve problems. But we all know that the true purpose of bureaucracy is to reproduce problems, even to recreate problems. So you have absolutely and I love it this pleasure of bureaucracy, how you are almost at the point of simply solving the problem, but no you have to invent a new complication so that the process goes on. And the best example that I know of this is... did you see a wonderful movie, I think one of the greatest movies of all times, Terry Gilliam's *Brazil*? Where... okay, let's see *Brazil* now. It's a short one minute and a half scene. A guy, the hero played by Jonathan Pryce, is looking for a certain high bureaucrat. [Video plays] Okay, let's stop nonetheless. You see the point. This group wandering around imitates ultra-efficiency, solve this problem, do that. But it's clearly a nonsensical game which is an aim in itself. And I claim that's how bureaucracy works basically. The the true point again is just to imitate this process of efficiency. And my greatest personal triumph, one of the few things of which I am really proud, it happened to me years ago, it was in France. French are the worst bureaucrats, much worse than you. I had to apply to some permission to stay and they told me, they tried the lady there in the office to fascinate me by saying, "Oh, but you didn't take into account the provision B-25 where you have to fill that form." And I risked a bluff. I say, "Yes, but what about the provision C-14?" I totally bluffed, but for a brief moment she was in a total panic, you know, like I almost won. I mean, you you have to fight back, you have to. And I again, I love these moments where again, here you have the pure surplus pleasure, you know. It's not about solving problems, it's about imitating the game of solving problems. Now, so that things will not be too too joyful, I will give you the terrifying example. You know when after Germany was defeated at Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did something quite ingenious. He organized a big mega-public meeting in Berlin, in Sportpalast, a big public venue, where he gave what is probably the ultimate for me at least political speech, the so-called *Totaler Krieg*, total war speech. Okay, unfortunately the only copy I was able to get with with English subtitles, it has some humanist introduction... whatever, forgot about it, it's worth listening to it all. In second part it'll be around three minutes... because what is so shocking, listen carefully to what Goebbels is saying. You know, some Nazi said, "Let's downplay the the Stalingrad defeat and so on." No, Goebbels said, "Let's go to the end, let's admit it, let's exaggerate." And it's an incredible it's performance of this surplus pleasure not only deprived of all pleasure but surplus pleasure in the very form of promising extreme suffering. You don't get any pleasure you just... you will see how... be careful what he is saying. He is not saying "There will be harsh times but don't worry, it will not be too bad, we will win." He promises just more misfortune. He says almost in the Kantian way of sublime, "Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total will it be? Do you want to work hours per day? Do you want to suffer deprivations that you cannot even imagine today?" And the crowd shout "Yes, yes, yes." This is surplus pleasure at its purest. Let's do this, yeah, please, let's. But now I want the sound, we are with Nazis, I mean it doesn't work without sound. Any problems with sound or what? Because this one doesn't have sound. Yeah. I'm sorry. [Video plays] We got the proper Nazi effect, it wasn't planned. [Video glitches] So there's a delay on the... But it was okay. The track it'll do it again. But it's okay, this doesn't matter, just while we will see him. [Video continues] Go forward, go to the middle of it if you can jump forward. [Video continues] Okay let's stop nonetheless. Does this sound familiar to you? Now no longer parties, people are directly in power, no. No, but what I want to say is that I'm sorry we don't have more details, crucial is it's wonderful to analyze it towards the end the expression of Goebbels's face, which is not just this active fury but a strange contortion of face which really betrays some kind of a very weird perverted pleasure and so on. And I think this is not just an an exception. This is the basic mechanism of why... you know, there is a big mystery. Everyone knew that from at least the spring of '43 that the war is over. Why did they go on for two years? I don't think they had many illusions. Nobody really believed their miraculous weapons and so on and so on. It's again at the libidinal level this excessive excessive pleasure at its purest. And that's I think how actual politics works. And you will say now I'm giving you an extreme example. No, even today I was shocked how my good friends in Greece, some Syriza people, they in a totally different way... I'm not even implying that they were in a any way close to Nazis or whatever... but how they got caught into the same trap of suffering is good. To be authentic you have to suffer. I remember when Grexit was an option a year ago, I told them, "But are you aware what this means? That European establishment, they wanted Grexit basically." Varoufakis, my friend, told me. When he visited Schäuble, German finance minister who was the central bad guy, he thought that he had a winning card to blackmail him: "If you don't give us better conditions for repaying the debt, we will do Grexit." And he told me, Varoufakis, he almost got a heart attack. You know what was Schäuble's answer? It was "Fine, do it. Do you need help? We give you billion more just to do the Brexit and so on." Because they now Varoufakis knows the whole story. The plan was to push Greece into Brexit and to make it sure... because you know Greece basically is a poor country which imports, I don't know how many percent of food, medicaments, everything. And to cause an incredible economic chaos, suffering, and then to do not a direct one but the plan was a kind of a benevolent coup d'état, like just to guarantee normality, food provisions and so on. But what shocked me so much is how all these leftist friends of mine, when I described them the suffering that this will cause, the more they say, "Yes, but we are ready to go through hell, we will eat grass and so on." You know, they were as if you they were fascinated by this prospect of suffering. Suffering as demonstrating greatness. I think this is this is a pretty dangerous temptation. And with all my respect for Che Guevara, the most tragic passage in all Che Guevara that I read is Che Guevara visited Yugoslavia which was a slightly softer self-management communism in '61, I think. And there is an incredible passage in that report. He said, "I took a walk around Belgrade and I noticed that people are well-dressed, glad, you have enough food in the stores, they enjoy life." But he didn't mean this in a positive way. This deeply bothered him, like "Where is the suffering which brings revolutionary enthusiasm and so on?" Like, couldn't... he was deeply disturbed by this. Now I I have a problem with this. Not out of any moralistic reason, but I I still remain a communist, if you want. But I don't trust left which is in love with extraordinary times. I hope you agree with me if I say, and I repeated this, it should be these days out, yesterday did an interview for Tavis Smiley there. He's a nice guy. Very appears authoritarian but in five minutes we were in a dirty dirty joke, obscene. He's a good guy. But I talked about this, about how you know what I don't like in the standard left. They like so much these big events, you know, one million people on Tahrir Square, on Syntagma Square, even Occupy Wall Street. And then they are already in love with themselves, you know. Like "It was so nice, we were there." I more and more think that the true test is as you call it, the morning after. What... forget about these big events, one million people we all cry together enthusiasm. How will ordinary people feel the change when things return to normal? Because you can live in this ecstatic extraordinary times for I don't know, a couple of months at the most. Then things return to normal. And if I may use, I'm sorry if you know it, another another another another example. You saw probably the movie *V for Vendetta*. I have big problem with that movie because it's precisely about that. You remember at the end, the crowd breaks through police protection, enters the Parliament, the people take over. As I like to say, I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery, she is dead so I can safely say it, to see a movie called, and this will be the subtitle of the first chapter of my next book, *V for Vendetta: Part But what will they do then, next day? What measures will they nationalize, how will they organize it? And this, if you ask me, is a mega-problem of the left today. I spent hours on Occupy Wall Street in Frankfurt and I asked them, "Okay, what do you want?" Their first reaction was, even to raise this question is a treason, you know. Like, we are here authentically in... but nonetheless. And then you know, you can see all the confusion. Some of them were basically just good Keynesians, "a little bit more of this, of that" and so on. Others dreamt of some immediate self-organization of the crowds. You know, after we see that unfortunately because of the recent tendencies in global capitalism, we cannot simply return to the old welfare state. After we see that of course really existing communism, socialism failed, the last dream is this pre-representative local communities governing themselves and so on. But I think... now this will be maybe to conclude, because I haven't even entered one third of the talk. But at least allow me to complete to conclude with this. You know when people asked me, "What is your political ideal?", I told them without joking, "Bureaucratic socialism." Why? Because you know when people claim Stalinism was bureaucratic, no, I claim if we grasp bureaucracy in the Max Weber sense of efficient state machinery, Stalinism was precisely not able to do this. It needed a permanent emergency state. In other words, I will tell you something very brutal: I wouldn't like to live in a society where of this immanent non-not alienated representation but constant self-organization. This is hell for me! What, every afternoon we will have to meet, how to distribute water, electricity, how to organize child care? No, I want to live in a nicely alienated society where anonymous state mechanisms take care of this somehow. Okay, you criticize them, of course I want independent civil society. But basically it is done for you. I want to have time to do my stupid work, watch movies, write books and so on. So I'm claiming that even theoretically, this doesn't work. Did you notice how countries which tried to move in this direction, like Venezuela? It's absolutely crucial that you had this pseudo-local self-organization movement backed with a very strong state with a charismatic leader. It's totally illusory to think that in Venezuela you could have just self-organization without Chavez. No, the two are absolutely needed. Now you will say, "But we can prove that all this doesn't work. Why even to demand this, any way to move beyond capitalism and
Thanks very much. Sorry, I will have probably to do it like this. I'm really glad to be here. I'm just afraid to maybe disappoint you. No, no, no, I know this is also what I always say, but this time really because I think this talk was announced as dealing with actual political situation and so on and so on. But I prefer precisely not to do this. I think that in crazy times like this, the whole point is to maintain, sustain the dignity of theory, you know? And even I'm even ready to draw a political consequence of this. I remember when I was young, after '68 and so on, it was that those in power, at that point the moderate right, where politicians, people of power, were using this kind of a pseudo-dignified language, nice words and so on, while the radical left, to provoke, used in their public appearances f-words and so on, vulgarities. Now, I hope you noticed it, it's the opposite. You get all the vulgarity already from those in power. And I wouldn't be afraid to say that maybe it's time, if we still want to be leftists, for us, the left, because it's in a way true, to change the rules and to claim, which is in a way again true, my God, we are the ones who stand for silent moral majority, simple dignity, good manners and so on and so on. They are the vulgar guys. They break all the rules and so on. It's a... that's why I appreciate Bernie Sanders. He entered a territory... you know, before Bernie's, I don't have any illusions about Bernie, but he did something extremely important. Before him, the left was this politically correct left, fighting for marginals and so on, it's okay, it's okay, but they lost contact with all this mythic disappointed, desperate ordinary people and so on. And I think now we have a unique chance to connect with those people. And if we miss this chance, it will be very sad. That's why, for example, if I talk, if I use your beloved president's language, one of the enemies of the people now is Nancy Pelosi, I think. You know why? In her last... no, no, nothing against her, she is a liberal blah-blah, but instead of maintaining this emergency state which should be... did you notice how in all her latest interventions, she is trying to re-normalize the situation? Already a month ago, at some public debate or what, she said, "Okay, things happen. We had Ronald Reagan for eight years, then we came back. We had Bush for eight years, we came back. And it will be the same here." I'm afraid it will not be the same here. Something extraordinary happened. The rules are changing. So... okay, I will not get lost into that. I could... I just want to tell you that to begin with a small joke, you remember when your beloved president said about that the strange Sweden, attack in Sweden the last night, no? I was immediately... I immediately remembered, you know, the most famous line from Sherlock Holmes stories, from *Silver Blaze*, when Sherlock Holmes asks Inspector Lestrade, his idiot companion, "Do you remember the incident with the dog last night?" Lestrade, who says, "But nothing happened with the dog last night." And then Sherlock Holmes answers, "That was the curious incident," no? Like I... wasn't something like this with Trump? Like, do you remember the strange incident in Sweden like last night? Nothing happened in Sweden last night. That was the curious incident and so on, you know. Okay, but not to lose time here, I must tell you something and I'm not alone, surprisingly. You know what I'm also afraid of? Of two things at least with Trump. One thing, don't underestimate this possibility, is that for a couple of years he may succeed. What if there will not be an economic catastrophe? What if he will show enough flexibility to somehow patch relations with China, with Russia and so on? And there are even signs that with immigrants, that he will do something very dirty. After all the big talk, he will throw some of them out, but not to disturb your beloved middle classes who like to have cheap Mexican immigrant workers. He will just allow enough of them so that you will still have the cheap... So he may relatively succeed for a couple of years. You know, don't... That's why, here I will say something which is maybe not popular, although I love them, I follow their shows, but all this... how should I call it, comicalization, comedization, you know. Who is... at least academic intellectuals, what do they usually follow against Trump? It's mostly, you know, Jon Stewart and all that comedy and so on. Well, don't laugh too much, you know. I don't like this approach of just making fun of Trump because, you know, then we will be laughing on and on and Trump will be winning. Doesn't this tell you something? This is for me, since we are here, at least both of us are card-carrying Lacanians, more or less, yeah... that the big... just my God, you have to think what happened with the... think about it, with the election of Trump. For example, do you remember a couple of months ago, how... how often, almost every week towards the end, the press declared Trump just committed public suicide? When he did some alleged mistake, "It's over." And then they got it that it only helped him. So they totally... if I may use that wonderful, I almost respect George Bush the younger, he coined that properly Freudian word, you remember, "Don't mis-underestimate" or whatever. "Don't mis-underestimate" Trump. The very thing that... the very thing that were perceived as final mistakes, finally he killed himself, he off... helped him. And it tells a lot about how people identified with him. Precisely when we thought we caught him, many people perceived this as "He is one of us, liberals arrogant attacking him" and so on and so on. So again, it's hard work to be done. It's not enough to laugh at Trump. It's easy to do that. Now it's no longer Jon Stewart, although he reappears, returns from the dead from time to time, it's more John Oliver and all the others. But I always feel that there is something terribly wrong in that approach, because we will be dying laughing and he will be doing better and better. But okay, enough of this, I'm sorry, you will have to go through a serious talk. Precisely... I mean, it's almost something in my nature resists it, that I will this time really do something that fits the title, no? Which is from surplus value to surplus enjoyment or what, no? Okay. Surplus value, obviously Marxist reference. So I would like to begin with a short remark of the relevance of Marxist critique of political economy in our era of global capitalism. I agree with Alain Badiou that not only is Marxist critique of political economy, his outline of the capitalist dynamics, still actual, one should even make a step further and claim that it is only today with global capitalism that reality arrived at its notion, the notion of Marx. That is to say, it is as if Marx was writing for today's time. But as we learned from Hegel, at this very moment when reality is at the level of Marxist capital, this moment of triumph is always also the moment of defeat. We also see where Marx did not go far enough, what were his limitations. That's the nice paradox. Now we are in the times described abstractly by Marx, full capitalist reality, and it's with wonderful ironies. For example, I once met Fukuyama at some debate and he laughed, I told him, "Listen, maybe you were right, no? Global capitalism. But do you admit that communists where they are still in power, China, Vietnam, nonetheless survived as the best managers of capitalist economy?" So what I want to say is that precisely today, to remain faithful to Marx, we have to go further. We have to clearly identify the limitations of Marx and so on and so on. In this sense, it is in this spirit that I want to combine Marx and Jacques Lacan. And in the first part of my talk, and I doubt if there will be time for the second part, we will see, I would like to begin with some very elementary things about what is Lacan's basic conceptual contribution, what new thing did he bring, Lacan in his reading of psychoanalysis. In his seminar, *Les Non-dupes errent* from '73-'74, and it's typically Lacanian title, *Les Non-dupes errent*, it means, the non-dupes, those who are not taken into illusion, *errent*, they are in the wrong. Like, it's a wonderful dialectical thought, that sometimes to see how things really are, you err the most, you don't see the point. As always with Lacan, there is here already also a wordplay, because if you pronounce it quickly in French, *Les Non-dupes errent* also means names of the father. Okay, but let's not go into that. At the... in his typical arrogant way, Lacan asks the question... he speaks of course, he was a megalomaniac, in the third person about himself. He said, "He, Lacan, what was it that Lacan who is here present invented?" Then he answers, he says like that to get things going, "Object A," *l'objet petit a*. He said... so it's typical that when he is pressed to isolate what did he really bring new, it's not any of the usual phrases like "desire is the desire of the other," "the unconscious is structured like a language," "there is no sexual relation." He says, "My true invention is *objet petit a*," the object small a, the object cause of desire. And as we can immediately see, anyone who knows Lacan, although he uses this term from the very beginning of his teaching, this term gets really elaborated only from the late '60s, '70s, when Lacan massively returns to reading capital. It's a clear connection between Lacan's object small a as the so-called *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment, and Marxist surplus *Mehrwert*, surplus value. So to begin with, I would simply like to elaborate on this link. I will treat you as idiots, but don't be afraid, the real idiot here is me, in the sense of I'm obsessed with this idea that one should state things as clearly as possible. So to explain what is object a, I would like to begin... I'm sorry if some of you know this example of mine already... with Pokémon Go, the game. I think there we can see not only object a, but how it is useful for our everyday ideology. As you know... I'm sorry if I treat you like idiots now... Pokémon Go is a location-based augmented reality game, typically played on mobile phones. So players use the device's GPS and camera to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, Pokémon, who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player. As players travel the real world, their avatar moves along with... along the game's map. This augmented reality mode is what makes Pokémon Go different from other PC games. Instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into artificial virtual space, it combines the two. We look at reality and we interact with reality through the fantasy frame of the digital screen. And this frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, pushing us to look for them in reality which without this frame would leave us indifferent. Sounds familiar, this simple description? Of course it does. What the technology of Pokémon Go externalizes is simply, I claim, the basic mechanism of ideology. At its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality. Again, to simplify things to the utmost, did Hitler not offer the Germans in 1930s the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology which made them see a specific Pokémon, the Jew of course? You know, just imagine what do you do with Pokémon game. You again, that's the crucial thing, that's the greatness of this game. It's not you are drawn into some imaginary world. You are there but you see more than it is. And that's, in a very vague parallel, the achievement, if I may use this obscene word, of Nazism. You walk along the street and you see Pokémons. You see Jewish plot and so on and so on. The Jew was popping up all around and provided the clue to what one has to fight against. And I think the same holds for all other ideological pseudo-entities which have to be added to reality in order to make it complete and meaningful. For example, one can easily imagine, and a friend told me that they already exist, they are pirated bad copies but nonetheless in Germany, anti-immigrant versions of Pokémon Go, where you wander around a German city and then you have a Muslim immigrant popping up, an Arab rapist popping up and so on and so on. Now, of course, you will immediately counter-attack. Is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which makes us see the Jewish plot as the source of our troubles, not radically different from the Marxist approach which observes social life as a battleground of economic and other power struggles? Because, of course, in Germany's left already tried to answer this with constructing the leftist version of Pokémon Go, like you see rich bankers, you see capital behind... But I think there is a big difference. In Marxism, the secret beneath all the confusion of social life are social antagonisms, not individual agents which can be personalized in the guise of Pokémon figures. Pokémon Go does... does in an inherent way tend towards ideologically personalized perception of social antagonisms. In the case of bankers threatening us from all around, it is easy to see how such a figure can easily be appropriated by a fascist populist ideology of plutocracy as opposed to honest productive capitalists and so on and so on. So let's not go into it. I only want to say this, that isolate the basic mechanism of Pokémon Go. We live in grey boring reality. You add a fantasy frame which makes you see something more, hidden figures in reality, which also triggers your desire. All of a sudden, you become an engaged observer, you look for Pokémon and so on. And this would be, again, ideology at its most elementary and at the same time the function of object small a. Object small a is precisely, in very elementary sense, the object cause of your desire, what you add to reality to be vulgar to make it interesting. And here also we see in what sense object a functions. Because the whole point is that this object a for the Nazis, the Jew, should remain unseen. It is hidden behind but you shouldn't see it too clearly. If object a becomes is perceived as directly part of reality, you become a psychotic, you know. The point is that it should remain unseen, a mystery and so on and so on. But you get the point. It is something which allows you to read confused reality. It makes it readable. We should never forget, propos anti-Semitism, this wonderful ambiguity of the... of the English word "plot". It's at the same time plot in the narrative sense and plot in the sense of Jewish plot. That's what Hitler did. By adding the Jew in the sense of the Jewish plot, he allowed to ordinary Germans to make the situation readable. You know, you are confused, inflation whatever, economic chaos, but then Hitler said "Jewish plot," "Ah, now I see it clearly." And we don't have time for it today, but it would be so interesting to read the transformation of anti-Semitism today. That's why I'm telling to my Jewish friends: beware of the people like Donald Trump because around Trump especially, they exemplify what I call, and I thought I was exaggerating, as they usually say, "Oh, Žižek is provocative" or whatever, but it's more and more true, namely a new entity is emerging, getting stronger and stronger. It's called... I call it Zionist anti-Semitism. There is no contradiction in what people around Trump are doing. They are at the same time pro-Zionist, in the sense of supporting Israel, and anti-Semitic in the sense of but Jews here shouldn't have too much influence and so on. There is a long line in fascism of this ambiguous attitude. Just when we were driving here, I told, and you probably knew about it, to Henry in an... in a history thick book of SS, the Nazi SS, I found a wonderful quote from Reinhard Heydrich, you know, the architect of Holocaust, who wrote that Jewish people are wonderful productive people. We should have good relations with them. We just cannot mix with them. And then he elaborates a plan of helping them to emigrate to Palestine, supporting them even, just they should be there, not here. If they are there, Heydrich says, we can have wonderful economic relations and so on and so on. And this is the predominant line. There is no contradiction when some people say "But many guys around Trump are anti-Semitic, how can be pro-Israeli?" That's the... that's the strategy of the... of the new right today. This paradox of Jews are good if they are there protecting us against the Arab... although it's even more interesting. I always loved conspiracy theories. This is today's even moderate right. Now we have radical right, all around Europe, it's we really living in crazy times, which go... who they go a step further. The theory is this one: the Arab or Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a fake. It's just staged to blur the fundamental thing happening. Jews are organizing mass Arab migration to Europe to ruin European Christianity. They literally use the word "Muslim-Zionist plot". This is why in Slovenia, my country, we have some right-wing commentators who claim George Soros is incarnation of the devil today, because he is a Jew who is helping the immigrants. There you see the truth and so on. I don't have time to go into this, I just say this to make you aware how with all the horrors at Trump immigration and so on, don't forget about the basic things that he is doing at the level of form. As a good Marxist, I'm always a formalist. Form matters. Like, did you notice how Trump destroyed or lowered the level of public debate? Things that it was possible to say them publicly... sorry, it was not possible to say them publicly some years ago. He just does it. Like this terrible regression of public speech is something terrifying. Now you will say, "But I'm just concerned with forms and so on." No, forms matter. You know, and that was my point I was misunderstood propos torture. I am... I think form matters there. I can well understand, I always say this to provoke people and so on, I in a totally desperate situation, I cannot promise you that I wouldn't torture someone. I can... I'm not saying that I will. Let's imagine this ridiculous scenario, you know, somebody kidnaps my daughter and I know that the guy that I have in my hands knows where the dog... my daughter is kept. Oh, well, out of pure despair, again, I would try not to do it, but I cannot guarantee to you that I will not do it. But for that very reason, it's important not to legalize it, you get the point. If I do it, I should be all the time aware that out of pure despair I'm doing something absolutely terrifying. The horror is the normalization of it. That, you know, Alan Dershowitz's vision: we legalize it, before you are tortured doctor examines you, you shall be tortured in this way, in that way or whatever. And here is the problem with Trump. Let me give you a vulgar example which I think clarifies in what sense he is really vulgar. Once he was praising his wife Melania, and you know, she is extra-popular in Slovenia, you know why? She is from there, you know. We already have a Melania cake, a Melania wine and so on, big tourist industry projects. But and to show how refined a refined lady she is, Trump says that in all the time that they are living together... I will not use the vulgar f-word... he said that not once did he hear her emit the sound of flatulence or whatever. But you see what is wrong here? Although he wanted to praise her as a noble girl, sorry, but you don't talk about this in the public. You know what I mean? The very fact that he mentions it was an incredible vulgarity. You don't talk about this in public. I mean. I mean, what would you say if to... to... to describe to you what a refined person I am, I would now start to go into detail how I shit, how I do it. You don't do this. Okay, let's go on. And and the sad thing is that it's not only Trump. You know what is now, I will propose another crazy idea for the left. We need more dogmatism, I claim. There is a very good sense of dogmatism, which is I think one way to measure the relative progress of society is how certain moral norms are simply dogmatically accepted. For example, I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to debate again and again why women shouldn't be raped. I want to live in a society where this is dogmatically accepted as a fact, so that if you get some crazy guy who says, "Eh, but women really like it, they just are too hypocritical to admit, blah blah," you don't even argue. The guy disqualifies himself, is perceived as an idiot. So when we start to debate things which should be absolutely clear, it's always a critical point. You see at some point we precisely shouldn't debate everything. Again, the fact that we started to debate torture again, it's a bad sign. But okay, let's not get lost here. This was just the first idea of object a, that mysterious surplus entity that you add and which allows you to perceive reality in a meaningful way. If I may use some of my old jokes to explain to you, maybe some of you know it, I'm sorry, this how this surplus object in the case of anti-Semitism the Jew functions... let me give you an example. When I was young, I saw of course, it was played everywhere, you