God Without the Sacred
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2010-11-09 · 1:40:54 · 12,938 words
with Paul Holdengräber
religion-theologyideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscapitalismecology-climatecommunism-socialismethicsphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culture
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture on the relationship between God, violence, and ideology, beginning from Lacan's inversion of Dostoevsky's 'if there is no God, everything is permitted' to argue that atheist hedonism produces the most rigid self-policing, while religious fundamentalists act as if everything is permitted. He traces this through the Book of Job, Christianity's demystification of the sacred, and the death of God on the cross as the moment when God himself stops believing in himself. The talk concludes with reflections on ecology as ideology, the problem of the commons under capitalism, and a defence of a post-Stalinist communism grounded in collective emancipatory solidarity rather than transcendent authority.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “if there is no God, everything is prohibited”
Lacan's inversion of the Dostoevsky dictum: without divine authority, atheist hedonists become enmeshed in ever more rigid self-imposed regulations and politically correct prohibitions.
Invoked to describe how liberal hedonists, lacking external divine authority, develop a more severe internal superego, endless politically correct self-policing, than traditional morality ever imposed.
as “religious suspension of the ethical”
Kierkegaard's concept, invoked to describe how fundamentalists justify mass murder by claiming to be instruments of divine will.
Žižek's own further inversion: those who claim direct access to God's will (fundamentalists, Stalinist communists acting on Historical Necessity) grant themselves permission to commit any violence in its name.
The symbolic order or transcendent authority (God, History, social space) that covers for subjects' acts by guaranteeing their meaning; getting rid of it as cover-up is Žižek's target, distinct from eliminating the other person.
as “the sacred”
Formally identical to terrifying evil but structurally set apart as exorbitant exception that contains ordinary violence; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are described as the first religions to systematically demystify this structure.
Dupuy's formulation endorsed by Žižek: Christianity's unique contribution is revealing the truth of the sacrificial mechanism, thereby depriving it of its creative/stabilising power.
as “sacrificial scapegoating”
The pagan mechanism by which collective violence is channelled onto a victim whose sacrifice stabilises the community; Christianity undermines it by telling the story from the innocent victim's viewpoint.
as “critique of ideology (Book of Job as first treatise)”
Žižek reads Job as the archetypal ideological critique: the three theological friends who rationalise Job's suffering perform the same function as ideological apologists, and God gives right to Job's insistence on meaninglessness over their theodicy.
Used via the bourgeois-attending-a-Marxism-course joke: knowing the truth of commodities does not dissolve their fetish power because the commodities themselves 'don't know it'.
Implied in the commodity fetishism passage: the subject knows commodities are just social relations yet they continue to function as if they have magical properties, the objective illusion that operates regardless of knowledge.
as “God who doesn't believe in himself”
At the moment of crucifixion ('Father, why hast thou forsaken me?') God himself momentarily ceases to believe in his own existence, enacting the death of the transcendent guarantor from within.
as “condensed freedom / abandoned by God”
Being abandoned by God, the experience of Christ on the cross, is reread as the supreme gift of freedom: the divine part of the human is precisely this freedom, making divine abandonment the closest God can come to us.
Stephen Jay Gould's evolutionary term, applied by Žižek to argue that mass choreography, emotional song, and other cultural forms are not inherently fascist but were exapted/appropriated by fascism from the workers' movement.
as “death of God (two-stage: in-itself and for-itself)”
In Judaism God dies 'in itself' by becoming the dead letter of the law; in Christianity he dies 'for itself', the fiction destroys itself from within when God himself proclaims his own inexistence on the cross.
Cited against Buddhist-hedonist self-help: psychoanalysis shows that humans, unlike animals, invest tremendous energy in sabotaging their own enjoyment, they are not simply pleasure-seeking organisms.
as “capitalism's religious structure”
Following Benjamin, Žižek argues capitalism is not utilitarian hedonism but has a quasi-religious structure: the capitalist is willing to starve and risk everything so that capital reproduces itself, a devotional, not hedonistic, drive.
as “Holy Ghost as emancipatory collective”
Žižek reads the Holy Ghost not as a supernatural entity but as the community of believers / emancipatory collective that remains after God's death, 'whenever there is love between two of you, I will be there'.
Performing token gestures (recycling, moralising about corporate villains) that provide the feeling of engagement while substituting for genuinely systemic political action.
as “ecology as ideology”
When ecology functions as a new sacred limit, replacing declining religion, it allows individuals to perform small rituals (recycling) as pseudo-activity that forecloses confrontation with deeper systemic/capitalist causes.
as “the problem of the commons”
Ecology, biogenetics, and intellectual property are all versions of the same problem, the enclosure or destruction of our shared natural, genetic, and intellectual substance, which for Žižek names the fundamental problem of capitalism today.
Stories he reaches for 11
Job's three theological friends offer rationalising interpretations of his suffering (he must have sinned; God is testing him), identical in structure to ideological apologists. God ultimately gives right to Job's insistence on meaninglessness over the friends' theodicy.
“the greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence but just to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities”
Napoleon humiliated the Pope by crowning himself; the Pope reportedly told him: 'You are trying to destroy Christianity, but sorry, we the Church have been trying this for years and failed.' Žižek takes this as the first step of ideology critique applied to institutional religion.
“you are trying to destroy Christianity but sorry to tell you you will fail we the church are trying this for the year for years and we failed”
A psychiatric patient is cured of believing he is a grain of seed but immediately returns terrified, there is a chicken outside. When told he now knows he is a man, he replies: 'But does the chicken know it?' Illustrates that knowing the truth of an illusion does not dissolve its real effects.
“of course I know it replies the patient but does the chicken know it”
In Benigni's film, the father convinces his son Auschwitz is a game to protect him. Žižek argues it would be more truthful if the son had also known it was fake but pretended to believe for the father's sake, a fiction that functions though nobody believes it, which is how belief operates today.
“a fiction structuring that relationship which was operative although no one believes in it that's how we believe today”
Watching your team on TV you shout and gesticulate as if you can influence the game, Žižek uses this as a metaphor for ecological pseudo-activity: performing rituals (recycling) that give the feeling of engagement while changing nothing systemic.
“isn't a little bit of this in I'm very evil now in recycling”
Maria returns to the convent unable to cope with her desire for Baron von Trapp. The Mother Superior's response, singing 'Climb Every Mountain', is, for Žižek, the obscene injunction to go back and consummate the relationship. The person expected to preach abstinence becomes the agent of desire.
“the message is what sacrifice go back and sorry for the expression screw the guy's brains out”
Atheist Zionists don't believe in God but believe God gave them the land of Israel, a fiction reduced to reality continues to exert symbolic efficiency, proving it must be destroyed from within, not from without.
“the fiction has to be destroyed from within… it is not enough to prove that God doesn't exist”
Bob Fosse's Cabaret scene where a beautiful blond boy begins singing a nature-awakening song that gradually reveals itself as a Nazi anthem, with the whole inn joining in. Žižek says he shamelessly likes the song and uses this to argue the pseudo-intellectual lesson ('now I understand fascism's emotional appeal') is wrong, the same song with changed words would work as a communist anthem.
“my point is not shame on you if you secretly enjoyed the song my point is enjoy it but not secretly”
'Oh thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive.' Illustrates the perverse logic of institutional Christianity: religion as safeguard allowing enjoyment with impunity.
“oh thou who conceived without having sinned let me sin without having to conceive”
After Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, many communist cadres who already knew the facts committed suicide, not because they learned anything new but because they were deprived of the historical-absolutist legitimation for their crimes.
“they were just deprived of the historical legitimation of their crimes in the communist historical absolute”
When Mohammed first hears the archangel Gabriel he thinks it must be the Devil; his wife Khadijah convinces him it is the divine voice. Žižek reads this as showing that in Islam the woman is the ultimate ethical agent who orients the confused man.
“it is as if men are confused the ultimate ethical agent is the woman”
Works invoked 17
Capital book
Marx's fictional device of 'if commodities could speak' is cited as the theoretical response to the fact that knowing commodity fetishism doesn't dissolve it.
Fight Club film
The scene where Ed Norton beats his own face is cited as structurally parallel to the Novecento ear-cutting, both enact the 'realized metaphor' and disconnection as condition of freedom.
The Sound of Music film
Called a 'horrible movie' and described ironically (a review: 'a stupid nun who would be allowed to live her happy monastic life if her mother superior were not to invite her and start shouting about climbing every mountain'), yet the Mother Superior scene is deployed to illustrate the superego as injunction to enjoy.
Life is Beautiful film
Called 'a fake' and 'even such a nice film although maybe not so nice', the protective fiction would be more honest if mutual knowledge were built in, prefiguring the structure of contemporary belief.
The (mis)attributed dictum is the intellectual springboard of the lecture; Žižek corrects the attribution but notes the book does render the insight in some way.
Žižek says he 'liked to do that book' with Milbank because despite their opposition both reject post-secular deconstructionist theology.
Orthodoxy book
Two passages quoted at length: the cry from the cross as the moment God is an atheist; and the outer ring of ethical abnegations enclosing a dancing pagan life within. Both endorsed by Žižek.
Lord of the Rings film
Cited as ultimate proof that only a devout Christian (Tolkien) could imagine such a magnificent pagan universe; a 'magnificent pagan universe' as the ultimate Christian dream.
The dream of Irma's injection is analysed structurally: horror followed by comic rationalization by three doctors, parallel to Job's three friends and the BP Congressional hearings.
Cabaret film
Žižek 'hates this scene' (the Tomorrow Belongs to Me sequence) because it embodies a pseudo-intellectual lesson about fascism's emotional appeal; he uses it to argue the opposite, formal elements are not inherently fascist.
Novecento film
Žižek finds Bertolucci 'one of the most boring', but singles out the ear-cutting scene as a genuine example of freedom through disconnection from the shared communicative field.
The Everlasting Man book
Chesterton's 'practically unknown essay' containing the mental experiment of imagining humans as monsters from animals' perspective, used to illustrate how we should read the animal gaze.
L'être et le néant book
Sartre's Being and Nothingness identified as the probable source of the misattribution of 'if there is no God everything is permitted' to Dostoevsky.
Dismissed as 'vulgar sex combined with long half-hour moments of pure boring nothing happening, which allegedly makes it all more deep'.
The Cheshire Cat's smile, persisting after the body vanishes, is used as a parallel for the clasped hands in the Semprún passage: a partial object persisting beyond the destruction of the whole.
Žižek's own recently published book; mentioned as containing a whole chapter on ecology distinguishing ecological problems from ecological ideology.
Phèdre play
Racine's line 'dans ses yeux je vois ma perte écrite' is cited to illustrate the abyss one sees in the other's (animal) gaze.
People invoked 41
Roberto Benigni negative
Life is Beautiful is called 'a fake', the film's protective fiction would be more honest if the son too had known the game was fake, prefiguring the real structure of contemporary belief.
Described as 'my good friend'; the protagonist of the opening anecdote about opposites coinciding after 9/11.
Identified as Riefenstahl's Marxist-Jewish co-writer and lover on her early Bergfilm, used to undercut the thesis that her mountain films are proto-fascist.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
His formulation that Christianity is 'not a morality but an epistemology' that reveals and thereby deprives the sacred of its power is endorsed by Žižek as 'I think the world-historical rupture enacted by Christianity'.
Named as the exemplar of 'literally behind every ethnic cleansing there is a poet', Karadžić was a poet as well as the architect of Bosnian ethnic cleansing.
René Girard positive
Referenced alongside Jean-Pierre Dupuy for the analysis of Christianity's rupture with sacrificial scapegoating by telling the story from the victim's viewpoint.
Explicitly noted as a thinker Žižek is 'otherwise rather critical' of, but the cat-gaze anecdote from Derrida is used positively to illustrate the radical otherness of the animal gaze.
Susan Sontag negative
Her analysis that Riefenstahl's entire body of work (not just the Nazi films) is proto-fascist in its texture is explicitly rejected by Žižek as the pseudo-intellectual reading.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Criticised for explicitly excluding the animal face from ethical responsibility; also criticised via Jewish friends' argument that Levinas secretly Christianises Judaism by reducing ethics to the dyadic I-other encounter and losing the collective dimension.
Jorge Semprún positive
His account of the Polish children at Buchenwald is quoted at length as an example of an ethical image of eternity, the frozen clasped hands as a 'positive ethical image'.
Described as 'one of the great disappointed communists'; his phrase 'a God that failed' is invoked to characterise Stalinist communism's ersatz transcendent absolute.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek deploys Lacan's inversion of the Dostoevsky dictum ('if there is no God, everything is prohibited') as the theoretical cornerstone of the lecture, and cites Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis on the claim that God is dead from the beginning.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Žižek read three of his books and found them all beginning the same way, 'all living beings want to avoid pain and live happily', and concluding with meditation-as-better-sex; used as example of spiritualised pseudo-Western Buddhist hedonism.
Steven Weinberg positive
His claim that only religion can make good people do bad things is endorsed and cited as a corrective to standard ideological defences of religion.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
His concept of 'exaptation' is applied to argue that fascism appropriated mass performance from the workers' movement; the elements are not inherently fascist but were exapted.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Repeatedly cited with admiration: for the 'monster that man is to animals' passage in Everlasting Man, for the re-reading of God's answer to Job as self-confessed astonishment, and for the Orthodoxy passage on Christianity as the only frame for pagan freedom.
Benedict XVI negative
Žižek says Ratzinger said 'as usual something pretty stupid' in attributing capitalism to utilitarian greed, missing Benjamin's insight that capitalism has a religious structure.
Paul Claudel positive
Cited for the passage: 'The true mystery of Christianity is God can do anything without us, it is not that God trusted us, but that we are thrown into freedom.'
John Milbank positive
Žižek enjoyed his debate with Milbank (Radical Orthodoxy) because despite their differences both reject the deconstructionist post-secular theology that reduces God to an 'undeconstructible ethical voice'.
Fredric Jameson negative
Described as a 'very good friend personally' but Žižek considers Jameson's apparent sympathy for Klaus's anti-EU position a strategic 'madness'.
His 1956 denunciation speech is used as the example of how removing ideological legitimation (not revealing new facts) caused communist cadres to commit suicide.
Richard Dawkins negative
Described as a 'vulgar atheist' who tries to destroy the fiction of God from outside by demonstrating its unreality, this approach fails because the fiction continues to function symbolically.
Bernardo Bertolucci negative
Žižek says Novecento is 'one of the most boring movies I ever saw' and Last Tango in Paris combines 'vulgar sex' with long boring nothing, yet finds one scene in Novecento worth analysing.
Žižek has 'no special love' for Riefenstahl but defends her early mountain films against the charge of inherent proto-fascism.
Václav Klaus negative
Žižek is 'totally opposed' to Klaus and rejects the left-wing strategy of tactical alliance with Klaus against the EU; Klaus's anti-ecology stance is distinguished from Žižek's own criticism of ecology-as-ideology.
Jeremy Bentham positive
Praised for replacing the question 'can animals reason?' with 'can they suffer?', an 'honourable exception' to the philosophical disavowal of animal pain.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited (via Paul Holdengräber's interjection, endorsed by Žižek) for the thesis that capitalism has a religious structure, not utilitarian hedonism but sacrificial devotion to capital's self-reproduction.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
The concept of 'the religious suspension of the ethical' is cited to describe how fundamentalists justify violence; later, Kierkegaard's observation that Christ mostly says banalities is endorsed as the correct theological stance.
