Great Minds
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-07-01 · 1:30:44 · 12,255 words
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ideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismcinema-art-culturehegel-dialecticsecology-climatecommunism-socialismliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracysubjectivityeveryday-lifephilosophy-general
Žižek presents his book 'Living in the End Times' as a revival of ideology critique, arguing through film analysis, jokes, and anecdotes that contemporary ideology operates primarily through fetishist disavowal rather than old-style false consciousness. He extends this analysis to cover market neoliberalism, the university, protest movements, and ecological crisis, arguing that the left lacks a viable alternative model while the system approaches new authoritarian forms.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The structural-linguistic principle that identity is constituted not only by what a thing is but also by what it is not, applied here to ideological omissions and silences.
as “fetishist split”
The psychic structure whereby one knows very well (e.g. that ecological catastrophe looms) but does not really believe it at an affective/symbolic level, enabling inaction.
as “isolierung (isolation)”
Freud's mechanism whereby one accepts a fact abstractly but severs its affective or symbolic connection, preventing full integration into one's psychic reality.
The capacity of a fact or knowledge to be symbolically integrated and acted upon; suspended by fetishist ideology even when rational knowledge is present.
as “symptomatic functioning of ideology”
The classical mode in which ideology works through repression and the return of the repressed in symptomatic form.
as “fetishist functioning of ideology”
The dominant mode of ideology today, where belief is not repressed but held at a distance via a fetish-object, contrasted with the older symptomatic/repression model.
An object that functions as a stand-in allowing the subject to acknowledge a traumatic reality at a rational level while refusing full symbolic-affective integration of it.
Žižek's ironic label for the vague spirituality / transcendental meditation adopted by top managers as a fetish that lets them play dirty market games while maintaining inner distance.
Žižek's appropriation of Chesterton's ironic proposal: the role of the critical intellectual who detects from books that ideological crimes will be committed.
as “private use of reason”
Kant's term for reason subordinated to pre-established institutional goals (church, legal system), contrasted with genuinely free intellectual work.
The process by which even intimate emotional and erotic life is progressively restructured according to the logic of market competition and risk management.
as “ethical consumerism”
The ideological mechanism (exemplified by Starbucks) whereby anti-consumerist solidarity is built into the commodity price so that consuming more equals displaying more social conscience.
as “geoengineering”
Large-scale intervention into global natural systems (e.g. spraying salt water to deflect sunlight) being seriously considered by states as a response to missed climate-mitigation targets.
Žižek's phrase for the model demonstrated by China and Singapore, a highly dynamic and productive capitalism that functions stably within an authoritarian political system, refuting the liberal claim that capitalism necessarily generates democracy.
The Hegelian concept, rehabilitated here to mean the inclusion of all contradictions, symptoms, and degenerations within a concept, not their harmonization.
Implied in the discussion of ideology as a place that can be 'occupied' when protest movements disavow politics but still address their demands to an unnamed authority.
Sloterdijk's formula: subjects know very well what they are doing but do it anyway, updating Marx's false consciousness for an era of enlightened cynicism.
as “objectified belief”
Belief that is not held consciously but is embodied and enacted in practical/social activity, independently of the subject's avowed convictions.
Marx's concept, emphasized here as a case where illusion resides not in what we consciously think but in what we actually do, in practical activity rather than belief.
Stories he reaches for 14
Niels Bohr had a horseshoe over his door. A friend asked: are you superstitious? Bohr replied: No, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in it. But I have it because I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.
“i'm not stupid. i'm a scientist. of course, i don't believe in it. but i have it there because i was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
In Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies they have no cream but can bring coffee without milk. The punch is that what you don't get determines the identity of what you do get.
“sorry, we have run out of cream. we only have milk. can i then bring you coffee without milk?”
Starbucks posters explain that 1% of the price goes to Guatemalan children, 1% to save trees, etc. Anti-consumerist solidarity is built into the commodity price so that consuming more equals enacting more social conscience.
“why not include into the price of the commodity the anti-consumerist solidarity… so that the more you consume, the more at the same time you display social solidarity”
Buying overpriced half-rotten organic apples when you probably don't believe they are healthier but do it to feel good, the materiality of ideology operating through consumption.
“it makes us feel warm. isn't it nice? by buying an apple, i'm doing something for the humanity also.”
Alain Badiou found a French matrimonial agency advertisement promising to let you be in love 'without the fall', to have the feeling of love with the risky moment of exposure safely controlled, like coffee without caffeine.
“we will enable you to be in love. without the fall, without falling in love.”
When Napoleon rode through Jena, Hegel reportedly said he saw the world spirit embodied riding on a horse. Žižek cites this as the Hegelian moment of recognizing historical movement in a concrete individual.
“i think i saw the world spirit there embodied. riding on a horse.”
In The Da Vinci Code there is no sex between the protagonists, but Jesus himself has to make love to cover for the absence of sex between Robert Langdon and the heroine. In Angels & Demons, sex present in the novel is removed from the film.
“poor jesus christ himself has to make love… to cover up the fact that there is no sex here between robert langdon and the grand-granddaughter of jesus christ.”
In 2011 China prohibited alternate-history and time-travel fiction as too frivolous; Žižek's point is that the West needs no such prohibition because we have already stopped being able to imagine alternatives.
“they at least still have to prohibit it. what if with us ideology is so strong that we simply consider it impossible”
In Quantum of Solace, Bond and the Bond girl merely embrace, the first Bond film with no sex. For Žižek this reflects subjective self-commodification: passionate erotic attachment has become too risky.
“this is the first james bond film where at the end the couple just bond and the bond girl, they embrace themselves there to traumatize, nothing happens.”
A customer in socialist Poland asks if a store doesn't have butter; the clerk replies: 'We are not the store that doesn't have butter, we are the store that doesn't have toilet paper; the one without batteries is across the street.'
“we are not the store which doesn't have butter. we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper”
Chesterton proposed in The Man Who Was Thursday a special corps of philosophical policemen who detect from books of sonnets that a crime will be committed. Žižek uses this to frame the intellectual's critical task.
“the ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists”
Holmes draws attention to the dog that did nothing in the night-time. The dog's silence is the significant clue. Applied to ideology: what is not said while something is said is often the most important element.
“the dog did nothing in the night time. that was the curious incident.”
In WWI, German HQ telegraphs Vienna: 'Serious but not catastrophic.' Austria replies: 'Catastrophic but not serious.' This perfectly renders the fetishist split: knowing the catastrophe but not taking it seriously.
“here on our part of the front, the situation is serious but not catastrophic... here with us, the situation is catastrophic but not serious.”
The US tells Europe: join the search for WMD in Iraq. Europe says it has no facility for that. America replies: no problem, there are no WMD in Iraq. The same logic of the absent negation applies, the absence of the thing to be found matches the absence of the means to find it.
“no problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in iraq.”
Works invoked 15
Capital book
Marx's Capital is cited for its account of commodity fetishism: illusion is not in what we think but in what we do.
Ninotchka film
Described as Lubitsch's 'masterpiece'; the coffee-without-cream joke is taken from it to illustrate differentiality.
The Da Vinci Code film
No sex between protagonists; Jesus has to make love to cover the desexualized narrative, used to illustrate the desexualization of popular culture.