remember Spielberg first big hit, the *Jaws*. Okay, it was a livid debate among cultural theorists: what does the shark stand for? What does it mean? We had majority of left cultural theorists read the shark as the embodiment of bourgeois paranoia, anti-immigrant fears. Shark stands for the attack of natural disasters, immigrants, whatever, the threat from outside onto American life. Now, Fidel Castro, I remember, proposed the opposite theory. Fidel Castro loved the movie and he said, "It's clear, shark is the big capital... the power of big capital and bankers who are exploiting ordinary people and so on." But who was right? I claim, and that's the mystery of ideology, they were all right and nobody was right. The way ideology functions is this one: ordinary people in their everyday lives have many fears, obsessions and so on. You fear nature, you fear big capital, you fear immigrants, whatever. And the trick of ideology is to replace all this inconsistent multitude of fears with one object. You fear the shark and all other fears are somehow almost in the Hegelian sense *aufgehoben*, sublated in this fear. That's how ideology works. And my point is it's exactly in the same way that anti-Semitism works. This is why you can notice it how in classical anti-Semitism, how contradictory the figure of the Jew is. Jews are at the same time... at least in European anti-Semitism... oh, they work too much, you know, it's this fear, "My God, we have ordinary fun, Jews just work all the night, no wonder they beat us at exams or whatever." And they're supposed to be lazy exploiting us. They're supposed to be too intellectual, at the same time too vulgar, seducing our girls and so on and so on. You see it's the same operation. You have many fears as a small bourgeois. You fear big finances, you fear vulgar guys raping your daughter, whatever. But all these fears are projected onto the figure of the Jew. And Jew in this sense Jew is the Pokémon. You see? You add a Jew and then you have all these mysteries of object small a. The more... This is also why, I don't have time to go into it, this is also why I don't believe this simplistic leftist dogma that Muslim immigrants are today's Jews. No, it's more complex. I'm not in any way trying to take sides, claim that one is less dangerous than the other, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism. But I think it was that Chicago... Marxist, I forgot his name, who is doing the reading of capital in detailed books... Chicago... it's... my name will come to me... who draw attention to one thing: whatever you think about immigrants coming here to the United States, Mexican, or in Europe from Middle East, nobody claims that they are invisible among us and that they really pull the strings. No, they are perceived precisely as all too visible and chaotic. They are... nobody claims that they are the hidden masters. If they are hidden masters, they are the ones who pull the strings behind the immigrants. And they they start to function as Jews again. So we have to be very careful here. But back to anti-Semitism, the crucial thing here is to see how the Jew, although it's supposed to be the name of that mysterious agent behind all our troubles... sexual depravity, finances, press liberal press is lying and so on, oh Jews control it. At the same time this Jew has nothing to do, at least directly not, with empirical Jews. It's precisely like Pokémon what we add to reality. And this is crucial in... sorry, I'm repeating another of my old lines of thought, but I think it's important today... in to analyze racism. We should always apply to it, I claim, Lacan's wonderful saying, Jacques Lacan of course, that even... let's say we have a man, it can also be a woman but okay, I will use Lacan's example which is a little bit sexist... he says that when a man is pathologically jealous about his wife, that she is sleeping around serially with other men, Lacan says, even if all the man's fears are true, even if his wife is really sleeping around with other men, his jealousy is no less pathological. Because you see, the true problem of pathological jealousy is not is my wife really doing it? And then if yes, then okay I'm normal. No, the true question is why do I cling, why do I need jealousy to assert my identity? Why do I need jealousy? And exactly the same holds for anti-Semitism. If you debate with an anti-Semitic guy or with a... here the logic is the same... or with a... or with an Islamophobe and so on, you should never accept the debate at the level of facts. Okay, we should openly admit the facts. And I here I go very far here. I claim that the big mistake in Europe is that liberal leftists practically prohibited the topic of openly confronting the serious problem of cultural clashes with immigrants. The price we are paying is now that the right-wing immigrant parties are winning. But I'm saying something else. Okay, my other plastic example, I'm sorry if some of you know it. Imagine... let's say we are in the mid-'30s in Germany. I am debating anti-Semitism with a guy who is not my friend who is a Nazi. The moment I accept the debate at the level of facts, like "Are Jews really like that?", I sold my soul to the devil. What would have been the result? "Jews are," he claims, "Jews are seducing our girls." What can I say? I hope they do, and I hope we are seducing Jewish girls and so on. Of course there is always something true in it. You know what I mean? You and then the conclusion will just be "Okay, anti-Semitism maybe exaggerated a little bit but there is something in it." Or "Jews are exploiting us." Well, some of the Jews were rich, and of course in some formal sense they did exploit Germans. "Jews control the press." Well, it is a statistic fact that the percentage of Jews among lawyers and journalists was higher than their percentage in general population. But this is not, my God, what anti-Semitism is about. What anti-Semitism is about is precisely why does the... why do the fascist need the figure of the Jew to define their project? Why do they need the Jew? Not "Are Jews really like that?". In this sense, Jew is what Jacques Lacan called the zero signifier, the signifier without signified. In what sense? All signification, actual signification in the of course anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, is our everyday inconsistent fears. You just add the name Jew. And it's the same as... I'm sorry if I repeat myself, it's my favorite joke from... a wonderful joke from Poland. It's although I'm a leftist but I love this joke... an anti-communist joke, or rather anti-socialist. It goes like this... you must remember that the official ideology of really existing socialism was that socialism is the synthesis of all the highest achievements of humanity, no? And okay, the joke goes like this: our Polish socialism is the achievement synthesis of all the highest elements from human history, no? From from pre-class tribal societies it took barbarian primitivism; from ancient slave societies it took slavery; from medieval times it took brutal domination; from capitalism it took exploitation; and now comes the beauty, from socialism it took the name. But you see the point? Socialism the in this sense empty signifier. As Lacan puts it in a very precise way, at some point as Lacan puts it signifier falls into the signified. The name just don't doesn't just designate a thing, but you need the name to... like, you know, it's in a way the name Jew, the anti-Semitic name, which performatively constructs the anti-Semitic... the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew. This is why again, you cannot fight any racism effectively... of course we should do it, my God, we should openly confront the problem, show that these are all lies and so on. But don't get too much into illusions. For example, I had here already a conflict years ago with my friend, but things turned back towards the end, Ernesto Laclau, who said that there is a tension between ideological figure of a Jew or any other racist entity like the racist of course anti-Semitic figure of the Jew and everyday experience. He says, "Look, let's say I live in Germany in the '30s. I see the Jew... I know, I follow ideology, Jews horror bankers, they control everything. But then my neighbor is a good old Jewish couple. And I see they are ordinary kind people, and this limits my anti-Semitism. It's difficult to combine the two. I mean, every day when I met them, when I go to pick up my newspaper or whatever, I have to admit but look they are nice people and so on." I totally disagree with this view. I told him in a very evil way, "You don't know what anti-Semitism is. Because if you are true... a truly anti-Semitic guy, you say, let's say you are my neighbor, 'You see? He pretends to be kind. That's why they are dangerous! They hide their evil by being over-kind and so on.' You know, if you are really in ideology, even the facts which seem to... which seem to undermine it ultimately help you do it... help you doing... help you doing it." So okay, let's not get lost. This would be the first element, object a as think about again the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism, this mythic entity which you... it's like Pokémon, you add it to reality to make it meaningful. But this is not all. At the same time what Lacan calls object a is something that... it's an object, a surplus object, something that as it were falls into our reality from nowhere. I will quote you a scene from Hitchcock's conversation... Alfred Hitchcock's conversations with François Truffaut. There is a wonderful passage where Hitchcock describes to Truffaut the quintessential scene that he wanted to insert into *North by Northwest*. He never Hitchcock shot this scene, and he was right because precisely it's too open, too direct in the sense of it lays bare the ideological mechanism precisely of surplus enjoyment in a too clear way. I will describe this scene, a brief quote: "I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers at a Ford car plant as they walk along the assembly line. Behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece. Finally the car they've been being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' They open the door of the car and out drops a corpse." You know, it's pure surplus. Like, you see everything how it was combined, but out of nowhere the corpse comes. I think for the Marxist reading of this scene, it's very important that what we see here is something that we see very rarely in a Hollywood movie: the production process. And the corpse that mysteriously drops out from nowhere is a perfect stand-in for the surplus value which is generated out of nowhere through the production process. This corpse is the surplus object at its purest. Let me use another example of this surplus. I I have I must confess to my guilty pleasures. I watch many dirty TV series and among others, I don't really like it but I got caught into this compulsion. You know, this is being a being of desire at its lowest. Sometimes you watch a show and you know you shouldn't do it, it's disgusting and so on, but you cannot help it, you have to go on. Okay, one of my guilty pleasures was the TV series *Castle*, maybe some of you saw it. Sorry. No, no, I have many many dark secrets. One my wife wanted to divorce me for watching Shades Darker*, you know, so you cannot imagine how low I can go, you know. So you know what the story is about, the premise of the series. Richard Castle, a best-selling detective writer, collaborates with Kate Beckett, a New York Police Department homicide detective, in solving various murder cases in New York City. Beckett is initially infuriated at the thought of working with a writer, but the two of course soon start developing feelings for each other and as expected, the overarching plot of the series focuses on the growing romance between the two. The ongoing murder investigation is thus clearly the object a, the object cause of their mutual desire, a pretext which compels them to spend a lot of time together. The problem is of course what will happen when they finally admit their love for each other and enter a full erotic relationship? Will they still need the pretext of murder investigations? You know, this is for me in a very elementary way the most interesting aspect of what Lacan calls object small a. It's what causes your desire, but what is usually directly experienced as an obstacle to it. For example, maybe you know this joke, I used it one of my books, I'm sorry if you do but it's perfect. My friend the British half-okay Lacanian, we Lacanians are the last Stalinists, you know, everybody you included are suspicious, you know, "Are you really?" and so on. He told me it's a wonderfully simple example but it makes the point clear. He told me that once he had a patient who told him of a slip of tongue he made. He invited a lady to a rich restaurant in a hotel, and of course standard scenario, he wanted to take her to dinner and then maybe later we will get a room up there. But something weird happened: when they entered the restaurant, he said instead "a table for two please", "a bed for two please." No, no, no. Now comes Lacanian genius of Darian Leader. He told me it's totally wrong to interpret this slip of tongue as the standard Freudian notion that you know, dinner was just a pretext, he was already thinking at what will happen later. Darian Leader told me no, it was the opposite. The guy was afraid that he will enjoy dinner too much, and it was more a control like "I should never forget that really my duty will be..." like the message was "Don't enjoy the pretext too much," you know. "Remember your..." and it's literally true. If I can make a little confession, I'm not embarrassed because it's years ago, even more. But a similar thing happened to me. When I was in high school, I had a girlfriend and Slovenia was slightly conservative, that is to say at that point to gain free access to the girl, she was still part of the family. She hinted at me "Visit my father, talk to him." Okay, I did that. But her father was a wonderful intellectual. And although officially I thought "Okay, I just have to go through this nightmare of talking with her father," I noticed that I started to enjoy too much the conversation with the father, you know. And she got it and I lost her. She said, "Okay, fuck off, if you want talk directly to my father, don't leave me out of it." This is the in... so here I claim you I will now in a second... just second... I will show you the beginning of it is I think it is episode four of the fifth... fifth season, I'm not sure, where they already live together. So and he Richard Castle invites her to his Hampton, in Hampton Court villa and so on, and just when they are about to make love, she provocatively drops off her bathrobe and... Then, okay, they look at each other with desire, now we'll do it. But I claim, maybe it's my projection, if you look at it closely you can see how this pure desire to do it is already mixed with some "My God, will we really have simply to do it?", you know. And then at that point a corpse enters near the swimming pool, and "Oh, they got their object of desire." Please let's do it, please. [Video plays] Okay, you can even stop. Nonetheless. But you see this is... again, I think they shouldn't have shot this scene because it's too vulgar, too direct. That's the mystery of the series. You need an obstacle. The object a is not her, the object a, as Lacan puts it, is not the object of your desire which is usually at least another human being, but it's what makes you desire. And that's the nice part, although it's a pretty boring repetitive series, how you know, you can see when they are together like and they have to spend later in the series when they live together, it's like "Oh where is the phone call they discovered a corpse?", you know, nothing works without without the corpse. So again... and here we can dwell on this. I used another example in some of my books, I hope you don't know it. A lady whom I met in Latin America, she was still very beautiful in the 40s and I don't know was she flirting with me, I'm a total idiot here, but the point is what she told me. She told me that when her last lover saw her naked, he told her that if she just were to lose two, three pounds her body would have been perfect. And I think I did the right Lacanian intervention when I told her, "Just don't lose two, three pounds." Because you know, this is the paradox of object a. It's that things which appear to spoil your beauty but retroactively it creates it. You have to have two... I'm sorry for this, but we can make other examples, I'm sorry I am aware I make politically correct self-criticism for this macho-chauvinist example, but you see I hope the logic in it. That what seems to disturb her perfect beauty, two, three pounds more too much, is what retroactively creates it. If you take it back, you also... you know, if you take back the disturbing element, you also lose the perfection of what this element was disturbing. You don't get pure beauty. So this would be the second functioning of object a. First that like Jew Jewish plot narrative, then the obstacle which appears as an obstacle but has as such a positive function. You take away the obstacle, you lose the thing itself. The third aspect, now we do a little bit more theoretical work. The third aspect of object a is this object a as surplus enjoyment, in parallel with Marxist notion of *Mehrwert*, surplus value. And this is again the great motive of Lacan's teaching in the '70s, this link between surplus enjoyment and surplus value. I mean, I should only point out here to a good book by the guy who is here, Todd McGowan. What's the title of your stupid book? *Capitalist Desire*? *Capitalist Desire* where he points out in a wonderful way how in a way the the apologue of capitalism are right when they claim capitalism is natural and so on. In the sense that there is a certain paradox of desire. You always need a surplus constitutive instability. Whatever you get it's never that, which is covered in all other ethico-religious libidinal economies. You think there is a god, some supreme being where you reach the balance. But but this truth about the constitutive instability, this mixture of lack and surplus, in capitalism it it breaks open and capitalism through this consumerist paradox or paradox of of capitalist circulation which is basically unstable. You know, in contrast to other systems, capitalism is always in an imbalance. It doesn't have any natural balance state. It can reproduce itself only through self-expansion and so on and so on. So again, the crucial point here is the Freudian notion of what he calls *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure. which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure, but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject effort in the subject's effort to attain pleasure. Think about how much a process of seduction gains with its intricate innuendos, false denials and so on and so on. It's it's not simply that we have a zero pleasure, me and my partner jump onto each other and do it, and then we complicated it through poetry, seduction, presents or whatsoever. In a way, if we want to target pure pleasure without these surpluses, we lose the pleasure itself. Paradoxically, you need an excess to construct what this excess is an excess is an excess to. And so this is why I am so interested in those phenomena where you can get the difference between standard pleasure and this gain in pleasure at its purest. Let me tell you an example. I don't know if in this part of the United States it's also happening, but a friend of mine, a Slovene who lives in in Ithaca, Cornell, told me what happened to him. He visited one evening a Walmart store when the store mega-store was almost closing. And he saw near the exit many shopping carts full of items thrown into them, items that are usually found among in the shelves. So again, close to the exit you had shopping carts abandoned just close to the exit. Then he asked one guy there from Walmart, "What does this mean?" And he got a wonderful explanation. These carts were mostly abandoned by members of the newly impoverished middle classes, middle-class families, who were no longer able to buy thing. So they usually the whole family, they visit the store, go through the ritual of shopping, just throwing things in, and then they just abandon the full cart and leave the store. In this set way they obtain the surplus enjoyment of shopping in its pure isolated form without buying anything. But you know, and I claim this is not an exception. I know it holds, okay I will not now be anti-feminist, not only for my wife but for me also. Often the the pleasure of shopping is the pleasure of the act of shopping itself. It's not really what... which is why many of my friends don't want to do digital shopping and so on. Like, where is the experience? So we do something including shopping itself with a clear purpose. You want to buy something. But we are really indifferent towards this purpose since the true satisfaction is brought about by the activity itself. And I claim... now we will finally... sorry, wait a minute, that the same holds for bureaucracy. That's what I love about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is meant to solve problems. But we all know that the true purpose of bureaucracy is to reproduce problems, even to recreate problems. So you have absolutely and I love it this pleasure of bureaucracy, how you are almost at the point of simply solving the problem, but no you have to invent a new complication so that the process goes on. And the best example that I know of this is... did you see a wonderful movie, I think one of the greatest movies of all times, Terry Gilliam's *Brazil*? Where... okay, let's see *Brazil* now. It's a short one minute and a half scene. A guy, the hero played by Jonathan Pryce, is looking for a certain high bureaucrat. [Video plays] Okay, let's stop nonetheless. You see the point. This group wandering around imitates ultra-efficiency, solve this problem, do that. But it's clearly a nonsensical game which is an aim in itself. And I claim that's how bureaucracy works basically. The the true point again is just to imitate this process of efficiency. And my greatest personal triumph, one of the few things of which I am really proud, it happened to me years ago, it was in France. French are the worst bureaucrats, much worse than you. I had to apply to some permission to stay and they told me, they tried the lady there in the office to fascinate me by saying, "Oh, but you didn't take into account the provision B-25 where you have to fill that form." And I risked a bluff. I say, "Yes, but what about the provision C-14?" I totally bluffed, but for a brief moment she was in a total panic, you know, like I almost won. I mean, you you have to fight back, you have to. And I again, I love these moments where again, here you have the pure surplus pleasure, you know. It's not about solving problems, it's about imitating the game of solving problems. Now, so that things will not be too too joyful, I will give you the terrifying example. You know when after Germany was defeated at Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did something quite ingenious. He organized a big mega-public meeting in Berlin, in Sportpalast, a big public venue, where he gave what is probably the ultimate for me at least political speech, the so-called *Totaler Krieg*, total war speech. Okay, unfortunately the only copy I was able to get with with English subtitles, it has some humanist introduction... whatever, forgot about it, it's worth listening to it all. In second part it'll be around three minutes... because what is so shocking, listen carefully to what Goebbels is saying. You know, some Nazi said, "Let's downplay the the Stalingrad defeat and so on." No, Goebbels said, "Let's go to the end, let's admit it, let's exaggerate." And it's an incredible it's performance of this surplus pleasure not only deprived of all pleasure but surplus pleasure in the very form of promising extreme suffering. You don't get any pleasure you just... you will see how... be careful what he is saying. He is not saying "There will be harsh times but don't worry, it will not be too bad, we will win." He promises just more misfortune. He says almost in the Kantian way of sublime, "Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total will it be? Do you want to work hours per day? Do you want to suffer deprivations that you cannot even imagine today?" And the crowd shout "Yes, yes, yes." This is surplus pleasure at its purest. Let's do this, yeah, please, let's. But now I want the sound, we are with Nazis, I mean it doesn't work without sound. Any problems with sound or what? Because this one doesn't have sound. Yeah. I'm sorry. [Video plays] We got the proper Nazi effect, it wasn't planned. [Video glitches] So there's a delay on the... But it was okay. The track it'll do it again. But it's okay, this doesn't matter, just while we will see him. [Video continues] Go forward, go to the middle of it if you can jump forward. [Video continues] Okay let's stop nonetheless. Does this sound familiar to you? Now no longer parties, people are directly in power, no. No, but what I want to say is that I'm sorry we don't have more details, crucial is it's wonderful to analyze it towards the end the expression of Goebbels's face, which is not just this active fury but a strange contortion of face which really betrays some kind of a very weird perverted pleasure and so on. And I think this is not just an an exception. This is the basic mechanism of why... you know, there is a big mystery. Everyone knew that from at least the spring of '43 that the war is over. Why did they go on for two years? I don't think they had many illusions. Nobody really believed their miraculous weapons and so on and so on. It's again at the libidinal level this excessive excessive pleasure at its purest. And that's I think how actual politics works. And you will say now I'm giving you an extreme example. No, even today I was shocked how my good friends in Greece, some Syriza people, they in a totally different way... I'm not even implying that they were in a any way close to Nazis or whatever... but how they got caught into the same trap of suffering is good. To be authentic you have to suffer. I remember when Grexit was an option a year ago, I told them, "But are you aware what this means? That European establishment, they wanted Grexit basically." Varoufakis, my friend, told me. When he visited Schäuble, German finance minister who was the central bad guy, he thought that he had a winning card to blackmail him: "If you don't give us better conditions for repaying the debt, we will do Grexit." And he told me, Varoufakis, he almost got a heart attack. You know what was Schäuble's answer? It was "Fine, do it. Do you need help? We give you billion more just to do the Brexit and so on." Because they now Varoufakis knows the whole story. The plan was to push Greece into Brexit and to make it sure... because you know Greece basically is a poor country which imports, I don't know how many percent of food, medicaments, everything. And to cause an incredible economic chaos, suffering, and then to do not a direct one but the plan was a kind of a benevolent coup d'état, like just to guarantee normality, food provisions and so on. But what shocked me so much is how all these leftist friends of mine, when I described them the suffering that this will cause, the more they say, "Yes, but we are ready to go through hell, we will eat grass and so on." You know, they were as if you they were fascinated by this prospect of suffering. Suffering as demonstrating greatness. I think this is this is a pretty dangerous temptation. And with all my respect for Che Guevara, the most tragic passage in all Che Guevara that I read is Che Guevara visited Yugoslavia which was a slightly softer self-management communism in '61, I think. And there is an incredible passage in that report. He said, "I took a walk around Belgrade and I noticed that people are well-dressed, glad, you have enough food in the stores, they enjoy life." But he didn't mean this in a positive way. This deeply bothered him, like "Where is the suffering which brings revolutionary enthusiasm and so on?" Like, couldn't... he was deeply disturbed by this. Now I I have a problem with this. Not out of any moralistic reason, but I I still remain a communist, if you want. But I don't trust left which is in love with extraordinary times. I hope you agree with me if I say, and I repeated this, it should be these days out, yesterday did an interview for Tavis Smiley there. He's a nice guy. Very appears authoritarian but in five minutes we were in a dirty dirty joke, obscene. He's a good guy. But I talked about this, about how you know what I don't like in the standard left. They like so much these big events, you know, one million people on Tahrir Square, on Syntagma Square, even Occupy Wall Street. And then they are already in love with themselves, you know. Like "It was so nice, we were there." I more and more think that the true test is as you call it, the morning after. What... forget about these big events, one million people we all cry together enthusiasm. How will ordinary people feel the change when things return to normal? Because you can live in this ecstatic extraordinary times for I don't know, a couple of months at the most. Then things return to normal. And if I may use, I'm sorry if you know it, another another another another example. You saw probably the movie *V for Vendetta*. I have big problem with that movie because it's precisely about that. You remember at the end, the crowd breaks through police protection, enters the Parliament, the people take over. As I like to say, I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery, she is dead so I can safely say it, to see a movie called, and this will be the subtitle of the first chapter of my next book, *V for Vendetta: Part But what will they do then, next day? What measures will they nationalize, how will they organize it? And this, if you ask me, is a mega-problem of the left today. I spent hours on Occupy Wall Street in Frankfurt and I asked them, "Okay, what do you want?" Their first reaction was, even to raise this question is a treason, you know. Like, we are here authentically in... but nonetheless. And then you know, you can see all the confusion. Some of them were basically just good Keynesians, "a little bit more of this, of that" and so on. Others dreamt of some immediate self-organization of the crowds. You know, after we see that unfortunately because of the recent tendencies in global capitalism, we cannot simply return to the old welfare state. After we see that of course really existing communism, socialism failed, the last dream is this pre-representative local communities governing themselves and so on. But I think... now this will be maybe to conclude, because I haven't even entered one third of the talk. But at least allow me to complete to conclude with this. You know when people asked me, "What is your political ideal?", I told them without joking, "Bureaucratic socialism." Why? Because you know when people claim Stalinism was bureaucratic, no, I claim if we grasp bureaucracy in the Max Weber sense of efficient state machinery, Stalinism was precisely not able to do this. It needed a permanent emergency state. In other words, I will tell you something very brutal: I wouldn't like to live in a society where of this immanent non-not alienated representation but constant self-organization. This is hell for me! What, every afternoon we will have to meet, how to distribute water, electricity, how to organize child care? No, I want to live in a nicely alienated society where anonymous state mechanisms take care of this somehow. Okay, you criticize them, of course I want independent civil society. But basically it is done for you. I want to have time to do my stupid work, watch movies, write books and so on. So I'm claiming that even theoretically, this doesn't work. Did you notice how countries which tried to move in this direction, like Venezuela? It's absolutely crucial that you had this pseudo-local self-organization movement backed with a very strong state with a charismatic leader. It's totally illusory to think that in Venezuela you could have just self-organization without Chavez. No, the two are absolutely needed. Now you will say, "But we can prove that all this doesn't work. Why even to demand this, any way to move beyond capitalism and