L'homme machine is cited as the inevitable endpoint of Cartesian animal-machine logic, the same argument that denies animal pain must deny human pain.
Paul Holdengräber positive
The interlocutor/host; Žižek calls him 'my good friend Paul' and, as a parting joke in Stalinist terms, 'a good progressive bourgeois intellectual', the ultimate insult rendered affectionately.
Jean Racine positive
A line from Phèdre ('dans ses yeux je vois ma perte écrite', in her eyes I see inscribed my loss) is cited to illustrate the abyss reflected in the animal gaze.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek supports Obama 'as a foreigner' but criticises his response to the BP oil spill as 'slightly ridiculous', too focused on legal blame rather than systemic questions.
Joseph Stalin negative
Stalinist communism is the central example of a secular absolute that functioned as an ersatz God permitting all violence; Žižek calls 20th-century communism the greatest ethico-political failure in history.
J. R. R. Tolkien positive
Lord of the Rings is cited as proof that only a devout Christian could imagine such a magnificent pagan universe, confirming that paganism is the ultimate Christian dream.
Karl Marx positive
The fictional device of 'if commodities could speak' in Capital is noted as necessary precisely because knowledge of commodity fetishism does not dissolve it, the commodity itself must be addressed.
René Descartes negative
The Cartesian animal-machine is criticised as a mechanism to disavow animal suffering; Žižek notes it logically entails La Mettrie's L'homme machine.
Paul the Apostle positive
Described as 'my hero', praised for his disregard for the biographical Jesus and his focus on the event of death and resurrection as the core of Christianity; his formation of the emancipatory collective parallels the Holy Ghost.
Sigmund Freud positive
The dream of Irma's injection is analysed as structurally identical to Job's three friends; Freud's insight into child sexuality and the death drive are also cited.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the contradiction between ritual and prohibition (rituals stage the violation of a religion's own prohibitions); also cited in the Q&A for the reading that what dies on the cross is not the Son but the Father himself.
Identified as the likely originator of the attribution of 'if there is no God everything is permitted' to Dostoevsky, in L'être et le néant.
The (mis)attributed dictum 'if there is no God everything is permitted' anchors the talk; Žižek notes Dostoevsky never actually wrote this in Brothers Karamazov.
What it argues
Lacan's inversion of the Dostoevsky dictum on God and permissionthe sacred as structurally identical to violence, contained by ritual exceptionChristianity as demystification of sacrificial scapegoatingGod's self-abandonment on the cross as the birth of human freedomecology as ideology and pseudo-activity replacing systemic critiqueHoly Ghost as emancipatory collective rather than transcendent authoritythe animal gaze as mirror of human monstrosity
Dialectical moves 10
“If there is no God, everything is prohibited — not permitted.”
The apparent liberation of atheist hedonism produces its own rigid superego; the inversion shows that the real constraint comes not from divine prohibition but from the absence of a legitimating authority.
“If God exists, everything is permitted — to those who claim to speak in his name.”
The fundamentalist's access to a transcendent absolute abolishes any ethical limit on their actions; the real danger of God is not his absence but his presence as cover for violence.
“To get rid of God means not to get rid of the Other but precisely to encounter the Other in its full abyssal weight.”
Atheism properly understood does not eliminate otherness but strips away the Big Other as symbolic cover, forcing a direct confrontation with the irreducible other (human and animal).
“The sacred is formally identical with evil — what makes something sacred is not content but the exorbitant structural exception that contains ordinary violence.”
Sacred and profane evil are the same act; sacredness is a formal wrapper that externalises violence into ritual, thereby limiting it, but also licensing it.
“God answers Job not by asserting divine power but by becoming, for an instant, a blasphemer — almost an atheist.”
The divine answer to meaningless suffering is not theodicy but the acknowledgment that even the Creator is astonished and overwhelmed by his creation, God himself rejects the search for deeper meaning.
“On the cross, for a brief moment, God himself does not believe in himself.”
Christ's cry of dereliction is not a moment of doubt but the enactment from within of God's own self-cancellation, the only genuine atheism is theological, performed by God on himself.
“Being abandoned by God is the most God can give us — abandonment to freedom is the supreme gift.”
Divine withdrawal is not punishment or absence but the condition of genuine human freedom; the divine part of the human is precisely this abyss of freedom into which God throws us.
“The true utopia is not communism but the belief that capitalism can go on as it is.”
The charge of utopianism is reversed: it is defenders of the status quo who are the real utopians, since the systemic contradictions of capitalism make its continuation impossible.
“Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom — you want pagan enjoyment without its melancholic price? Choose Christianity.”
The apparent opposition of Christian renunciation and pagan pleasure is inverted: Christianity's inner life is dancing paganism, while paganism itself is haunted by melancholy, Christianity enables the enjoyment it appears to prohibit.
“The elements fascism uses are not per se fascist — it was fascism that stole them from the workers' movement.”
Aesthetic forms (mass choreography, emotional nationalist song) are not inherently ideological in any direction; their political valence is determined by their articulation, and fascism appropriated tools originally belonging to the left.
Claims 20
asserts
The liberal-hedonist who rejects God lives not in permissiveness but under an even more oppressive superego — nothing is more regulated than being a simple hedonist.atheist liberal hedonism / Lacan's inversion of Dostoevsky
asserts
It is religious fundamentalists, not godless hedonists, who act as if everything is permitted, because they perceive themselves as direct instruments of a transcendent will.religious fundamentalism and violence
asserts
Behind every ethnic cleansing there is a poet — mass violence requires a sacred cause to anesthetise ordinary people against their elementary decency.ideology, religion, and political violence
asserts
Without religion, good people would do good things and bad people bad things; only religion can make good people do bad things.religion and moral psychology (endorsing Weinberg)
asserts
Stalinist communism followed the same logic as religious violence: its crimes were permitted by reference to a transcendent absolute (Historical Progress), not by godless individualism.Stalinist terror / communist ideology
asserts
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the first religions without the sacred — their unique achievement is to demystify the sacrificial mechanism rather than perpetuate it.the Abrahamic religions and the sacred
asserts
Christianity's world-historical rupture lies in telling the sacrificial story from the victim's standpoint, thereby undermining the scapegoating mechanism — but this liberation is deeply ambiguous, also setting free violence no longer contained by mythic limits.Christianity and sacrificial violence (Girard/Dupuy)
reframes
God's answer to Job is not arrogant assertion of divine power but a confession that the universe is a mess beyond even God's control — resistance to meaning is the correct theological stance.the Book of Job / theodicy
asserts
In psychoanalytic treatment it is not enough to convince the patient of the unconscious truth; the unconscious itself must assume it — knowledge of an illusion does not dissolve the illusion.psychoanalysis and the nature of belief
asserts
True atheism is not demonstrated from outside by showing God does not exist; the fiction must destroy itself from within — God himself must proclaim his inexistence, which is what happens on the cross.atheism and the death of God in Christianity
asserts
The resurrection is the Holy Ghost — the emancipatory collective of believers — not a bodily return of Christ; the parallel is the Joe Hill trade-union song.resurrection / Holy Spirit
asserts
Christianity, properly read, is the ultimate enabling frame for pagan enjoyment — Christ took the price upon himself, allowing believers to enjoy life without paying the pagan price of melancholic guilt.Christianity and enjoyment / paganism
asserts
Ecology as currently practised functions as a new ideological opium, replacing religion by positing a new sacred limit and encouraging pseudo-activity (recycling) that forecloses systemic critique.ecology as ideology
reframes
The true utopia is not communism but the belief that capitalism as it is can continue — its destruction of the commons makes it unsustainable.capitalism and utopianism
asserts
In contemporary ideology, private and technological possibilities are presented as unlimited while any change to the economic/social order is declared impossible.ideology and the foreclosure of political possibility
reframes
Capitalism is not a system of utilitarian hedonism but has a quasi-religious structure: the capitalist sacrifices everything for capital's self-reproduction.capitalism and religion / Walter Benjamin
rejects
The proto-fascist aesthetics argument (Sontag on Riefenstahl) is wrong: formal elements like mass choreography or emotional song are not inherently fascist — they were exapted by fascism from the workers' movement.fascism and aesthetics / Sontag-Riefenstahl thesis
asserts
The animal gaze confronts us not with the animal's interiority but with an abyss that reflects our own monstrosity back at us.the animal other and human self-understanding
asserts
We systematically disavow animal suffering through the Cartesian notion of the animal-machine, but this logic inevitably ends in La Mettrie's man-machine, collapsing any special status for human pain.Cartesian animal-machine and animal suffering
asserts
Paul, not John, is the true hero of Christianity: Paul's disregard for the biographical Jesus and focus on the event of death and resurrection is the correct theological move.Paul vs John / early Christianity
Quotes 17
“if there is no God then everything is prohibited”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's inversion of Dostoevsky — hedonism without authority breeds the most severe self-policing
“indeed nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist”Slavoj Žižek · atheist liberalism and the superego
“while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things only religion can make good people do bad things”Slavoj Žižek · religion as enabler of mass violence (Weinberg)
“literally behind every ethnic cleansing there is a poet”Slavoj Žižek · art and sacred cause as preconditions of mass violence
“seeing oneself being seen by an animal is an abyssal encounter of the other's gaze since precisely because we should not simply project onto the animal our inner experience something is returning the gaze which is impenetrable radically other”Slavoj Žižek · the animal gaze as radical alterity
“alone among the animals man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on human monstrosity
“it is not a morality but an epistemology it says the truth about the sacred and thereby it deprives the sacred of its creative power”Slavoj Žižek · Dupuy on Christianity as epistemological rupture
“of course I know it replies the patient but does the chicken know it”Slavoj Žižek · the real efficacy of illusions — knowledge does not dissolve the symptom
“when the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God”Slavoj Žižek · God's self-abandonment on the cross as the only true atheism
“nay the matter grows too difficult for human speech but let the atheists themselves choose a God they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation only one religion in which God seems for an instant to be an atheist”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as the religion in which God himself is atheist
“the outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as enabler of pagan joy (Chesterton)
“first I am not your Lord but a comrade second are you crazy talking to fictions I don't exist and third be short otherwise I will miss my party cell meeting”Slavoj Žižek · the God we need — self-negating, collective, non-transcendent
“the true utopia is to think that where we are now this can go on”Slavoj Žižek · reversing the charge of utopianism against defenders of capitalism
“my children have vanquished me my children have vanquished me”Slavoj Žižek · Talmudic story — God concedes authority of interpretation to human debate
“God is dead from the very beginning it is just that he just didn't know it”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on the death of God as always-already accomplished
“here you have it what you wanted my ear with its implicit subversion now I no longer have ears I will not hear you I'm deaf for your arguments”Slavoj Žižek · disconnection from shared communication as condition of freedom
“the 20th century communism was the greatest ethico-political failure in the history of humanity”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's frank assessment of actually existing communism
Transcript 28 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much I'm always a little bit embarrassed by such kind introductions but I have a lot to say I hope you will have patience so let me begin with the wonderful anecdote which happened a couple of days after September 11th attacks to my good friend Udi Aloni while he was in a taxi near Union Square here on Manhattan he engaged in a conversation with the Muslim driver who tried to convince him that the attacks were a Jewish plot of course referring to the well-known rumors that no Jews died there since they were secretly informed a day before not to go to the Twin Towers Udi my friend immediately of course told the driver to stop and stepped out but what he then encountered when walking across Union Square was a group of Orthodox Jews trying to mobilize their followers one of them was as it were preaching to others saying that we have now a new ultimate proof that God is protecting the Jewish people no Jews were killed in the September 11th attack so my friend was kind of perplexed by this strange bedfellows this is how opposites coincide in our daily lives so how does God fit into all this let me begin with a well-known quote from Dostoevsky and as the joke goes but in this case the joke is literally true this is a quote from Dostoevsky Dostoevsky just never said this namely if there is no God then everything is permitted as far as I was able to establish the first one to attribute this to Dostoevsky was Sartre in in his L’être et le néant allegedly Dostoevsky said this in Brothers Karamazov he doesn't say it but okay it does render his insight in some way conservatives like to evoke this thought if there is no God then everything is permitted propos scandals among the atheist hedonist elite from millions killed in Gulag up to animal sex and gay marriages here is so they say where we end if we deny all transcendent authority which poses some unsurpassable limits to human endeavors without such limits so the story goes there is no ultimate obstacle to exploiting one's neighbors ruthlessly to use them as tools for profit and pleasure to enslave and humiliate them even to kill them in millions all that separates us from this ultimate moral vacuum are in the absence of a higher transcendent limit temporary and non-obligatory pacts among wolves self-imposed limitations in the interest of one's survival and well-being which can be violated at any moment but I would like to begin with this naive question are things really like that well the first thing one cannot help noticing is that Jacques Lacan's well-known critical inversion of this Dostoevsky's dictum Lacan inverted it into if there is no God then everything is prohibited this inversion is much more appropriate to describe the universe of atheist liberal hedonists they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them a space for this pursuit they get entangled into a thick network of self-imposed politically correct regulations as if a superego much more severe than that of the traditional morality is controlling them they get obsessed by the idea that in pursuing their pleasures they may humiliate or violate others' space so they regulate their behavior with detailed prescriptions about how to avoid harassing others not to mention the no less complex regulation of their own care of the self bodily fitness health food spiritual relaxation and so on indeed nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist the second thing strictly correlative to this first observation is that today it is rather those who refer to God in a brutally direct way perceiving themselves as direct instruments of God's will it is rather to them that everything is permitted it is the so-called fundamentalists who practice a perverted version of what Kierkegaard called the religious suspension of the ethical on a God's mission one is allowed to kill thousands so why do we witness today the rise of religiously or ethically justified violence because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as grounds for mass violence or war that is to say since our hegemonic ideology calls on us to enjoy life and to realize our inner selves it is difficult for the majority to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing another human being the large majority of people are thanks God spontaneously moral torturing or killing another human being is deeply traumatic for most of us so in order to make them do it a larger sacred cause is needed which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial religion or ethnic belonging or art poetry fits this role perfectly this is my old thesis that literally behind every ethnic cleansing there is a poet it's not only Karadžić there are others of course there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure just for the sake of it but I claim they are rare exceptions the majority needs to be anesthetized against their elementary decency and sensitivity for the other's suffering again for this a sacred cause is needed without this cause we would have to feel all the burden of what we did with no absolute on whom to put the ultimate responsibility religious ideologists usually claim that true or not religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things from today's experience one should rather stick to Steven Weinberg to his claim that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things only religion can make good people do bad things but I am far from as you will see of course condemning religion no less importantly the same another critical point also seems to hold for the display of so-called human weaknesses isolated extreme forms of sexuality among godless hedonists are immediately elevated into representative symbols of the depravity of the godless while any questioning of say the link between the much more massive phenomenon of priests' pedophilia and the church as institution Catholic Church is rejected as anti-religious slander the well-documented story of how the Catholic Church as institution protects pedophiliacs in its own ranks is another good example of how if God exists then everything is permitted to those who legitimate themselves as his servants what makes this protective attitude towards pedophiliacs so disgusting is that it is not practiced by tolerant hedonists but to add insult to injury by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society now you will say and I agree with this immediate counter-question but what about the Stalinist communist mass killings what about the extra-legal liquidations of the nameless millions in the Soviet Union but I claim it is easy to see how these crimes were always justified by their own ersatz God a God that failed as Ignazio Silone one of the great disappointed communists called it they had their own God which is why everything was permitted to them in other words the same logic as that of religious violence applies here Stalinist communists do not perceive themselves as hedonist individuals abandoned to their freedom no they perceive themselves as instruments of historical progress of a higher necessity which pushes humanity towards next stage of communism and it is this reference to their own absolute and to their own privileged relationship to this absolute which permits them to do whatever they want or consider necessary this is why the moment cracks appear in this ideological protective shield the weight of what they Stalinist communists did becomes unbearable to many individual communists since they have to confront their acts as their own with no cover-up in a higher reason of history this is why after Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin's crimes many cadres committed suicide they did not learn anything new during that speech you know when they say oh my God we learned what horrors were happening in the Soviet Union they were of course lying all the facts were more or less known to them they were just deprived of the historical legitimation of their crimes in the communist historical absolute so to get rid of God is this simply our task