Quantum of Solace film
Acknowledged as 'politically progressive' (Bond saves Evo Morales from capitalist coup) but notable for being the first Bond film with no sex, symptom of subjective self-commodification.
Angels and Demons film
Sex present in the novel between Langdon and Vittoria Vetra is deleted from the film, further evidence for the self-commodification of erotic life.
Žižek's own book, presented as a revival of ideology critique; its framework structures the entire talk.
To Be or Not to Be film
Another Lubitsch film; the dialogue about doing to Shakespeare what the Germans do to Germany is deployed to critique conservative defenders of Europe.
The Lost Symbol book
Called 'one of the candidates for the worst novel of all times'; not even sexual attraction between characters, illustrating the desexualization thesis.
Chesterton's novel provides the quote about philosophical policemen detecting pessimists, which Žižek uses to frame the intellectual's critical vocation.
Orthodoxy book
Chesterton's Orthodoxy provides the argument that critics of religion, in fighting religion, sacrifice the freedom they mean to defend, a dialectical pattern Žižek applies to Europe's conservative defenders.
The King's Speech film
Read as ideology: the film portrays making a man 'stupid enough' to identify with his symbolic title as liberation. Žižek uses it to diagnose conservative ideology of authority.
Black Swan film
Called 'even much worse' and 'truly anti-feminist'; read as reviving the reactionary myth that women pursuing careers will die for it.
Sloterdijk's book; its formula ('they know very well but they do it anyway') is credited as the key update to Marx's ideology formula, though Žižek distances himself from Sloterdijk's anti-communism.
Cited as an instance of the old anti-feminist myth (woman chooses career, pays with death) in a chain from fairy tales to Black Swan.
Silver Blaze book
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story containing the 'curious incident of the dog in the night-time', cited as the best example of differentiality.
People invoked 24
John McDowell positive
The other Pittsburgh Hegelian named; same context as Brandom.
Robert Brandom positive
One of the Pittsburgh Hegelians; cited to illustrate that German students now go to the US to study Hegel properly, a symptom of European university marketization.
Grouped with Popper and Levinas on the critique of totality as leading to totalitarianism, cited but not explicitly endorsed or rejected on this point.
Grouped with Popper and Adorno on the critique of totality, cited without explicit endorsement or rejection.
Named as the actor in the early-90s film from which Žižek takes the double-negation / coffee erotic-invitation joke.
Jacques Lacan positive
The pathological jealousy example, jealousy is a pathology regardless of whether its content is true, is cited to illustrate that ideology is not settled at the level of truth-value.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek calls him 'my favorite Catholic theology' and draws extensively on The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy to frame the role of the critical intellectual and the dialectic of defenders destroying what they defend.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
Exemplifies the Iraq WMD logic, deployed as a comic illustration of the coffee-without-cream differential logic applied to geopolitics.
Alain Badiou positive
Badiou found the French matrimonial agency ad promising love 'without the fall,' which Žižek uses to illustrate subjective self-commodification.
Leon Trotsky negative
Trotskyist dream of direct workers' self-management is treated as a 20th-century model that has also failed and cannot be revived.
Named as the star of Black Swan, which Žižek reads as resuscitating anti-feminist myths.
Mentioned incidentally as the leader whose regime is saved by Bond in Quantum of Solace.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Despite describing him as 'anti-communist conservative', Žižek expresses respect and credits his Critique of Cynical Reason ('they know very well… but they are doing it') as the key update to Marx's formula.
Appears in the 'Who is the president of China?' Bush joke about the name 'Hu'.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Called a 'masterpiece' director; both Ninotchka and To Be or Not to Be are deployed as key examples of ideological/dialectical mechanisms.
Napoleon positive
The 'world spirit on horseback' moment when Hegel saw him at Jena is cited to illustrate the Hegelian recognition of historical force in a concrete individual.
The Double Life of Véronique is cited as an older instance of the anti-feminist myth that a woman must choose between career and life, placed in a lineage from fairy tales.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote about working even without belief is used as a perfect illustration of objectified/externalized belief.
Called 'we really cannot go lower' and The Lost Symbol 'one of the candidates for the worst novel of all times', but his works are used to illustrate the desexualization of popular culture.
Karl Popper negative
Grouped with Adorno and Levinas as thinkers who draw a straight road from philosophical totality to political totalitarianism, a position Žižek rejects.
Karl Marx positive
Commodity fetishism from Capital is central: Žižek insists on a careful reading showing that illusion is in practice, not consciousness.
Sigmund Freud positive
The mechanism of isolierung (isolation) is used to describe how one accepts facts abstractly without symbolically integrating them; the fetishist split also draws on Freud.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The concept of totality (including all contradictions) and the world-spirit-on-horseback anecdote are central. Žižek is also working on an 800-page book on Hegel at the time of this talk.
Immanuel Kant positive
His distinction between public and private use of reason is deployed to articulate the proper function of the university and the intellectual against marketization.
What it argues
fetishist functioning of ideology vs. symptomatic functioningdifferentiality and the logic of absent negationthe left's lack of a viable alternative modelmarketization of the university and the public use of reasoncynical reason and objectified beliefcommodity fetishism and Starbucks-style ethical consumerismcapitalism with Asian values and new authoritarianism
Dialectical moves 10
“The future king's problem is not too much symbolic identification but too little — the film is the sad story of how to make an intelligent man stupid enough to take his title seriously.”
The King's Speech reverses the apparent narrative (liberation through symbolic identification) into its opposite (ideological subjugation).
“The true threat to the Judeo-Christian legacy are not the immigrants but precisely the so-called defenders of Europe.”
The defenders of a value destroy it more thoroughly than any external enemy, the conservative defence of Europe enacts the very assault on public reason it claims to resist.
“The only true utopia today is the conservative belief that things can go on more or less as they are.”
Inverts the usual accusation (the left is utopian): radical pessimism is realist, while the optimism of continuity is the real utopia.
“Fetishists are not idiots who see nothing else; they can be very brutal and cynical — the fetish is precisely what enables cynical realism.”
The fetish does not blind the subject but allows them to function in full awareness, reversing the naive picture of fetishism as simple delusion.
“In China they still have to prohibit alternate-history stories; with us ideology is so strong we don't even have to prohibit it — we simply consider it impossible.”
The absence of prohibition is a symptom of deeper ideological closure than explicit censorship.
“Psychoanalysis's basic lesson is the exact opposite of what is usually attributed to it: we believe much more than we know we believe.”
Reverses the standard reading of psychoanalysis (repressed hedonism) to reveal that unconscious over-belief, not unbelief, is the real condition.
“Illusion is not in what we think but in what we are doing.”
Relocates ideological mystification from consciousness to practice, inverting the Enlightenment assumption that correct knowledge dissolves illusion.
“The moment you try to fight anti-semitism by measuring the truth-value of Nazi claims about Jews, you've already sold your soul to the devil.”
Engaging ideology on its own factual terrain accepts ideology's frame; the inversion is that even factually true anti-semitic claims would not make anti-semitism less ideological.
“Overspecialization engenders its opposite — it is not productive; the advantage of capitalism was precisely its apparently irrational expenditures.”
Planned expert-production destroys the surplus space of contingent discovery that drives real innovation, the 'irrational' is the motor of rationality.
“I'm not a crazy communist optimist who believes in revolution — I'm much more of a pessimist: I'm claiming that the true utopia is the belief that things can just go on.”