unknown
so on?" Here I am, that's why I am a communist. Because
so on?" Here I am, that's why I am a communist. Because
Slavoj Žižek
I think that it's clear that we are approaching some social antagonisms where I'm simply a pessimist. I don't think that within the Fukuyama vision of world history we can even properly confront these problems. The predominant left today, inclusive of Paul Krugman and all those, I began to suspect them... did you notice how Paul Krugman brutally attacked Bernie Sanders immediately? There he disclosed himself as pure Hillary, not you but the other Hillary Clinton. So what I wanted to say is that... what I wanted to say is that the majority of the left even today are what I ironically call left-Fukuyamaists, you know. We accept liberal-democratic global capitalism, we just try to make it a little bit better, more heartful, more this, more that and so on. Well, I would have said if it can work, nothing against it. But will it work? Again, my claim is that we are confronting a series of problems from ecology... Sorry, I totally support that we use market as much as we can, proper taxation and so on and so on. But the true ecological threats, you cannot solve them through market. We will need mega-organization, mega, even transnational organizations to find it. Intellectual property, banking and so on. It's clear that capitalism is losing there. And this is why what is happening today more and more is from what I defined in one earlier books, from from profit back to rent. We have a crisis of private property. The solution that is emerging now is that you have these companies which no longer work as old capitalist companies, but companies which in a way privatize the commons themselves and in this way get profit. In even in agriculture, Monsanto. I'm open there. I don't know how really bad biogenetic engineering is. But the true horror Monsanto for me is this one: once you buy their seeds, you have to go on buying it. That is to say, this basic autonomy of the process, agricultural process, you know, reproducing, is no longer possible. In a way, the commons, seeds and so on, are privatized. And it's the same with Microsoft, privatizing the language we use on the web and so on and so on, Amazon. So it's clear, everybody knows this, my God, that here capitalism is approaching a limit. Another limit that I see is the pro... and although it may appear that I exaggerate, it's a very serious limit. It's the prospect of what people in big media call call call call this "post-human," the arrival of post-humanity. Of course, we should drop all that crazy Ray Kurzweil vision of singularity and so on and so on. You know where he cheats? I read his books, of Ray Kurzweil. He he thinks as if we can all become one great mind, post-human, but some at some level the way he describes it, we will still remain human communicating. He doesn't see that the change will be will be a much more radical one. And what will happen? We have two visions basically. One vision is this happy post-human vision, singularity, we will all merge into one big collective intelligence and so on. The other vision is a more pessimist one: simply we will become irrelevant. We will just be directed, regulated by machines and so on and so on. I think there is a third option, a much more pessimist one, which is the combination of the two. We, the majority of us, will be just cogs, bolts in the machine, but some people, the elite, will be much closer to controlling the machine. You know, I always think about Stalin here. There is another... and with this I will conclude... wonderful joke from Stalinist Soviet Union. In the mid-'30s, the Politburo debates will there be money in communism or not. So first you have right-wing revisionists who claim, "Of course, money is natural, how can you exchange it without money? There will be money." Then the left-wingers claim, "No money is capitalist alienation, there will be no money." And Stalin intervenes and says, "Oh, comrades, you are both wrong, right-wing and left-wing deviation. The true solution is the dialectical synthesis of both. There will be money and there will be no money." And then they ask him, "But comrade Stalin, how do you mean this?" And Stalin answers, "It's very simple: some people will have money, others will not have money." And it's the same with the prospect of artificial intelligence, you know. Some people will control us, the others will just be will just be controlled. And can you... I mean, I really think that the very basis of liberal democracy are threatened by this development. And it's extremely important what at this level is happening today. I read some medical reports where they claim that, and they are not utopians, they the futurologists, they don't claim machines are perfect computers, but they claim on average they are better. For example, if you go if you are examined just by a machine, and machine does the diagnosis... they said of course machine can make mistakes, if a computer diagnosed you. But they make much less mistakes than human doctors. Then they did a wonderful experiment, I love it. They controlled some voters. Machine just registered your dissatisfaction through the four years between the two elections and then they compared how machine would vote for you. But machine in the sense of the machine without an opinion of its own. The machine would just register when you were furious, your unhap... and how you vote. And they discovered that the vote proposed by the computer would have been much more rational. Because usually you get caught in some spin before elections and measured by your own reactions, long-term interests and so on, you know. So we are approaching here really a new era. On the other hand, then you know what but you know what really makes me, not afraid, I just don't know where it will lead us... two things are happening now. First, not only this obvious possibility of biogenetic manipulations which also affect your psychic features, character. But what especially interests me is this direct interface contact between a machine computer and your brain. You know that, for example, Stephen Hawking no longer needs his finger. Now his brain's his wheelchair computer is linked to his brains and he just thinks "forward" and the chair moves forward. And this opens totally new totally new perspectives. Like the most fascinating story I learned from my friends who work in this domain is they made an experiment they have shown me the video with rats. They can connect rats' neurons with these just basic computer instructions, "move forward, left, right." And it's pretty terrifying, rat becomes a remote-controlled car. Rat is running around in a big box. Then you press the button and you can literally direct the rat. Now why is this so interesting? Ah, because they told me, but they don't want to go public with it, but they're already making experiments on people and they focus on the right problem, which is how will you experience that moment when your neurons which control your movements are are computer-regulated. And they told me the first results are very dark pessimist. Why? Because you are not even aware of it. The result is not "all of a sudden you feel some foreign power took over." No, you think you are still freely running around. So I'm not a pessimist here, who knows what will happen. I'm just saying that this is a tremendous challenge to it. How we deal this? We have ecology, we have new walls, we are approaching new class society. If you don't believe me, look at Hollywood, they know it: *Hunger Games*, *Elysium* and so on. I I am not simply against capitalism. My God, listen, I'm a Marxist and everyone who read *Capital* knows that Marx was absolutely fascinated by capitalism, no? The most productive... I'm just saying that we live in a really dangerous era where it's obvious that we are approaching a certain limit and people know it. We have many protests all around the world, even in developed countries. Occupy Wall Street, now here in Europe all... but no clear offer, no program what to do, how to get out. And these are truly dangerous times. Like the most tragic thing that I learned from European politics is that and you have elements of this even in Trump is that you know which European government did recently the most radical pro-working class enacted pro-working class measures? The extremely nationalist conservative Polish government. They did incredible things. They lowered the era of retirement, they enabled student... the whole set of measures that no social democrat today dares to advocate. So we live in crazy times, isn't this the European madness at its purest? If you want to have the most brutal austerity measures actualized, get an extremely left government like Syriza in Greece, and if you want to do some relatively radical for today at least pro-worker measures, get an extremely right-wing government. Like in France, Marine Le Pen is the only one who openly advocates workers' interests. Of course, in this half-fascist way and so on and so on. So I think that where I'm no longer a Marxist, I think we should abandon that metaphor of, you know, Marxist, "We know where the future is going," all this unfortunate metaphor of "train of history" riding it. We have to... the metaphor that I prefer much more is one used by, I'm still in love with French Revolution, Saint-Just and Robespierre, both of them said, "We revolutionaries are not fulfilling some big historical necessity." He says, "We are like captains on a ship. Our ships are entering uncharted unknown territories." And we have to improvise, to see what to do. And that's that's the situation where we are today. Again, the situation is open. We don't know, open in the sense that it's clear that we are approaching some kind of global crisis, ecologically, refugees, biogenetics, financial capital, intellectual property. Like, isn't it absolutely clear with all those problems of pirate and so on that, to put it in the most old-fashioned brutal Marxist way, private property doesn't work with intellectual so-called intellectual property. It... you cannot really privatize it. It doesn't work. But what is the solution? And this is the danger. I'm I'm really really afraid. So to return really to conclude to my topic... because I wanted... okay, now I will do something very hypocritical. We start to debate and I ask myself the first question: "Professor Žižek, what did you want to say in the remaining part of your talk?" And I will be very brief. I wanted to do to also go into other domains where this surplus functions, especially of power and knowledge. You know that in power also we have surplus power. That's for me the weakness of this contractual liberalism. Even with the most democratic power, where they say, "Oh, we are just your servant, state apparatuses are just agencies you hire, as it were, buy, rent to do some job." No, for power to effectively function, every power, not just fascist, for power structures to retain their
I think that it's clear that we are approaching some social antagonisms where I'm simply a pessimist. I don't think that within the Fukuyama vision of world history we can even properly confront these problems. The predominant left today, inclusive of Paul Krugman and all those, I began to suspect them... did you notice how Paul Krugman brutally attacked Bernie Sanders immediately? There he disclosed himself as pure Hillary, not you but the other Hillary Clinton. So what I wanted to say is that... what I wanted to say is that the majority of the left even today are what I ironically call left-Fukuyamaists, you know. We accept liberal-democratic global capitalism, we just try to make it a little bit better, more heartful, more this, more that and so on. Well, I would have said if it can work, nothing against it. But will it work? Again, my claim is that we are confronting a series of problems from ecology... Sorry, I totally support that we use market as much as we can, proper taxation and so on and so on. But the true ecological threats, you cannot solve them through market. We will need mega-organization, mega, even transnational organizations to find it. Intellectual property, banking and so on. It's clear that capitalism is losing there. And this is why what is happening today more and more is from what I defined in one earlier books, from from profit back to rent. We have a crisis of private property. The solution that is emerging now is that you have these companies which no longer work as old capitalist companies, but companies which in a way privatize the commons themselves and in this way get profit. In even in agriculture, Monsanto. I'm open there. I don't know how really bad biogenetic engineering is. But the true horror Monsanto for me is this one: once you buy their seeds, you have to go on buying it. That is to say, this basic autonomy of the process, agricultural process, you know, reproducing, is no longer possible. In a way, the commons, seeds and so on, are privatized. And it's the same with Microsoft, privatizing the language we use on the web and so on and so on, Amazon. So it's clear, everybody knows this, my God, that here capitalism is approaching a limit. Another limit that I see is the pro... and although it may appear that I exaggerate, it's a very serious limit. It's the prospect of what people in big media call call call call this "post-human," the arrival of post-humanity. Of course, we should drop all that crazy Ray Kurzweil vision of singularity and so on and so on. You know where he cheats? I read his books, of Ray Kurzweil. He he thinks as if we can all become one great mind, post-human, but some at some level the way he describes it, we will still remain human communicating. He doesn't see that the change will be will be a much more radical one. And what will happen? We have two visions basically. One vision is this happy post-human vision, singularity, we will all merge into one big collective intelligence and so on. The other vision is a more pessimist one: simply we will become irrelevant. We will just be directed, regulated by machines and so on and so on. I think there is a third option, a much more pessimist one, which is the combination of the two. We, the majority of us, will be just cogs, bolts in the machine, but some people, the elite, will be much closer to controlling the machine. You know, I always think about Stalin here. There is another... and with this I will conclude... wonderful joke from Stalinist Soviet Union. In the mid-'30s, the Politburo debates will there be money in communism or not. So first you have right-wing revisionists who claim, "Of course, money is natural, how can you exchange it without money? There will be money." Then the left-wingers claim, "No money is capitalist alienation, there will be no money." And Stalin intervenes and says, "Oh, comrades, you are both wrong, right-wing and left-wing deviation. The true solution is the dialectical synthesis of both. There will be money and there will be no money." And then they ask him, "But comrade Stalin, how do you mean this?" And Stalin answers, "It's very simple: some people will have money, others will not have money." And it's the same with the prospect of artificial intelligence, you know. Some people will control us, the others will just be will just be controlled. And can you... I mean, I really think that the very basis of liberal democracy are threatened by this development. And it's extremely important what at this level is happening today. I read some medical reports where they claim that, and they are not utopians, they the futurologists, they don't claim machines are perfect computers, but they claim on average they are better. For example, if you go if you are examined just by a machine, and machine does the diagnosis... they said of course machine can make mistakes, if a computer diagnosed you. But they make much less mistakes than human doctors. Then they did a wonderful experiment, I love it. They controlled some voters. Machine just registered your dissatisfaction through the four years between the two elections and then they compared how machine would vote for you. But machine in the sense of the machine without an opinion of its own. The machine would just register when you were furious, your unhap... and how you vote. And they discovered that the vote proposed by the computer would have been much more rational. Because usually you get caught in some spin before elections and measured by your own reactions, long-term interests and so on, you know. So we are approaching here really a new era. On the other hand, then you know what but you know what really makes me, not afraid, I just don't know where it will lead us... two things are happening now. First, not only this obvious possibility of biogenetic manipulations which also affect your psychic features, character. But what especially interests me is this direct interface contact between a machine computer and your brain. You know that, for example, Stephen Hawking no longer needs his finger. Now his brain's his wheelchair computer is linked to his brains and he just thinks "forward" and the chair moves forward. And this opens totally new totally new perspectives. Like the most fascinating story I learned from my friends who work in this domain is they made an experiment they have shown me the video with rats. They can connect rats' neurons with these just basic computer instructions, "move forward, left, right." And it's pretty terrifying, rat becomes a remote-controlled car. Rat is running around in a big box. Then you press the button and you can literally direct the rat. Now why is this so interesting? Ah, because they told me, but they don't want to go public with it, but they're already making experiments on people and they focus on the right problem, which is how will you experience that moment when your neurons which control your movements are are computer-regulated. And they told me the first results are very dark pessimist. Why? Because you are not even aware of it. The result is not "all of a sudden you feel some foreign power took over." No, you think you are still freely running around. So I'm not a pessimist here, who knows what will happen. I'm just saying that this is a tremendous challenge to it. How we deal this? We have ecology, we have new walls, we are approaching new class society. If you don't believe me, look at Hollywood, they know it: *Hunger Games*, *Elysium* and so on. I I am not simply against capitalism. My God, listen, I'm a Marxist and everyone who read *Capital* knows that Marx was absolutely fascinated by capitalism, no? The most productive... I'm just saying that we live in a really dangerous era where it's obvious that we are approaching a certain limit and people know it. We have many protests all around the world, even in developed countries. Occupy Wall Street, now here in Europe all... but no clear offer, no program what to do, how to get out. And these are truly dangerous times. Like the most tragic thing that I learned from European politics is that and you have elements of this even in Trump is that you know which European government did recently the most radical pro-working class enacted pro-working class measures? The extremely nationalist conservative Polish government. They did incredible things. They lowered the era of retirement, they enabled student... the whole set of measures that no social democrat today dares to advocate. So we live in crazy times, isn't this the European madness at its purest? If you want to have the most brutal austerity measures actualized, get an extremely left government like Syriza in Greece, and if you want to do some relatively radical for today at least pro-worker measures, get an extremely right-wing government. Like in France, Marine Le Pen is the only one who openly advocates workers' interests. Of course, in this half-fascist way and so on and so on. So I think that where I'm no longer a Marxist, I think we should abandon that metaphor of, you know, Marxist, "We know where the future is going," all this unfortunate metaphor of "train of history" riding it. We have to... the metaphor that I prefer much more is one used by, I'm still in love with French Revolution, Saint-Just and Robespierre, both of them said, "We revolutionaries are not fulfilling some big historical necessity." He says, "We are like captains on a ship. Our ships are entering uncharted unknown territories." And we have to improvise, to see what to do. And that's that's the situation where we are today. Again, the situation is open. We don't know, open in the sense that it's clear that we are approaching some kind of global crisis, ecologically, refugees, biogenetics, financial capital, intellectual property. Like, isn't it absolutely clear with all those problems of pirate and so on that, to put it in the most old-fashioned brutal Marxist way, private property doesn't work with intellectual so-called intellectual property. It... you cannot really privatize it. It doesn't work. But what is the solution? And this is the danger. I'm I'm really really afraid. So to return really to conclude to my topic... because I wanted... okay, now I will do something very hypocritical. We start to debate and I ask myself the first question: "Professor Žižek, what did you want to say in the remaining part of your talk?" And I will be very brief. I wanted to do to also go into other domains where this surplus functions, especially of power and knowledge. You know that in power also we have surplus power. That's for me the weakness of this contractual liberalism. Even with the most democratic power, where they say, "Oh, we are just your servant, state apparatuses are just agencies you hire, as it were, buy, rent to do some job." No, for power to effectively function, every power, not just fascist, for power structures to retain their
unknown
authority, no matter how much they are bound by laws and regulations, there has to be this
authority, no matter how much they are bound by laws and regulations, there has to be this
Slavoj Žižek
superego message between the lines: "But basically we can do whatever we want." You know, it has to be that threat of omnipotence, which of course has to remain potential, but it has to be there. And then I wanted to do the same line of thought with
superego message between the lines: "But basically we can do whatever we want." You know, it has to be that threat of omnipotence, which of course has to remain potential, but it has to be there. And then I wanted to do the same line of thought with
unknown
science. How modern science works directly in the capitalist way, not in the bad sense of surplus knowledge. You know, traditional knowledge is this artisanal knowledge... farmer knows how to work the field, artisan how to do the swords' metal. And then you have the higher mythic
science. How modern science works directly in the capitalist way, not in the bad sense of surplus knowledge. You know, traditional knowledge is this artisanal knowledge... farmer knows how to work the field, artisan how to do the swords' metal. And then you have the higher mythic
Slavoj Žižek
knowledge, religious, ideology. But what happened with scientific knowledge is the first type of knowledge which constantly
knowledge, religious, ideology. But what happened with scientific knowledge is the first type of knowledge which constantly
unknown
perceives itself
perceives itself
Slavoj Žižek
as self-revolutionizing. Like,
as self-revolutionizing. Like,
unknown
science is never finished, we always have to discover more and more. And then I wanted to conclude with all that topic. But to finish, I think to return to it that the great danger for progressives, for the left, I claim, is precisely to escape this plot, the danger of let's call it surplus pleasure. For example, it's so suspicious for me this self-torturing anti-Eurocentrism very much in fashion in Europe. You know, every radical leftist in Europe feels good when whatever bad
science is never finished, we always have to discover more and more. And then I wanted to conclude with all that topic. But to finish, I think to return to it that the great danger for progressives, for the left, I claim, is precisely to escape this plot, the danger of let's call it surplus pleasure. For example, it's so suspicious for me this self-torturing anti-Eurocentrism very much in fashion in Europe. You know, every radical leftist in Europe feels good when whatever bad
Slavoj Žižek
thing happens in the third world you can somehow blame Europe. You know and it's incredible how whenever something happens there, like... I had a debate with a about honor killing in Palestine with some West European leftists who claim, "No, honor killings are the result of Israeli imperial manipulation of the West." Like, and I spoke then I have many Palestinian friends who were furious at it, who one of them told me a wonderful tragic thing. He told me, "Listen, this is for me the utmost racism, they patronize us so much that they don't even tolerate us being evil, you know. Like we have to be those innocent manipulated people where..." and so on. That's why my ultimate encounter was with some native so-called, they hated the name, in Missoula, Montana, I met some Indians Native Americans. I love them. They saw... they hated so much this patronizing white attitude, "We are imperialist exploiting nature, you are doing it differently. Before you enter a mountain to dig a hole to mine it, you ask the mountain for permission, you talk with the spirit of the mountain and so on." One of my friends there, maybe you know the joke, I'm sorry to repeat it to you if you know it, first he told me, "I much prefer to be called Indian than Native American." Because I don't like it "Native American". First, I'm hyphen-American then. I will accept it when you the British-English majority will be called "English-American," you know. Like, "I don't... this is already second-class the hyphenated Americans." Second thing he told me is that "Native American," well, what echoes in the background is nature versus culture. "We are Native Americans and what you are cultured Americans and so on." So they told me, "I love to be called Indian because at least my name is then a monument to white man's stupidity who thought they are in India." And they one of them wrote a wonderful analysis proving that Indians, so-called, killed more buffaloes and burned more forests than all the white people together. Of course it was not quite true but you see the tendency was "Don't patronize us, don't put us in that innocence" because what they saw very clearly is the surplus enjoyment we white people get in this. You know, like once we had "white man's burden" in the sense of "we are destined to rule," now we have another type of "white man's burden," for every evil that comes we have to be guilty. Now you will say I agree this is mostly true. But you know hidden beneath this self-torture is the fact that it's still racist. It privileges you as the only guy with a universal position. They marginals just see their particular identity, we admire them, we... this is why I think it's deeply racist when this fact that... did you notice this simple fact that the more you go to a marginal group, the more they are allowed to assert their particular identity? If Native Americans perform their ritual dances, perfect. And so on and so on. With Italians, it gets suspicious then. If a white WASP says, "We also have our tradition," you are a fascist. You know why I oppose this? Not I'm not a right-winger who says, you know, the main right-wing argumentation today is precisely "We just want for us what politically correct..." No, I think the racism is there precisely in so far as we are not allowed to assert our particular identity, we secretly reserve for ourselves the universal position. That's why we can fight for others' rights, that... you know, it's an incredible arrogant racism behind it. So again, the big obstacle for me with political correctness
thing happens in the third world you can somehow blame Europe. You know and it's incredible how whenever something happens there, like... I had a debate with a about honor killing in Palestine with some West European leftists who claim, "No, honor killings are the result of Israeli imperial manipulation of the West." Like, and I spoke then I have many Palestinian friends who were furious at it, who one of them told me a wonderful tragic thing. He told me, "Listen, this is for me the utmost racism, they patronize us so much that they don't even tolerate us being evil, you know. Like we have to be those innocent manipulated people where..." and so on. That's why my ultimate encounter was with some native so-called, they hated the name, in Missoula, Montana, I met some Indians Native Americans. I love them. They saw... they hated so much this patronizing white attitude, "We are imperialist exploiting nature, you are doing it differently. Before you enter a mountain to dig a hole to mine it, you ask the mountain for permission, you talk with the spirit of the mountain and so on." One of my friends there, maybe you know the joke, I'm sorry to repeat it to you if you know it, first he told me, "I much prefer to be called Indian than Native American." Because I don't like it "Native American". First, I'm hyphen-American then. I will accept it when you the British-English majority will be called "English-American," you know. Like, "I don't... this is already second-class the hyphenated Americans." Second thing he told me is that "Native American," well, what echoes in the background is nature versus culture. "We are Native Americans and what you are cultured Americans and so on." So they told me, "I love to be called Indian because at least my name is then a monument to white man's stupidity who thought they are in India." And they one of them wrote a wonderful analysis proving that Indians, so-called, killed more buffaloes and burned more forests than all the white people together. Of course it was not quite true but you see the tendency was "Don't patronize us, don't put us in that innocence" because what they saw very clearly is the surplus enjoyment we white people get in this. You know, like once we had "white man's burden" in the sense of "we are destined to rule," now we have another type of "white man's burden," for every evil that comes we have to be guilty. Now you will say I agree this is mostly true. But you know hidden beneath this self-torture is the fact that it's still racist. It privileges you as the only guy with a universal position. They marginals just see their particular identity, we admire them, we... this is why I think it's deeply racist when this fact that... did you notice this simple fact that the more you go to a marginal group, the more they are allowed to assert their particular identity? If Native Americans perform their ritual dances, perfect. And so on and so on. With Italians, it gets suspicious then. If a white WASP says, "We also have our tradition," you are a fascist. You know why I oppose this? Not I'm not a right-winger who says, you know, the main right-wing argumentation today is precisely "We just want for us what politically correct..." No, I think the racism is there precisely in so far as we are not allowed to assert our particular identity, we secretly reserve for ourselves the universal position. That's why we can fight for others' rights, that... you know, it's an incredible arrogant racism behind it. So again, the big obstacle for me with political correctness
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and so on and again
and so on and again
Slavoj Žižek
the paradox is that of course I agree with all goals and of
the paradox is that of course I agree with all goals and of
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political correctness and so on. But my suspicion is in this, let's call it precisely self... the more they criticize
political correctness and so on. But my suspicion is in this, let's call it precisely self... the more they criticize
Slavoj Žižek
themselves, the more you detect a perverted a perverted surplus pleasure in it. And that's why another thing that makes me suspicious is of course I'm well
themselves, the more you detect a perverted a perverted surplus pleasure in it. And that's why another thing that makes me suspicious is of course I'm well
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aware of the need to criticize Eurocentrism and so on.