maybe to get rid of God as the big Other in the sense of higher authority covering up for us as it were but definitely not to get rid of the figure of the other not only the Levinasian other another human being his face but why not even the animal other Jacques Derrida of whom I am otherwise rather critical reported on a kind of primordial sin from his life after awakening he went naked to his bathroom where his cat followed him then the awkward moment occurred he was standing in front of the cat which looked at his naked body unable to endure this situation he did something put a towel around his waist chasing the cat outside entering the shower the cat's gaze stands for the gaze of the other an inhuman gaze but for this reason all the more the other's gaze in all its abyssal impenetrability seeing oneself being seen by an animal is an abyssal encounter of the other's gaze since precisely because we should not simply project onto the animal our inner experience something is returning the gaze which is impenetrable radically other the entire history of philosophy is based perhaps upon a disavowal of such an encounter I remember a photo of a cat after it was submitted to some lab experiment in a centrifuge I saw this photo years ago a cat its bones half broken its skin half hairless her its eyes helplessly looking into the camera this is the gaze of the other disavowed not only by philosophers but by humans as such even Levinas who wrote so much about the helpless other's face as the original site of ethical responsibility explicitly denied that an animal's face can function like this one of the few honorable exceptions was here Jeremy Bentham who made a simple proposal instead of asking can animals reason and think can they talk all these humanist enterprises where then you triumphantly say no they can't they just exchange signs they don't really talk and so on we should according to Bentham rather ask can they suffer human industry alone is continuously causing immense suffering on animals which is systematically disavowed we know about it but we pretend not to know not only laboratory experiments but special regimes for example to produce eggs and milk turning artificial light on and off to shorten the day use of hormones and so on pigs which are half blind and barely able to walk just fattened fast to be slaughtered and so on and so on the majority of those who visit a chicken factory can no longer eat chicken and all of us knows all of us know what goes on there but this knowledge has to be neutralized again so that we can act as if we do not know one of the ways to facilitate this ignorance is the Cartesian notion of animal machine Cartesians already in the 17th century were warning people against compassion with animals they claimed that when we see an animal emitting sounds of pain we should always bear in mind that these sounds do not express any real inner feeling since animals do not have souls they are just these are just sounds generated by a complex mechanism of muscles bones fluids and so on you can clearly see the origin of these sounds through dissection the problem is that the notion of animal machine has to end up in La Mettrie's notion of L'homme machine of a human man as a machine if one is fully committed a fully committed neurobiologist exactly the same claim can be made about sounds and gestures emitted by humans when they are tortured there is no separate interior domain of soul where pain is really felt such sounds and gestures are simply produced by the complex neurobiological mechanisms that constitute a human body so back to the gaze of the cat what if the perplexity a human looking at a cat sees in the cat's gaze is the perplexity aroused by the monstrosity of the human being itself what if what we see in this abyss of the other's gaze is our own abyss or to quote Racine a wonderful line from Jean Racine's Phèdre dans ses yeux je vois ma perte écrite in her eyes I see inscribed my loss Gilbert Keith Chesterton proposed such a reversal of perspective instead of asking what are animals for us humans for our experience we should ask or try to imagine what are we humans for animals in his practically unknown essay Everlasting Man Chesterton makes a wonderful mental experiment along these lines imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the animals around him a quote the simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth in all sobriety he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one he has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage he cannot sleep in his own skin he cannot trust his own instincts he is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple he is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture alone among the animals man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself alone among the animals man feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame end of quote so my point here is that if we try to imagine things like this maybe this is the first step of wisdom to extend this logic which was first formulated by Descartes which is for me the origin of and I use now the term in its positive sense multiculturalism when you find other people's customs strange remember how your own customs must appear strange to the same foreigners we should maybe try just to imagine what kind of monstrosity we were and still are for animals maybe this is what we should read in the perplexed animal gaze and now this brings me to the topic of this talk the sacred maybe in this sense what the animals see in us is something sacred sacred in its very monstrosity here I ask you to do what I did although I have a kind of natural revulsion for museums like I'm like for me going to a museum is like for a vampire when you tell him why don't you eat this wonderful plate of garlic you know but nonetheless I went I wasn't disappointed why because I claim these three religions of the book to whom the exhibition this wonderful one is dedicated here are precisely the three religions which systematically undermine the traditional notion of the sacred what do I mean by this the sacred is as to its content the same as something terrifying evil the difference is purely formal structural what makes something sacred is its exorbitant character which made it a limitation of ordinary evil for this is why and I totally understand this remember here on Manhattan the ruins of September 11th acquired almost the quality of something sacred precisely because of this excessive horror destruction to see this we should not only focus on religious prohibitions and obligations we should also bear in mind the rituals practiced by religions and the contradiction already noted by Hegel between prohibitions and rituals as a rule rituals of a certain religion consist in staging the violation of prohibitions of this same religion the sacred sacrifice to gods is the same act as murder what makes it sacred is the fact that it limits contains murders in ordinary life in times of crisis of the sacred this distinction disintegrates there is no sacred exception a sacrifice is all of a sudden perceived as a simple murder but this also means that there is nothing no external limit to contain our ordinary violence therein resides the ethical dilemma Christianity tries to resolve how to contain violence without this sacrificial exception following René Girard Jean-Pierre Dupuy described how Christianity stages the same sacrificial process but with a crucially different cognitive spin the story is not told by the collective which stages the sacrifice as in the so-called pagan rituals but by the victim from the standpoint of the victim whose full innocence is thereby asserted the first step towards this reversal can be discerned of course already in the Book of Job where the story is told from the standpoint of the innocent victim of the divine wrath once the innocence of the sacrificial victim is known the efficiency of the entire sacrificial mechanism of scapegoating is undermined sacrifices even at the magnitude of Holocaust become hypocritical inoperative a fake but we also lose the containment of violence enacted by the sacrifice a quote from Jean-Pierre Dupuy concerning Christianity it is not a morality but an epistemology it says the truth about the sacred and thereby it deprives the sacred of its creative power for better or for worse humans alone decide about this end of quote therein resides I think the world-historical rupture enacted by Christianity now we know about the fake of the sacrificial scapegoat logic and we can no longer pretend we don't know the impact of this knowledge one cannot get rid of once it is here is not only liberating but deeply ambiguous it also deprives society of the stabilizing role of scapegoating and thus sets free the space for violence not contained by any mythic limit this is how in a truly perspicuous insight Dupuy reads the scandalous lines from Matthew Matthew do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth I did not come to bring peace but a sword furthermore we stumble here upon another ambiguity it is not that this absence of limits should be read in the standard way of either humanity will find a way to set itself limits or it will perish in an uncontained violence if there is a lesson from so-called totalitarian experience it is that the temptation is exactly the opposite one the danger of the absence of a divine limit is to impose a new pseudo-limit a fake transcendence on behalf of which I act from Stalinism to religious fundamentalism even ecology functions as ideology the moment it is evoked as a new limit it has all the chances of developing into a predominant form of ideology today a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion it takes over the old religion's fundamental function that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits so it is fashionable in some of today's neo-pagan post-secular circles to affirm the dimension of the sacred as prior to religion as a space in which every religion dwells but which is prior to religion there can be sacred without religion but not the other way around sometimes this priority of the sacred is even given an anti-religious spin a way to remain agnostic while nonetheless being engaged in a deep spiritual experience but I think that we should precisely turn things around here the radical break of Judaism Christianity and so on even of Islam I don't have time to develop that consists in the fact that these are the first religions without the sacred religions whose unique achievement is precisely to demystify the sacred does it mean that no sublime shattering experience remains it does but not that of sacred in the sense of sacrificial scapegoating let me evoke to you one such experience I will quote Jorge Semprún who reported how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews to the Buchenwald concentration camp the Jews were stuck into the freight train almost to a car traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the war on arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death except for children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies when the children were emptied from the car the Nazis led their dogs loose on them and soon only two fleeing children were left then I quote from Semprún a passage the little one of the two children began to fall behind the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too the smell of blood was driving them mad and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller together they covered a few more yards till the blows of the clubs felled them and together they dropped their faces to the ground their hands clasped for all eternity end of quote what should not escape our attention here is that the freeze of eternity is embodied in hand as partial object while the bodies of two boys perish the clasped hands persist for all eternity like tasteless parallel the smile of the Cheshire Cat in in Alice of Alice one can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed in a movie while the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality the two children are clubbed to death torn apart alive the image of their hands clasped freezes immobilized for eternity while the sound renders temporary reality the image renders the eternal real the frozen image which insists over reality rendered by sounds stands for a kind of positive ethical image of eternity but is this sacred or not how does Christianity fit into it let me begin where I think it all begins the Book of Job the first treatise on critique of ideology why remember what happens there after Job is hit by calamities the three theological friends come offering interpretations which render these calamities meaningful you know one says oh wait a minute God is just so if you are punished some you must have done something wrong the second says maybe God is testing you whatever that is to say they all try to argue that Job's suffering has some meaning and the greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence but just to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities and you know the beauty of it when God appears afterwards he gives right to Job against the ideological defenders of faith did you notice how here the structure is exactly the same as that of Freud's dream of Irma's injection which opens interpretation of dreams this dream begins with a conversation between Freud and his patient Irma about the failure of her treatment due to an infected injection in the course of the conversation Freud gets closer to her approaches her face looks deep into her mouth confronts the horrible sight of the live red flesh and at this point of horror the tonality of the dream changes the horror all of a sudden passes into comedy three doctors Freud's friends appear who in a ridiculous pseudo-professional jargon enumerate multiple and mutually exclusive reasons why Irma's poisoning by the infected injection was nobody's guilt there was no injection the injection was clean and so on and so on so there is first a traumatic encounter in Freud's dream the sight of the raw flesh of Irma's throat which is then followed by the sudden change into comedy the ridiculous exchange between three doctors the function of the three doctors is I think exactly the same as that of the three theological friends in the Book of Job to obfuscate the impact of the trauma with some kind of symbolic comedy and I am glad to tell you didn't you notice exactly the same scenario propos of the Louisiana Mexico Bay oil spill first there was the horror the correlative of the look into Irma's throat was you remember my God I at least was transfixed onto that blurred TV shot of of the crack in the ground just spilling out oil as if you pardon me but I think it's justified here an obscene metaphor as some kind of a toilet throwing shit back at us and then what was the comedy again the three doctors you remember the Congress hearings the three Halliburton and so on playing exactly the same game first BP saying oh we just approved the plan we didn't do it the second guy saying no we just provided the concrete the first the third one saying no we were just executing the plans of the others and so on and so on it's another story about which I don't have time to go into today how unfortunately because I still as a foreigner what does this matter support him President Obama's reaction was also slightly ridiculous to me namely he all too much for my taste fell into fell into this legal moralistic trap of oh it's BP's problems let's find the culprits and so on no sorry it's not BP's problem it's the problem of us all it's something that may endanger our way of life so we have to start to stop this cheap game of finding the culprit and to ask much more radical questions first okay BP has to be punished but wait a minute I have nothing good to say about BP yes but are you aware that it could have happened also probably other companies are using are using similar materials so more radical questions to be asked and so on and so on so again we have to begin asking much more radical questions here unfortunately again this was unfortunately this was not done but let me go on so asked about I return to the Book of Job asked about why then did Job suffer God replies with what is usually read as his supreme arrogance as the assertion of the gap separating God from man you know that oh who are you to ask me this what do you know about all the monsters I created and so on and so on but again Chesterton proposes here a radically different reading I quote Chesterton to startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist he unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things the horse the eagle the raven the wild ass the peacock the ostrich the crocodile he so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun the whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder the maker of all things is astonished at the things he has himself made I prefer much this reading which means God's answer is who are you to complain look at all the mess that I've created the whole universe is crazy like sorry I don't control it this resistance to meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes from AIDS and ecological disasters to up up to Holocaust they have no deeper meaning this legacy of Job prohibits us to take refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as a meaningless catastrophe the God who sees the entire picture in what we perceive as a stain so that you know what appears to us as a stain God sees the total harmony of the universe but when confronted with an event like Gulag Holocaust or today the death of millions in Congo in the last decade is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning you know like oh we are just blind humans we are not able to see how Gulag or Holocaust contribute to the global harmony of the universe and so on this of course is an obscenity if there is a whole totality which can teleologically justify and thus redeem an event like the Holocaust then we are finished Christ's death on the cross means precisely that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts Christ's death on the cross is the death of precisely this God the God above the old guy up there so that when you are in trouble here you can say oh don't worry too much somehow we all know it will end well I think that Christ's death means to refuse any deeper meaning that obfuscates the brutal real of historical catastrophes now in order to explain what this means I will do something horrible horrible don't be afraid not none of my dirty jokes just the more horrible thing even to repeat an old joke that you all know but I think it's crucial its logic here maybe I even repeated it here already years ago you know I know you all know it you know that story about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed taken to the mental institution finally he is cured convinced that he is not a grain but a man however when he is allowed to leave the hospital he immediately comes back trembling of scare he says there is a chicken outside the door and I am afraid that the chicken will eat me doctor tells him but you know very well that you are now that you are not a grain of seed but a man of course I know it replies the patient but does the chicken know it this is incidentally the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms the unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth we can imagine in a similar way a bourgeois subject visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism after the finished course he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism the teacher tells him but you know now how things stand commodities are only expressions of social relations there is nothing magic about them to which the pupil replies of course I know all that but the commodities I'm dealing with seem not to know it this is why incidentally Marx has to evoke this fiction of if commodities could speak in Capital so again the true task is not to convince the subject but the chicken commodities and the same goes for God let me imagine an enlightened society of revolutionary terror where a man is put in prison because he believes in God with different measures mostly education he is brought to the knowledge that God does not exist when dismissed the man comes running back and explains that how scared he is of being punished by God but tells him his terrorizing doctor whatever of course but you know now that God doesn't exist the man's reply of course I know God doesn't exist but does God know that he doesn't exist far from being a joke this exactly I claim is what happens in Christianity when dying on the cross Christ utters his Father Father why did you forsake me here for a brief moment God himself does not believe in himself or again to quote a wonderful passage from Chesterton quote his Orthodoxy when the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven the moment of crucifixion it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God and now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a God from all the gods of the world carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power they will not find another God who has himself been in revolt nay the matter grows too difficult for human speech but let the atheists themselves choose a God they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation only one religion in which God seems for an instant to be an atheist end of quote it is in this precise sense I claim that today's era is perhaps less atheist than any prior one we are all ready to indulge in utter skepticism cynical distance exploitation of others without