Positions radical pessimism as more realistic than either conservative continuity or revolutionary optimism.
Claims 21
asserts
Ideology today operates primarily through fetishist disavowal ('I know very well, but…') rather than through ignorance or simple false consciousness.the contemporary mode of ideological functioning
asserts
The King's Speech is an ideological fable about a man being made stupid enough to take his symbolic title (king) seriously.ideology in popular cinema / The King's Speech
asserts
The Black Swan resuscitates the reactionary anti-feminist myth that a woman who pursues a career will pay for it with death.ideology in popular cinema / The Black Swan
reframes
The Hegelian concept of totality requires including all contradictions, symptoms, and horrors within a notion — not harmonizing them.the concept of totality and its alleged link to totalitarianism
reframes
The true threat to the Judeo-Christian legacy in Europe is not Muslim immigrants but the conservative defenders of Europe who are destroying its most noble element: the public use of reason.European identity, immigration, and the university
asserts
Neoliberalism is an ideology rather than an economic reality — nobody, including the United States, actually practices it.neoliberalism
asserts
Starbucks-style ethical consumerism is ideology at its purest because it integrates anti-consumerist solidarity into the commodity price, making consumption and social conscience indistinguishable.commodity fetishism and ethical consumerism
asserts
The left lacks even a general viable model of what to do the day after it takes power.the contemporary left's strategic deficit
asserts
The democratic Arab Spring and Occupy-style protest movements are dangerous because they attack all political institutions without replacing them with a new political subject ('we the people will do it').contemporary protest movements and political subjectivity
asserts
With China and Singapore, capitalism has demonstrated it can be more dynamic and productive within authoritarian coordinates, refuting the liberal claim that capitalism generates democratic demand.capitalism, democracy, and authoritarianism
reframes
The only true utopia today is the conservative belief that with small accommodations, liberal democratic welfare-state Europe can survive as it is.utopianism and political pessimism
asserts
Ideology combated at the level of truth-value is ideology already conceded to; the proper target is the structural function ideology serves for the subject's identity.anti-ideological critique and anti-semitism as a case study
asserts
Anti-semitism would be a reprehensible ideology even if everything the Nazis said about Jews were true, because ideology is not decided by truth-value but by the structural need for its object.ideology, anti-semitism, and the limits of factual refutation
asserts
University education is being turned from a space of free inquiry into a factory for producing socially useful experts, which will paradoxically undermine even practical scientific innovation.marketization of the university
reframes
We believe much more than we know we believe — psychoanalysis's lesson is the opposite of what is usually attributed to it (that beneath appearances we are hedonists).psychoanalysis, unconscious belief, and ideology
asserts
Illusion in commodity fetishism is not in what we think but in what we do — practical activity, not consciousness, is where ideology resides.Marx's commodity fetishism and ideology
rejects
Stalinist Soviet society was far more chaotic and disorganized beneath its planned surface than Western liberal democracies — the planned-puppet-subject image is a liberal cliché.Stalinism and total social control
asserts
The 20th-century left's dream — including Trotskyism's direct-democracy workers' self-management — has to be regarded as a failure and cannot be the model going forward.20th century emancipatory models and the Trotskyist tradition
asserts
In today's ideological closure we may not even need to prohibit alternate-history fiction as China does — we simply cannot imagine it as possible.ideology and the foreclosure of alternative futures
asserts
The task of philosophers and public intellectuals today is not to provide solutions but to shift the coordinates of what counts as possible and impossible.the role of the intellectual
asserts
Defenders of a tradition so fanatically that they sacrifice the thing they defend (freedom, Judeo-Christian legacy) is a dialectical reversal Chesterton identified and which applies to conservative Europe today.dialectical self-undermining of ideological defenders
Quotes 16
“that's ideology today. we don't believe in it, we are all cynics, but we believe in it much more than we ourselves are ready to admit that we believe.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical reason and ideology as objectified belief
“ideology is not in what you know or you don't know. ideology resides in this underlying selection where some things, although you know them, you behave, act as if you don't know them.”Slavoj Žižek · the fetishist definition of ideology
“i'm much more of a pessimist. i'm claiming that the only true utopia today is this old-time european nostalgia utopia. if we keep silent and just go on cautiously, somehow this beautiful, safe europe will survive.”Slavoj Žižek · pessimism and the utopia of continuity
“the true threat to judeo-christian legacy are not poor pakistani or muslim or whatever immigrants. it's precisely the so called defenders of europe who effectively are a threat to it.”Slavoj Žižek · defenders as destroyers of European legacy
“illusion is not in what we think. we can be realists. illusion is in what we are doing.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as practice not consciousness
“even if most of what nazis were telling about the jews were to be true, anti-semitism would still have been a reprehensible ideology. because what makes it an ideology is not its truth value.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology cannot be refuted by factual correction
“the basic lesson of psychoanalysis today: it's exactly the opposite one of the one usually attributed to psychoanalysis. we believe much more than we know that we believe.”Slavoj Žižek · unconscious over-belief
“a true intellectual doesn't resolve problems posed by others. the first step of intellectual work is precisely to reflect on the problem itself.”Slavoj Žižek · the task of the critical intellectual
“what if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem? what if the way we spontaneously formulate a problem mystifies the problem?”Slavoj Žižek · meta-critique: the problem's framing is the problem
“these sublime moments are cheap for me. they're beautiful. you cry, how beautiful all life was brought to a stop, millions in solidarity. what interests me much more is the day after.”Slavoj Žižek · the day after revolutionary sublime moments
“neoliberalism is an ideology, not even an economic reality. nobody really practices it.”Slavoj Žižek · neoliberalism as ideology not practice
“starbucks has come with a wonderful ideological mechanism. why not include into the price of the commodity the anti-consumerist solidarity… so that the more you consume, the more at the same time you display social solidarity.”Slavoj Žižek · commodity fetishism and ethical consumerism
“here is the materiality of ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's summary formula for ideology embedded in material practice
“now i think it's like half an hour to pretend that we live in democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic description of the Q&A as democratic theatre
“my point is if we do nothing we are approaching a new form of authoritarianism. it will not be the old totalitarian, fascist, whatever system, but a new form.”Slavoj Žižek · new authoritarianism as the horizon of inaction
“the question to ask them is, okay, okay, okay, but where is your hamster or whatever form this hamster has.”Slavoj Žižek · how to locate the fetish behind cynicism
Transcript 43 turns
Announcer
the live debate. intelligencequare.com
the live debate. intelligencequare.com
Slavoj Žižek