aware of the need to criticize Eurocentrism and so on.
Slavoj Žižek
But what makes me suspicious is that precisely
But what makes me suspicious is that precisely
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today with the new stage of world capitalism, global capitalism, it's
today with the new stage of world capitalism, global capitalism, it's
Slavoj Žižek
clear that capitalism less and less needs authentic democracy. We are approaching
clear that capitalism less and less needs authentic democracy. We are approaching
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a much more authoritarian form of capitalism. It's a paradoxical capitalism, it's not simply the old fascism. It's a soft fascism. Like you get all your personal rights, you can have sex with animals whatever you want, you get the freedom of choice, but social processes become totally non-transparent, regulated not even by political agents, by experts and so on and so on. And in such a situation, what I fear is that this
a much more authoritarian form of capitalism. It's a paradoxical capitalism, it's not simply the old fascism. It's a soft fascism. Like you get all your personal rights, you can have sex with animals whatever you want, you get the freedom of choice, but social processes become totally non-transparent, regulated not even by political agents, by experts and so on and so on. And in such a situation, what I fear is that this
Slavoj Žižek
anti-democratic resentment is often masked as a critique of Eurocentrism. Precisely today when what nonetheless was good about European legacy is threatened. This is why my true heroes are people like Haiti revolution, Toussaint
anti-democratic resentment is often masked as a critique of Eurocentrism. Precisely today when what nonetheless was good about European legacy is threatened. This is why my true heroes are people like Haiti revolution, Toussaint
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Louverture, like Malcolm X and so on, who saw this danger very... Malcolm X is for me, I wrote about it I'm sorry if you know, a genius, a Hegelian genius. You know what he saw clearly? X. X was we were deprived of our roots and so on. But his solution is not the Hollywood one, Alex Haley *Roots*: "Let's look for our roots." No, the genius of Malcolm X was that he saw this X as a new opening. Precisely because we are in a tragic situation of deprived of our roots, we blacks have a unique chance of being more authentically universalist than the white people. Toussaint Louverture, Haiti revolution, so clearly the same and so on and so on. So again, I claim that the way things are moving now, Europe is precisely the greatest danger to what is worth fighting for in Europe. European tradition is threatened not by Muslim immigrants, but by Europeans themselves. I mean, Europe which will be run by by, I don't know, Le Pen in France, UKIP in Britain, this precisely will no longer be Europe, Enlightenment Europe. But and so I claim that maybe we will see this wonderful paradox where blacks and others will be the only one where European legacy will be alive. That would be a wonderful moment to see. This is when I was in India, it was wonderful for me to see this, the untouchables, the lowest. They love English language. You know why? Because they told me, "Our languages are so impregnated by caste systems and so on, that for us English language is the great equalizer." So again, we have to be absolutely open here. We are entering an uncharted territory. But we know that we will have to do something, otherwise I think we are really lost. If we will be lucky, then we
Louverture, like Malcolm X and so on, who saw this danger very... Malcolm X is for me, I wrote about it I'm sorry if you know, a genius, a Hegelian genius. You know what he saw clearly? X. X was we were deprived of our roots and so on. But his solution is not the Hollywood one, Alex Haley *Roots*: "Let's look for our roots." No, the genius of Malcolm X was that he saw this X as a new opening. Precisely because we are in a tragic situation of deprived of our roots, we blacks have a unique chance of being more authentically universalist than the white people. Toussaint Louverture, Haiti revolution, so clearly the same and so on and so on. So again, I claim that the way things are moving now, Europe is precisely the greatest danger to what is worth fighting for in Europe. European tradition is threatened not by Muslim immigrants, but by Europeans themselves. I mean, Europe which will be run by by, I don't know, Le Pen in France, UKIP in Britain, this precisely will no longer be Europe, Enlightenment Europe. But and so I claim that maybe we will see this wonderful paradox where blacks and others will be the only one where European legacy will be alive. That would be a wonderful moment to see. This is when I was in India, it was wonderful for me to see this, the untouchables, the lowest. They love English language. You know why? Because they told me, "Our languages are so impregnated by caste systems and so on, that for us English language is the great equalizer." So again, we have to be absolutely open here. We are entering an uncharted territory. But we know that we will have to do something, otherwise I think we are really lost. If we will be lucky, then we
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will live in a society like *Hunger Games* and so on. If not, something much worse. So, you know, we really live in dangerous times, I claim. Sorry, I was too long, but what the hell, you had to suffer it, you were helpless. Thanks very much. You know, I spoke too long, but my usual excuses is I spoke too long if you measure it with this metaphysical homogeneous linear time. So I subverted that notion of time. I'm sorry that I didn't go to the last part which was much more theoretical, but I really think that we live... the good thing about our times is nonetheless... here I'm a Maoist. You know my favorite Mao saying? "Heaven is under disorder, the situation is excellent." You should never forget that chaotic times like others are also times when something new can emerge. And maybe it will. Look who would have predicted even Bernie Sanders years ago? They would have said no, it's
will live in a society like *Hunger Games* and so on. If not, something much worse. So, you know, we really live in dangerous times, I claim. Sorry, I was too long, but what the hell, you had to suffer it, you were helpless. Thanks very much. You know, I spoke too long, but my usual excuses is I spoke too long if you measure it with this metaphysical homogeneous linear time. So I subverted that notion of time. I'm sorry that I didn't go to the last part which was much more theoretical, but I really think that we live... the good thing about our times is nonetheless... here I'm a Maoist. You know my favorite Mao saying? "Heaven is under disorder, the situation is excellent." You should never forget that chaotic times like others are also times when something new can emerge. And maybe it will. Look who would have predicted even Bernie Sanders years ago? They would have said no, it's
Slavoj Žižek
absolutely impossible because this was the pure surplus pleasure of American academic left. You know, "We are leftists but..." Like I spoke once, I was even a member years ago with *October* journal. And I asked them the stupid question: "Where does the title come from?" And they told me, "You know, October, October revolution, you know." Like the big secret. But it meant absolutely nothing. You know what I mean? This the academic left should think what they did. Instead of just making fun of Trump, they should ask themselves how did they and the liberal left contribute to Trump. The metaphor I like to use is that of medicine: if we just fight Trump, and we should, we are doing what in medicine is called, if I know it correctly, symptomatic healing. You know, you have a pain, you take a pill just to ease the pain. But we should never forget that Trump was a reaction to the impotence and wrong politics of the liberal left. So the change has to happen there. I mean, I'm absolutely... I was misunderstood when I made those provocations, you know, for Trump. Trump is a nightmare. But at least you know it's a nightmare. What I fear if Hillary were to win is that people would say, "Oh, thanks God, now we are back in normal times." No, we are not! I mean, Trump was a wrong reaction to a real problem. You have to stop me. Now comes my surplus pleasure, I spoke so long and then I will be able to say, "I'm sorry, we don't have a lot of time to the debate, I would love to stay all the night with you, but unfortunately, you know..." You see the nice thing about Slavoj is he's given you the answer, now what we want to do is get the question to which that was the answer. You are a Hegelian! My ideal debate, I once proposed it but they didn't want me to do it, was a debate like this: I talk for three minutes and then you should guess the question which I was answering, you know. That would be a Hegelian reversal. All right, uh there is time for questions. I think perhaps we should go for perhaps another half hour. Um... minutes! minutes. We have got uh two microphones, uh running around the place. Have the microphones been picked up? Okay. Uh, would you just raise your hand and I'll uh send a microphone in your direction. We have one question here, and then one over there. Sorry. Hi, thank you so much for coming and speaking. Um... But! When you begin like this, I see you sharpening the knife behind your... Go grab your knife directly, yeah. Um, so earlier you were talking about uh about the value of dogma in... Of dogma? Of dogma in politics... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what role do you think religion plays in that? Ah, that's a nice question. The only problem is that of course to give you a proper answer would have meant not half an hour but more. Um, my hope, I define myself just to give you a hint if you want my position... it's cheap to make propaganda but I have a long chapter in my last theoretical book *Disparities* with the title of... it's maybe even unnecessarily provocative... with the title of "Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual or whatever I don't know"... where I literally describe what I call my atheist my my Christian atheism. Uh I'm proud to call him my friend, he is a wonderful guy, the ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. You know, the one who I think married even Lady Di or whatever. He is a wonderful guy, he is really a good theorist also. And he in his book on Dostoevsky, which I advise you to read it... it's a... sorry if I'm getting lost in these detours... but he gives the best reading of Dostoevsky's *Idiot* that I know. His reading is that far from being an innocent pure guy, that idiot is the most terrifying person. There are persons who are in themselves innocent sincere, but somehow the way they act in their immediate environment, they cause just trouble all around. And he thinks *Idiot*, you know, he brings to Nastasya Filippovna to all others... he's a pure guy who brings... but okay, Rowan Williams said that the most elementary form of religious experience... and this is my negative theology. My negative theology is not, "Oh God is beyond, we don't know what," it's literally... God is for me just a negative opening. It's this basic feeling, not feeling, is not a good word, it's much more radical existentialist, it's this basic experience that this world is out of joint. We don't fully belong here. But my idea is precisely to keep it at this level. There the way you fill in this void comes second. And I claim... I did write three, four books on Christianity... that this is the implicit lesson of Christianity for me. Christianity is something for me at least incredibly subversive. The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom. You know, Christianity... it's totally wrong to read Christianity in the sense of uh God sent a messenger, he failed, there will be second coming. No, it's no second coming. I read it literally, you know in the Bible when some pupils asked Christ, "But how will we know that you will return?", and Christ said literally, "When there will be love between two of you, I will be there." That is to say, you know, uh like let's say God is dead, which means we are abandoned, we are alone, which means we are left to ourselves. But what we have to do is not to say, "Oh, if we do well, pray, fast ourselves, we will rejoin God." No, we just have to shift the perspective: God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom, the greatest gift and so on. The message of Christianity is for me what comes after the death of Christ is not God as Hegel put it very precisely: what dies on the cross is not just a messenger of God, it's in a way God himself. What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community. Which is why the most beautiful line in Gospel for me, you know when Christ is with his disciples and somebody comes in and says, "Oh, your family is out there," and he says... not in this terms but in my version: "Fuck you, my family is here with you, my..." And that's how I read Christ saying, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you're not my pupil." No, it's not meant of course in this stupid way you have to hate them. But I think that father, mother stand for all traditional hierarchic structures. The greatness of the idea of Holy Spirit is that we can have an egalitarian emancipatory community, not just as in Buddhism more or less in death, in the beyond, here in our social life we can have it. So in this sense... okay I will not lose time now, you should stop me here... but in this sense I literally understand myself as uh an atheist Christian. And I think that Christian... I'm absolutely opposed to this ecumenic bullshit, you know, like Christianity uh we are all praying to the same God who just appears in different guises and so on, whatever whatever. No, immense things happened within religion. And there is such a radical break with Christianity. And now you will say, "But look at all the horrors that happened in Christianity." Here I like to quote uh you know that anecdote when Napoleon was crowned by Pope, emperor. When Pope approached him, Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and puts it on. And you know what the Pope answered to Napoleon? It's a wonderful answer. He said, "I know your excellency what you wanted to do. You wanted to destroy Christianity. But believe me you will not succeed. We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet." You know, I think that we have this nice paradox of how church as an organization is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting its own excess in the good sense. It's fighting the radical core of of Christianity itself. Okay, I cannot go on, just things are... No, sorry... Did you see a movie... Slavoj, you asked me to be brutal and to cut... he is an Austrian, Austrians were worse Nazis than Germans, yet. Say hello to Adolf, your grandfather or what. *Jetzt ist es fertig*. All right, so there was another question over here. Um, so you talked about uh bureaucracy and how bureaucracy doesn't really want to be efficient, it just wants to perpetuate itself. Um and then is that inherently a bad thing? And if so, how do we get away from that, especially if you want sort of a bureaucratic socialist state? I'm ready to take... I know, this is... I I wonder how other people didn't notice it before, this apparent contradiction. First I claim bureaucracy is perverted, reproducing itself, then I praise bureaucratic socialism or whatever, you know. But I think that my crazy wager is that if you allow bureaucracy to be... you bureaucracy the basic goal of bureaucracy is to reproduce itself, not to solve problems. There is another wonderful detail in the movie that I referred to, *Brazil*. You remember all the troubles of the hero begin when something breaks in his machinery... I don't know what, heating in his apartment. So he calls the official state... how do you call them, repairmen? And of course they just complicate things, write a report and so on. Then the same night Robert De Niro comes as a kind of an illegal repairman, who what does he do, and it's the greatest act of transgression, he just corrects things, you know, immediately. And next day bureaucrats come, the official, and say, "What? You just did repair yourself? Who come?" It's a pro... and this is how he is arrested. I think that I'm much of a pessimist here. I think if we accept the irrationality of bureaucracy, I believe that if we organize it well, bureaucracy can do some really good thing as an excess, you know. It's the other way around. Bureaucracy serves itself, but as an excess it can do things. And I think this is our reality. It's so easy to criticize bureaucracy. But are you aware how health care system, school and so on... My God, I I are you aware what a terrifying thing a life would have been without bureaucracy? You have to externalize all this machinic aspect. And it can be done. My answer is tolerance but at the same time a little bit of terror. Not against the people, but against the bureaucracy. I think the price should be... I'm not exactly for North Korea. But one thing I like in North Korea and in Stalinism, I'm not crazy, you will maybe even agree with me. You know, people forget that under Stalinism there it you remember like the great Stalinist terror from '34 to '37: of the army generals were shot, of the central committee members were shot. So I think that with a little bit of terror, bureaucracy like my idea would be: be a bureaucrat fine, you are better paid, but there is always a risk of terror against you, you know. Like, not terror against against the people, but terror against bureaucracy. I know it's a crazy idea. But I just think that my God, I was part of them, all these communes self-organized and so on and so on. It works at a certain level. But then the moment it gets developed, it turns bad. You... I'll put it like this, and even to my great pleasure Negri and Hardt conceded this. You know, Toni Negri now did some interview where he said, "We have to rehabilitate taking power, leadership, vertical power and so on and so on." He admits that this... that the idea that the logic of multitudes will will grasp the entire social field, as it were, that it doesn't work. Okay, I didn't again answer you but what the hell. I liked the fact that Pomona has just appointed a new president and I think we should pass on that piece of information in your last question. Uh Pomona just appointed a new president and I think a new chief administrator, so I think this is a good... a good thing to pass on. I didn't get it. Did you is this a good fact? Is he a good guy, bad guy? Why did you mention this? I'm intrigued. Uh she's an amazing woman. In what sense? Sexual, intellectual? I mean, in my primitive Balkan country, if you say "an amazing woman," you know. No, let's drop this, I'm sorry, let's better drop... You see that serves me right, right? All right, we have a question up here. Hi, thank you. I'm I'm interested in what you said about um the ecological crisis in the world and how that's going to require organization outside of the market. Um, but I also if I remember correctly in *An Examined Life*, you also had some criticisms about environmentalism as a dogma. And I saw a little bit of what you said about um excess pleasure in that in that argument. Could you talk a little bit about how to how to address the ecological crisis that you mentioned but avoid the dangers of... Okay, no, no, it's a wonderful question but again the only problem is like let's do another talk for one hour and a half. No, you know what I'm saying, that ecology is unfortunately today one of the great ideological battlefields. The main danger that I see is precisely this superego dimension. How does the ruling ideology deal with ecological topic? First, it individualizes it. The strategy is to put you, treat you as guilty, but at the same time to offer you an easy way out. The idea is first: don't just criticize, do something. And then they say: recycle, do this, buy green apples and so on and so on. And that's the catch. At the same time, they offer you this easy way out just so that you know, so that it makes you feel good, you know. Like "What can I do? I recycle, I buy green apples, I go to to Starbucks" which I really hate and then you know the cappuccino there is a little bit more expensive, but I know that one cent goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other to some stupid... It's a feel-good ecologism. So I think we should and this is really I think in a way a magical magical thinking to avoid real problems. It's the same with how we treat immigrants. I don't like in Europe this humanitarian perception of it. Of course we should help them, but basically this is not a humanitarian problem, this is a problem of geopolitics, of forms of new global capitalism and so on and so on. And I hate this idea of just, "Oh there are half a million of people in Turkey waiting, will we show our open hearts and so on." Where sorry to tell you, but the solution is not that Europe just opens itself and lets them in. What will happen there? There is no serious will in minimally addressing, for example, refugees in Libya from Africa. The first question to ask is what created this wake of refugees? New extremely brutal form of neocolonialism, for example new models of farming. The true tragedy of Africa is that not so much Europe, not even United States, these are more some Arab countries and South Korea, Japan and others, they are buying incredible quantities of the best fertile land, growing there industrial plants for exports and so on, and then of course you create dispossessed people and so on. So what I am saying is that on the one hand, I don't believe in this individual culpabilization. I don't believe... and I also don't believe in this communal thing, you know, local thing. I think that the way new... for example, sorry, to give you an example, my good friend... you really should read him... the futurologist theorist of catastrophes who teaches a little bit up from here at at I think at Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. He is also a member of some ecological communities in Europe. He told me he was at Fukushima two days after as part of... and he told me something pretty terrifying. That for a couple of hours, maybe one day, Japanese authorities thought that the radiation will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area, million people. How to do it? The only rational solution would have been to ask Russia to give them part of Siberia or what. How would this be done? You see, we have to be ready to these mega-catastrophes. We know, for example, that we don't even know if it's nature or just or human global warming that the temperatures are rising so much in in all those parts of Emirates, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, that whole parts are simply becoming unlivable there. What will happen there? Then, sorry, just to make a small detour to refugees. You know what bothers me so much and it's prohibited by the left, even to raise this question. Listen, the whole problem is now will Europe be open enough. But for example, did you notice the paradox? Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims, most. Okay. Immediately below the war zone there are some very rich Arab countries, which are Sunni countries: Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. What's their politics? They simply don't accept any refugees. All the refugees if they are in Arab countries had to go to poor Arab countries: Lebanon is full of it, Egypt and so on. Of course, these precisely are the countries like Saudi Arabia which are most connected with the West. And also we should not forget that in spite of all terror attacks and so on, the big conflict there is basically Sunnis killing Shias and vice versa and so on. So you see we have to politicize it. And again, the same with ecology. Local ecologism is always often, not always, but often openly racist. For example, I was... my favorite place on earth because it's very cold and so on, how do you pronounce it here? Iceland. Reykjavik, the capital. Okay. And I was there invited to a TV debate because they wanted to build some chemical factory close to their... on their coast, and the ecologists were against: "No, it will... it will ruin our beautiful coast and so on." But I told them, "What do you propose?" And they made it very clear to me that "Okay, let's give the capital and build it somewhere else." So I told them, "Oh, fuck you, you just want your coast clear, you know, and you don't care in some city African country city in the sense of they don't care about it, it's spoil." So I'm very much afraid against this clean local ecologism. It's usually very egotist. The second thing, I hate so much all this bullshit about sustainability and so on. If you look closely at these self-sustainable houses and so on, they usually to construct them does much more ruin the... My ideal is I spoke with a German ecologist who told me, "You know what would have been the best way? That we pack as many people as possible into big dirty mega-cities and just keep it keep the nature around like the Japanese solution." They I think more or less, if I know it correctly, they try to pack all the people into of the country and they try to keep as green as possible the others. So again, I see I see so many problems here that we really have to change our to change our attitude in a much more collective, large-scale thinking. We don't even know, you know, like when Trump and his guys say, "But we don't know what is it's not sure that it's global warming." My answer is: that's what makes it even worse. We don't even really know what is happening, you know, because we should always remember that all those statistical data, they are mythic. Like, we live now under the impression that if global temperature raised for whatever, two degrees Celsius, something like this, if they are beneath that it's okay, if they go up it's a catastrophe. But we don't know that. The catastrophe may be with one degree and a half, or maybe Earth can survive three degrees and so on. The other thing I worry very much, I've written a short text on it, is this incredible oscillation between fear, panic and renormalization. It's like with Trump. You get panic "Ooh, it's fascism," and you get Nancy Pelosi, "Oh, it's normal, no problem." I was... I spoke with some of my Chinese friends, you know, when they got that airpocalypse they called it, terrible air in Beijing and in other big cities. It's really tragic, because you know that now in Beijing you have many new cheap tourist agencies. You know what's their offer? They do daily trips out to the countryside, their only promise is "We will take you to a place where you can see the sky," you know. For... but they told me my friends, the horrible thing is how quickly the situation was renormalized. People just get used to it, you no longer wear just that white cotton mask, you wear the real, I call them Darth Vader masks, you know, big ones. And you simply get used to it. You listen to the news tomorrow, "Can I go out without a mask or not?", and life goes on. What I fear is how what I fear is this oscillation between catastrophism and then immediately this renormalization. I don't know, I'm a pessimist here. I try to avoid the logic of some of my even more pessimist ecologically-oriented friends who claim the only thing that can save us is a serious catastrophe, like a mega-catastrophe. Well, I think this is a risky strategy because, you know, who knows who will take over after? Maybe a guy will take over in comparison with whom we will praise the good old Trump times, you know what I mean. But I just think again that what we can do now is just write about it, make it clear how all these strategies of individual culpabilization, of renormalization and so on, all this mythic thinking of setting some limits, like "Oh, if we are just below two degrees we are safe." No, we don't know what's happening. Maybe maybe it is up to a point a natural because, you know, we should that's the first also myth myth to be debunked. There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch. Are we aware... I always take this example, uh how do you call it, oil reserves. Are we even aware what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes had to happen in the past of our earth so that we get oil reserves today? So the lesson of this is not "Oh, it's natural we don't have to worry," but the lesson of this is I think there is no easy way back. There is no pre-given natural balance where we just return to that and we are safe. Nature is caught in catastrophes and so on and so on. So we have to again, we have to think and because you know, the problem is that when we have real dangers, ecological threats and so on, the ability of people to delude themselves is incredible, this willingness simply not... and I can understand it. Like, you know, you read about ecological catastrophes and then you go out, there is sun, nice weather and you say, "My God, this is nature, it cannot really change." I don't think I think that our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of... fuck... no, literally, fuck you, you know it, you wrote about your wonderful book on fetish... it's of fetishist denial, it's "I know very well but still I don't believe it." I don't think we talk so much about ecology. There is this superstitious childish strategy beneath it. If we talk a lot about catastrophe, maybe it will not happen, you know. Just talk a lot to... and unfortunately I claim even in politics many fake leftists are doing this. If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen. There is wonderful passage in George Orwell, early, from late '30s, where he says that leftist intellectuals like to talk about need for the revolution just to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I think that many American academics like to do this. I follow you know, the big problem is "Do I call you black or African-American or what?" It's much better to have these debates than to really go together with black people. I notice only this correlation: most of my politically correct friends, the more they are politically correct academics, less they really have black friends and so on and so on, you know. It's a very comfortable way this official politically correct anti-racism. So again, I'm... Slavoj, we should maybe aim one more question. I love you. That's what I wanted to hear, yeah. Uh, maybe a gentleman in the blue shirt? Opportunist! You see, you move to the center. From the left, you move to the center. What comes next? For whom did you vote? Ten years ago, for Schwarzenegger, probably, no? Because he is your Austrian colleague, you know. Sorry, let's go on, one. Uh, hi Mr. Žižek, my name is Yanai. Um, thank you for speaking today. But! When you begin like this, I see you sharpening the knife behind your... Go grab your knife directly, yeah. Yeah, so uh so earlier you were talking about uh about the value of dogma in... Of dogma? Of dogma in politics... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what role do you think religion plays in that? Ah, that's a nice question. The only problem is that of course to give you a proper answer would have meant not half an hour but more. Um, my hope, I define myself just to give you a hint if you want my position... it's cheap to make propaganda but I have a long chapter in my last theoretical book *Disparities* with the title of... it's maybe even unnecessarily provocative... with the title of "Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual or whatever I don't know"... where I literally describe what I call my atheist my my Christian atheism. Uh I'm proud to call him my friend, he is a wonderful guy, the ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. You know, the one who I think married even Lady Di or whatever. He is a wonderful guy, he is really a good theorist also. And he in his book on Dostoevsky, which I advise you to read it... it's a... sorry if I'm getting lost in these detours... but he gives the best reading of Dostoevsky's *Idiot* that I know. His reading is that far from being an innocent pure guy, that idiot is the most terrifying person. There are persons who are in themselves innocent sincere, but somehow the way they act in their immediate environment, they cause just trouble all around. And he thinks *Idiot*, you know, he brings to Nastasya Filippovna to all others... he's a pure guy who brings... but okay, Rowan Williams said that the most elementary form of religious experience... and this is my negative theology. My negative theology is not, "Oh God is beyond, we don't know what," it's literally... God is for me just a negative opening. It's this basic feeling, not feeling, is not a good word, it's much more radical existentialist, it's this basic experience that this world is out of joint. We don't fully belong here. But my idea is precisely to keep it at this level. There the way you fill in this void comes second. And I claim... I did write three, four books on Christianity... that this is the implicit lesson of Christianity for me. Christianity is something for me at least incredibly subversive. The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom. You know, Christianity... it's totally wrong to read Christianity in the sense of uh God sent a messenger, he failed, there will be second coming. No, it's no second coming. I read it literally, you know in the Bible when some pupils asked Christ, "But how will we know that you will return?", and Christ said literally, "When there will be love between two of you, I will be there." That is to say, you know, uh like let's say God is dead, which means we are abandoned, we are alone, which means we are left to ourselves. But what we have to do is not to say, "Oh, if we do well, pray, fast ourselves, we will rejoin God." No, we just have to shift the perspective: God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom, the greatest gift and so on. The message of Christianity is for me what comes after the death of Christ is not God as Hegel put it very precisely: what dies on the cross is not just a messenger of God, it's in a way God himself. What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community. Which is why the most beautiful line in Gospel for me, you know when Christ is with his disciples and somebody comes in and says, "Oh, your family is out there," and he says... not in this terms but in my version: "Fuck you, my family is here with you, my..." And that's how I read Christ saying, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you're not my pupil." No, it's not meant of course in this stupid way you have to hate them. But I think that father, mother stand for all traditional hierarchic structures. The greatness of the idea of Holy Spirit is that we can have an egalitarian emancipatory community, not just as in Buddhism more or less in death, in the beyond, here in our social life we can have it. So in this sense... okay I will not lose time now, you should stop me here... but in this sense I literally understand myself as uh an atheist Christian. And I think that Christian... I'm absolutely opposed to this ecumenic bullshit, you know, like Christianity uh we are all praying to the same God who just appears in different guises and so on, whatever whatever. No, immense things happened within religion. And there is such a radical break with Christianity. And now you will say, "But look at all the horrors that happened in Christianity." Here I like to quote uh you know that anecdote when Napoleon was crowned by Pope, emperor. When Pope approached him, Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and puts it on. And you know what the Pope answered to Napoleon? It's a wonderful answer. He said, "I know your excellency what you wanted to do. You wanted to destroy Christianity. But believe me you will not succeed. We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet." You know, I think that we have this nice paradox of how church as an organization is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting its own excess in the good sense. It's fighting the radical core of of Christianity itself. Okay, I cannot go on, just things are... [Video glitches] No, sorry... Did you see a movie... Slavoj, you asked me to be brutal and to cut... he is an Austrian, Austrians were worse Nazis than Germans, yet. Say hello to Adolf, your grandfather or what. *Jetzt ist es fertig*. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so there was another question over here. Um, so you talked about uh bureaucracy and how bureaucracy doesn't really want to be efficient, it just wants to perpetuate itself. Um and then is that inherently a bad thing? And if so, how do we get away from that, especially if you want sort of a bureaucratic socialist state? I'm ready to take... I know, this is... I I wonder how other people didn't notice it before, this apparent contradiction. First I claim bureaucracy is perverted, reproducing itself, then I praise bureaucratic socialism or whatever, you know. But I think that my crazy wager is that if you allow bureaucracy to be... you bureaucracy the basic goal of bureaucracy is to reproduce itself, not to solve problems. There is another wonderful detail in the movie that I referred to, *Brazil*. You remember all the troubles of the hero begin when something breaks in his machinery... I don't know what, heating in his apartment. So he calls the official state... how do you call them, repairmen? And of course they just complicate things, write a report and so on. Then the same night Robert De Niro comes as a kind of an illegal repairman, who what does he do, and it's the greatest act of transgression, he just corrects things, you know, immediately. And next day bureaucrats come, the official, and say, "What? You just did repair yourself? Who come?" It's a pro... and this is how he is arrested. I think that I'm much of a pessimist here. I think if we accept the irrationality of bureaucracy, I believe that if we organize it well, bureaucracy can do some really good thing as an excess, you know. It's the other way around. Bureaucracy serves itself, but as an excess it can do things. And I think this is our reality. It's so easy to criticize bureaucracy. But are you aware how health care system, school and so on... My God, I I are you aware what a terrifying thing a life would have been without bureaucracy? You have to externalize all this machinic aspect. And it can be done. My answer is tolerance but at the same time a little bit of terror. Not against the people, but against the bureaucracy. I think the price should be... I'm not exactly for North Korea. But one thing I like in North Korea and in Stalinism, I'm not crazy, you will maybe even agree with me. You know, people forget that under Stalinism there it you remember like the great Stalinist terror from '34 to '37: of the army generals were shot, of the central committee members were shot. So I think that with a little bit of terror, bureaucracy like my idea would be: be a bureaucrat fine, you are better paid, but there is always a risk of terror against you, you know. Like, not terror against against the people, but terror against bureaucracy. I know it's a crazy idea. But I just think that my God, I was part of them, all these communes self-organized and so on and so on. It works at a certain level. But then the moment it gets developed, it turns bad. You... I'll put it like this, and even to my great pleasure Negri and Hardt conceded this. You know, Toni Negri now did some interview where he said, "We have to rehabilitate taking power, leadership, vertical power and so on and so on." He admits that this... that the idea that the logic of multitudes will will grasp the entire social field, as it were, that it doesn't work. Okay, I didn't again answer you but what the hell. I liked the fact that Pomona has just appointed a new president and I think we should pass on that piece of information in your last question. Uh Pomona just appointed a new president and I think a new chief administrator, so I think this is a good... a good thing to pass on. I didn't get it. Did you is this a good fact? Is he a good guy, bad guy? Why did you mention this? I'm intrigued. Uh she's an amazing woman. In what sense? Sexual, intellectual? I mean, in my primitive Balkan country, if you say "an amazing woman," you know. No, let's drop this, I'm sorry, let's better drop... You see that serves me right, right? All right, we have a question up here. Hi, thank you. I'm I'm interested in what you said about um the ecological crisis in the world and how
absolutely impossible because this was the pure surplus pleasure of American academic left. You know, "We are leftists but..." Like I spoke once, I was even a member years ago with *October* journal. And I asked them the stupid question: "Where does the title come from?" And they told me, "You know, October, October revolution, you know." Like the big secret. But it meant absolutely nothing. You know what I mean? This the academic left should think what they did. Instead of just making fun of Trump, they should ask themselves how did they and the liberal left contribute to Trump. The metaphor I like to use is that of medicine: if we just fight Trump, and we should, we are doing what in medicine is called, if I know it correctly, symptomatic healing. You know, you have a pain, you take a pill just to ease the pain. But we should never forget that Trump was a reaction to the impotence and wrong politics of the liberal left. So the change has to happen there. I mean, I'm absolutely... I was misunderstood when I made those provocations, you know, for Trump. Trump is a nightmare. But at least you know it's a nightmare. What I fear if Hillary were to win is that people would say, "Oh, thanks God, now we are back in normal times." No, we are not! I mean, Trump was a wrong reaction to a real problem. You have to stop me. Now comes my surplus pleasure, I spoke so long and then I will be able to say, "I'm sorry, we don't have a lot of time to the debate, I would love to stay all the night with you, but unfortunately, you know..." You see the nice thing about Slavoj is he's given you the answer, now what we want to do is get the question to which that was the answer. You are a Hegelian! My ideal debate, I once proposed it but they didn't want me to do it, was a debate like this: I talk for three minutes and then you should guess the question which I was answering, you know. That would be a Hegelian reversal. All right, uh there is time for questions. I think perhaps we should go for perhaps another half hour. Um... minutes! minutes. We have got uh two microphones, uh running around the place. Have the microphones been picked up? Okay. Uh, would you just raise your hand and I'll uh send a microphone in your direction. We have one question here, and then one over there. Sorry. Hi, thank you so much for coming and speaking. Um... But! When you begin like this, I see you sharpening the knife behind your... Go grab your knife directly, yeah. Um, so earlier you were talking about uh about the value of dogma in... Of dogma? Of dogma in politics... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what role do you think religion plays in that? Ah, that's a nice question. The only problem is that of course to give you a proper answer would have meant not half an hour but more. Um, my hope, I define myself just to give you a hint if you want my position... it's cheap to make propaganda but I have a long chapter in my last theoretical book *Disparities* with the title of... it's maybe even unnecessarily provocative... with the title of "Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual or whatever I don't know"... where I literally describe what I call my atheist my my Christian atheism. Uh I'm proud to call him my friend, he is a wonderful guy, the ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. You know, the one who I think married even Lady Di or whatever. He is a wonderful guy, he is really a good theorist also. And he in his book on Dostoevsky, which I advise you to read it... it's a... sorry if I'm getting lost in these detours... but he gives the best reading of Dostoevsky's *Idiot* that I know. His reading is that far from being an innocent pure guy, that idiot is the most terrifying person. There are persons who are in themselves innocent sincere, but somehow the way they act in their immediate environment, they cause just trouble all around. And he thinks *Idiot*, you know, he brings to Nastasya Filippovna to all others... he's a pure guy who brings... but okay, Rowan Williams said that the most elementary form of religious experience... and this is my negative theology. My negative theology is not, "Oh God is beyond, we don't know what," it's literally... God is for me just a negative opening. It's this basic feeling, not feeling, is not a good word, it's much more radical existentialist, it's this basic experience that this world is out of joint. We don't fully belong here. But my idea is precisely to keep it at this level. There the way you fill in this void comes second. And I claim... I did write three, four books on Christianity... that this is the implicit lesson of Christianity for me. Christianity is something for me at least incredibly subversive. The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom. You know, Christianity... it's totally wrong to read Christianity in the sense of uh God sent a messenger, he failed, there will be second coming. No, it's no second coming. I read it literally, you know in the Bible when some pupils asked Christ, "But how will we know that you will return?", and Christ said literally, "When there will be love between two of you, I will be there." That is to say, you know, uh like let's say God is dead, which means we are abandoned, we are alone, which means we are left to ourselves. But what we have to do is not to say, "Oh, if we do well, pray, fast ourselves, we will rejoin God." No, we just have to shift the perspective: God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom, the greatest gift and so on. The message of Christianity is for me what comes after the death of Christ is not God as Hegel put it very precisely: what dies on the cross is not just a messenger of God, it's in a way God himself. What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community. Which is why the most beautiful line in Gospel for me, you know when Christ is with his disciples and somebody comes in and says, "Oh, your family is out there," and he says... not in this terms but in my version: "Fuck you, my family is here with you, my..." And that's how I read Christ saying, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you're not my pupil." No, it's not meant of course in this stupid way you have to hate them. But I think that father, mother stand for all traditional hierarchic structures. The greatness of the idea of Holy Spirit is that we can have an egalitarian emancipatory community, not just as in Buddhism more or less in death, in the beyond, here in our social life we can have it. So in this sense... okay I will not lose time now, you should stop me here... but in this sense I literally understand myself as uh an atheist Christian. And I think that Christian... I'm absolutely opposed to this ecumenic bullshit, you know, like Christianity uh we are all praying to the same God who just appears in different guises and so on, whatever whatever. No, immense things happened within religion. And there is such a radical break with Christianity. And now you will say, "But look at all the horrors that happened in Christianity." Here I like to quote uh you know that anecdote when Napoleon was crowned by Pope, emperor. When Pope approached him, Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and puts it on. And you know what the Pope answered to Napoleon? It's a wonderful answer. He said, "I know your excellency what you wanted to do. You wanted to destroy Christianity. But believe me you will not succeed. We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet." You know, I think that we have this nice paradox of how church as an organization is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting its own excess in the good sense. It's fighting the radical core of of Christianity itself. Okay, I cannot go on, just things are... No, sorry... Did you see a movie... Slavoj, you asked me to be brutal and to cut... he is an Austrian, Austrians were worse Nazis than Germans, yet. Say hello to Adolf, your grandfather or what. *Jetzt ist es fertig*. All right, so there was another question over here. Um, so you talked about uh bureaucracy and how bureaucracy doesn't really want to be efficient, it just wants to perpetuate itself. Um and then is that inherently a bad thing? And if so, how do we get away from that, especially if you want sort of a bureaucratic socialist state? I'm ready to take... I know, this is... I I wonder how other people didn't notice it before, this apparent contradiction. First I claim bureaucracy is perverted, reproducing itself, then I praise bureaucratic socialism or whatever, you know. But I think that my crazy wager is that if you allow bureaucracy to be... you bureaucracy the basic goal of bureaucracy is to reproduce itself, not to solve problems. There is another wonderful detail in the movie that I referred to, *Brazil*. You remember all the troubles of the hero begin when something breaks in his machinery... I don't know what, heating in his apartment. So he calls the official state... how do you call them, repairmen? And of course they just complicate things, write a report and so on. Then the same night Robert De Niro comes as a kind of an illegal repairman, who what does he do, and it's the greatest act of transgression, he just corrects things, you know, immediately. And next day bureaucrats come, the official, and say, "What? You just did repair yourself? Who come?" It's a pro... and this is how he is arrested. I think that I'm much of a pessimist here. I think if we accept the irrationality of bureaucracy, I believe that if we organize it well, bureaucracy can do some really good thing as an excess, you know. It's the other way around. Bureaucracy serves itself, but as an excess it can do things. And I think this is our reality. It's so easy to criticize bureaucracy. But are you aware how health care system, school and so on... My God, I I are you aware what a terrifying thing a life would have been without bureaucracy? You have to externalize all this machinic aspect. And it can be done. My answer is tolerance but at the same time a little bit of terror. Not against the people, but against the bureaucracy. I think the price should be... I'm not exactly for North Korea. But one thing I like in North Korea and in Stalinism, I'm not crazy, you will maybe even agree with me. You know, people forget that under Stalinism there it you remember like the great Stalinist terror from '34 to '37: of the army generals were shot, of the central committee members were shot. So I think that with a little bit of terror, bureaucracy like my idea would be: be a bureaucrat fine, you are better paid, but there is always a risk of terror against you, you know. Like, not terror against against the people, but terror against bureaucracy. I know it's a crazy idea. But I just think that my God, I was part of them, all these communes self-organized and so on and so on. It works at a certain level. But