any illusions violation of all ethical constraints extreme sexual practices and so on protected by the silent awareness that the big Other God social space whatever doesn't know it like I claim that after the 70s we got so-called sexual revolution liberation but I claim it's absolutely crucial to read this liberation together with its other side which is a sudden disappearance of Freud's fundamental insights of child sexuality did you notice how today molesting children became the ultimate horror as if you know we can engaged in all our perversities but there must be some innocent gaze for which we should maintain the appearance here incidentally I claim that even such a nice film although maybe not so nice as Life is Beautiful of Benigni is a fake namely you know the story father a Jew is arrested with his son taken to Auschwitz and in order to render possible easier for the son to survive he convinces the small boy that this is really just one great social game they can leave any moment they want it's just that if you insist freely to remain to the end there you will gain a big reward at the end and so on and so forth and only at the end after the father dies we are supposed not to laugh to cry at the end when the child learns of the father's sacrifice but would you not agree that there would have been a simple way to render a film I claim much more appropriate and in a way tragic which is that just prior to his death father were to learn that son the son also knew all the time that father's story is a fake but that he just pretended to believe father not to to make it easier for the father so that you have a fiction structuring that relationship which was operative although no one believes in it that's how we believe today we have fictions we don't believe in them but they function God what does this mean the point the Lacanian point of this is that in a way the moment we speak we unconsciously believe in God it is our speech which creates God God is here the moment we talk or to quote Talmud passage quote you have made me into a single entity in the world for it is written hear O Israel the Lord is our God the Lord is one and I shall make you into a single entity in the world end of quote this Talmud formula exemplifies the idea of God kept alive by subjects' incessant activity in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan opposes to the thesis of the death of God the claim that God is dead from the very beginning it is just that he just didn't know it one should nonetheless take note of how this process unfolds in two stages Jewish Christian one while in pagan religions gods are alive Jewish believers are already taking into account his death indications of this awareness abound in Jewish sacred texts recall from Talmud the wonderful story about two rabbis who basically tell God to shut up the two rabbis fight over a theological question and unable to resolve it one of them proposes let heaven itself testify that the law is according to my judgment then a voice from heaven agrees with the rabbi who appealed to it however the other rabbi then stands up and claims that even a voice from heaven God's voice was not to be regarded quote for thou oh God didst long ago write down in the law which thou gavest on Sinai thou shalt follow the multitude end of quote so God himself had to agree after saying my children have vanquished me my children have vanquished me and he runs away in short after the end of creation is accomplished God survives only as the dead letter of the law without retaining even the right to intervene into how people interpret his law God thus has to die two times in itself and for itself in Judaism it dies in itself by way of being reduced to the effect of the human speech such God God nonetheless continues to function so it has to die for itself and this I think happens in Christianity that is to say why did Christ had to die the paradox is that God is a fiction but a fiction which structures our reality it's a symbolic fiction it is efficient in its very inexistence it doesn't exist but it nonetheless works it is thus not enough to destroy the fiction from outside to reduce it to reality to demonstrate how it emerged from reality this is what vulgar atheists like Dawkins are doing the fiction has to be destroyed from within to put it in descriptive terms it is not enough to prove that God doesn't exist the formula of true atheism is that God himself must be made must proclaim his inexistence must stop believing in himself therein resides the paradox if we destroy the fiction from outside just reducing it to reality the fiction continues to function to exert its symbolic efficiency as in the famous joke about the atheist Zionists who do not believe that God exists but nonetheless believe that somehow God gave them the land of Israel so what happens when God dies for himself imagine experiencing oneself as abandoned by God left to one's own devices with no big other secretly watching over my fate guaranteeing the happy outcome is this abandonment not another name for the abyss of freedom this abandonment to freedom causes anxiety as Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud not because the divine is far from us but because it gets all too close to us since it is our freedom that is the divine part of ourselves if freedom is the supreme gift of God to us where we should restore to the word gift all its fundamental ambiguity present and poison a dangerous poisonous present then being abandoned by God is the most God can give us and the consequence of fully assuming this abandonment are immense let me refer here to Chesterton for the last time it goes to Chesterton's credit that he turned around the standard misperception according to which the ancient pagan attitude is that of the joyful assertion of life while Christianity imposes a somber order of guilt and reconciliation for Chesterton on the contrary it is the pagan attitude which is deeply melancholic yes enjoy it but enjoy it while it lasts because at the end there is always death and decay the message of Christianity according to Chesterton is on the contrary that of infinite joy beneath the deceptive surface of guilt and renunciation quote again from Chesterton's Orthodoxy the outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom end of quote so is it not Tolkien's Lord of the Rings the ultimate proof of this paradox only a devout Christian which Tolkien was could have imagined such magnificent pagan universe thereby confirming the thesis that paganism is the ultimate Christian dream which is why the conservative Christian critics who years a couple of years ago expressed their concern at how books and movies like Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series undermine Christianity missed the point that is to say the perverse conclusion which is unavoidable here you want to enjoy the pagan dream of pleasurable life without paying the pagan price of melancholic sadness for it choose Christianity we can discern the traces of this paradox up to the well-known Catholic figure of the priest or a nun as the ultimate bearer of the sexual wisdom recall what is arguably the most powerful scene of horrible movie The Sound of Music can you please just prepare the clip I will show you this is the only really hardcore scene that you will see today namely it's the scene when after Maria Julie Andrews to use the human term escapes from the Von Trapp family back to the monastery unable to deal with her sexual attraction towards Baron Von Trapp she cannot find peace there since she still well has sexual longing for the baron now in a memorable scene the mother superior summons her and advises her what Maria wants to be punished and so on no mother superior advises her to return to the Von Trapp family and try to sort out her relationship with the baron she then I will show it to you now just while you will be hearing the song think about the obscenity basically the message is what sacrifice go back and sorry for the expression screw the guy's brains out please the clip climb every mountain search high and low follow every byway every path you know climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream a dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream a dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream okay the uncanny power of this scene I think resides in its unexpected display of the spectacle of desire which renders the scene literally embarrassing the very person whom one would expect to preach abstinence and renunciation turns out to be the agent of desire years ago a wonderful ironic review aptly characterized The Sound of Music as a movie about a stupid nun who would be allowed to let her happy monastic life if her mother superior were not to invite her to her room and start to shout at her hysterically about the need to climb every mountain significantly when The Sound of Music was shown in the still communist Yugoslavia in the late sixties this scene the three-minute song was the only part of the film which was censored cut out I think the anonymous communist censor displayed his profound sense here for the truly dangerous power of Catholic ideology far from being the religion of sacrifice of renouncing the earthly pleasures in contrast to the pagan affirmation of the life of passion Christianity offers this perverted false Christianity a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires without having to pay the price for them to enjoy life without the fear of decay and debilitating pain awaiting us at the end of the day if we go to the end in this direction it would even be possible to sustain that therein resided the ultimate function of Christ's sacrifice you can indulge in your desires you can enjoy I took the price for it upon myself there is thus an element of truth in a joke about what is the ideal prayer of a young Christian girl to Virgin Mary oh thou who conceived without having sinned let me sin without having to conceive in the perverse functioning of Christianity religion is effectively evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life with impunity this I think again is to avoid a misunderstanding the fake Christianity the institutional one you know I recall cannot but recall here that wonderful moment I don't know if it really happened the legend says it did when you know when Napoleon humiliated the pope forcing him to crown him and then even taking the crown from him and then pope told to Napoleon something very nice he told him pope told Napoleon I know what you try you are trying to destroy Christianity but sorry to tell you you will fail we the church are trying this for the year for years and we failed so this is the first step this is ideology this religion bad to put it simply so how to get out of this deadlock first I want to tests you a clarification one of the reliable ways to identify a half-educated pseudo-intellectual is his or her reaction to the well-known scene from Bob Fosse's Cabaret in which in a country inn the camera shows a blond young man's face in a close-up he starts to to sing about how nature is gradually awakening how birds start to sing again blah blah blah then the camera moves to two of his buddies a girl and a boy joining him in singing then all the most of the guests in the inn join them the singing gets more and more passionate the words describing how the fatherland should also awaken and of course we get the point it's a Nazi song please the second clip do you still think you're in control fatherland fatherland show us a sign your children have waited to see the morning will come when the world is mine tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs to me the branch of the linden is leafy and green the Rhine gives its gold to the sea but somewhere a glory of its unseen tomorrow belongs to me the babe in his cradle is closing his eyes the blossom embraces the bee but soon says a whisper arise arise tomorrow belongs to me fatherland fatherland show us a sign your children have waited to see the morning will come when the world is mine tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs to me I hate this scene why because I think it contains a kind of pseudo-wisdom you remember that guy I don't know the the cabaret the cabaret manager whatever who appears at the end with this wise smile and so on it's totally wrong in what sense the pseudo-intellectual's reaction to this scene is something like I mean I even had ex-friends because you know following the joke of Lacan that I like my fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée I would say no none of my friends likes this scene because the moment they like this scene they are no longer my friends why the idiot's reaction is the following one oh my God only now after seeing this scene do I understand what was Nazism how it took possession of Germans the underlying idea is that the raw emotional
Thank you very much I'm always a little bit embarrassed by such kind introductions but I have a lot to say I hope you will have patience so let me begin with the wonderful anecdote which happened a couple of days after September 11th attacks to my good friend Udi Aloni while he was in a taxi near Union Square here on Manhattan he engaged in a conversation with the Muslim driver who tried to convince him that the attacks were a Jewish plot of course referring to the well-known rumors that no Jews died there since they were secretly informed a day before not to go to the Twin Towers Udi my friend immediately of course told the driver to stop and stepped out but what he then encountered when walking across Union Square was a group of Orthodox Jews trying to mobilize their followers one of them was as it were preaching to others saying that we have now a new ultimate proof that God is protecting the Jewish people no Jews were killed in the September 11th attack so my friend was kind of perplexed by this strange bedfellows this is how opposites coincide in our daily lives so how does God fit into all this let me begin with a well-known quote from Dostoevsky and as the joke goes but in this case the joke is literally true this is a quote from Dostoevsky Dostoevsky just never said this namely if there is no God then everything is permitted as far as I was able to establish the first one to attribute this to Dostoevsky was Sartre in in his L’être et le néant allegedly Dostoevsky said this in Brothers Karamazov he doesn't say it but okay it does render his insight in some way conservatives like to evoke this thought if there is no God then everything is permitted propos scandals among the atheist hedonist elite from millions killed in Gulag up to animal sex and gay marriages here is so they say where we end if we deny all transcendent authority which poses some unsurpassable limits to human endeavors without such limits so the story goes there is no ultimate obstacle to exploiting one's neighbors ruthlessly to use them as tools for profit and pleasure to enslave and humiliate them even to kill them in millions all that separates us from this ultimate moral vacuum are in the absence of a higher transcendent limit temporary and non-obligatory pacts among wolves self-imposed limitations in the interest of one's survival and well-being which can be violated at any moment but I would like to begin with this naive question are things really like that well the first thing one cannot help noticing is that Jacques Lacan's well-known critical inversion of this Dostoevsky's dictum Lacan inverted it into if there is no God then everything is prohibited this inversion is much more appropriate to describe the universe of atheist liberal hedonists they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them a space for this pursuit they get entangled into a thick network of self-imposed politically correct regulations as if a superego much more severe than that of the traditional morality is controlling them they get obsessed by the idea that in pursuing their pleasures they may humiliate or violate others' space so they regulate their behavior with detailed prescriptions about how to avoid harassing others not to mention the no less complex regulation of their own care of the self bodily fitness health food spiritual relaxation and so on indeed nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist the second thing strictly correlative to this first observation is that today it is rather those who refer to God in a brutally direct way perceiving themselves as direct instruments of God's will it is rather to them that everything is permitted it is the so-called fundamentalists who practice a perverted version of what Kierkegaard called the religious suspension of the ethical on a God's mission one is allowed to kill thousands so why do we witness today the rise of religiously or ethically justified violence because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as grounds for mass violence or war that is to say since our hegemonic ideology calls on us to enjoy life and to realize our inner selves it is difficult for the majority to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing another human being the large majority of people are thanks God spontaneously moral torturing or killing another human being is deeply traumatic for most of us so in order to make them do it a larger sacred cause is needed which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial religion or ethnic belonging or art poetry fits this role perfectly this is my old thesis that literally behind every ethnic cleansing there is a poet it's not only Karadžić there are others of course there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure just for the sake of it but I claim they are rare exceptions the majority needs to be anesthetized against their elementary decency and sensitivity for the other's suffering again for this a sacred cause is needed without this cause we would have to feel all the burden of what we did with no absolute on whom to put the ultimate responsibility religious ideologists usually claim that true or not religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things from today's experience one should rather stick to Steven Weinberg to his claim that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things only religion can make good people do bad things but I am far from as you will see of course condemning religion no less importantly the same another critical point also seems to hold for the display of so-called human weaknesses isolated extreme forms of sexuality among godless hedonists are immediately elevated into representative symbols of the depravity of the godless while any questioning of say the link between the much more massive phenomenon of priests' pedophilia and the church as institution Catholic Church is rejected as anti-religious slander the well-documented story of how the Catholic Church as institution protects pedophiliacs in its own ranks is another good example of how if God exists then everything is permitted to those who legitimate themselves as his servants what makes this protective attitude towards pedophiliacs so disgusting is that it is not practiced by tolerant hedonists but to add insult to injury by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society now you will say and I agree with this immediate counter-question but what about the Stalinist communist mass killings what about the extra-legal liquidations of the nameless millions in the Soviet Union but I claim it is easy to see how these crimes were always justified by their own ersatz God a God that failed as Ignazio Silone one of the great disappointed communists called it they had their own God which is why everything was permitted to them in other words the same logic as that of religious violence applies here Stalinist communists do not perceive themselves as hedonist individuals abandoned to their freedom no they perceive themselves as instruments of historical progress of a higher necessity which pushes humanity towards next stage of communism and it is this reference to their own absolute and to their own privileged relationship to this absolute which permits them to do whatever they want or consider necessary this is why the moment cracks appear in this ideological protective shield the weight of what they Stalinist communists did becomes unbearable to many individual communists since they have to confront their acts as their own with no cover-up in a higher reason of history this is why after Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin's crimes many cadres committed suicide they did not learn anything new during that speech you know when they say oh my God we learned what horrors were happening in the Soviet Union they were of course lying all the facts were more or less known to them they were just deprived of the historical legitimation of their crimes in the communist historical absolute so to get rid of God is this simply our task maybe to get rid of God as the big Other in the sense of higher authority covering up for us as it were but definitely not to get rid of the figure of the other not only the Levinasian other another human being his face but why not even the animal other Jacques Derrida of whom I am otherwise rather critical reported on a kind of primordial sin from his life after awakening he went naked to his bathroom where his cat followed him then the awkward moment occurred he was standing in front of the cat which looked at his naked body unable to endure this situation he did something put a towel around his waist chasing the cat outside entering the shower the cat's gaze stands for the gaze of the other an inhuman gaze but for this reason all the more the other's gaze in all its abyssal