i hope this works. thanks very much. i'm very proud to be here i'm proud. because of one and very specific reason. i was just told that this hall was once a church. and now it's a kind of a... cultural home for talks, concerts my god, this is what they were doing. to churches in the late 20s and early 30s under stalin, no like you know. turning them into homes of culture where they had concerts and so on. so it's nice to be here in the. truly bolshevik part of london. okay. uh... let me... begin with... ideology today the book that i'm supposed to present or rather somehow refer to. living in the end times is basically an attempt to... practice again the old half-forgotten art of critique of ideology. first, through a couple of examples, i will simply try to convince you that ideology is well kicking alive and so on. let me start with an example which may even surprise you. the two big oscar winners of the last year one british one the king's speech and. the other one, the black swan. i cannot. imagine almost a better example of ideology. let me begin with the king's speech. the problem of the to be king. the cause of his stuttering. if you saw the movie is what it's his inability to assume. his symbolic function to identify with his title. so i claim, on the contrary, at the beginning of the film, the future king is quite a normal, reasonable person. he simply displays a minimum of common sense, like who can be stupid enough to say, oh my god, it's my divine right to be the king and so on and so on. and i read a movie as a very shed tale of how to make this guy, who obviously has some intelligence, stupid enough to accept seriously that. he is. the king. you remember how it happens towards the end of the film. the trainer the australian trainer sits on the king's chair. the furious king asks him how dares he to do this? and the coach replies, why not? what right do you have to sit on this chair and not me? the king shouts back, because i am a king by divine right. to which the coach just nods with satisfaction. i've rendered him stupid enough now he takes himself seriously and so on. i think seriously, the message is very sad here. it's you know, we are from all sides we are informed how we live in a crisis of authority, male patriarchal authority, of course the reactionary perception or rather conservative of the crisis. and the lesson of the movie is precisely although you men know that to take your symbolic title father master teacher king seriously's a little bit stupid but it's your duty to accept this stupidity, to become stupid enough to play the role of authority. now... the other film, the black swan, i claim, i hope you noticed it, with natalie portman and so on, is even much worse. it's truly a kind of an anti-feminist counterpart. uh. it, i claim, resuscitates arguably one of the most reactionary myths about femininity. while in this same masculine universe that we encounter in the king's speech, while a man if you become stupid enough at least can have it both. you can have your title authority and still have a private life let's call it. it's an old anti-feminist myth. from old. fairy tales up to Krzysztof Kieślowski's film double life of veronique, namely this means that a woman has to make a choice. your natural place is to withdraw from public career to... do your role in the family if you. choose your. let's call it mission, what you really care about as a career, you will pay the price for it by death. i think these are the coordinates of the second film. so you see, that's where we are in two popular films. men become stupid enough, play your authority, women don't play with career. you will die. now let's make a step further through some other examples from movies. how can we detect this ideological background in popular culture. i think that the basic rule here is to. apply the concept which was elaborated by structural linguistics of so-called differentiality. it doesn't only matter what a thing is, it only also matters as its positive feature what a thing is not. it doesn't only matter what you say, it only also matters what you don't say while saying what you say, of what is only implied in saying what you say. of course, i hope you know that there is a dialogue, one of the best known dialogues in sherlock holmes. this. this one is from silver blaze, short dialogue between detective gregory and holmes himself, which provides the best example of differentiality. it's a short dialogue exchange about so-called curious incident of the dog in the night time. here is the dialogue. is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention? asks detective gregory sherlock holmes. to the curious incident of the dog in the night time. the dog did nothing in the night time. that was the curious incident. how does this work in ideology? uh... there is a wonderful joke in Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece Ninotchka. the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. and here is the wonderful reply of the waiter. sorry, we have run out of cream. we only have milk. can i then bring you coffee without milk? i think it's absolutely a correct answer. it's not the same thing coffee without cream or coffee without milk. what you don't get, it's part of the identity of what you do get. in what sense? because if you bring this logic to its extreme you can also see how a double negation, when you don't have just, when you do not have, in this case, coffee without cream or milk, the result is not zero, but what? another, my last example from popular culture, from i think it's from early 90s. you remember the movie with Ewan McGregor before he became a jedi, when he was still playing working class guys brushed off. the hero accompanies... to her home after their date, a young pretty woman who at the entrance to her flat tells him, would you like to come in for a coffee? he answers, there is a problem. i don't drink coffee. she retorts with a smile, no problem, i don't have any. what i like is that, you know, what you get through this double negation is probably the most not vulgar but open erotic invitation. like, that's my point. i invite you for a coffee, then i negate coffee and the result is not zero. the result is pure invitation. why lose time with such? dialectical jokes, because i claim they allow us to grasp how ideology functions. to detect so-called ideological distortions, you should note not only what is said, but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said. which unsaid is implied in what is said? do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk? there is even a direct political equivalent to this joke about coffee without cream, without milk. a friend, an old dissident from poland told me. uh... in a well-known joke from socialist poland, a customer enters a store and asks, you probably don't have butter, or do you? the answer sorry, but we are... not the store which doesn't have butter. we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper, the one that doesn't have batteries across the street and so on. okay, but now let's take another. a little bit more elaborate example. in today's brazil, they have carnivals and as they like to put it, people from all classes dance together on the street, momentarily obliterating their race, class, and so on differences. but it is obviously not the same if a jobless worker delivers himself to free dance forgetting his worries about how to feed his family or if a rich banker lets himself go and feels good about being one united with the people they are both dancing on the same street but the worker is dancing as it were without milk while the banker is dancing without cream. you can also imagine a bit of dialogue between the united states and europe in late 2002 when the invasion of iraq was being prepared. the us saying to europe would you care to join us in the attack on iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction? europe critical replied but we have no facility to search for the weapons of mass destruction. then Rumsfeld or some American guy answers, no problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in iraq. i mean, it was exactly the same logic. now let's put things in a little bit more serious way. why do we not see what nonetheless in a way we see in ideology. how does ideology enact this suspension? uh i claim, i'm sorry if you know it already but it's crucial that there is a wonderful apocryphal probably anecdote. from the first world war, which perfectly renders our predicament today and how we see things that we see, but we don't see things that we also see. it's the anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between german and austrian army headquarters in the middle of the first world war. the germans from berlin sent the message to vienna. here on our part of the front, the situation is serious but not catastrophic, to which, of course, as you know, the austrians replied here with us, the situation is catastrophic but not serious. is this not more and more the way many of us, at least in the developed world, relate to our global predicament? we all know about the impending catastrophe, ecological, social and so on. but we somehow cannot take it seriously. in psychoanalysis, this attitude is called a fetishist split. i know very well but but what? but i do not really believe it. and i think such a split is a clear indication of the material force of ideology which makes us refuse what we see and know. we can also call this the mechanism of what. freud sometimes refers to as isolierung, isolation, where you accept effect. but don't take it. don do not, what you abstractly know, you do not really. at a symbolic or affective level, you do not really integrate it. you just rationally deal with it as if this is the case, but again, you somehow suspend its. let's call it symbolic efficiency. this, again, i claim, is how ideology more and more functions today. ideology is not in what you know or you don't know. you can know quite a lot of things. ideology is... resides in this underlying selection where some things, although you know them, you behave, act. as if you don't. know them. uh. let me improvise a little bit here because i think this ideological mechanism is crucial. this is what i call the fetishist functioning of ideology. the old traditional. functioning of ideology was more symptomatic, you know, symptom, like return of the repressed. you base your life on a lie, you repress, ignore some traumatic truth, but as we say it, whatever you do, the repressed will somehow return. in one or another symptomatic form. just to give you a stupid everyday example, the proverbial adolescent who is traumatized by sex and in order to in order to forget about it, takes refuge in physics and mathematics. but then you know, sooner or later he tries to resolve a task like