then the moment it gets developed, it turns bad. You... I'll put it like this, and even to my great pleasure Negri and Hardt conceded this. You know, Toni Negri now did some interview where he said, "We have to rehabilitate taking power, leadership, vertical power and so on and so on." He admits that this... that the idea that the logic of multitudes will will grasp the entire social field, as it were, that it doesn't work. Okay, I didn't again answer you but what the hell. I liked the fact that Pomona has just appointed a new president and I think we should pass on that piece of information in your last question. Uh Pomona just appointed a new president and I think a new chief administrator, so I think this is a good... a good thing to pass on. I didn't get it. Did you is this a good fact? Is he a good guy, bad guy? Why did you mention this? I'm intrigued. Uh she's an amazing woman. In what sense? Sexual, intellectual? I mean, in my primitive Balkan country, if you say "an amazing woman," you know. No, let's drop this, I'm sorry, let's better drop... You see that serves me right, right? All right, we have a question up here. Hi, thank you. I'm I'm interested in what you said about um the ecological crisis in the world and how that's going to require organization outside of the market. Um, but I also if I remember correctly in *An Examined Life*, you also had some criticisms about environmentalism as a dogma. And I saw a little bit of what you said about um excess pleasure in that in that argument. Could you talk a little bit about how to how to address the ecological crisis that you mentioned but avoid the dangers of... Okay, no, no, it's a wonderful question but again the only problem is like let's do another talk for one hour and a half. No, you know what I'm saying, that ecology is unfortunately today one of the great ideological battlefields. The main danger that I see is precisely this superego dimension. How does the ruling ideology deal with ecological topic? First, it individualizes it. The strategy is to put you, treat you as guilty, but at the same time to offer you an easy way out. The idea is first: don't just criticize, do something. And then they say: recycle, do this, buy green apples and so on and so on. And that's the catch. At the same time, they offer you this easy way out just so that you know, so that it makes you feel good, you know. Like "What can I do? I recycle, I buy green apples, I go to to Starbucks" which I really hate and then you know the cappuccino there is a little bit more expensive, but I know that one cent goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other to some stupid... It's a feel-good ecologism. So I think we should and this is really I think in a way a magical magical thinking to avoid real problems. It's the same with how we treat immigrants. I don't like in Europe this humanitarian perception of it. Of course we should help them, but basically this is not a humanitarian problem, this is a problem of geopolitics, of forms of new global capitalism and so on and so on. And I hate this idea of just, "Oh there are half a million of people in Turkey waiting, will we show our open hearts and so on." Where sorry to tell you, but the solution is not that Europe just opens itself and lets them in. What will happen there? There is no serious will in minimally addressing, for example, refugees in Libya from Africa. The first question to ask is what created this wake of refugees? New extremely brutal form of neocolonialism, for example new models of farming. The true tragedy of Africa is that not so much Europe, not even United States, these are more some Arab countries and South Korea, Japan and others, they are buying incredible quantities of the best fertile land, growing there industrial plants for exports and so on, and then of course you create dispossessed people and so on. So what I am saying is that on the one hand, I don't believe in this individual culpabilization. I don't believe... and I also don't believe in this communal thing, you know, local thing. I think that the way new... for example, sorry, to give you an example, my good friend... you really should read him... the futurologist theorist of catastrophes who teaches a little bit up from here at at I think at Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. He is also a member of some ecological communities in Europe. He told me he was at Fukushima two days after as part of... and he told me something pretty terrifying. That for a couple of hours, maybe one day, Japanese authorities thought that the radiation will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area, million people. How to do it? The only rational solution would have been to ask Russia to give them part of Siberia or what. How would this be done? You see, we have to be ready to these mega-catastrophes. We know, for example, that we don't even know if it's nature or just or human global warming that the temperatures are rising so much in in all those parts of Emirates, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, that whole parts are simply becoming unlivable there. What will happen there? Then, sorry, just to make a small detour to refugees. You know what bothers me so much and it's prohibited by the left, even to raise this question. Listen, the whole problem is now will Europe be open enough. But for example, did you notice the paradox? Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims, most. Okay. Immediately below the war zone there are some very rich Arab countries, which are Sunni countries: Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. What's their politics? They simply don't accept any refugees. All the refugees if they are in Arab countries had to go to poor Arab countries: Lebanon is full of it, Egypt and so on. Of course, these precisely are the countries like Saudi Arabia which are most connected with the West. And also we should not forget that in spite of all terror attacks and so on, the big conflict there is basically Sunnis killing Shias and vice versa and so on. So you see we have to politicize it. And again, the same with ecology. Local ecologism is always often, not always, but often openly racist. For example, I was... my favorite place on earth because it's very cold and so on, how do you pronounce it here? Iceland. Reykjavik, the capital. Okay. And I was there invited to a TV debate because they wanted to build some chemical factory close to their... on their coast, and the ecologists were against: "No, it will... it will ruin our beautiful coast and so on." But I told them, "What do you propose?" And they made it very clear to me that "Okay, let's give the capital and build it somewhere else." So I told them, "Oh, fuck you, you just want your coast clear, you know, and you don't care in some city African country city in the sense of they don't care about it, it's spoil." So I'm very much afraid against this clean local ecologism. It's usually very egotist. The second thing, I hate so much all this bullshit about sustainability and so on. If you look closely at these self-sustainable houses and so on, they usually to construct them does much more ruin the... My ideal is I spoke with a German ecologist who told me, "You know what would have been the best way? That we pack as many people as possible into big dirty mega-cities and just keep it keep the nature around like the Japanese solution." They I think more or less, if I know it correctly, they try to pack all the people into of the country and they try to keep as green as possible the others. So again, I see I see so many problems here that we really have to change our to change our attitude in a much more collective, large-scale thinking. We don't even know, you know, like when Trump and his guys say, "But we don't know what is it's not sure that it's global warming." My answer is: that's what makes it even worse. We don't even really know what is happening, you know, because we should always remember that all those statistical data, they are mythic. Like, we live now under the impression that if global temperature raised for whatever, two degrees Celsius, something like this, if they are beneath that it's okay, if they go up it's a catastrophe. But we don't know that. The catastrophe may be with one degree and a half, or maybe Earth can survive three degrees and so on. The other thing I worry very much, I've written a short text on it, is this incredible oscillation between fear, panic and renormalization. It's like with Trump. You get panic "Ooh, it's fascism," and you get Nancy Pelosi, "Oh, it's normal, no problem." I was... I spoke with some of my Chinese friends, you know, when they got that airpocalypse they called it, terrible air in Beijing and in other big cities. It's really tragic, because you know that now in Beijing you have many new cheap tourist agencies. You know what's their offer? They do daily trips out to the countryside, their only promise is "We will take you to a place where you can see the sky," you know. For... but they told me my friends, the horrible thing is how quickly the situation was renormalized. People just get used to it, you no longer wear just that white cotton mask, you wear the real, I call them Darth Vader masks, you know, big ones. And you simply get used to it. You listen to the news tomorrow, "Can I go out without a mask or not?", and life goes on. What I fear is how what I fear is this oscillation between catastrophism and then immediately this renormalization. I don't know, I'm a pessimist here. I try to avoid the logic of some of my even more pessimist ecologically-oriented friends who claim the only thing that can save us is a serious catastrophe, like a mega-catastrophe. Well, I think this is a risky strategy because, you know, who knows who will take over after? Maybe a guy will take over in comparison with whom we will praise the good old Trump times, you know what I mean. But I just think again that what we can do now is just write about it, make it clear how all these strategies of individual culpabilization, of renormalization and so on, all this mythic thinking of setting some limits, like "Oh, if we are just below two degrees we are safe." No, we don't know what's happening. Maybe maybe it is up to a point a natural because, you know, we should that's the first also myth myth to be debunked. There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch. Are we aware... I always take this example, uh how do you call it, oil reserves. Are we even aware what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes had to happen in the past of our earth so that we get oil reserves today? So the lesson of this is not "Oh, it's natural we don't have to worry," but the lesson of this is I think there is no easy way back. There is no pre-given natural balance where we just return to that and we are safe. Nature is caught in catastrophes and so on and so on. So we have to again, we have to think and because you know, the problem is that when we have real dangers, ecological threats and so on, the ability of people to delude themselves is incredible, this willingness simply not... and I can understand it. Like, you know, you read about ecological catastrophes and then you go out, there is sun, nice weather and you say, "My God, this is nature, it cannot really change." I don't think I think that our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of... fuck... no, literally, fuck you, you know it, you wrote about your wonderful book on fetish... it's of fetishist denial, it's "I know very well but still I don't believe it." I don't think we talk so much about ecology. There is this superstitious childish strategy beneath it. If we talk a lot about catastrophe, maybe it will not happen, you know. Just talk a lot to... and unfortunately I claim even in politics many fake leftists are doing this. If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen. There is wonderful passage in George Orwell, early, from late '30s, where he says that leftist intellectuals like to talk about need for the revolution just to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I think that many American academics like to do this. I follow you know, the big problem is "Do I call you black or African-American or what?" It's much better to have these debates than to really go together with black people. I notice only this correlation: most of my politically correct friends, the more they are politically correct academics, less they really have black friends and so on and so on, you know. It's a very comfortable way this official politically correct anti-racism. So again, I'm... Slavoj, we should maybe aim one more question. I love you. That's what I wanted to hear, yeah. Uh, maybe a gentleman in the blue shirt? Opportunist! You see, you move to the center. From the left, you move to the center. What comes next? For whom did you vote? Ten years ago, for Schwarzenegger, probably, no? Because he is your Austrian colleague, you know. Sorry, let's go on, one. Uh, hi Mr. Žižek, my name is Yanai. Um, thank you for speaking today. But! When you begin like this, I see you sharpening the knife behind your... Go grab your knife directly, yeah. Yeah, so uh so earlier you were talking about uh about the value of dogma in... Of dogma? Of dogma in politics... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what role do you think religion plays in that? Ah, that's a nice question. The only problem is that of course to give you a proper answer would have meant not half an hour but more. Um, my hope, I define myself just to give you a hint if you want my position... it's cheap to make propaganda but I have a long chapter in my last theoretical book *Disparities* with the title of... it's maybe even unnecessarily provocative... with the title of "Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual or whatever I don't know"... where I literally describe what I call my atheist my my Christian atheism. Uh I'm proud to call him my friend, he is a wonderful guy, the ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. You know, the one who I think married even Lady Di or whatever. He is a wonderful guy, he is really a good theorist also. And he in his book on Dostoevsky, which I advise you to read it... it's a... sorry if I'm getting lost in these detours... but he gives the best reading of Dostoevsky's *Idiot* that I know. His reading is that far from being an innocent pure guy, that idiot is the most terrifying person. There are persons who are in themselves innocent sincere, but somehow the way they act in their immediate environment, they cause just trouble all around. And he thinks *Idiot*, you know, he brings to Nastasya Filippovna to all others... he's a pure guy who brings... but okay, Rowan Williams said that the most elementary form of religious experience... and this is my negative theology. My negative theology is not, "Oh God is beyond, we don't know what," it's literally... God is for me just a negative opening. It's this basic feeling, not feeling, is not a good word, it's much more radical existentialist, it's this basic experience that this world is out of joint. We don't fully belong here. But my idea is precisely to keep it at this level. There the way you fill in this void comes second. And I claim... I did write three, four books on Christianity... that this is the implicit lesson of Christianity for me. Christianity is something for me at least incredibly subversive. The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom. You know, Christianity... it's totally wrong to read Christianity in the sense of uh God sent a messenger, he failed, there will be second coming. No, it's no second coming. I read it literally, you know in the Bible when some pupils asked Christ, "But how will we know that you will return?", and Christ said literally, "When there will be love between two of you, I will be there." That is to say, you know, uh like let's say God is dead, which means we are abandoned, we are alone, which means we are left to ourselves. But what we have to do is not to say, "Oh, if we do well, pray, fast ourselves, we will rejoin God." No, we just have to shift the perspective: God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom, the greatest gift and so on. The message of Christianity is for me what comes after the death of Christ is not God as Hegel put it very precisely: what dies on the cross is not just a messenger of God, it's in a way God himself. What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community. Which is why the most beautiful line in Gospel for me, you know when Christ is with his disciples and somebody comes in and says, "Oh, your family is out there," and he says... not in this terms but in my version: "Fuck you, my family is here with you, my..." And that's how I read Christ saying, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you're not my pupil." No, it's not meant of course in this stupid way you have to hate them. But I think that father, mother stand for all traditional hierarchic structures. The greatness of the idea of Holy Spirit is that we can have an egalitarian emancipatory community, not just as in Buddhism more or less in death, in the beyond, here in our social life we can have it. So in this sense... okay I will not lose time now, you should stop me here... but in this sense I literally understand myself as uh an atheist Christian. And I think that Christian... I'm absolutely opposed to this ecumenic bullshit, you know, like Christianity uh we are all praying to the same God who just appears in different guises and so on, whatever whatever. No, immense things happened within religion. And there is such a radical break with Christianity. And now you will say, "But look at all the horrors that happened in Christianity." Here I like to quote uh you know that anecdote when Napoleon was crowned by Pope, emperor. When Pope approached him, Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and puts it on. And you know what the Pope answered to Napoleon? It's a wonderful answer. He said, "I know your excellency what you wanted to do. You wanted to destroy Christianity. But believe me you will not succeed. We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet." You know, I think that we have this nice paradox of how church as an organization is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting its own excess in the good sense. It's fighting the radical core of of Christianity itself. Okay, I cannot go on, just things are... [Video glitches] No, sorry... Did you see a movie... Slavoj, you asked me to be brutal and to cut... he is an Austrian, Austrians were worse Nazis than Germans, yet. Say hello to Adolf, your grandfather or what. *Jetzt ist es fertig*. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so there was another question over here. Um, so you talked about uh bureaucracy and how bureaucracy doesn't really want to be efficient, it just wants to perpetuate itself. Um and then is that inherently a bad thing? And if so, how do we get away from that, especially if you want sort of a bureaucratic socialist state? I'm ready to take... I know, this is... I I wonder how other people didn't notice it before, this apparent contradiction. First I claim bureaucracy is perverted, reproducing itself, then I praise bureaucratic socialism or whatever, you know. But I think that my crazy wager is that if you allow bureaucracy to be... you bureaucracy the basic goal of bureaucracy is to reproduce itself, not to solve problems. There is another wonderful detail in the movie that I referred to, *Brazil*. You remember all the troubles of the hero begin when something breaks in his machinery... I don't know what, heating in his apartment. So he calls the official state... how do you call them, repairmen? And of course they just complicate things, write a report and so on. Then the same night Robert De Niro comes as a kind of an illegal repairman, who what does he do, and it's the greatest act of transgression, he just corrects things, you know, immediately. And next day bureaucrats come, the official, and say, "What? You just did repair yourself? Who come?" It's a pro... and this is how he is arrested. I think that I'm much of a pessimist here. I think if we accept the irrationality of bureaucracy, I believe that if we organize it well, bureaucracy can do some really good thing as an excess, you know. It's the other way around. Bureaucracy serves itself, but as an excess it can do things. And I think this is our reality. It's so easy to criticize bureaucracy. But are you aware how health care system, school and so on... My God, I I are you aware what a terrifying thing a life would have been without bureaucracy? You have to externalize all this machinic aspect. And it can be done. My answer is tolerance but at the same time a little bit of terror. Not against the people, but against the bureaucracy. I think the price should be... I'm not exactly for North Korea. But one thing I like in North Korea and in Stalinism, I'm not crazy, you will maybe even agree with me. You know, people forget that under Stalinism there it you remember like the great Stalinist terror from '34 to '37: of the army generals were shot, of the central committee members were shot. So I think that with a little bit of terror, bureaucracy like my idea would be: be a bureaucrat fine, you are better paid, but there is always a risk of terror against you, you know. Like, not terror against against the people, but terror against bureaucracy. I know it's a crazy idea. But I just think that my God, I was part of them, all these communes self-organized and so on and so on. It works at a certain level. But then the moment it gets developed, it turns bad. You... I'll put it like this, and even to my great pleasure Negri and Hardt conceded this. You know, Toni Negri now did some interview where he said, "We have to rehabilitate taking power, leadership, vertical power and so on and so on." He admits that this... that the idea that the logic of multitudes will will grasp the entire social field, as it were, that it doesn't work. Okay, I didn't again answer you but what the hell. I liked the fact that Pomona has just appointed a new president and I think we should pass on that piece of information in your last question. Uh Pomona just appointed a new president and I think a new chief administrator, so I think this is a good... a good thing to pass on. I didn't get it. Did you is this a good fact? Is he a good guy, bad guy? Why did you mention this? I'm intrigued. Uh she's an amazing woman. In what sense? Sexual, intellectual? I mean, in my primitive Balkan country, if you say "an amazing woman," you know. No, let's drop this, I'm sorry, let's better drop... You see that serves me right, right? All right, we have a question up here. Hi, thank you. I'm I'm interested in what you said about um the ecological crisis in the world and how
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that's going to require
that's going to require
Slavoj Žižek
organization outside of the market. Um, but I also if I remember correctly in *An Examined Life*, you also had some criticisms about environmentalism as a dogma. And I saw a little bit of what you said about um excess pleasure in that in that argument. Could you talk a little bit about how to how to address the ecological crisis that you mentioned but avoid the dangers of... Okay, no, no, it's a wonderful question but again the only problem is like let's do another talk for one hour and a half. No, you know what I'm saying, that ecology is unfortunately today one of the great ideological battlefields. The main danger that I see is precisely this superego dimension. How does the ruling ideology deal with ecological topic? First, it individualizes it. The strategy is to put you, treat you as guilty, but at the same time to offer you an easy way out. The idea is first: don't just criticize, do something. And then they say: recycle, do this, buy green apples and so on and so on. And that's the catch. At the same time, they offer you this easy way out just so that you know, so that it makes you feel good, you know. Like "What can I do? I recycle, I buy green apples, I go to to Starbucks" which I really hate and then you know the cappuccino there is a little bit more expensive, but I know that one cent goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other to some stupid... It's a feel-good ecologism. So I think we should and this is really I think in a way a magical magical thinking to avoid real problems. It's the same with how we treat immigrants. I don't like in Europe this humanitarian perception of it. Of course we should help them, but basically this is not a humanitarian problem, this is a problem of geopolitics, of forms of new global capitalism and so on and so on. And I hate this idea of just, "Oh there are half a million of people in Turkey waiting, will we show our open hearts and so on." Where sorry to tell you, but the solution is not that Europe just opens itself and lets them in. What will happen there? There is no serious will in minimally addressing, for example, refugees in Libya from Africa. The first question to ask is what created this wake of refugees? New extremely brutal form of neocolonialism, for example new models of farming. The true tragedy of Africa is that not so much Europe, not even United States, these are more some Arab countries and South Korea, Japan and others, they are buying incredible quantities of the best fertile land, growing there industrial plants for exports and so on, and then of course you create dispossessed people and so on. So what I am saying is