impenetrability seeing oneself being seen by an animal is an abyssal encounter of the other's gaze since precisely because we should not simply project onto the animal our inner experience something is returning the gaze which is impenetrable radically other the entire history of philosophy is based perhaps upon a disavowal of such an encounter I remember a photo of a cat after it was submitted to some lab experiment in a centrifuge I saw this photo years ago a cat its bones half broken its skin half hairless her its eyes helplessly looking into the camera this is the gaze of the other disavowed not only by philosophers but by humans as such even Levinas who wrote so much about the helpless other's face as the original site of ethical responsibility explicitly denied that an animal's face can function like this one of the few honorable exceptions was here Jeremy Bentham who made a simple proposal instead of asking can animals reason and think can they talk all these humanist enterprises where then you triumphantly say no they can't they just exchange signs they don't really talk and so on we should according to Bentham rather ask can they suffer human industry alone is continuously causing immense suffering on animals which is systematically disavowed we know about it but we pretend not to know not only laboratory experiments but special regimes for example to produce eggs and milk turning artificial light on and off to shorten the day use of hormones and so on pigs which are half blind and barely able to walk just fattened fast to be slaughtered and so on and so on the majority of those who visit a chicken factory can no longer eat chicken and all of us knows all of us know what goes on there but this knowledge has to be neutralized again so that we can act as if we do not know one of the ways to facilitate this ignorance is the Cartesian notion of animal machine Cartesians already in the 17th century were warning people against compassion with animals they claimed that when we see an animal emitting sounds of pain we should always bear in mind that these sounds do not express any real inner feeling since animals do not have souls they are just these are just sounds generated by a complex mechanism of muscles bones fluids and so on you can clearly see the origin of these sounds through dissection the problem is that the notion of animal machine has to end up in La Mettrie's notion of L'homme machine of a human man as a machine if one is fully committed a fully committed neurobiologist exactly the same claim can be made about sounds and gestures emitted by humans when they are tortured there is no separate interior domain of soul where pain is really felt such sounds and gestures are simply produced by the complex neurobiological mechanisms that constitute a human body so back to the gaze of the cat what if the perplexity a human looking at a cat sees in the cat's gaze is the perplexity aroused by the monstrosity of the human being itself what if what we see in this abyss of the other's gaze is our own abyss or to quote Racine a wonderful line from Jean Racine's Phèdre dans ses yeux je vois ma perte écrite in her eyes I see inscribed my loss Gilbert Keith Chesterton proposed such a reversal of perspective instead of asking what are animals for us humans for our experience we should ask or try to imagine what are we humans for animals in his practically unknown essay Everlasting Man Chesterton makes a wonderful mental experiment along these lines imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the animals around him a quote the simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth in all sobriety he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one he has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage he cannot sleep in his own skin he cannot trust his own instincts he is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple he is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture alone among the animals man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself alone among the animals man feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame end of quote so my point here is that if we try to imagine things like this maybe this is the first step of wisdom to extend this logic which was first formulated by Descartes which is for me the origin of and I use now the term in its positive sense multiculturalism when you find other people's customs strange remember how your own customs must appear strange to the same foreigners we should maybe try just to imagine what kind of monstrosity we were and still are for animals maybe this is what we should read in the perplexed animal gaze and now this brings me to the topic of this talk the sacred maybe in this sense what the animals see in us is something sacred sacred in its very monstrosity here I ask you to do what I did although I have a kind of natural revulsion for museums like I'm like for me going to a museum is like for a vampire when you tell him why don't you eat this wonderful plate of garlic you know but nonetheless I went I wasn't disappointed why because I claim these three religions of the book to whom the exhibition this wonderful one is dedicated here are precisely the three religions which systematically undermine the traditional notion of the sacred what do I mean by this the sacred is as to its content the same as something terrifying evil the difference is purely formal structural what makes something sacred is its exorbitant character which made it a limitation of ordinary evil for this is why and I totally understand this remember here on Manhattan the ruins of September 11th acquired almost the quality of something sacred precisely because of this excessive horror destruction to see this we should not only focus on religious prohibitions and obligations we should also bear in mind the rituals practiced by religions and the contradiction already noted by Hegel between prohibitions and rituals as a rule rituals of a certain religion consist in staging the violation of prohibitions of this same religion the sacred sacrifice to gods is the same act as murder what makes it sacred is the fact that it limits contains murders in ordinary life in times of crisis of the sacred this distinction disintegrates there is no sacred exception a sacrifice is all of a sudden perceived as a simple murder but this also means that there is nothing no external limit to contain our ordinary violence therein resides the ethical dilemma Christianity tries to resolve how to contain violence without this sacrificial exception following René Girard Jean-Pierre Dupuy described how Christianity stages the same sacrificial process but with a crucially different cognitive spin the story is not told by the collective which stages the sacrifice as in the so-called pagan rituals but by the victim from the standpoint of the victim whose full innocence is thereby asserted the first step towards this reversal can be discerned of course already in the Book of Job where the story is told from the standpoint of the innocent victim of the divine wrath once the innocence of the sacrificial victim is known the efficiency of the entire sacrificial mechanism of scapegoating is undermined sacrifices even at the magnitude of Holocaust become hypocritical inoperative a fake but we also lose the containment of violence enacted by the sacrifice a quote from Jean-Pierre Dupuy concerning Christianity it is not a morality but an epistemology it says the truth about the sacred and thereby it deprives the sacred of its creative power for better or for worse humans alone decide about this end of quote therein resides I think the world-historical rupture enacted by Christianity now we know about the fake of the sacrificial scapegoat logic and we can no longer pretend we don't know the impact of this knowledge one cannot get rid of once it is here is not only liberating but deeply ambiguous it also deprives society of the stabilizing role of scapegoating and thus sets free the space for violence not contained by any mythic limit this is how in a truly perspicuous insight Dupuy reads the scandalous lines from Matthew Matthew do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth I did not come to bring peace but a sword furthermore we stumble here upon another ambiguity it is not that this absence of limits should be read in the standard way of either humanity will find a way to set itself limits or it will perish in an uncontained violence if there is a lesson from so-called totalitarian experience it is that the temptation is exactly the opposite one the danger of the absence of a divine limit is to impose a new pseudo-limit a fake transcendence on behalf of which I act from Stalinism to religious fundamentalism even ecology functions as ideology the moment it is evoked as a new limit it has all the chances of developing into a predominant form of ideology today a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion it takes over the old religion's fundamental function that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits so it is fashionable in some of today's neo-pagan post-secular circles to affirm the dimension of the sacred as prior to religion as a space in which every religion dwells but which is prior to religion there can be sacred without religion but not the other way around sometimes this priority of the sacred is even given an anti-religious spin a way to remain agnostic while nonetheless being engaged in a deep spiritual experience but I think that we should precisely turn things around here the radical break of Judaism Christianity and so on even of Islam I don't have time to develop that consists in the fact that these are the first religions without the sacred religions whose unique achievement is precisely to demystify the sacred does it mean that no sublime shattering experience remains it does but not that of sacred in the sense of sacrificial scapegoating let me evoke to you one such experience I will quote Jorge Semprún who reported how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews to the Buchenwald concentration camp the Jews were stuck into the freight train almost to a car traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the war on arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death except for children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies when the children were emptied from the car the Nazis led their dogs loose on them and soon only two fleeing children were left then I quote from Semprún a passage the little one of the two children began to fall behind the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too the smell of blood was driving them mad and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller together they covered a few more yards till the blows of the clubs felled them and together they dropped their faces to the ground their hands clasped for all eternity end of quote what should not escape our attention here is that the freeze of eternity is embodied in hand as partial object while the bodies of two boys perish the clasped hands persist for all eternity like tasteless parallel the smile of the Cheshire Cat in in Alice of Alice one can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed in a movie while the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality the two children are clubbed to death torn apart alive the image of their hands clasped freezes immobilized for eternity while the sound renders temporary reality the image renders the eternal real the frozen image which insists over reality rendered by sounds stands for a kind of positive ethical image of eternity but is this sacred or not how does Christianity fit into it let me begin where I think it all begins the Book of Job the first treatise on critique of ideology why remember what happens there after Job is hit by calamities the three theological friends come offering interpretations which render these calamities meaningful you know one says oh wait a minute God is just so if you are punished some you must have done something wrong the second says maybe God is testing you whatever that is to say they all try to argue that Job's suffering has some meaning and the greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence but just to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities and you know the beauty of it when God appears afterwards he gives right to Job against the ideological defenders of faith did you notice how here the structure is exactly the same as that of Freud's dream of Irma's injection which opens interpretation of dreams this dream begins with a conversation between Freud and his patient Irma about the failure of her treatment due to an infected injection in the course of the conversation Freud gets closer to her approaches her face looks deep into her mouth confronts the horrible sight of the live red flesh and at this point of horror the tonality of the dream changes the horror all of a sudden passes into comedy three doctors Freud's friends appear who in a ridiculous pseudo-professional jargon enumerate multiple and mutually exclusive reasons why Irma's poisoning by the infected injection was nobody's guilt there was no injection the injection was clean and so on and so on so there is first a traumatic encounter in Freud's dream the sight of the raw flesh of Irma's throat which is then followed by the sudden change into comedy the ridiculous exchange between three doctors the function of the three doctors is I think exactly the same as that of the three theological friends in the Book of Job to obfuscate the impact of the trauma with some kind of symbolic comedy and I am glad to tell you didn't you notice exactly the same scenario propos of the Louisiana Mexico Bay oil spill first there was the horror the correlative of the look into Irma's throat was you remember my God I at least was transfixed onto that blurred TV shot of of the crack in the ground just spilling out oil as if you pardon me but I think it's justified here an obscene metaphor as some kind of a toilet throwing shit back at us and then what was the comedy again the three doctors you remember the Congress hearings the three Halliburton and so on playing exactly the same game first BP saying oh we just approved the plan we didn't do it the second guy saying no we just provided the concrete the first the third one saying no we were just executing the plans of the others and so on and so on it's another story about which I don't have time to go into today how unfortunately because I still as a foreigner what does this matter support him President Obama's reaction was also slightly ridiculous to me namely he all too much for my taste fell into fell into this legal moralistic trap of oh it's BP's problems let's find the culprits and so on no sorry it's not BP's problem it's the problem of us all it's something that may endanger our way of life so we have to start to stop this cheap game of finding the culprit and to ask much more radical questions first okay BP has to be punished but wait a minute I have nothing good to say about BP yes but are you aware that it could have happened also probably other companies are using are using similar materials so more radical questions to be asked and so on and so on so again we have to begin asking much more radical questions here unfortunately again this was unfortunately this was not done but let me go on so asked about I return to the Book of Job asked about why then did Job suffer God replies with what is usually read as his supreme arrogance as the assertion of the gap separating God from man you know that oh who are you to ask me this what do you know about all the monsters I created and so on and so on but again Chesterton proposes here a radically different reading I quote Chesterton to startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist he unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things the horse the eagle the raven the wild ass the peacock the ostrich the crocodile he so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun the whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder the maker of all things is astonished at the things he has himself made I prefer much this reading which means God's answer is who are you to complain look at all the mess that I've created the whole universe is crazy like sorry I don't control it this resistance to meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes from AIDS and ecological disasters to up up to Holocaust they have no deeper meaning this legacy of Job prohibits us to take refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as a meaningless catastrophe the God who sees the entire picture in what we perceive as a stain so that you know what appears to us as a stain God sees the total harmony of the universe but when confronted with an event like Gulag Holocaust or today the death of millions in Congo in the last decade is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning you know like oh we are just blind humans we are not able to see how Gulag or Holocaust contribute to the global harmony of the universe and so on this of course is an obscenity if there is a whole totality which can teleologically justify and thus redeem an event like the Holocaust then we are finished Christ's death on the cross means precisely that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts Christ's death on the cross is the death of precisely this God the God above the old guy up there so that when you are in trouble here you can say oh don't worry too much somehow we all know it will end well I think that Christ's death means to refuse any deeper meaning that obfuscates the brutal real of historical catastrophes now in order to explain what this means I will do something horrible horrible don't be afraid not none of my dirty jokes just the more horrible thing even to repeat an old joke that you all know but I think it's crucial its logic here maybe I even repeated it here already years ago you know I know you all know it you know that story about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed taken to the mental institution finally he is cured convinced that he is not a grain but a man however when he is allowed to leave the hospital he immediately comes back trembling of scare he says there is a chicken outside the door and I am afraid that the chicken will eat me doctor tells him but you know very well that you are now that you are not a grain of seed but a man of course I know it replies the patient but does the chicken know it this is incidentally the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms the unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth we can imagine in a similar way a bourgeois subject visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism after the finished course he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism the teacher tells him but you know now how things stand commodities are only expressions of social relations there is nothing magic about them to which the pupil replies of course I know all that but the commodities I'm dealing with seem not to know it this is why incidentally Marx has to evoke this fiction of if commodities could speak in Capital so again the true task is not to convince the subject but the chicken commodities and the same goes for God let me imagine an enlightened society of revolutionary terror where a man is put in prison because he believes in God with different measures mostly education he is brought to the knowledge that God does not exist when dismissed the man comes running back and explains that how scared he is of being punished by God but tells him his terrorizing doctor whatever of course but you know now that God doesn't exist the man's reply of course I know God doesn't exist but does God know that he doesn't exist far from being a joke this exactly I claim is what happens in Christianity when dying on the cross Christ utters his Father Father why did you forsake me here for a brief moment God himself does not believe in himself or again to quote a wonderful passage from Chesterton quote his Orthodoxy when the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven the moment of crucifixion it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God and now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a God from all the gods of the world carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power they will not find another God who has himself been in revolt nay the matter grows too difficult for human speech but let the atheists themselves choose a God they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation only one religion in which God seems for an instant to be an atheist end of quote it is in this precise sense I claim that today's era is perhaps less atheist than any prior one we are all ready to indulge in utter skepticism cynical distance exploitation of others without any illusions violation of all ethical constraints extreme sexual practices and so on protected by the silent awareness that the big Other God social space whatever doesn't know it like I claim that after the 70s we got so-called sexual revolution liberation but I claim it's absolutely crucial to read this liberation together with its other side which is a sudden disappearance of Freud's fundamental insights of child sexuality did you notice how today molesting children became the ultimate horror as if you know we can engaged in all our perversities but there must be some innocent gaze for which we should maintain the appearance here incidentally I claim that even such a nice film although maybe not so nice as Life is Beautiful of Benigni is a fake namely you know the story