how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other and so on and it's there. but much more interesting, i claim, is the fetishist functioning, which again is operative today, where you don't deny anything, you just true... a fetish ineect. a distance of not really accepting it, not really taking it seriously. incidentally, as i developed also in this last book, living in the end times, this i think, explains why and how, although we, most of us at least, probably. not only believe scientists and in this sense know very well that the situation is potentially eh. catastrophic, but like... really are convinced that this is the case but nonetheless are not ready to do anything again although we know there are threats of catastrophes we cannot bring ourselves to to act upon it. to do it. here fetish enters. what is? fetisch. i will repeat an old story of mine which is very tragic. it happened to a friend of mine who was married and his wife died. young, beautiful wife, the usual story you know she went to a doctor, breast cancer in two months she was dead. what surprised us, his friends, is that this same lady sorry, this same guy after the wife died was absolutely ready all the time to talk about the most painful moments of the wife dying. you know, we didn't have to play any of these games or don't mention this in front of him. it will traumatize him. no, he was ready to talk about everything. so we doubt that, my god. we started to raise questions, what's going on with this guy? like did he love his wife at all? is he kind of a cruel? cynical subject or what? then we learned the secret. every time that he was talking about his dead wife and the most painful moments of her death, he was playing with a hamster. in his hands and the hamster was obviously his fetish. this was also the preferred pet animal of his wife. so in a way, playing with the hamster meant i can talk about it, but hamster was the fetish's stand-in for my wife is still alive. i don't accept she is dead. now you will say bullshit, this is primitive pseudo-analysis. how do i know it? unfortunately, i do know it because this hamster died half a year later and immediately the guy collapsed. start for a week every second day. made a suicide attempt and had to be immediately. so. so again i claim that from here you can see how interesting is socially, ideologically, the functioning of a fetish. fetishists are not idiots, like you have your fetish feet and see nothing else. no. fetishists can be very brutal, cynical, realistic. they pretend that they accept the life the way it is. why? because secretly their fetish enables them to acquire a distance, not to, as we put it in traditional terms, fully emotionally assume what they rationally know. uh for example, my thesis is that if you look at modern top managers, especially in the united states, one of the model fetishes is... what i ironically call western buddhism, this kind of a vague spirituality, transcendental meditation, whatsoever, that's their fetish. they can play all the dirty market games, but deep in themselves they think, oh, i know, this is just a game of appearances, the truth is in my inner self and so on and so on. so again, you know, i claim that you cannot really be a fully cynical subject. people who pretend to be brutally cynical, i don't have any ideals, i know life is just a brutal struggle and so on, i claim there always is a fetish. the question to ask them is, okay, okay, okay, but where is your hamster or whatever form this hamster? this hamster has and this hamster can also b, i don't have time to go into this direction, but nonetheless, externalized, like in the sense of you should strictly distinguish between your subjective beliefs in the sense of what you take seriously, what you believe and i will on purpose use this very clumsy. formulation and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it. i claim that the basic lesson of psychoanalysis today. still actual, fully actual today is death. it's exactly the opposite one of the one usually attributed to psychoanalysis, that we just pretend to believe beneath we are hedonists with all the dirty, obscene desires and so on. no, on the contrary, we believe much more than we know that we believe. like, you can think. i'm a totally cynical person, i don't care. but in your acts, there is a belief embodied. this category, again, is absolutely crucial today, i claim. i'm sorry now if i repeat a short joke, which i repeated at least 20 times, but it's just the pure structure of this paradox. you know, Niels Bohr, quantum physics once was visited at a country. in his country house by a friend, there he had above the entrance door a horseshoe. in central europe, the superstitious item signaling destined, that's the idea, to prevent evil spirits to enter the house. and the friend asked him, why do you have this here? are you stupid? are you superstitious? and Niels Bohr gave him a perfect answer. no, i'm not stupid. i'm a scientist. of course, i don't believe in it. but i have it there because i was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. that's ideology today. we don't believe in it, we are all cynics, but... tr, we believe in it much more. then we. ourselves are ready to admit that we believe. how can a theorist do here? how to deal with all this? i think the first one who provided the right direction although in a negative way was my favorite. catholic theology your own okay, not englishmen, but l. he lived in london, gilbert keith chesterton. in his. i think the man who was thursday novel he ironically but nonetheless seriously proposed to install i quote a special corps of policemen policemen who are also philosophers here is the quote the work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective the ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists the ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed we discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed we have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime end of quote now this may sound a crazy eccentric idea, but would thinkers as different as karl popper, theodor adorno and Emmanuel Levinas would they not subscribe all of them to maybe a slightly changed version of this idea where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime. is condensed in the notion of totality. the idea is that a straight road leads from philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism, or as we usually ironically put it, the line from plato to nato, you know and the task of philosophical police is to discover from a book of plato's dialogues or like rousseau's treatise on social contract that a political crime will be committed. the ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries. the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect the proponents of totality. so what should we reply to this accusation? i claim it hulk. we are doing this intellectuals, just not in the way chesterton thought. we are not. destroying. society we are doing something much more uncanny it... our best we so-called critical intellectuals we are demonstrating displaying rendering visible how. society necessarily undermines its own basic premises. like, what is our task is to do this. you, now i will be critical even, why not, against the 20th century communism. it is not enough for a critical intellectual to say, oh, communism was a noble idea and it was a simple contingent misapplication what they did to it in the stalinist soviet union. a critical intellectual should demonstrate how the distortion. of a notion of a noble idea its falsification its misinterpretation is somehow grounded in the idea itself. and if we do this with stalinism, we should be honest enough, i claim, to do it also with today's global capitalism. no, i am not anti-capitalist in some abstract, naive sense, but in the simple sense of what? for example. when you talk about today's global capitalism i would say don't talk only about countries which function more or less developed western countries mention also countries like for example the democratic republic of congo which doesn't even function as a country you have local warlords who have all exclusive contracts of course with big international mostly mining companies because you know that the metals used in all our computers and so on mostly come from congo and so on so the point is that this country which is a nightmare it doesn't function as a state it has the record number of children. drugged children turned into killing machines, etc. the point is to see the republic of congo not a simple deviation or they're still primitive this is not yet capitalism but precisely as part of the totality of today's capitalism. and i used here precisely. and with full awareness, as it were, the notion of totality. because i claim that this is one of the crucial critical notions that we should rehabilitate today totality doesn't mean this kind of a rehabilitation of all the crimes so that you say, but they. fit into a global harmony and play their role. this is the usual accusation of hegel. all the horrors are part of the divine plan. everything is justified. on the contrary, the hegelian notion of totality means precisely that if you observe a phenomenon, to observe it in its totality means that you should include also all its degenerations, symptoms, antagonisms, incon. dist and so on and so on. totality means, for example, that you cannot say when you talk about capitalism or places like congo or today's china, these are falsifications, this