organization outside of the market. Um, but I also if I remember correctly in *An Examined Life*, you also had some criticisms about environmentalism as a dogma. And I saw a little bit of what you said about um excess pleasure in that in that argument. Could you talk a little bit about how to how to address the ecological crisis that you mentioned but avoid the dangers of... Okay, no, no, it's a wonderful question but again the only problem is like let's do another talk for one hour and a half. No, you know what I'm saying, that ecology is unfortunately today one of the great ideological battlefields. The main danger that I see is precisely this superego dimension. How does the ruling ideology deal with ecological topic? First, it individualizes it. The strategy is to put you, treat you as guilty, but at the same time to offer you an easy way out. The idea is first: don't just criticize, do something. And then they say: recycle, do this, buy green apples and so on and so on. And that's the catch. At the same time, they offer you this easy way out just so that you know, so that it makes you feel good, you know. Like "What can I do? I recycle, I buy green apples, I go to to Starbucks" which I really hate and then you know the cappuccino there is a little bit more expensive, but I know that one cent goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other to some stupid... It's a feel-good ecologism. So I think we should and this is really I think in a way a magical magical thinking to avoid real problems. It's the same with how we treat immigrants. I don't like in Europe this humanitarian perception of it. Of course we should help them, but basically this is not a humanitarian problem, this is a problem of geopolitics, of forms of new global capitalism and so on and so on. And I hate this idea of just, "Oh there are half a million of people in Turkey waiting, will we show our open hearts and so on." Where sorry to tell you, but the solution is not that Europe just opens itself and lets them in. What will happen there? There is no serious will in minimally addressing, for example, refugees in Libya from Africa. The first question to ask is what created this wake of refugees? New extremely brutal form of neocolonialism, for example new models of farming. The true tragedy of Africa is that not so much Europe, not even United States, these are more some Arab countries and South Korea, Japan and others, they are buying incredible quantities of the best fertile land, growing there industrial plants for exports and so on, and then of course you create dispossessed people and so on. So what I am saying is
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that on the one hand, I don't believe in this individual culpabilization. I don't believe... and I also don't believe in this communal thing,
that on the one hand, I don't believe in this individual culpabilization. I don't believe... and I also don't believe in this communal thing,
Slavoj Žižek
you know, local thing. I think that the way new... for example, sorry, to give you an example, my good friend... you really should read him... the futurologist theorist of catastrophes who teaches a little bit up from here at at I think at Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. He is also a member of some ecological communities in Europe. He told me
you know, local thing. I think that the way new... for example, sorry, to give you an example, my good friend... you really should read him... the futurologist theorist of catastrophes who teaches a little bit up from here at at I think at Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. He is also a member of some ecological communities in Europe. He told me
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he was at Fukushima two days after as part of... and he told me something pretty terrifying. That for a couple of hours, maybe one day, Japanese authorities
he was at Fukushima two days after as part of... and he told me something pretty terrifying. That for a couple of hours, maybe one day, Japanese authorities
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thought that the radiation will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area, million people. How to do it? The only rational solution
thought that the radiation will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area, million people. How to do it? The only rational solution
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would have been to ask Russia to give them part of Siberia or what. How would this be done? You see, we have to be ready to these mega-catastrophes. We know, for example, that we don't even know if it's nature or just or human global warming that the temperatures are rising so much in in all those parts of Emirates, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, that whole parts are simply becoming unlivable there. What will happen there? Then, sorry, just to make a small detour to refugees. You
would have been to ask Russia to give them part of Siberia or what. How would this be done? You see, we have to be ready to these mega-catastrophes. We know, for example, that we don't even know if it's nature or just or human global warming that the temperatures are rising so much in in all those parts of Emirates, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, that whole parts are simply becoming unlivable there. What will happen there? Then, sorry, just to make a small detour to refugees. You
Slavoj Žižek
know what bothers me so much and it's prohibited by the left, even to raise this question. Listen, the whole problem is now will Europe be open enough. But for example, did you notice the paradox? Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims, most. Okay. Immediately below the war zone there are some very rich Arab countries, which are Sunni countries: Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. What's their politics? They simply don't accept any refugees. All the refugees if they are in Arab countries had to go to poor Arab countries: Lebanon is full of it, Egypt and so on. Of course, these precisely are the countries like Saudi Arabia which are most connected with the West. And also we should not forget that in spite of all terror attacks and so on, the big conflict there is basically Sunnis killing Shias and vice versa and so on. So you see we have to politicize it. And again, the same with ecology. Local ecologism is always often, not always, but often openly racist. For example, I was... my favorite place on earth because it's very cold and so on, how do you pronounce it here? Iceland. Reykjavik, the capital. Okay. And I was there invited to a TV debate because they wanted to build some chemical factory close to their... on their coast, and the ecologists were against: "No, it will... it will ruin our beautiful coast and so on." But I told them, "What do you propose?" And they made it very clear to me that "Okay, let's give the capital and build it somewhere else." So I told them, "Oh, fuck you, you just want your coast clear, you know, and you don't care in some city African country city in the sense of they don't care about it, it's spoil." So I'm very much afraid against this clean local ecologism. It's usually very egotist. The second thing, I hate so much all this bullshit about sustainability and so on. If you look closely at these self-sustainable houses and so on, they usually to construct them does much more ruin the... My ideal is I spoke with a German ecologist who told me, "You know what would have been the best way? That we pack as many people as possible into big dirty mega-cities and just keep it keep the nature around like the Japanese solution." They I think more or less, if I know it correctly, they try to pack all the people into of the country and they try to keep as green as possible the others. So again, I see I see so many problems here that we really have to change our to change our attitude in a much more collective, large-scale thinking. We don't even know, you know, like when Trump and his guys say, "But we don't know what is it's not sure that it's global warming." My answer is: that's what makes it even worse. We don't even really know what is happening, you know, because we should always remember that all those statistical data, they are mythic. Like, we live now under the impression that if global temperature raised for whatever, two degrees Celsius, something like this, if they are beneath that it's okay, if they go up it's a catastrophe. But we don't know that. The catastrophe may be with one degree and a half, or maybe Earth can survive three degrees and so on. The other thing I worry very much, I've written a short text on it, is this incredible oscillation between fear, panic and renormalization. It's like with Trump. You get panic "Ooh, it's fascism," and you get Nancy Pelosi, "Oh, it's normal, no problem." I was... I spoke with some of my Chinese friends, you know, when they got that airpocalypse they called it, terrible air in Beijing and in other big cities. It's really tragic, because you know that now in Beijing you have many new cheap tourist agencies. You know what's their offer? They do daily trips out to the countryside, their only promise is "We will take you to a place where you can see the sky," you know. For... but they told me my friends, the horrible thing is how quickly the situation was renormalized. People just get used to it, you no longer wear just that white cotton mask, you wear the real, I call them Darth Vader masks, you know, big ones. And you simply get used to it. You listen to the news tomorrow, "Can I go out without a mask or not?", and life goes on. What I fear is how what I fear is this oscillation between catastrophism and then immediately this renormalization. I don't know, I'm a pessimist here. I try to avoid the logic of some of my even more pessimist ecologically-oriented friends who claim the only thing that can save us is a serious catastrophe, like a mega-catastrophe. Well, I think this is a risky strategy because, you know, who knows who will take over after? Maybe a guy will take over in comparison with whom we will praise the good old Trump times, you know what I mean. But I just think again that what we can do now is just write about it, make it clear how all these strategies of individual culpabilization, of renormalization and so on, all this mythic thinking of setting some limits, like "Oh, if we are just below two degrees we are safe." No, we don't know what's happening. Maybe maybe it is up to a point a natural because, you know, we should that's the first also myth myth to be debunked. There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch. Are we aware... I always take this example, uh how do you call it, oil reserves. Are we even aware what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes had to happen in the past of our earth so that we get oil reserves today? So the lesson of this is not "Oh, it's natural we don't have to worry," but the lesson of this is I think there is no easy way back. There is no pre-given natural balance where we just return to that and we are safe. Nature is caught in catastrophes and so on and so on. So we have to
know what bothers me so much and it's prohibited by the left, even to raise this question. Listen, the whole problem is now will Europe be open enough. But for example, did you notice the paradox? Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims, most. Okay. Immediately below the war zone there are some very rich Arab countries, which are Sunni countries: Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. What's their politics? They simply don't accept any refugees. All the refugees if they are in Arab countries had to go to poor Arab countries: Lebanon is full of it, Egypt and so on. Of course, these precisely are the countries like Saudi Arabia which are most connected with the West. And also we should not forget that in spite of all terror attacks and so on, the big conflict there is basically Sunnis killing Shias and vice versa and so on. So you see we have to politicize it. And again, the same with ecology. Local ecologism is always often, not always, but often openly racist. For example, I was... my favorite place on earth because it's very cold and so on, how do you pronounce it here? Iceland. Reykjavik, the capital. Okay. And I was there invited to a TV debate because they wanted to build some chemical factory close to their... on their coast, and the ecologists were against: "No, it will... it will ruin our beautiful coast and so on." But I told them, "What do you propose?" And they made it very clear to me that "Okay, let's give the capital and build it somewhere else." So I told them, "Oh, fuck you, you just want your coast clear, you know, and you don't care in some city African country city in the sense of they don't care about it, it's spoil." So I'm very much afraid against this clean local ecologism. It's usually very egotist. The second thing, I hate so much all this bullshit about sustainability and so on. If you look closely at these self-sustainable houses and so on, they usually to construct them does much more ruin the... My ideal is I spoke with a German ecologist who told me, "You know what would have been the best way? That we pack as many people as possible into big dirty mega-cities and just keep it keep the nature around like the Japanese solution." They I think more or less, if I know it correctly, they try to pack all the people into of the country and they try to keep as green as possible the others. So again, I see I see so many problems here that we really have to change our to change our attitude in a much more collective, large-scale thinking. We don't even know, you know, like when Trump and his guys say, "But we don't know what is it's not sure that it's global warming." My answer is: that's what makes it even worse. We don't even really know what is happening, you know, because we should always remember that all those statistical data, they are mythic. Like, we live now under the impression that if global temperature raised for whatever, two degrees Celsius, something like this, if they are beneath that it's okay, if they go up it's a catastrophe. But we don't know that. The catastrophe may be with one degree and a half, or maybe Earth can survive three degrees and so on. The other thing I worry very much, I've written a short text on it, is this incredible oscillation between fear, panic and renormalization. It's like with Trump. You get panic "Ooh, it's fascism," and you get Nancy Pelosi, "Oh, it's normal, no problem." I was... I spoke with some of my Chinese friends, you know, when they got that airpocalypse they called it, terrible air in Beijing and in other big cities. It's really tragic, because you know that now in Beijing you have many new cheap tourist agencies. You know what's their offer? They do daily trips out to the countryside, their only promise is "We will take you to a place where you can see the sky," you know. For... but they told me my friends, the horrible thing is how quickly the situation was renormalized. People just get used to it, you no longer wear just that white cotton mask, you wear the real, I call them Darth Vader masks, you know, big ones. And you simply get used to it. You listen to the news tomorrow, "Can I go out without a mask or not?", and life goes on. What I fear is how what I fear is this oscillation between catastrophism and then immediately this renormalization. I don't know, I'm a pessimist here. I try to avoid the logic of some of my even more pessimist ecologically-oriented friends who claim the only thing that can save us is a serious catastrophe, like a mega-catastrophe. Well, I think this is a risky strategy because, you know, who knows who will take over after? Maybe a guy will take over in comparison with whom we will praise the good old Trump times, you know what I mean. But I just think again that what we can do now is just write about it, make it clear how all these strategies of individual culpabilization, of renormalization and so on, all this mythic thinking of setting some limits, like "Oh, if we are just below two degrees we are safe." No, we don't know what's happening. Maybe maybe it is up to a point a natural because, you know, we should that's the first also myth myth to be debunked. There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch. Are we aware... I always take this example, uh how do you call it, oil reserves. Are we even aware what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes had to happen in the past of our earth so that we get oil reserves today? So the lesson of this is not "Oh, it's natural we don't have to worry," but the lesson of this is I think there is no easy way back. There is no pre-given natural balance where we just return to that and we are safe. Nature is caught in catastrophes and so on and so on. So we have to
unknown
again, we have to think and because you know, the problem is that when we have real dangers, ecological
again, we have to think and because you know, the problem is that when we have real dangers, ecological
Slavoj Žižek
threats and so on, the ability of people to delude themselves is incredible, this willingness simply not... and I can understand it. Like, you know, you read about ecological catastrophes and then you go
threats and so on, the ability of people to delude themselves is incredible, this willingness simply not... and I can understand it. Like, you know, you read about ecological catastrophes and then you go
unknown
out, there is sun, nice weather and you say, "My God, this is nature, it cannot really
out, there is sun, nice weather and you say, "My God, this is nature, it cannot really
unknown
change." I don't think I think that our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of... fuck... no, literally, fuck you, you know it, you wrote about your wonderful book on fetish... it's of fetishist
change." I don't think I think that our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of... fuck... no, literally, fuck you, you know it, you wrote about your wonderful book on fetish... it's of fetishist
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denial,
denial,
unknown
it's "I know very well but still I don't believe it." I don't think
it's "I know very well but still I don't believe it." I don't think
unknown
we talk so much about ecology. There is this superstitious childish strategy beneath it. If we talk a lot about catastrophe,
we talk so much about ecology. There is this superstitious childish strategy beneath it. If we talk a lot about catastrophe,
Slavoj Žižek
maybe it will not happen, you know. Just talk a lot to... and unfortunately I claim even in politics many fake leftists are doing this. If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen. There is wonderful passage in George Orwell, early, from late '30s, where he says that leftist intellectuals like to talk about need for the revolution just to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I think that many American academics like to do this. I follow you know, the big problem is "Do I call you black or African-American or what?" It's much better to have these debates than to really go together with black people. I notice only this correlation: most of my politically correct friends, the more they are politically correct academics, less they really have black friends and so on and so on, you know. It's a very comfortable way this official politically correct anti-racism. So again, I'm... Slavoj, we should maybe aim one more question. I love you. That's what I wanted to hear, yeah. Uh, maybe a gentleman in the blue shirt? Opportunist! You see, you move to the center. From the left, you move to the center. What comes next? For whom did you vote? Ten years ago, for Schwarzenegger, probably, no? Because he is your Austrian colleague, you know. Sorry, let's go on, one. Uh, hi Mr. Žižek, my name is Yanai. Um, thank you for speaking today. But! When you begin like this, I see you sharpening the knife behind your... Go grab your knife directly, yeah. Um, so earlier you were talking about uh about the value of dogma in... Of dogma? Of dogma in politics... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what role do you think religion plays in that? Ah, that's a nice question. The only problem is that of course to give you a proper answer would have meant not half an hour but more. Um, my hope, I define myself just to give you a hint if you want my position... it's cheap to make propaganda but I have a long chapter in my last theoretical book *Disparities* with the title of... it's maybe even unnecessarily provocative... with the title of "Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual or whatever I don't know"... where I literally describe what I call my atheist my my Christian atheism. Uh I'm proud to call him my friend, he is a wonderful guy, the ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. You know, the one who I think married even Lady Di or whatever. He is a wonderful guy, he is really a good theorist also. And he in his book on Dostoevsky, which I advise you to read it... it's a... sorry if I'm getting lost in these detours... but he gives the best reading of Dostoevsky's *Idiot* that I know. His reading is that far from being an innocent pure guy, that idiot is the most terrifying person. There are persons who are in themselves innocent sincere, but somehow the way they act in their immediate environment, they cause just trouble all around. And he thinks *Idiot*, you know, he brings to Nastasya Filippovna to all others... he's a pure guy who brings... but okay, Rowan Williams said that the most elementary form of religious experience... and this is my negative theology. My negative theology is not, "Oh God is beyond, we don't know what," it's literally... God is for me just a negative opening. It's this basic feeling, not feeling, is not a good
maybe it will not happen, you know. Just talk a lot to... and unfortunately I claim even in politics many fake leftists are doing this. If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen. There is wonderful passage in George Orwell, early, from late '30s, where he says that leftist intellectuals like to talk about need for the revolution just to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I think that many American academics like to do this. I follow you know, the big problem is "Do I call you black or African-American or what?" It's much better to have these debates than to really go together with black people. I notice only this correlation: most of my politically correct friends, the more they are politically correct academics, less they really have black friends and so on and so on, you know. It's a very comfortable way this official politically correct anti-racism. So again, I'm... Slavoj, we should maybe aim one more question. I love you. That's what I wanted to hear, yeah. Uh, maybe a gentleman in the blue shirt? Opportunist! You see, you move to the center. From the left, you move to the center. What comes next? For whom did you vote? Ten years ago, for Schwarzenegger, probably, no? Because he is your Austrian colleague, you know. Sorry, let's go on, one. Uh, hi Mr. Žižek, my name is Yanai. Um, thank you for speaking today. But! When you begin like this, I see you sharpening the knife behind your... Go grab your knife directly, yeah. Um, so earlier you were talking about uh about the value of dogma in... Of dogma? Of dogma in politics... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what role do you think religion plays in that? Ah, that's a nice question. The only problem is that of course to give you a proper answer would have meant not half an hour but more. Um, my hope, I define myself just to give you a hint if you want my position... it's cheap to make propaganda but I have a long chapter in my last theoretical book *Disparities* with the title of... it's maybe even unnecessarily provocative... with the title of "Is God Unconscious, Stupid, Evil, or Just Virtual or whatever I don't know"... where I literally describe what I call my atheist my my Christian atheism. Uh I'm proud to call him my friend, he is a wonderful guy, the ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. You know, the one who I think married even Lady Di or whatever. He is a wonderful guy, he is really a good theorist also. And he in his book on Dostoevsky, which I advise you to read it... it's a... sorry if I'm getting lost in these detours... but he gives the best reading of Dostoevsky's *Idiot* that I know. His reading is that far from being an innocent pure guy, that idiot is the most terrifying person. There are persons who are in themselves innocent sincere, but somehow the way they act in their immediate environment, they cause just trouble all around. And he thinks *Idiot*, you know, he brings to Nastasya Filippovna to all others... he's a pure guy who brings... but okay, Rowan Williams said that the most elementary form of religious experience... and this is my negative theology. My negative theology is not, "Oh God is beyond, we don't know what," it's literally... God is for me just a negative opening. It's this basic feeling, not feeling, is not a good
unknown
word, it's much more radical existentialist, it's this basic experience that this world is out of joint. We don't fully belong here. But my idea is precisely to keep it at this level. There the way you fill in this void comes second. And I claim... I did write three, four books on Christianity... that this is the
word, it's much more radical existentialist, it's this basic experience that this world is out of joint. We don't fully belong here. But my idea is precisely to keep it at this level. There the way you fill in this void comes second. And I claim... I did write three, four books on Christianity... that this is the
Slavoj Žižek
implicit lesson of Christianity for me. Christianity is something for me at least incredibly
implicit lesson of Christianity for me. Christianity is something for me at least incredibly
unknown
subversive.
subversive.