father a Jew is arrested with his son taken to Auschwitz and in order to render possible easier for the son to survive he convinces the small boy that this is really just one great social game they can leave any moment they want it's just that if you insist freely to remain to the end there you will gain a big reward at the end and so on and so forth and only at the end after the father dies we are supposed not to laugh to cry at the end when the child learns of the father's sacrifice but would you not agree that there would have been a simple way to render a film I claim much more appropriate and in a way tragic which is that just prior to his death father were to learn that son the son also knew all the time that father's story is a fake but that he just pretended to believe father not to to make it easier for the father so that you have a fiction structuring that relationship which was operative although no one believes in it that's how we believe today we have fictions we don't believe in them but they function God what does this mean the point the Lacanian point of this is that in a way the moment we speak we unconsciously believe in God it is our speech which creates God God is here the moment we talk or to quote Talmud passage quote you have made me into a single entity in the world for it is written hear O Israel the Lord is our God the Lord is one and I shall make you into a single entity in the world end of quote this Talmud formula exemplifies the idea of God kept alive by subjects' incessant activity in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan opposes to the thesis of the death of God the claim that God is dead from the very beginning it is just that he just didn't know it one should nonetheless take note of how this process unfolds in two stages Jewish Christian one while in pagan religions gods are alive Jewish believers are already taking into account his death indications of this awareness abound in Jewish sacred texts recall from Talmud the wonderful story about two rabbis who basically tell God to shut up the two rabbis fight over a theological question and unable to resolve it one of them proposes let heaven itself testify that the law is according to my judgment then a voice from heaven agrees with the rabbi who appealed to it however the other rabbi then stands up and claims that even a voice from heaven God's voice was not to be regarded quote for thou oh God didst long ago write down in the law which thou gavest on Sinai thou shalt follow the multitude end of quote so God himself had to agree after saying my children have vanquished me my children have vanquished me and he runs away in short after the end of creation is accomplished God survives only as the dead letter of the law without retaining even the right to intervene into how people interpret his law God thus has to die two times in itself and for itself in Judaism it dies in itself by way of being reduced to the effect of the human speech such God God nonetheless continues to function so it has to die for itself and this I think happens in Christianity that is to say why did Christ had to die the paradox is that God is a fiction but a fiction which structures our reality it's a symbolic fiction it is efficient in its very inexistence it doesn't exist but it nonetheless works it is thus not enough to destroy the fiction from outside to reduce it to reality to demonstrate how it emerged from reality this is what vulgar atheists like Dawkins are doing the fiction has to be destroyed from within to put it in descriptive terms it is not enough to prove that God doesn't exist the formula of true atheism is that God himself must be made must proclaim his inexistence must stop believing in himself therein resides the paradox if we destroy the fiction from outside just reducing it to reality the fiction continues to function to exert its symbolic efficiency as in the famous joke about the atheist Zionists who do not believe that God exists but nonetheless believe that somehow God gave them the land of Israel so what happens when God dies for himself imagine experiencing oneself as abandoned by God left to one's own devices with no big other secretly watching over my fate guaranteeing the happy outcome is this abandonment not another name for the abyss of freedom this abandonment to freedom causes anxiety as Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud not because the divine is far from us but because it gets all too close to us since it is our freedom that is the divine part of ourselves if freedom is the supreme gift of God to us where we should restore to the word gift all its fundamental ambiguity present and poison a dangerous poisonous present then being abandoned by God is the most God can give us and the consequence of fully assuming this abandonment are immense let me refer here to Chesterton for the last time it goes to Chesterton's credit that he turned around the standard misperception according to which the ancient pagan attitude is that of the joyful assertion of life while Christianity imposes a somber order of guilt and reconciliation for Chesterton on the contrary it is the pagan attitude which is deeply melancholic yes enjoy it but enjoy it while it lasts because at the end there is always death and decay the message of Christianity according to Chesterton is on the contrary that of infinite joy beneath the deceptive surface of guilt and renunciation quote again from Chesterton's Orthodoxy the outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom end of quote so is it not Tolkien's Lord of the Rings the ultimate proof of this paradox only a devout Christian which Tolkien was could have imagined such magnificent pagan universe thereby confirming the thesis that paganism is the ultimate Christian dream which is why the conservative Christian critics who years a couple of years ago expressed their concern at how books and movies like Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series undermine Christianity missed the point that is to say the perverse conclusion which is unavoidable here you want to enjoy the pagan dream of pleasurable life without paying the pagan price of melancholic sadness for it choose Christianity we can discern the traces of this paradox up to the well-known Catholic figure of the priest or a nun as the ultimate bearer of the sexual wisdom recall what is arguably the most powerful scene of horrible movie The Sound of Music can you please just prepare the clip I will show you this is the only really hardcore scene that you will see today namely it's the scene when after Maria Julie Andrews to use the human term escapes from the Von Trapp family back to the monastery unable to deal with her sexual attraction towards Baron Von Trapp she cannot find peace there since she still well has sexual longing for the baron now in a memorable scene the mother superior summons her and advises her what Maria wants to be punished and so on no mother superior advises her to return to the Von Trapp family and try to sort out her relationship with the baron she then I will show it to you now just while you will be hearing the song think about the obscenity basically the message is what sacrifice go back and sorry for the expression screw the guy's brains out please the clip climb every mountain search high and low follow every byway every path you know climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream a dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream a dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream okay the uncanny power of this scene I think resides in its unexpected display of the spectacle of desire which renders the scene literally embarrassing the very person whom one would expect to preach abstinence and renunciation turns out to be the agent of desire years ago a wonderful ironic review aptly characterized The Sound of Music as a movie about a stupid nun who would be allowed to let her happy monastic life if her mother superior were not to invite her to her room and start to shout at her hysterically about the need to climb every mountain significantly when The Sound of Music was shown in the still communist Yugoslavia in the late sixties this scene the three-minute song was the only part of the film which was censored cut out I think the anonymous communist censor displayed his profound sense here for the truly dangerous power of Catholic ideology far from being the religion of sacrifice of renouncing the earthly pleasures in contrast to the pagan affirmation of the life of passion Christianity offers this perverted false Christianity a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires without having to pay the price for them to enjoy life without the fear of decay and debilitating pain awaiting us at the end of the day if we go to the end in this direction it would even be possible to sustain that therein resided the ultimate function of Christ's sacrifice you can indulge in your desires you can enjoy I took the price for it upon myself there is thus an element of truth in a joke about what is the ideal prayer of a young Christian girl to Virgin Mary oh thou who conceived without having sinned let me sin without having to conceive in the perverse functioning of Christianity religion is effectively evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life with impunity this I think again is to avoid a misunderstanding the fake Christianity the institutional one you know I recall cannot but recall here that wonderful moment I don't know if it really happened the legend says it did when you know when Napoleon humiliated the pope forcing him to crown him and then even taking the crown from him and then pope told to Napoleon something very nice he told him pope told Napoleon I know what you try you are trying to destroy Christianity but sorry to tell you you will fail we the church are trying this for the year for years and we failed so this is the first step this is ideology this religion bad to put it simply so how to get out of this deadlock first I want to tests you a clarification one of the reliable ways to identify a half-educated pseudo-intellectual is his or her reaction to the well-known scene from Bob Fosse's Cabaret in which in a country inn the camera shows a blond young man's face in a close-up he starts to to sing about how nature is gradually awakening how birds start to sing again blah blah blah then the camera moves to two of his buddies a girl and a boy joining him in singing then all the most of the guests in the inn join them the singing gets more and more passionate the words describing how the fatherland should also awaken and of course we get the point it's a Nazi song please the second clip do you still think you're in control fatherland fatherland show us a sign your children have waited to see the morning will come when the world is mine tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs to me the branch of the linden is leafy and green the Rhine gives its gold to the sea but somewhere a glory of its unseen tomorrow belongs to me the babe in his cradle is closing his eyes the blossom embraces the bee but soon says a whisper arise arise tomorrow belongs to me fatherland fatherland show us a sign your children have waited to see the morning will come when the world is mine tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs tomorrow belongs to me I hate this scene why because I think it contains a kind of pseudo-wisdom you remember that guy I don't know the the cabaret the cabaret manager whatever who appears at the end with this wise smile and so on it's totally wrong in what sense the pseudo-intellectual's reaction to this scene is something like I mean I even had ex-friends because you know following the joke of Lacan that I like my fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée I would say no none of my friends likes this scene because the moment they like this scene they are no longer my friends why the idiot's reaction is the following one oh my God only now after seeing this scene do I understand what was Nazism how it took possession of Germans the underlying idea is that the raw emotional
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impact of this song accounts for the force of attraction of Nazism and does that it tells us more than any study of Nazi ideology how Nazism effectively functions this was grosso modo the point of Susan Sontag's famous analysis of Leni Riefenstahl's work it is fascist not only when it explicitly celebrates the Nazi regime the very texture of her entire work her obsession with bodily beauty discipline nature mountain climbing is proto-fascist I totally reject this reading not that I have a special love for Leni Riefenstahl but let's take the I think it's the Blue Mountain or what her last Bergfilm a mountain film just before proto-Nazi well there is one big problem you know with whom she
impact of this song accounts for the force of attraction of Nazism and does that it tells us more than any study of Nazi ideology how Nazism effectively functions this was grosso modo the point of Susan Sontag's famous analysis of Leni Riefenstahl's work it is fascist not only when it explicitly celebrates the Nazi regime the very texture of her entire work her obsession with bodily beauty discipline nature mountain climbing is proto-fascist I totally reject this reading not that I have a special love for Leni Riefenstahl but let's take the I think it's the Blue Mountain or what her last Bergfilm a mountain film just before proto-Nazi well there is one big problem you know with whom she
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co-wrote the scenario for that film the guy who was her lover at that point in the early 30s Béla Balázs a Marxist and a Jew and I think it's much more productive to read that movie as a kind of condemnation of the
co-wrote the scenario for that film the guy who was her lover at that point in the early 30s Béla Balázs a Marxist and a Jew and I think it's much more productive to read that movie as a kind of condemnation of the
Slavoj Žižek
Jewish outcast so along the same lines one likes to emphasize the allegedly proto-fascist character of the mass choreography where one displays disciplined movements of thousands of bodies mass performances parades and so on and if one finds this also in socialism one immediately draws the conclusion about a deep solidarity between the two totalitarianisms but I again disagree here such a procedure I think misses the point not only are such mass performances not inherently fascist they are not even neutral waiting to be appropriated either by left or by right it was Nazism which stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement their original site none of the proto-fascist elements is per se fascist what makes these elements fascist is their specific articulation or to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms all these elements are exapted by fascism so back to this song I hate the scene because I shamelessly like the song I no my point is not shame on you if you secretly enjoyed the song my point is enjoy it but not secretly in what sense imagine the same song with just a slightly changed words celebrating like the nature is awakening the awakening of the working class as a communist battle cry you know not fatherland awaken but Communist Party awaken and so on and so on it would have perfectly functioned why not I think it's totally wrong to leave this to the enemy and to add insult to injury for those who like this scene do you know I love this detail that the song many people thought oh this was a well-selected old Nazi song no it was written by two Jewish composers specially for the film and I don't read this in any potentially anti-semitic way I'm not saying ah because the Jews are somehow they can adopt to anything or no this could have been also a positive wonderful song but something more is needed what ah now comes a slightly more traumatic detail with which I will conclude don't be afraid about one about one hour into Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento and I just like this scene I hate Bertolucci otherwise I mean one of the most boring movies that I ever saw was was the Last Tango in Paris you know you had vulgar sex combined with long half an hour moments of pure boring nothing happening which allegedly makes it all more deep and so on but there is a nice scene in Novecento something quite shocking happens during a confrontation between the poor farmers on strike and their landowner who is explaining to them why due to catastrophic weather which ruined the harvest he has to cut by half their wages please the last clip this scene structurally very similar to the famous scene from David Fincher's Fight Club where during a confrontation with his boss Ed Norton starts to beat his own face with his fist this scene with its logic of realized metaphor it is the usual way to ask someone to listen carefully not to say lend me your ear reminds renders in a hard way the price the proverbial Shylock's pound of meat one has to pay for liberation the defying offering of one's ear of here you have it what you wanted my ear with its implicit subversion now I no longer have ears I will not hear you I'm deaf for your arguments again such a refusal such a withdrawer disconnection from the shared
Jewish outcast so along the same lines one likes to emphasize the allegedly proto-fascist character of the mass choreography where one displays disciplined movements of thousands of bodies mass performances parades and so on and if one finds this also in socialism one immediately draws the conclusion about a deep solidarity between the two totalitarianisms but I again disagree here such a procedure I think misses the point not only are such mass performances not inherently fascist they are not even neutral waiting to be appropriated either by left or by right it was Nazism which stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement their original site none of the proto-fascist elements is per se fascist what makes these elements fascist is their specific articulation or to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms all these elements are exapted by fascism so back to this song I hate the scene because I shamelessly like the song I no my point is not shame on you if you secretly enjoyed the song my point is enjoy it but not secretly in what sense imagine the same song with just a slightly changed words celebrating like the nature is awakening the awakening of the working class as a communist battle cry you know not fatherland awaken but Communist Party awaken and so on and so on it would have perfectly functioned why not I think it's totally wrong to leave this to the enemy and to add insult to injury for those who like this scene do you know I love this detail that the song many people thought oh this was a well-selected old Nazi song no it was written by two Jewish composers specially for the film and I don't read this in any potentially anti-semitic way I'm not saying ah because the Jews are somehow they can adopt to anything or no this could have been also a positive wonderful song but something more is needed what ah now comes a slightly more traumatic detail with which I will conclude don't be afraid about one about one hour into Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento and I just like this scene I hate Bertolucci otherwise I mean one of the most boring movies that I ever saw was was the Last Tango in Paris you know you had vulgar sex combined with long half an hour moments of pure boring nothing happening which allegedly makes it all more deep and so on but there is a nice scene in Novecento something quite shocking happens during a confrontation between the poor farmers on strike and their landowner who is explaining to them why due to catastrophic weather which ruined the harvest he has to cut by half their wages please the last clip this scene structurally very similar to the famous scene from David Fincher's Fight Club where during a confrontation with his boss Ed Norton starts to beat his own face with his fist this scene with its logic of realized metaphor it is the usual way to ask someone to listen carefully not to say lend me your ear reminds renders in a hard way the price the proverbial Shylock's pound of meat one has to pay for liberation the defying offering of one's ear of here you have it what you wanted my ear with its implicit subversion now I no longer have ears I will not hear you I'm deaf for your arguments again such a refusal such a withdrawer disconnection from the shared
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field of communication is a condition sine qua non of freedom this happens with Spartacus this happens with Jesus Christ and so on and so on painful as it is you cannot avoid it so to conclude what kind of God do you get after such a gesture let me nonetheless after this depressing scene conclude on a lighter tone I think the God you get is a God from a wonderful old Bolshevik joke from early 20s when communist propagandists were still taken minimally seriously as the one who can really convince people such a joke wouldn't have been possible already in the late 20s in Soviet Union about an able communist propagandist who after his death finds himself finds himself in hell where he quickly of course being a good propagandist convinces the guards to let him go out and he escapes to heaven when after a week the devil notices inspecting hell his absence he devil also goes up quickly pays a visit to God demanding that God returns to hell what belongs to the devil however immediately after the devil starts to address God oh my Lord God interrupts him because of course the communist propagandist has done his job also in heaven God interrupts him first I am not your Lord but a comrade second are you crazy talking to fictions I don't exist and third be short otherwise I will miss my party cell meeting I'm on the way to it this is the God we need today a God who fully wholly becomes man a comrade among us crucified together with two social outcasts and who not only doesn't exist but himself knows this entirely passing over into the love that binds together members of the Holy Ghost which is the name of a the emancipatory collective running to meet to the to the party meeting means sorry I belong to the Holy Ghost the community of believers where I am one of the equals that's the God I am ready to die for thank you very much if we still have some time we can maybe do some Q and A Slavoj Žižek is asking if we still have some time I think we still have some time I mean you are the master not me I am the master and I'm the master of time even if you are not my Lord but