doesn't count. no, it counts. all the inconsistencies, horrors, contradictions and so on have to be included into the notion. or to put the same point in a different different way and this other way was also wonderfully formulated by chesterton this time in his orthodoxy. he demonstrates in a very nice way how critics of religion start with denouncing religion as the force of oppression which threatens human freedom. however, in fighting religion, they are compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus sacrificing precisely that which they wanted to defend. you know how to cut a long story short, you defend a certain phenomenon so fanatically that just to fight, to destroy what you perceive as the enemy, you are ready to sacrifice even this phenomenon itself, to be a little bit vicious like some warriors on terror, they like our freedom so much that they are ready even to torture people and so on just to. just to defend freedom and so on and so on. so again. i'm coming back to my initial uh question. how can we detect this dialectical analysis, this necessary inner distortions, the way things go wrong but for necessary. reasons. you have a certain idea, you actualize it, it turns more or less up to a point maybe, but nonetheless, it turns into its opposite. i will not go now into boring philosophical analysis. to conclude, i would just like to claim that what is needed here is something which was already deployed by kant. the german idealist immanuel kant, as what he called the public use of reason, as opposed to the private use of reason. what kant means by public use of reason is not simply public talk and so on. no, for kant, precisely state institutions like the church, legal system are a private use of reason, because they subordinate reason to some pre-established goal, organize religious life, the legal system and so on. for kant private use, sorry, public use of reason means use of reason subtracted. from the entire field of social authority and hierarchy. where you can, as it were, freely think deploying all the consequences and so on and so on. why is this so interesting? because today, i claim in europe, we are witnessing a great concentrated attack on this public use of reason. it's not only that you, by you i mean here in the united kingdom, with your... reform of proposed by the conservative government, reform of the university studies institutions and so on. that you are practicing one of the most radical versions of it the same process goes on all around. europe what we are witnessing is precisely an attempt to change. university as a space of freedom, illusory as it was, i know i took my marxist lesson, but nonetheless, as the space of freedom into work, into a socially useful factory of producing experts. what basically, to simplify it, society wants now, by society of course i don't mean all the people, but those in power, capital and so on, is to turn university into factories for producing experts. as french future minister told me years ago already i was in a debate in france he told me take. those demonstrations years ago, you remember in the suburb of paris where people were... youth was burning cars in the suburbs of paris. he told me, here we need intellectuals. we need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. we need urbanists to tell us how to restructure the suburbs so that crowds cannot gather and so on and so on. this is what they want us to do. is this intellectual life? no. i think this precisely is... this precisely is not what intellectuals should do and are needed doing today more than ever. a true intellectual doesn't resolve problems. posed by others. the first step of intellectual work is precisely to reflect on the problem itself. what if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem? what if the way we spontaneously formulate a problem mystifies the problem? i think that this is the task of it. now i will say something which maybe will come at least up to a point as a shock to you i claim that when we and i consider myself radical leftists think hear about conservatives claiming european legacy is in. we we have to protect judeo-christian legacy against whomever immigrants and so on instead of acting like liberals who like to feel guilty yeah yeah i know european imperialism we are guilty of all the crimes and so on and so on and plead for some abstract multiculturalism, yes, we have to learn a lot from other cultures. i think we should return the question to them, to conservatives, in the same way as, for example, chesterton says. you can criticize religion on behalf of freedom, but you endanger freedom itself. of course, i don't agree with him here. the point is clear in the same way we should say that yes the judeo-christian legacy is in crisis today, but the true threat to it are not poor pakistani or muslim or whatever immigrants. it's precisely... the so called defenders of europe who effectively are a threat to it and that should be i think your counterattack like here in england when you criticise this proposed university reforms this is what your conservative government is now doing with universities this is the truth this is the true threat to europe. this is the true threat to judeo-christian legacy, whose most noble part, we shouldn't be ashamed of it, is precisely public use of reason and so on and so on. so do you remember, i think it's from to be or not to be, that wonderful dialogue in ernst lich, again, yes, to be or not to be. between a polish actor who pretends to be a nazi officer and a german gestapo. officer i don't know what so. the polish guy who is very narcissistic asks the general. the gestapo guy, did you hear about a great Polish actor, Józef Tura? that's himself, he wants to see. and the guy tells him, this takes place in poland in 42 or when. the guy tells him, yes, yes, he was doing to, he is doing to shakespeare what we germans are now doing to germany, something like that, and like something like this you should say, you know, to all those defenders of judeo-christian christurope you are doing to judeo-christian legacy what hitler was doing to the jews or something like that. so again, you see my point here. do not concede. to the enemy to mark. what's the... underlying fact here it is that i claim today not only are we living in a... strange time where. the... public space of debate itself is more and more privatized is disappearing but where. uh the functioning of ideology itself is changing. in what sense? if in classical capitalism, the two main ideological mechanisms were law, legal system and church, or sorry, education rather education. education formed you as a bourgeois subject, legal system. provided the coordinates of your freedom today i claim it. market, the logic of market competition, which is progressively imposing itself as the hegemonic ideology for example in education. the classical bourgeois school obligatory equal for all citizens is elevated above the market is gradually being dismantled. and replaced by this formula lower costs high efficiency multiple forms of of private education in the organization and legitization of power. the is more and more presenting itself as simply a kind of a market operation where in elections we buy oui. by votes, we, as it were, on the market, select the best offer, the best party to do the job. i claim that even in the domain of emotional relations, we see this, let's call it self-modification. sorry self-commodification in what sense did you notice something strange if you. if you watch some of the recent hollywood movies, i always think, as already... try to demonstrate at the very beginning that they tell quite a lot about where we stand ideologically. for example, did you see the last james bond, quantum of solace? did you notice a strange thing about this film? i know it's politically progressive. basically james bond saves the evo morales regime from... capitalist coup but did you notice that there is no sex at the end? this is the first james bond film where at the end the couple just bond and the bond girl, they embrace themselves there to traumatize, nothing happens. now let's go even lower. then Dan Brown, we really cannot go lower. did you notice that in the Da Vinci Code? no sex. and i claim that's how you have to read the fact that poor jesus christ himself has to make love. there is sex up there. to cover up the fact that there is no sex here between robert langdon and. the grand-granddaughter of jesus christ. in the lost symbol, i think one of the candidates for the worst novel of all times, there is absolutely not even a sexual attraction. things are even more interesting in the lost than brown film angels and demons. there, there is sex in the novel. between robert langdon and the heroine, the italian scientist Vittoria Vetra, but not in the film. isn't this strange? like up till now we were saying hollywood is adding sex to make it more commercial. now hollywood is... deleting checks too many. why? i claim that, and this is part of subjective self-commodification. more and more, and here i am incurably romantic. even this idea of passionate sexual attachment or of passionate love is more and more perceived as potentially dangerous. this narcissistic, solipsistic, subjective economy. is getting so strong that, sorry to repeat my old joke, in the same way that we like to get today on the market, you know, like coffee without caffeine, sausages without fat. cakes without sugar, beer without alcohol, whatever we like. love