Slavoj Žižek
The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom. You know, Christianity... it's totally wrong to read Christianity in the sense
The message of Christianity is: God dies. And we are the... God's gift to us is our freedom. You know, Christianity... it's totally wrong to read Christianity in the sense
unknown
of uh God sent a messenger, he failed, there will be second coming. No, it's no second
of uh God sent a messenger, he failed, there will be second coming. No, it's no second
unknown
coming. I read it literally, you know in the Bible when some pupils asked Christ, "But how will we know that you will return?", and Christ said literally, "When there will be love between two of you, I will be there." That is to say, you know, uh like let's say God is dead, which means we are abandoned, we are alone, which means we are left to ourselves. But what we have to do is not to say, "Oh, if we do well, pray, fast ourselves, we will rejoin God." No, we just have to shift the perspective:
coming. I read it literally, you know in the Bible when some pupils asked Christ, "But how will we know that you will return?", and Christ said literally, "When there will be love between two of you, I will be there." That is to say, you know, uh like let's say God is dead, which means we are abandoned, we are alone, which means we are left to ourselves. But what we have to do is not to say, "Oh, if we do well, pray, fast ourselves, we will rejoin God." No, we just have to shift the perspective:
Slavoj Žižek
God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom, the greatest gift and so on. The message of Christianity is for me what comes after the death of Christ is not God as Hegel put it very precisely: what dies on the cross is not just a messenger of God, it's in a way God himself. What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community. Which is why the most beautiful line in Gospel for me, you know when Christ is with his disciples and somebody comes in and says, "Oh, your family is out there," and he says... not in this terms but in my version: "Fuck you, my family is here with you, my..." And that's how I read Christ saying, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you're not my pupil." No, it's not meant of course in this stupid way you have to hate them. But I think that father, mother stand for all traditional hierarchic structures. The greatness of the idea of Holy Spirit is that we can have an egalitarian emancipatory community, not just as in Buddhism more or less in death, in the beyond, here in our social life we can have it. So in this sense... okay I will not lose time now, you should stop me here... but in this sense I literally understand myself as uh an atheist Christian. And I think that Christian... I'm absolutely opposed to this ecumenic bullshit, you know, like Christianity uh we are all praying to the same God who just appears in different guises and so on, whatever whatever. No, immense things happened within religion. And there is such a radical break with Christianity. And now you will say, "But look at all the horrors that happened in Christianity." Here I like to quote uh you know that anecdote when Napoleon was crowned by Pope, emperor. When Pope approached him, Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and puts it on. And you know what the Pope answered to Napoleon? It's a wonderful answer. He said, "I know your excellency what you wanted to do. You wanted to destroy Christianity. But believe me you will not succeed. We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet." You know, I think that we have this nice paradox of how church as an organization is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting its own excess in the good sense. It's fighting the radical core of of Christianity itself. Okay, I cannot go on, just things are... No, sorry... Did you see a movie... Slavoj, you asked me to be brutal and to cut... he is an Austrian, Austrians were worse Nazis than Germans, yet. Say hello to Adolf, your grandfather or what. *Jetzt ist es fertig*. All right, so there was another question over here. Um, so you talked about uh bureaucracy and how bureaucracy doesn't really want to be efficient, it just wants to perpetuate itself. Um and then is that inherently a bad thing? And if so, how do we get away from that, especially if you want sort of a bureaucratic socialist state? I'm ready to take... I know, this is... I I wonder how other people didn't notice it before, this apparent contradiction. First I claim bureaucracy is perverted, reproducing itself, then I praise bureaucratic socialism or whatever, you know. But I think that my crazy wager is that if you allow bureaucracy to be... you bureaucracy the basic goal of bureaucracy is to reproduce itself, not to solve problems. There is another wonderful detail in the movie that I referred to, *Brazil*. You remember all the troubles of the hero begin when something breaks in his machinery... I don't know what, heating in his apartment. So he calls the official state... how do you call them, repairmen? And of course they just complicate things, write a report and so on. Then the same night Robert De Niro comes as a kind of an illegal repairman, who what does he do, and it's the greatest act of transgression, he just corrects things, you know, immediately. And next day bureaucrats come, the official, and say, "What? You just did repair yourself? Who come?" It's a pro... and this is how he is arrested. I think that I'm much of a pessimist here. I think if we accept the irrationality of bureaucracy, I believe that if we organize it well, bureaucracy can do some really good thing as an excess, you know. It's the other way around. Bureaucracy serves itself, but as an excess it can do things. And I think this is our reality. It's so easy to criticize bureaucracy. But are you aware how health care system, school and so on... My God, I I are you aware what a terrifying thing a life would have been without bureaucracy? You have to externalize all this machinic aspect. And it can be done. My answer is tolerance but at the same time a little bit of terror. Not against the people, but against the bureaucracy. I think the price should be... I'm not exactly for North Korea. But one thing I like in North Korea and in Stalinism, I'm not crazy, you will maybe even agree with me. You know, people forget that under Stalinism there it you remember like the great Stalinist terror from '34 to '37: of the army generals were shot, of the central committee members were shot. So I think that with a little bit of terror, bureaucracy like my idea would be: be a bureaucrat fine, you are better paid, but there is always a risk of terror against you, you know. Like, not terror against against the people, but terror against bureaucracy. I know it's a crazy idea. But I just think that my God, I was part of them, all these communes self-organized and so on and so on. It works at a certain level. But then the moment it gets developed, it turns bad. You... I'll put it like this, and even to my great pleasure Negri and Hardt conceded this. You know, Toni Negri now did some interview where he said, "We have to rehabilitate taking power, leadership, vertical power and so on and so on." He admits that this... that the idea that the logic of multitudes will will grasp the entire social field, as it were, that it doesn't work. Okay, I didn't again answer you but what the hell. I liked the fact that Pomona has just appointed a new president and I think we should pass on that piece of information in your last question. Uh Pomona just appointed a new president and I think a new chief administrator, so I think this is a good... a good thing to pass on. I didn't get it. Did you is this a good fact? Is he a good guy, bad guy? Why did you mention this? I'm intrigued. Uh she's an amazing woman. In what sense? Sexual, intellectual? I mean, in my primitive Balkan country, if you say "an amazing woman," you know. No, let's drop this, I'm sorry, let's better drop... You see that serves me right, right? All right, we have a question up here. Hi, thank you. I'm I'm interested in what you said about um the ecological crisis in the world and how that's going to require organization outside of the market. Um, but I also if I remember correctly in *An Examined Life*, you also had some criticisms about environmentalism as a dogma. And I saw a little bit of what you said about um excess pleasure in that in that argument. Could you talk a little bit about how to how to address the ecological crisis that you mentioned but avoid the dangers of... Okay, no, no, it's a wonderful question but again the only problem is like let's do another talk for one hour and a half. No, you know what I'm saying, that ecology is unfortunately today one of the great ideological battlefields. The main danger that I see is precisely this superego dimension. How does the ruling ideology deal with ecological topic? First, it individualizes it. The strategy is to put you, treat you as guilty, but at the same time to offer you an easy way out. The idea is first: don't just criticize, do something. And then they say: recycle, do this, buy green apples and so on and so on. And that's the catch. At the same time, they offer you this easy way out just so that you know, so that it makes you feel good, you know. Like "What can I do? I recycle, I buy green apples, I go to to Starbucks" which I really hate and then you know the cappuccino there is a little bit more expensive, but I know that one cent goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other to some stupid... It's a feel-good ecologism. So I think we should and this is really I think in a way a magical magical thinking to avoid real problems. It's the same with how we treat immigrants. I don't like in Europe this humanitarian perception of it. Of course we should help them, but basically this is not a humanitarian problem, this is a problem of geopolitics, of forms of new global capitalism and so on and so on. And I hate this idea of just, "Oh there are half a million of people in Turkey waiting, will we show our open hearts and so on." Where sorry to tell you, but the solution is not that Europe just opens itself and lets them in. What will happen there? There is no serious will in minimally addressing, for example, refugees in Libya from Africa. The first question to ask is what created this wake of refugees? New extremely brutal form of neocolonialism, for example new models of farming. The true tragedy of Africa is that not so much Europe, not even United States, these are more some Arab countries and South Korea, Japan and others, they are buying incredible quantities of the best fertile land, growing there industrial plants for exports and so on, and then of course you create dispossessed people and so on. So what I am saying is that on the one hand, I don't believe in this individual culpabilization. I don't believe... and I also don't believe in this communal thing, you know, local thing. I think that the way new... for example, sorry, to give you an example, my good friend... you really should read him... the futurologist theorist of catastrophes who teaches a little bit up from here at at I think at Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. He is also a member of some ecological communities in Europe. He told me he was at Fukushima two days after as part of... and he told me something pretty terrifying. That for a couple of hours, maybe one day, Japanese authorities thought that the radiation will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area, million people. How to do it? The only rational solution would have been to ask Russia to give them part of Siberia or what. How would this be done? You see, we have to be ready to these mega-catastrophes. We know, for example, that we don't even know if it's nature or just or human global warming that the temperatures are rising so much in in all those parts of Emirates, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, that whole parts are simply becoming unlivable there. What will happen there? Then, sorry, just to make a small detour to refugees. You know what bothers me so much and it's prohibited by the left, even to raise this question. Listen, the whole problem is now will Europe be open enough. But for example, did you notice the paradox? Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims, most. Okay. Immediately below the war zone there are some very rich Arab countries, which are Sunni countries: Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. What's their politics? They simply don't accept any refugees. All the refugees if they are in Arab countries had to go to poor Arab countries: Lebanon is full of it, Egypt and so on. Of course, these precisely are the countries like Saudi Arabia which are most connected with the West. And also we should not forget that in spite of all
God left us alone, which means God gave us freedom, the greatest gift and so on. The message of Christianity is for me what comes after the death of Christ is not God as Hegel put it very precisely: what dies on the cross is not just a messenger of God, it's in a way God himself. What comes after is the Holy Ghost which is... okay, I will be consciously provocative... communist party, psychoanalytic association, whatever, is an emancipatory community. Which is why the most beautiful line in Gospel for me, you know when Christ is with his disciples and somebody comes in and says, "Oh, your family is out there," and he says... not in this terms but in my version: "Fuck you, my family is here with you, my..." And that's how I read Christ saying, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you're not my pupil." No, it's not meant of course in this stupid way you have to hate them. But I think that father, mother stand for all traditional hierarchic structures. The greatness of the idea of Holy Spirit is that we can have an egalitarian emancipatory community, not just as in Buddhism more or less in death, in the beyond, here in our social life we can have it. So in this sense... okay I will not lose time now, you should stop me here... but in this sense I literally understand myself as uh an atheist Christian. And I think that Christian... I'm absolutely opposed to this ecumenic bullshit, you know, like Christianity uh we are all praying to the same God who just appears in different guises and so on, whatever whatever. No, immense things happened within religion. And there is such a radical break with Christianity. And now you will say, "But look at all the horrors that happened in Christianity." Here I like to quote uh you know that anecdote when Napoleon was crowned by Pope, emperor. When Pope approached him, Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and puts it on. And you know what the Pope answered to Napoleon? It's a wonderful answer. He said, "I know your excellency what you wanted to do. You wanted to destroy Christianity. But believe me you will not succeed. We, the church, are trying to do this for almost years yet." You know, I think that we have this nice paradox of how church as an organization is not really fighting paganism, it's fighting its own excess in the good sense. It's fighting the radical core of of Christianity itself. Okay, I cannot go on, just things are... No, sorry... Did you see a movie... Slavoj, you asked me to be brutal and to cut... he is an Austrian, Austrians were worse Nazis than Germans, yet. Say hello to Adolf, your grandfather or what. *Jetzt ist es fertig*. All right, so there was another question over here. Um, so you talked about uh bureaucracy and how bureaucracy doesn't really want to be efficient, it just wants to perpetuate itself. Um and then is that inherently a bad thing? And if so, how do we get away from that, especially if you want sort of a bureaucratic socialist state? I'm ready to take... I know, this is... I I wonder how other people didn't notice it before, this apparent contradiction. First I claim bureaucracy is perverted, reproducing itself, then I praise bureaucratic socialism or whatever, you know. But I think that my crazy wager is that if you allow bureaucracy to be... you bureaucracy the basic goal of bureaucracy is to reproduce itself, not to solve problems. There is another wonderful detail in the movie that I referred to, *Brazil*. You remember all the troubles of the hero begin when something breaks in his machinery... I don't know what, heating in his apartment. So he calls the official state... how do you call them, repairmen? And of course they just complicate things, write a report and so on. Then the same night Robert De Niro comes as a kind of an illegal repairman, who what does he do, and it's the greatest act of transgression, he just corrects things, you know, immediately. And next day bureaucrats come, the official, and say, "What? You just did repair yourself? Who come?" It's a pro... and this is how he is arrested. I think that I'm much of a pessimist here. I think if we accept the irrationality of bureaucracy, I believe that if we organize it well, bureaucracy can do some really good thing as an excess, you know. It's the other way around. Bureaucracy serves itself, but as an excess it can do things. And I think this is our reality. It's so easy to criticize bureaucracy. But are you aware how health care system, school and so on... My God, I I are you aware what a terrifying thing a life would have been without bureaucracy? You have to externalize all this machinic aspect. And it can be done. My answer is tolerance but at the same time a little bit of terror. Not against the people, but against the bureaucracy. I think the price should be... I'm not exactly for North Korea. But one thing I like in North Korea and in Stalinism, I'm not crazy, you will maybe even agree with me. You know, people forget that under Stalinism there it you remember like the great Stalinist terror from '34 to '37: of the army generals were shot, of the central committee members were shot. So I think that with a little bit of terror, bureaucracy like my idea would be: be a bureaucrat fine, you are better paid, but there is always a risk of terror against you, you know. Like, not terror against against the people, but terror against bureaucracy. I know it's a crazy idea. But I just think that my God, I was part of them, all these communes self-organized and so on and so on. It works at a certain level. But then the moment it gets developed, it turns bad. You... I'll put it like this, and even to my great pleasure Negri and Hardt conceded this. You know, Toni Negri now did some interview where he said, "We have to rehabilitate taking power, leadership, vertical power and so on and so on." He admits that this... that the idea that the logic of multitudes will will grasp the entire social field, as it were, that it doesn't work. Okay, I didn't again answer you but what the hell. I liked the fact that Pomona has just appointed a new president and I think we should pass on that piece of information in your last question. Uh Pomona just appointed a new president and I think a new chief administrator, so I think this is a good... a good thing to pass on. I didn't get it. Did you is this a good fact? Is he a good guy, bad guy? Why did you mention this? I'm intrigued. Uh she's an amazing woman. In what sense? Sexual, intellectual? I mean, in my primitive Balkan country, if you say "an amazing woman," you know. No, let's drop this, I'm sorry, let's better drop... You see that serves me right, right? All right, we have a question up here. Hi, thank you. I'm I'm interested in what you said about um the ecological crisis in the world and how that's going to require organization outside of the market. Um, but I also if I remember correctly in *An Examined Life*, you also had some criticisms about environmentalism as a dogma. And I saw a little bit of what you said about um excess pleasure in that in that argument. Could you talk a little bit about how to how to address the ecological crisis that you mentioned but avoid the dangers of... Okay, no, no, it's a wonderful question but again the only problem is like let's do another talk for one hour and a half. No, you know what I'm saying, that ecology is unfortunately today one of the great ideological battlefields. The main danger that I see is precisely this superego dimension. How does the ruling ideology deal with ecological topic? First, it individualizes it. The strategy is to put you, treat you as guilty, but at the same time to offer you an easy way out. The idea is first: don't just criticize, do something. And then they say: recycle, do this, buy green apples and so on and so on. And that's the catch. At the same time, they offer you this easy way out just so that you know, so that it makes you feel good, you know. Like "What can I do? I recycle, I buy green apples, I go to to Starbucks" which I really hate and then you know the cappuccino there is a little bit more expensive, but I know that one cent goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other to some stupid... It's a feel-good ecologism. So I think we should and this is really I think in a way a magical magical thinking to avoid real problems. It's the same with how we treat immigrants. I don't like in Europe this humanitarian perception of it. Of course we should help them, but basically this is not a humanitarian problem, this is a problem of geopolitics, of forms of new global capitalism and so on and so on. And I hate this idea of just, "Oh there are half a million of people in Turkey waiting, will we show our open hearts and so on." Where sorry to tell you, but the solution is not that Europe just opens itself and lets them in. What will happen there? There is no serious will in minimally addressing, for example, refugees in Libya from Africa. The first question to ask is what created this wake of refugees? New extremely brutal form of neocolonialism, for example new models of farming. The true tragedy of Africa is that not so much Europe, not even United States, these are more some Arab countries and South Korea, Japan and others, they are buying incredible quantities of the best fertile land, growing there industrial plants for exports and so on, and then of course you create dispossessed people and so on. So what I am saying is that on the one hand, I don't believe in this individual culpabilization. I don't believe... and I also don't believe in this communal thing, you know, local thing. I think that the way new... for example, sorry, to give you an example, my good friend... you really should read him... the futurologist theorist of catastrophes who teaches a little bit up from here at at I think at Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. He is also a member of some ecological communities in Europe. He told me he was at Fukushima two days after as part of... and he told me something pretty terrifying. That for a couple of hours, maybe one day, Japanese authorities thought that the radiation will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area, million people. How to do it? The only rational solution would have been to ask Russia to give them part of Siberia or what. How would this be done? You see, we have to be ready to these mega-catastrophes. We know, for example, that we don't even know if it's nature or just or human global warming that the temperatures are rising so much in in all those parts of Emirates, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, that whole parts are simply becoming unlivable there. What will happen there? Then, sorry, just to make a small detour to refugees. You know what bothers me so much and it's prohibited by the left, even to raise this question. Listen, the whole problem is now will Europe be open enough. But for example, did you notice the paradox? Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims, most. Okay. Immediately below the war zone there are some very rich Arab countries, which are Sunni countries: Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. What's their politics? They simply don't accept any refugees. All the refugees if they are in Arab countries had to go to poor Arab countries: Lebanon is full of it, Egypt and so on. Of course, these precisely are the countries like Saudi Arabia which are most connected with the West. And also we should not forget that in spite of all
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terror attacks and so on, the big conflict there is basically Sunnis killing Shias and vice versa and so on. So you see we have to
terror attacks and so on, the big conflict there is basically Sunnis killing Shias and vice versa and so on. So you see we have to
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politicize it. And again, the same with ecology. Local
politicize it. And again, the same with ecology. Local
Slavoj Žižek
ecologism is always often, not always, but often openly racist. For example, I was... my favorite place on earth because it's very cold and
ecologism is always often, not always, but often openly racist. For example, I was... my favorite place on earth because it's very cold and
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so on, how do you pronounce it here? Iceland. Reykjavik, the capital. Okay. And I was there invited to a TV debate because they wanted to build some chemical factory close to their... on their coast, and the ecologists were against: "No, it will... it will ruin our beautiful coast and so on."
so on, how do you pronounce it here? Iceland. Reykjavik, the capital. Okay. And I was there invited to a TV debate because they wanted to build some chemical factory close to their... on their coast, and the ecologists were against: "No, it will... it will ruin our beautiful coast and so on."
Slavoj Žižek
But I told them, "What do you propose?"
But I told them, "What do you propose?"
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And they
And they
Slavoj Žižek
made it very clear to me that "Okay, let's give the capital and build
made it very clear to me that "Okay, let's give the capital and build
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it somewhere else." So I told them,
it somewhere else." So I told them,
Slavoj Žižek
"Oh, fuck you, you just want your
"Oh, fuck you, you just want your
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coast clear, you know, and you don't care in some city African country city in the sense of they don't care about it, it's spoil." So I'm very much afraid against this clean local
coast clear, you know, and you don't care in some city African country city in the sense of they don't care about it, it's spoil." So I'm very much afraid against this clean local
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ecologism.
ecologism.
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It's usually very egotist. The second thing, I hate so much all this bullshit about sustainability and so on. If you look closely at these self-sustainable houses and so on, they usually to construct them does much more ruin the... My ideal is I spoke with a
It's usually very egotist. The second thing, I hate so much all this bullshit about sustainability and so on. If you look closely at these self-sustainable houses and so on, they usually to construct them does much more ruin the... My ideal is I spoke with a
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German
German
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ecologist who told me, "You know
ecologist who told me, "You know
Slavoj Žižek
what would have been the best way? That we
what would have been the best way? That we
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pack as many people as possible into big dirty mega-cities and just keep it keep the nature around like the Japanese solution." They I think more or
pack as many people as possible into big dirty mega-cities and just keep it keep the nature around like the Japanese solution." They I think more or
Slavoj Žižek
less, if I know it correctly, they try to pack all the people into of the country and they try to keep as green as possible the others. So again, I see I see so many problems here that we really have to change our to change our attitude in a much more collective, large-scale thinking. We don't even know, you know, like when Trump and his guys say, "But we don't know what is it's not sure that it's global warming." My answer is: that's what makes it even worse. We don't even really know what is happening, you know, because we should always remember that all those statistical data, they are mythic. Like, we live now under the impression that if global temperature raised for whatever, two degrees Celsius, something like this, if they are beneath that it's okay, if they go up it's a catastrophe. But we don't know that. The catastrophe may be with one degree and a half, or maybe Earth can survive three degrees and so on. The other thing I worry very much, I've written a short text on it, is this incredible oscillation between fear, panic and renormalization. It's like with Trump. You get panic "Ooh, it's fascism," and you get Nancy Pelosi, "Oh, it's normal, no problem." I was... I spoke with some of my Chinese friends, you know, when they got that airpocalypse they called it, terrible air in Beijing and in other big cities. It's really tragic, because you know that now in Beijing you have many new cheap tourist agencies. You know what's their offer? They do daily trips out to the countryside, their only promise is "We will take you to a place where you can see the sky," you know. For... but they told me my friends, the horrible thing is how quickly the situation was renormalized. People just get used to it, you no longer wear just that white cotton mask, you wear the real, I call them Darth Vader masks, you know, big ones. And you simply get used to it. You listen to the news tomorrow, "Can I go out without a mask or not?", and life goes on. What I fear is how what I fear is this oscillation between catastrophism and then immediately this renormalization. I don't know, I'm a pessimist here. I try to avoid the logic of some of my even more pessimist ecologically-oriented friends who claim the only thing that can save us is a serious catastrophe, like a mega-catastrophe. Well, I think this is a risky strategy because, you know, who knows who will take over after? Maybe a guy will take over in comparison with whom we will praise the good old Trump times, you know what I mean. But I just think again that what we can do now is just write about it, make it clear how all these strategies of individual culpabilization, of renormalization and so on, all this mythic thinking of setting some limits, like "Oh, if we are just below two degrees we are safe." No, we don't know what's happening. Maybe maybe it is up to a point a natural because, you know, we should that's the first also myth myth to be debunked. There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch. Are we aware... I always take this example, uh how do you call it, oil reserves. Are we even aware what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes had to happen in the past of our earth so that we get oil reserves today? So the lesson of this is not "Oh, it's natural we don't have to worry," but the lesson of this is I think there is no easy way back. There is no pre-given natural balance where we just return to that and we are safe. Nature is caught in catastrophes and so on and so on. So we have to again, we have to think and because you know, the problem is that when we have real dangers, ecological threats and so on, the ability of people to delude themselves is incredible, this willingness simply not... and I can understand it. Like, you know, you read about ecological catastrophes and then you go out, there is sun, nice weather and you say, "My God, this is nature, it cannot really change." I don't think I think that our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of... fuck... no, literally, fuck you, you know it, you wrote about your wonderful book on fetish... it's of fetishist denial, it's "I know very well but still I don't believe it." I don't think we talk so much about ecology. There is this superstitious childish strategy beneath it. If we talk a lot about catastrophe, maybe it will not happen, you know. Just talk a lot to... and unfortunately I claim even in politics many fake leftists are doing this. If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen. There is wonderful passage in George Orwell, early, from late '30s, where he says that leftist intellectuals like to talk about need for the revolution just to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I think that many American academics like to do this. I follow you know, the big problem is "Do I call you black or African-American or what?" It's much better to have these debates than to really go together with black people. I notice only this correlation: most of my politically correct friends, the more they are politically correct academics, less they really have black friends and so on and so on, you know. It's a very comfortable way this official politically correct anti-racism. So again, I'm... I'm grateful to your patience. Thanks very much and you know, Lacan defines the real as that which always returns to the same place. I hope this is real and that
less, if I know it correctly, they try to pack all the people into of the country and they try to keep as green as possible the others. So again, I see I see so many problems here that we really have to change our to change our attitude in a much more collective, large-scale thinking. We don't even know, you know, like when Trump and his guys say, "But we don't know what is it's not sure that it's global warming." My answer is: that's what makes it even worse. We don't even really know what is happening, you know, because we should always remember that all those statistical data, they are mythic. Like, we live now under the impression that if global temperature raised for whatever, two degrees Celsius, something like this, if they are beneath that it's okay, if they go up it's a catastrophe. But we don't know that. The catastrophe may be with one degree and a half, or maybe Earth can survive three degrees and so on. The other thing I worry very much, I've written a short text on it, is this incredible oscillation between fear, panic and renormalization. It's like with Trump. You get panic "Ooh, it's fascism," and you get Nancy Pelosi, "Oh, it's normal, no problem." I was... I spoke with some of my Chinese friends, you know, when they got that airpocalypse they called it, terrible air in Beijing and in other big cities. It's really tragic, because you know that now in Beijing you have many new cheap tourist agencies. You know what's their offer? They do daily trips out to the countryside, their only promise is "We will take you to a place where you can see the sky," you know. For... but they told me my friends, the horrible thing is how quickly the situation was renormalized. People just get used to it, you no longer wear just that white cotton mask, you wear the real, I call them Darth Vader masks, you know, big ones. And you simply get used to it. You listen to the news tomorrow, "Can I go out without a mask or not?", and life goes on. What I fear is how what I fear is this oscillation between catastrophism and then immediately this renormalization. I don't know, I'm a pessimist here. I try to avoid the logic of some of my even more pessimist ecologically-oriented friends who claim the only thing that can save us is a serious catastrophe, like a mega-catastrophe. Well, I think this is a risky strategy because, you know, who knows who will take over after? Maybe a guy will take over in comparison with whom we will praise the good old Trump times, you know what I mean. But I just think again that what we can do now is just write about it, make it clear how all these strategies of individual culpabilization, of renormalization and so on, all this mythic thinking of setting some limits, like "Oh, if we are just below two degrees we are safe." No, we don't know what's happening. Maybe maybe it is up to a point a natural because, you know, we should that's the first also myth myth to be debunked. There is no good mother nature that we humans with our hubris are destroying. Nature is a dirty bitch. Are we aware... I always take this example, uh how do you call it, oil reserves. Are we even aware what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes had to happen in the past of our earth so that we get oil reserves today? So the lesson of this is not "Oh, it's natural we don't have to worry," but the lesson of this is I think there is no easy way back. There is no pre-given natural balance where we just return to that and we are safe. Nature is caught in catastrophes and so on and so on. So we have to again, we have to think and because you know, the problem is that when we have real dangers, ecological threats and so on, the ability of people to delude themselves is incredible, this willingness simply not... and I can understand it. Like, you know, you read about ecological catastrophes and then you go out, there is sun, nice weather and you say, "My God, this is nature, it cannot really change." I don't think I think that our attitude towards ecology is more or less the attitude of... fuck... no, literally, fuck you, you know it, you wrote about your wonderful book on fetish... it's of fetishist denial, it's "I know very well but still I don't believe it." I don't think we talk so much about ecology. There is this superstitious childish strategy beneath it. If we talk a lot about catastrophe, maybe it will not happen, you know. Just talk a lot to... and unfortunately I claim even in politics many fake leftists are doing this. If you write thick books about revolution, it's one way to make it sure that it will not happen. There is wonderful passage in George Orwell, early, from late '30s, where he says that leftist intellectuals like to talk about need for the revolution just to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I think that many American academics like to do this. I follow you know, the big problem is "Do I call you black or African-American or what?" It's much better to have these debates than to really go together with black people. I notice only this correlation: most of my politically correct friends, the more they are politically correct academics, less they really have black friends and so on and so on, you know. It's a very comfortable way this official politically correct anti-racism. So again, I'm... I'm grateful to your patience. Thanks very much and you know, Lacan defines the real as that which always returns to the same place. I hope this is real and that
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I will
I will
Slavoj Žižek
return here. Thanks very much.
return here. Thanks very much.