field of communication is a condition sine qua non of freedom this happens with Spartacus this happens with Jesus Christ and so on and so on painful as it is you cannot avoid it so to conclude what kind of God do you get after such a gesture let me nonetheless after this depressing scene conclude on a lighter tone I think the God you get is a God from a wonderful old Bolshevik joke from early 20s when communist propagandists were still taken minimally seriously as the one who can really convince people such a joke wouldn't have been possible already in the late 20s in Soviet Union about an able communist propagandist who after his death finds himself finds himself in hell where he quickly of course being a good propagandist convinces the guards to let him go out and he escapes to heaven when after a week the devil notices inspecting hell his absence he devil also goes up quickly pays a visit to God demanding that God returns to hell what belongs to the devil however immediately after the devil starts to address God oh my Lord God interrupts him because of course the communist propagandist has done his job also in heaven God interrupts him first I am not your Lord but a comrade second are you crazy talking to fictions I don't exist and third be short otherwise I will miss my party cell meeting I'm on the way to it this is the God we need today a God who fully wholly becomes man a comrade among us crucified together with two social outcasts and who not only doesn't exist but himself knows this entirely passing over into the love that binds together members of the Holy Ghost which is the name of a the emancipatory collective running to meet to the to the party meeting means sorry I belong to the Holy Ghost the community of believers where I am one of the equals that's the God I am ready to die for thank you very much if we still have some time we can maybe do some Q and A Slavoj Žižek is asking if we still have some time I think we still have some time I mean you are the master not me I am the master and I'm the master of time even if you are not my Lord but
Slavoj Žižek
comrade but nonetheless no as a comrade in arms I would love to invite all of the people who have real questions and only good questions and only short questions and only you are even a good communist Bolshevik you want to censor questions immediately I absolutely want to censor so anybody who has a good question a censored question should come up to the mic and ask their question I just want to know were you ever religious did you ever practice any religion no and why in what circumstances because I mean the circumstances were very easy unfortunately I am saying this sincerely in my country ex-Yugoslavia the church did not play such a role as for example exemplarily in Poland in the struggle for freedom and so on they were more or less more or less opportunistically silent so you know they didn't have they didn't enjoy this how should I put it moral status we I'm not saying I was a mega great dissident I was a mid-level dissident enough to be jobless unemployed for a couple of years we didn't look at church as some kind of authority and it's very interesting how I it's only through these new readings of Paul from Taubes to Altizer death of God theology and so on and through contacts with my Jewish friends who told me many wonderful things about Talmud and so on and also to some I sorry didn't have time to go into this Islam friends who showed me all the ambiguity of Islam how it's not just simply you know screw the women and so on I mean control them it's much more ambiguous remember for example just one detail so that I don't lose time that in Islam women are not only simply subordinated you remember if you know a little bit of Islam just one detail how does Mohammed become a prophet through the woman first he is when he hears the voices of archangel Gabriel or who giving him messages he thinks this must be devil it's his wife Kadija who renders clear to him no it's divine voice so it is as if men are confused the ultimate ethical agent is the woman you know where you find this now I will shock you the lowest moment and I'm totally opposed to it I don't have any sympathy for oh it's a different culture here of Islamic fundamentalism do you remember this scandal some four five no not you I see the worry in your look I will cut it short don't worry no worry I'm not worry you are now like that wounded cat that I mentioned you know I don't know what to read it to you sorry you remember in Australia that scandal when a woman was raped and the highest Islam authority there a priest said blamed the woman using that pretty disgusting metaphor saying what about if somebody leaves a piece of unwrapped meat on the street and if dogs come by and eat it whom would you blame the dogs or the idiot who left the meat there the idea was the woman is to blame it's disgusting but on the other hand no on the other hand doesn't mean I have some sympathy for it I just wanted to draw attention to a very strange fact in this story the woman is the only ethically autonomous agent we men are idiots like dogs you see it ah ah you grab it the only one who is supposed to have the minimal ethical firmness to oppose temptation which is why she is blamed is the woman I mean it's okay I stop here sorry here and there in your works you talk about the Holy Trinity and I wonder if you could pull together some of your ideas on the Trinity no all the way I read it I think I tried to develop in my very limited way this in my debate with John Milbank who is much more member of what he calls himself as you probably know better than me radical Orthodoxy you know why I liked to do that book with him incidentally because we opposite as we are we both reject a certain theological orientation which I don't like this kind of a deconstructionist post-secular post-modern theology well the story goes like this of course there is no God as a good uncle up there the God is dead but after out of the void of this absence a certain undeconstructible voice is addressing us and so on and so on this kind of reduction of God through a some kind of a purely purely ethical beyond being agency the abyss of
comrade but nonetheless no as a comrade in arms I would love to invite all of the people who have real questions and only good questions and only short questions and only you are even a good communist Bolshevik you want to censor questions immediately I absolutely want to censor so anybody who has a good question a censored question should come up to the mic and ask their question I just want to know were you ever religious did you ever practice any religion no and why in what circumstances because I mean the circumstances were very easy unfortunately I am saying this sincerely in my country ex-Yugoslavia the church did not play such a role as for example exemplarily in Poland in the struggle for freedom and so on they were more or less more or less opportunistically silent so you know they didn't have they didn't enjoy this how should I put it moral status we I'm not saying I was a mega great dissident I was a mid-level dissident enough to be jobless unemployed for a couple of years we didn't look at church as some kind of authority and it's very interesting how I it's only through these new readings of Paul from Taubes to Altizer death of God theology and so on and through contacts with my Jewish friends who told me many wonderful things about Talmud and so on and also to some I sorry didn't have time to go into this Islam friends who showed me all the ambiguity of Islam how it's not just simply you know screw the women and so on I mean control them it's much more ambiguous remember for example just one detail so that I don't lose time that in Islam women are not only simply subordinated you remember if you know a little bit of Islam just one detail how does Mohammed become a prophet through the woman first he is when he hears the voices of archangel Gabriel or who giving him messages he thinks this must be devil it's his wife Kadija who renders clear to him no it's divine voice so it is as if men are confused the ultimate ethical agent is the woman you know where you find this now I will shock you the lowest moment and I'm totally opposed to it I don't have any sympathy for oh it's a different culture here of Islamic fundamentalism do you remember this scandal some four five no not you I see the worry in your look I will cut it short don't worry no worry I'm not worry you are now like that wounded cat that I mentioned you know I don't know what to read it to you sorry you remember in Australia that scandal when a woman was raped and the highest Islam authority there a priest said blamed the woman using that pretty disgusting metaphor saying what about if somebody leaves a piece of unwrapped meat on the street and if dogs come by and eat it whom would you blame the dogs or the idiot who left the meat there the idea was the woman is to blame it's disgusting but on the other hand no on the other hand doesn't mean I have some sympathy for it I just wanted to draw attention to a very strange fact in this story the woman is the only ethically autonomous agent we men are idiots like dogs you see it ah ah you grab it the only one who is supposed to have the minimal ethical firmness to oppose temptation which is why she is blamed is the woman I mean it's okay I stop here sorry here and there in your works you talk about the Holy Trinity and I wonder if you could pull together some of your ideas on the Trinity no all the way I read it I think I tried to develop in my very limited way this in my debate with John Milbank who is much more member of what he calls himself as you probably know better than me radical Orthodoxy you know why I liked to do that book with him incidentally because we opposite as we are we both reject a certain theological orientation which I don't like this kind of a deconstructionist post-secular post-modern theology well the story goes like this of course there is no God as a good uncle up there the God is dead but after out of the void of this absence a certain undeconstructible voice is addressing us and so on and so on this kind of reduction of God through a some kind of a purely purely ethical beyond being agency the abyss of
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address and so on my Jewish friends gave me a wonderful argument against Levinas here they told me no wonder Levinas is so popular they claim he is already secretly Christianizing Judaism what totally disappears in Levinas is precisely what I like in Judaism this spirit of as a communist I like it spirit of collective
address and so on my Jewish friends gave me a wonderful argument against Levinas here they told me no wonder Levinas is so popular they claim he is already secretly Christianizing Judaism what totally disappears in Levinas is precisely what I like in Judaism this spirit of as a communist I like it spirit of collective
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no in Levinas all of a sudden it's me and that stupid face
no in Levinas all of a sudden it's me and that stupid face
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addressing me and then it's only when there are other others and so on that collective appears so going back to your point my reading of it is simply brutal literal reading two premises A as Hegel puts it what dies on the cross is not son but father himself I think it's correct speculative reading otherwise we are in some pagan stupidity where you have God up there God sends a messenger oh sorry crucify this time it failed come back my son will try it
addressing me and then it's only when there are other others and so on that collective appears so going back to your point my reading of it is simply brutal literal reading two premises A as Hegel puts it what dies on the cross is not son but father himself I think it's correct speculative reading otherwise we are in some pagan stupidity where you have God up there God sends a messenger oh sorry crucify this time it failed come back my son will try it
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later years or whatever this is obscenity the whole point is that it's not that if we do this we are back at this boring pagan topic of Phoenix you know
later years or whatever this is obscenity the whole point is that it's not that if we do this we are back at this boring pagan topic of Phoenix you know
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you
you
Slavoj Žižek
die but out of out of the ashes you like that stupid bird whatever you come back no no no what comes after crucifixion is not Christ back to daddy it's Holy Ghost what is Holy Ghost read it literally when Christ is asked by his followers how will we know that you come you know that famous passage whenever there is love between two of you I will be there I take this absolutely literally Holy Ghost is what remains of God and it's our freedom there is no higher guarantee and so on here even some intelligent conservative Catholics got the point like I like the passage in Paul Claudel where he says the true mystery of Christianity is God can do anything without us it's not trust God is God trusted us this this as it were thrown into freedom condemned to freedom so it's against this background again that I read Trinity Trinity as precisely a break with any of these boring pagan notions God appears disappears maybe he will come again or whatever all this cyclic view and again I think this is something so tremendous that agreeing with what the pope said to Napoleon that one can almost read entire or most of at least Christianity as if I may put it in this way a struggle against its own subversive core and I think that today politically even this is very important where even Christianity is being more and more reinterpreted with some kind of a what is today the predominant spiritual attitude let's be frank it's no longer Christianity even if it's called Christianity it's some kind of a I like to call it a spiritualized pseudo-Western Buddhist hedonism you know realize yourself a little bit of spiritual exercise and so on and so on even Christianity is secretly if you look at it reformulated in these terms this is why with all my appreciation of Dalai Lama read his books I checked in a bookstore three of them on the first page they always begin in the same way all living beings want to avoid pain and live happily enjoy it and basically the message is a little bit of meditation will help you even better sex and so on I think that first this is blatantly false if there is anything to learn from psychoanalysis is that it's at least one human being sorry at least one living being humans who put all its energy to screw things up for itself as far as as much as possible it's this is what Freud called death drive and so on we are not hedonist animals and especially I think this is important I wonder if you would agree with me that the pope Ratzinger said as usual something pretty stupid that you know greed utilitarian greed and so on we have to overcome it in
die but out of out of the ashes you like that stupid bird whatever you come back no no no what comes after crucifixion is not Christ back to daddy it's Holy Ghost what is Holy Ghost read it literally when Christ is asked by his followers how will we know that you come you know that famous passage whenever there is love between two of you I will be there I take this absolutely literally Holy Ghost is what remains of God and it's our freedom there is no higher guarantee and so on here even some intelligent conservative Catholics got the point like I like the passage in Paul Claudel where he says the true mystery of Christianity is God can do anything without us it's not trust God is God trusted us this this as it were thrown into freedom condemned to freedom so it's against this background again that I read Trinity Trinity as precisely a break with any of these boring pagan notions God appears disappears maybe he will come again or whatever all this cyclic view and again I think this is something so tremendous that agreeing with what the pope said to Napoleon that one can almost read entire or most of at least Christianity as if I may put it in this way a struggle against its own subversive core and I think that today politically even this is very important where even Christianity is being more and more reinterpreted with some kind of a what is today the predominant spiritual attitude let's be frank it's no longer Christianity even if it's called Christianity it's some kind of a I like to call it a spiritualized pseudo-Western Buddhist hedonism you know realize yourself a little bit of spiritual exercise and so on and so on even Christianity is secretly if you look at it reformulated in these terms this is why with all my appreciation of Dalai Lama read his books I checked in a bookstore three of them on the first page they always begin in the same way all living beings want to avoid pain and live happily enjoy it and basically the message is a little bit of meditation will help you even better sex and so on I think that first this is blatantly false if there is anything to learn from psychoanalysis is that it's at least one human being sorry at least one living being humans who put all its energy to screw things up for itself as far as as much as possible it's this is what Freud called death drive and so on we are not hedonist animals and especially I think this is important I wonder if you would agree with me that the pope Ratzinger said as usual something pretty stupid that you know greed utilitarian greed and so on we have to overcome it in
Paul Holdengräber
this apparent anti-capitalism totally wrong capitalism is as Benjamin knew has a much more
this apparent anti-capitalism totally wrong capitalism is as Benjamin knew has a much more
Slavoj Žižek
religious structure a true capitalist is not a utilitarian hedonist you
religious structure a true capitalist is not a utilitarian hedonist you
Paul Holdengräber
are ready to starve to risk everything just so that capital
are ready to starve to risk everything just so that capital
unknown
reproduces
reproduces
Slavoj Žižek
itself and so on you are even ready ready to whatever to to endanger the earth whatever just so that it goes on capitalism again is not the structure of personal egotism and greed every intelligent ideologist knows this I talk too much I hope I gave you at least some orientation of a possible answer at least let's have at least another one to make it a good triad if yes yes at least a triad yes another question and then there's a question that came to us through the web go ahead could you clarify what you make of the resurrection if the death God dies on the cross is a literal death not only this my idea is again that resurrection is the Holy Spirit which is the community of believers I here read God through I tried to and I was even tempted but it would have taken too much time to play it here but I didn't find Paul Robeson version I don't like Joan Baez version namely you know that legendary American trade union song Joe Hill where a friend asks Joe Hill but who appears to to a sleeping or working class trade unionist Joe Hill who was killed by the corps appears and the dreamer asks him but you are dead I saw you dying how can you be here and then the guy says no whenever workers organize I am there and so on and so on that's the only resurrection if you ask me okay what about all that bullshit at the here I'm a little bit of a Stalinist censor what about that John's Apocalypse and so on uh I am against I think first all bad things in Christianity including the first traces of anti-semitism they start in Gospel of John I'm totally against John I think the other three are the true ones and I think this is why John's Apocalypse is bullshit I think it's already a regression this ethical trust of early Christianity is already lost that would have been my reading none of these Armageddon and so on all that I think the Paul is my hero you know just community what I like about Paul is again this disregard of this disregard of of not fetishizing the person of Jesus Christ Paul is even often criticized for this how Paul basically almost doesn't quote Jesus Christ's sayings and so