without it's dangerous, traumatic moment without what? in english and in french, we use happily the same expression, tomber, to fall in love. and my friend Alain Badiou drew my attention to the fact that he found one. publicité, you know. in a daily newspaper in france for a certain matrimonial agency where they say precisely. we will enable you to be in love. without the fall, without falling in love. the idea is that that moment of, you know, exposing yourself, opening yourself to the danger of it should be controlled. now this then is our... universe today and here i must make just a couple of concluding remarks. here i would like to make a couple of points which are crucial first when i say that what is today's predominant ideology is market neoliberalism i am not making the same boring leftist point about fighting neoliberalism. i think that we should do apro neoliberalism the same thing as i proposed apro propos this judeo-christian legacy or whatever. we should always remember that neoliberalism is an ideology, not even an economic reality. nobody really practices it. do the united states practice neoliberalism? on the contrary look at their economy not only under obama but already under bush. hundreds of billions spent for state interventions and so on and so on. neoliberalism is i think mainly used to economize where you can, less education and so on or to put the pressure on third world countries. so it's not a reality. uh what then but? nonetheless in this ideological closure of course there are cracks in it things are happening now from egypt to greece and so on but there is still a problem here i think it's wonderful what is happening now again greece spain even here a little bit something change is in the air. but what i'm really afraid of, what really scares me is that what? recently i read a kind of manifesto of it. mass movement in spain. and it depressed me very much of those who insist on the squares, protests and so on. first uh. not only this totally apolitical character of the protest, we don't care about politics, we are neither left nor right, we just want decent life, dignity, and so on and so on. my god, to be brutal, every fascist would have signed that. what worries me even more it's that. although... these manifests are written. in a way to dismantle attack. renounce the entire political class, they like to emphasize, we are neither left nor right, the entire political class is corrupted and so on and so on. they nonetheless don't say we the people will do it. it's still a demand to someone. and this is, i claim, a dangerous situation when you attack all the politics and nonetheless you do not say like oh we the people ourselves we shall do it. but when you still address someone, then this place of the someone can be occupied by who knows whom. so we live in hopeful times but at the same time in very dangerous times. the problem is even more crucial here for me. like it's easy to, now i will tell you something horrible if you are a radical leftist like me. it's easy to criticize capitalism. i do it all the time. but do we really have even in the. vaguuest outline an alternate model to propose. like my friends from greece are telling me, you know, the situation is terrifying also in a good sense now in greece the system is almost disintegrating. people may take over. i told them, okay, wonderful. and what do you do then the day after when people take over, what will you do? will you play just some keynesianism? will you nationalize industries? they tell me, oh, it's wonderful what is happening in greece. we have egalitarianism. direct democracy. i mean. how can you translate this into? a new order into two. coordinates of a new order. you have again, on the one hand, this kind of a vague self-management notices, you know, local communities, people should take care of themselves and so on, which i think is precisely a model which cannot be universalized. you have on the other hand, some kind of abstract anti-corruption capitalism and our media are full of anti-capitalism. but i think this is the greatest triumph of capitalist ideology, where, you know, like you cannot open a newspaper without reading about how, oh my god, this company is employing child labor, that company is polluting environment, that bank is cheating, whatever. yeah, but it's always as an individual accidental distortion of the system with some greedy bad guys behind to be blamed for. this is not enough so is the change possible at all? here nonetheless i would like to conclude on a little bit more upbeat note you know when we read about what is possible and what is not possible? the first thing to note is how in what a strange way these two poles are disposed today on the one hand in the domains of well, mostly i would say technology and private life, private pleasures. we are being constantly told by the media that practically everything is possible you know they say through biogenetic mechanisms or whatever, we will be soon able to clone organs, parts of our body so you need. your're a new heart, you will no longer need time to wait for somebody who is like you to die in an accident, whatever. it will be possible for us to become practically immortal or just think about the domain of pleasures like i'm not kidding. i recently met in new york a guy. a surgeon whose specialty is to cut male penis into two. so you get two of them. so you can do it with two women at the same time, whatever. also here everything is possible. on the other hand when you turn to economy almost everything is becoming impossible. you want to raise expenditure for health impossible we will no longer be competitive' and so on and so on so we are in this strange situation where on the one hand almost everything seems possible technologically at the level of private lives but in the matters of social life economic decisions and so on practically nothing is. considered possible and this again i claim is the work of the material. power force rather sorry, of ideology. maybe, you know, it's easy to make fun of china, but maybe we are here even a little bit worse than china. why? in mid-april 2011 the media reported that chinese government. uh. uh uh. imposed wonderful for me wonderful in the crazy sense new law or rule, i don't know what. it is now prohibited in china to show on tv in movie theaters or. to make it part of the novels or comics, any stories which deal with time travel or alternate history. the idea is that such stories include frivolity, into serious historical matters are too frivolous shouldn't be allowed. of course, we know what's the point, that they consider even fictional narratives about possible alternate realities too dangerous. but we have maybe no right to make fun of the chinese here. they at least still have to prohibit it. what if with us ideology is so strong that we simply consider it impossible we don't even have to prohibit it and this i think is let us be realistic the task of i claim philosophers or more generally public intellectuals today. i don't think that we can really provide precise new solutions and so on, what to do with global warming. my god, what do i know what to do? what to do with economic crisis and so on. but we can maybe do something much more important. we can just open up a little bit. the space, this confines of ideology, the space just shift a little bit, the coordinates of the space which tells us what is possible, what is impossible, and so on. just for example, to do something, to... to make it palpable or sensible how maybe we will not become immortal maybe not every one of us wants to have a double penis but maybe we can nonetheless spend a little bit more for health care and education or whatsoever this may sound secondary but i think it's extremely important just to we cannot provide the solution but we can as it were open up the space for thinking about possible solutions and so on and so on. it may sound a very easy thing to do but i claim again in our ideological closure it's maybe the most difficult thing to do why because i'm not a paranoiac again great thinkers happening social unrest and so on but nonetheless don't underestimate the amount or how far ideology has penetrated our daily lives. for example, for me, ideology ideology are not these big things, you know, fight for freedom or whatever. nobody takes that seriously. ideology is bought. to conclude with by... example that i refer to all the time. ideology is going to the starbucks coffee. why? you know what happens when you enter it? you get all those posters there informing you yes, our coffee is more more expensive, but 1% goes to some stupid guatemala children, 1% to save trees and so on and so on. this is ideology at its wonderful purest. in the old times, we were at least aware that we are consumers, you know. so you have to do something, help, charity, socially conscious. starbucks has come with a wonderful ideological mechanism. why not include into the price of the commodity the anti-consumerist solidarity, whatever aspect so that the more you consume, the more at the same time you display know social solidarity and so on are already part of the commodity price. here is the material force of ideology. and i'm here suspect even of... green movement sometimes... making things out of best intentions where do you have their ideology let me be brutally frank i'm sorry if this line is known to some of you why do we really buy those half-rotten apples who cost twice more than those wonderful genetically manipulated apples.