itself and so on you are even ready ready to whatever to to endanger the earth whatever just so that it goes on capitalism again is not the structure of personal egotism and greed every intelligent ideologist knows this I talk too much I hope I gave you at least some orientation of a possible answer at least let's have at least another one to make it a good triad if yes yes at least a triad yes another question and then there's a question that came to us through the web go ahead could you clarify what you make of the resurrection if the death God dies on the cross is a literal death not only this my idea is again that resurrection is the Holy Spirit which is the community of believers I here read God through I tried to and I was even tempted but it would have taken too much time to play it here but I didn't find Paul Robeson version I don't like Joan Baez version namely you know that legendary American trade union song Joe Hill where a friend asks Joe Hill but who appears to to a sleeping or working class trade unionist Joe Hill who was killed by the corps appears and the dreamer asks him but you are dead I saw you dying how can you be here and then the guy says no whenever workers organize I am there and so on and so on that's the only resurrection if you ask me okay what about all that bullshit at the here I'm a little bit of a Stalinist censor what about that John's Apocalypse and so on uh I am against I think first all bad things in Christianity including the first traces of anti-semitism they start in Gospel of John I'm totally against John I think the other three are the true ones and I think this is why John's Apocalypse is bullshit I think it's already a regression this ethical trust of early Christianity is already lost that would have been my reading none of these Armageddon and so on all that I think the Paul is my hero you know just community what I like about Paul is again this disregard of this disregard of of not fetishizing the person of Jesus Christ Paul is even often criticized for this how Paul basically almost doesn't quote Jesus Christ's sayings and so
Paul Holdengräber
on his point is what
on his point is what
Slavoj Žižek
interest him is that Christ died and it's resurrected all other things who cares about them and incidentally the same point was made already by Kierkegaard or later who says openly as to what he says Christ is saying mostly banalities
interest him is that Christ died and it's resurrected all other things who cares about them and incidentally the same point was made already by Kierkegaard or later who says openly as to what he says Christ is saying mostly banalities
unknown
Kierkegaard puts it
Kierkegaard puts it
Slavoj Žižek
acidly every average student of theology today is able to put it better than than Jesus Christ if you look for something in Jesus Christ it's not wisdom but a wonderful here you have subversiveness of Christ a wonderful sense of maybe humor sarcasm you know what's the usual story Christ says something nobody understands then Christ says okay I will give you a parable then you understand even less did you notice this like what is the point of this parable and so on this is a wonderful strategy to shake people no okay sorry I talk too much very good and there is one one question that came to us online you organized it okay yeah I organized it um let me see if I can read it though you have claimed that environmentalism is a new opium of the masses Václav Klaus has said that ecology and global warming alarmism is a new ideology how would you respond to his notion of environmentalism as a new ideology and furthermore what is your impression of leaders such as Klaus who dogmatically advocate market liberal liberalization in the face of global financial crisis and new ecological catastrophes wonderful question I'm very grateful to it you know why because first I want to clarify a misunderstanding here not in the question but with some leftist today my it already depresses me more and more today's left like you know this will shock you I totally accept this description of Václav Klaus no for him already Václav Havel is a communist and so on no why what you know what's going on now leftist logic is this one pseudo-leftist I claim European Union is an organ of International Monetary Fund and so on the liberal agent so the only thing that can save welfare state in Europe is delinking go out of European Union bad European Union more autonomy state sovereignty where you are not constrained by any rules and so on and so on so there are serious friends of mine among them my very good friend personally Fred Jameson who are pro Václav Klaus they told me oh forget about this right wing and so on this is just the way for him to pass this basic message out of European Union and this is important for the left today it's the only way I think this strategy is madness I so but just to clarify this point two so I'm totally opposed to Václav Klaus and this is why I appreciate this question to avoid the interpretation my God if you read the book which I just published one book too many maybe living at the end times there I have a whole chapter on it my God ecology I'm fanatically pro ecology but one should distinguish and I emphasize this ecology as dealing with problems of ecology from its ideological use the real tragedy of ecology is how this field which is extremely serious remember I mentioned oil spill where where President Obama was even too short for me and so on I mean not radical enough and so on you know this is the problem today with ecology and even with general critiques of capitalism I always repeat it today we have even some of the leftists wanted to shoot me when I mention this we have maybe even an overload too much of critique of capitalism but what kind of critique this Hollywood left moralistic critique we are all the time bombarded by you know oh my God that company is is that company is polluting environment another company is exploiting children the bank there is speculating but the premise is always this moralizing legal premise the culprits let's punish them and so on and so forth this excessive anti-capitalism is just a way for me to avoid deeper systemic questions back to ecology where I am critical towards ecology is this easy way of culpabilizing us you know aren't we let's be frank often when dealing with ecology aren't we acting a little bit that would be my ultimate brutal irony the way soccer fans do when they watch TV you know you are at your home in front of TV but you
acidly every average student of theology today is able to put it better than than Jesus Christ if you look for something in Jesus Christ it's not wisdom but a wonderful here you have subversiveness of Christ a wonderful sense of maybe humor sarcasm you know what's the usual story Christ says something nobody understands then Christ says okay I will give you a parable then you understand even less did you notice this like what is the point of this parable and so on this is a wonderful strategy to shake people no okay sorry I talk too much very good and there is one one question that came to us online you organized it okay yeah I organized it um let me see if I can read it though you have claimed that environmentalism is a new opium of the masses Václav Klaus has said that ecology and global warming alarmism is a new ideology how would you respond to his notion of environmentalism as a new ideology and furthermore what is your impression of leaders such as Klaus who dogmatically advocate market liberal liberalization in the face of global financial crisis and new ecological catastrophes wonderful question I'm very grateful to it you know why because first I want to clarify a misunderstanding here not in the question but with some leftist today my it already depresses me more and more today's left like you know this will shock you I totally accept this description of Václav Klaus no for him already Václav Havel is a communist and so on no why what you know what's going on now leftist logic is this one pseudo-leftist I claim European Union is an organ of International Monetary Fund and so on the liberal agent so the only thing that can save welfare state in Europe is delinking go out of European Union bad European Union more autonomy state sovereignty where you are not constrained by any rules and so on and so on so there are serious friends of mine among them my very good friend personally Fred Jameson who are pro Václav Klaus they told me oh forget about this right wing and so on this is just the way for him to pass this basic message out of European Union and this is important for the left today it's the only way I think this strategy is madness I so but just to clarify this point two so I'm totally opposed to Václav Klaus and this is why I appreciate this question to avoid the interpretation my God if you read the book which I just published one book too many maybe living at the end times there I have a whole chapter on it my God ecology I'm fanatically pro ecology but one should distinguish and I emphasize this ecology as dealing with problems of ecology from its ideological use the real tragedy of ecology is how this field which is extremely serious remember I mentioned oil spill where where President Obama was even too short for me and so on I mean not radical enough and so on you know this is the problem today with ecology and even with general critiques of capitalism I always repeat it today we have even some of the leftists wanted to shoot me when I mention this we have maybe even an overload too much of critique of capitalism but what kind of critique this Hollywood left moralistic critique we are all the time bombarded by you know oh my God that company is is that company is polluting environment another company is exploiting children the bank there is speculating but the premise is always this moralizing legal premise the culprits let's punish them and so on and so forth this excessive anti-capitalism is just a way for me to avoid deeper systemic questions back to ecology where I am critical towards ecology is this easy way of culpabilizing us you know aren't we let's be frank often when dealing with ecology aren't we acting a little bit that would be my ultimate brutal irony the way soccer fans do when they watch TV you know you are at your home in front of TV but you
Paul Holdengräber
nonetheless shout stand as if in a magic way you can influence help your team isn't a little bit of this in I'm
nonetheless shout stand as if in a magic way you can influence help your team isn't a little bit of this in I'm
unknown
very evil now in recycling and so
very evil now in recycling and so
Slavoj Žižek
on basically we know larger systemic changes are necessary but you know it makes you feel good you know like oh the bottle oh I have friends who if I don't put aside one can of coke oh my God how can you do it and so on it's pseudo-activity I claim this is ecology as ideology we are ready to follow all these small rituals not to confront the real problems which are very real I claim I now did a text which maybe will appear in some kind of a stupid new new year volume magazine of International Herald Tribune where I go precisely into this are people aware what is awaiting us like that probably imagine Iceland volcanic ash imagine the same thing which could happen now again we have it in Indonesia in Indonesia some it can happen it probably will some five ten times stronger imagine the whole of Iceland Iceland becoming uninhabitable how will we even deal with these problems where will the people from Iceland move who will or now that sub-Saharan Africa is getting more and more desert on the other hand so we are told parts of Siberia because of global warming and so on who will even organize the population exchange and so on all this calls for unheard of new forms of cooperation and so on and so on so again my point is not ecology is ideology but the predominant functioning of ecology is ideological which makes it all the more dangerous because it makes us avoid confronting the more radical issue so no no I'm totally pro green here if you if you had to in a in a few words say what is the radical issue today yes this is the reason why and I'm well aware of the risk sticking to this name I remain some kind of a communist not in any sense of oh another Leninist party and so on my God I said it on BBC that Hardtalk and you know that some people even
on basically we know larger systemic changes are necessary but you know it makes you feel good you know like oh the bottle oh I have friends who if I don't put aside one can of coke oh my God how can you do it and so on it's pseudo-activity I claim this is ecology as ideology we are ready to follow all these small rituals not to confront the real problems which are very real I claim I now did a text which maybe will appear in some kind of a stupid new new year volume magazine of International Herald Tribune where I go precisely into this are people aware what is awaiting us like that probably imagine Iceland volcanic ash imagine the same thing which could happen now again we have it in Indonesia in Indonesia some it can happen it probably will some five ten times stronger imagine the whole of Iceland Iceland becoming uninhabitable how will we even deal with these problems where will the people from Iceland move who will or now that sub-Saharan Africa is getting more and more desert on the other hand so we are told parts of Siberia because of global warming and so on who will even organize the population exchange and so on all this calls for unheard of new forms of cooperation and so on and so on so again my point is not ecology is ideology but the predominant functioning of ecology is ideological which makes it all the more dangerous because it makes us avoid confronting the more radical issue so no no I'm totally pro green here if you if you had to in a in a few words say what is the radical issue today yes this is the reason why and I'm well aware of the risk sticking to this name I remain some kind of a communist not in any sense of oh another Leninist party and so on my God I said it on BBC that Hardtalk and you know that some people even
Paul Holdengräber
attacked me on the streets of London I had to run oh you dirty anti I said the 20th century communism was the greatest ethico-political failure in the history of humanity my God what do people want me more to say to convince them that I'm not some kind of a Stalinist or whatever but I claim the problem is this one problems which gave birth to communism remain what I already
attacked me on the streets of London I had to run oh you dirty anti I said the 20th century communism was the greatest ethico-political failure in the history of humanity my God what do people want me more to say to convince them that I'm not some kind of a Stalinist or whatever but I claim the problem is this one problems which gave birth to communism remain what I already
Slavoj Žižek
mentioned this large probably movements of population they happened in the past the decay the decline of the Roman Empire and it was done chaotically with terrible destruction today we cannot afford it with weapons of mass destruction and so on that's the end so I would say all these problems that I see as fundamental ecology biogenetics and so on are the problems of commons commons in the sense of something that is our shared substance substance of our life like nature genetic base intellectual property and so on and so forth these are all fundamentally problems of commons and for me these are all different versions of the same problem so for me ultimately the problem is capitalism but not in this simple moralistic sense I'm my God the first one to admit that capitalism is obviously the most revolutionary dynamic system in the history of humanity my God that let's be frank I'm the first to say this let's be really frank and some leftist will now maybe shout at me but can you imagine in the entire history of humanity a time where a large majority at least of the people were living in relatively safe free high standard conditions then at least Western Europe in the last years the point is that this cannot last I claim the point is that you know when people tell me you are a utopian my answer is no the true utopia is to think that where we are now this can go on here you have ideology sorry to repeat an old point at the everyday level where I think if you want to detect ideology today think about impossibility what we consider possible what impossible did you notice how on the one hand impossibility sorry possibilities are exploding we are told especially in private lives and in and in technology practically everything is or will be possible you can download anything you can do all the sex operations split your penis you can do it with two women whatever you want maybe we will become a software eternally live everything is possible with money you can be everyone if you have money can become an astronaut visiting space and so on here everything is more and more possible at the same time did you notice how in the last decades the moment you touch economy and social order we are told oh the utopian era is possible sorry is over almost everything is impossible like do you need do you want more health care ah sorry it renders us incompetent it's impossible and so on and so on so we are living in this pure ideology in a crazy time where on the one hand you you can sorry to return to this tasteless example you can have your penis cut into two do it with two women you can become a virtual entity all that is possible but to give a
mentioned this large probably movements of population they happened in the past the decay the decline of the Roman Empire and it was done chaotically with terrible destruction today we cannot afford it with weapons of mass destruction and so on that's the end so I would say all these problems that I see as fundamental ecology biogenetics and so on are the problems of commons commons in the sense of something that is our shared substance substance of our life like nature genetic base intellectual property and so on and so forth these are all fundamentally problems of commons and for me these are all different versions of the same problem so for me ultimately the problem is capitalism but not in this simple moralistic sense I'm my God the first one to admit that capitalism is obviously the most revolutionary dynamic system in the history of humanity my God that let's be frank I'm the first to say this let's be really frank and some leftist will now maybe shout at me but can you imagine in the entire history of humanity a time where a large majority at least of the people were living in relatively safe free high standard conditions then at least Western Europe in the last years the point is that this cannot last I claim the point is that you know when people tell me you are a utopian my answer is no the true utopia is to think that where we are now this can go on here you have ideology sorry to repeat an old point at the everyday level where I think if you want to detect ideology today think about impossibility what we consider possible what impossible did you notice how on the one hand impossibility sorry possibilities are exploding we are told especially in private lives and in and in technology practically everything is or will be possible you can download anything you can do all the sex operations split your penis you can do it with two women whatever you want maybe we will become a software eternally live everything is possible with money you can be everyone if you have money can become an astronaut visiting space and so on here everything is more and more possible at the same time did you notice how in the last decades the moment you touch economy and social order we are told oh the utopian era is possible sorry is over almost everything is impossible like do you need do you want more health care ah sorry it renders us incompetent it's impossible and so on and so on so we are living in this pure ideology in a crazy time where on the one hand you you can sorry to return to this tasteless example you can have your penis cut into two do it with two women you can become a virtual entity all that is possible but to give a
Paul Holdengräber
little bit more for health care is
little bit more for health care is
Slavoj Žižek
impossible no maybe we have to change the priorities here a little bit you know just be more mod just be more modest here so again in this sense in a very modest way I don't have solutions I just think we are confronting serious problems let's start thinking as usual as usual before I would like to before we thank Slavoj Žižek I would like to thank you are brutally interrupting the spontaneous applause of people before I would like to sorry no no please stop my God please I would like to brutally interrupted I'd like to thank Books our independent bookstore that will be selling your book which you will sign and thank Slavoj Žižek for this performance thank you and I want to thank you all of you and especially to my good friend Paul I warn you now comes the ultimate insult if you know how Stalinist communists use this term you are not one of us communists but you are a good progressive bourgeois intellectual thank you
impossible no maybe we have to change the priorities here a little bit you know just be more mod just be more modest here so again in this sense in a very modest way I don't have solutions I just think we are confronting serious problems let's start thinking as usual as usual before I would like to before we thank Slavoj Žižek I would like to thank you are brutally interrupting the spontaneous applause of people before I would like to sorry no no please stop my God please I would like to brutally interrupted I'd like to thank Books our independent bookstore that will be selling your book which you will sign and thank Slavoj Žižek for this performance thank you and I want to thank you all of you and especially to my good friend Paul I warn you now comes the ultimate insult if you know how Stalinist communists use this term you are not one of us communists but you are a good progressive bourgeois intellectual thank you