i hope this works. thanks very much. i'm very proud to be here i'm proud. because of one and very specific reason. i was just told that this hall was once a church. and now it's a kind of a... cultural home for talks, concerts my god, this is what they were doing. to churches in the late 20s and early 30s under stalin, no like you know. turning them into homes of culture where they had concerts and so on. so it's nice to be here in the. truly bolshevik part of london. okay. uh... let me... begin with... ideology today the book that i'm supposed to present or rather somehow refer to. living in the end times is basically an attempt to... practice again the old half-forgotten art of critique of ideology. first, through a couple of examples, i will simply try to convince you that ideology is well kicking alive and so on. let me start with an example which may even surprise you. the two big oscar winners of the last year one british one the king's speech and. the other one, the black swan. i cannot. imagine almost a better example of ideology. let me begin with the king's speech. the problem of the to be king. the cause of his stuttering. if you saw the movie is what it's his inability to assume. his symbolic function to identify with his title. so i claim, on the contrary, at the beginning of the film, the future king is quite a normal, reasonable person. he simply displays a minimum of common sense, like who can be stupid enough to say, oh my god, it's my divine right to be the king and so on and so on. and i read a movie as a very shed tale of how to make this guy, who obviously has some intelligence, stupid enough to accept seriously that. he is. the king. you remember how it happens towards the end of the film. the trainer the australian trainer sits on the king's chair. the furious king asks him how dares he to do this? and the coach replies, why not? what right do you have to sit on this chair and not me? the king shouts back, because i am a king by divine right. to which the coach just nods with satisfaction. i've rendered him stupid enough now he takes himself seriously and so on. i think seriously, the message is very sad here. it's you know, we are from all sides we are informed how we live in a crisis of authority, male patriarchal authority, of course the reactionary perception or rather conservative of the crisis. and the lesson of the movie is precisely although you men know that to take your symbolic title father master teacher king seriously's a little bit stupid but it's your duty to accept this stupidity, to become stupid enough to play the role of authority. now... the other film, the black swan, i claim, i hope you noticed it, with natalie portman and so on, is even much worse. it's truly a kind of an anti-feminist counterpart. uh. it, i claim, resuscitates arguably one of the most reactionary myths about femininity. while in this same masculine universe that we encounter in the king's speech, while a man if you become stupid enough at least can have it both. you can have your title authority and still have a private life let's call it. it's an old anti-feminist myth. from old. fairy tales up to Krzysztof Kieślowski's film double life of veronique, namely this means that a woman has to make a choice. your natural place is to withdraw from public career to... do your role in the family if you. choose your. let's call it mission, what you really care about as a career, you will pay the price for it by death. i think these are the coordinates of the second film. so you see, that's where we are in two popular films. men become stupid enough, play your authority, women don't play with career. you will die. now let's make a step further through some other examples from movies. how can we detect this ideological background in popular culture. i think that the basic rule here is to. apply the concept which was elaborated by structural linguistics of so-called differentiality. it doesn't only matter what a thing is, it only also matters as its positive feature what a thing is not. it doesn't only matter what you say, it only also matters what you don't say while saying what you say, of what is only implied in saying what you say. of course, i hope you know that there is a dialogue, one of the best known dialogues in sherlock holmes. this. this one is from silver blaze, short dialogue between detective gregory and holmes himself, which provides the best example of differentiality. it's a short dialogue exchange about so-called curious incident of the dog in the night time. here is the dialogue. is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention? asks detective gregory sherlock holmes. to the curious incident of the dog in the night time. the dog did nothing in the night time. that was the curious incident. how does this work in ideology? uh... there is a wonderful joke in Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece Ninotchka. the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. and here is the wonderful reply of the waiter. sorry, we have run out of cream. we only have milk. can i then bring you coffee without milk? i think it's absolutely a correct answer. it's not the same thing coffee without cream or coffee without milk. what you don't get, it's part of the identity of what you do get. in what sense? because if you bring this logic to its extreme you can also see how a double negation, when you don't have just, when you do not have, in this case, coffee without cream or milk, the result is not zero, but what? another, my last example from popular culture, from i think it's from early 90s. you remember the movie with Ewan McGregor before he became a jedi, when he was still playing working class guys brushed off. the hero accompanies... to her home after their date, a young pretty woman who at the entrance to her flat tells him, would you like to come in for a coffee? he answers, there is a problem. i don't drink coffee. she retorts with a smile, no problem, i don't have any. what i like is that, you know, what you get through this double negation is probably the most not vulgar but open erotic invitation. like, that's my point. i invite you for a coffee, then i negate coffee and the result is not zero. the result is pure invitation. why lose time with such? dialectical jokes, because i claim they allow us to grasp how ideology functions. to detect so-called ideological distortions, you should note not only what is said, but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said. which unsaid is implied in what is said? do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk? there is even a direct political equivalent to this joke about coffee without cream, without milk. a friend, an old dissident from poland told me. uh... in a well-known joke from socialist poland, a customer enters a store and asks, you probably don't have butter, or do you? the answer sorry, but we are... not the store which doesn't have butter. we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper, the one that doesn't have batteries across the street and so on. okay, but now let's take another. a little bit more elaborate example. in today's brazil, they have carnivals and as they like to put it, people from all classes dance together on the street, momentarily obliterating their race, class, and so on differences. but it is obviously not the same if a jobless worker delivers himself to free dance forgetting his worries about how to feed his family or if a rich banker lets himself go and feels good about being one united with the people they are both dancing on the same street but the worker is dancing as it were without milk while the banker is dancing without cream. you can also imagine a bit of dialogue between the united states and europe in late 2002 when the invasion of iraq was being prepared. the us saying to europe would you care to join us in the attack on iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction? europe critical replied but we have no facility to search for the weapons of mass destruction. then Rumsfeld or some American guy answers, no problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in iraq. i mean, it was exactly the same logic. now let's put things in a little bit more serious way. why do we not see what nonetheless in a way we see in ideology. how does ideology enact this suspension? uh i claim, i'm sorry if you know it already but it's crucial that there is a wonderful apocryphal probably anecdote. from the first world war, which perfectly renders our predicament today and how we see things that we see, but we don't see things that we also see. it's the anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between german and austrian army headquarters in the middle of the first world war. the germans from berlin sent the message to vienna. here on our part of the front, the situation is serious but not catastrophic, to which, of course, as you know, the austrians replied here with us, the situation is catastrophic but not serious. is this not more and more the way many of us, at least in the developed world, relate to our global predicament? we all know about the impending catastrophe, ecological, social and so on. but we somehow cannot take it seriously. in psychoanalysis, this attitude is called a fetishist split. i know very well but but what? but i do not really believe it. and i think such a split is a clear indication of the material force of ideology which makes us refuse what we see and know. we can also call this the mechanism of what. freud sometimes refers to as isolierung, isolation, where you accept effect. but don't take it. don do not, what you abstractly know, you do not really. at a symbolic or affective level, you do not really integrate it. you just rationally deal with it as if this is the case, but again, you somehow suspend its. let's call it symbolic efficiency. this, again, i claim, is how ideology more and more functions today. ideology is not in what you know or you don't know. you can know quite a lot of things. ideology is... resides in this underlying selection where some things, although you know them, you behave, act. as if you don't. know them. uh. let me improvise a little bit here because i think this ideological mechanism is crucial. this is what i call the fetishist functioning of ideology. the old traditional. functioning of ideology was more symptomatic, you know, symptom, like return of the repressed. you base your life on a lie, you repress, ignore some traumatic truth, but as we say it, whatever you do, the repressed will somehow return. in one or another symptomatic form. just to give you a stupid everyday example, the proverbial adolescent who is traumatized by sex and in order to in order to forget about it, takes refuge in physics and mathematics. but then you know, sooner or later he tries to resolve a task like how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other and so on and it's there. but much more interesting, i claim, is the fetishist functioning, which again is operative today, where you don't deny anything, you just true... a fetish ineect. a distance of not really accepting it, not really taking it seriously. incidentally, as i developed also in this last book, living in the end times, this i think, explains why and how, although we, most of us at least, probably. not only believe scientists and in this sense know very well that the situation is potentially eh. catastrophic, but like... really are convinced that this is the case but nonetheless are not ready to do anything again although we know there are threats of catastrophes we cannot bring ourselves to to act upon it. to do it. here fetish enters. what is? fetisch. i will repeat an old story of mine which is very tragic. it happened to a friend of mine who was married and his wife died. young, beautiful wife, the usual story you know she went to a doctor, breast cancer in two months she was dead. what surprised us, his friends, is that this same lady sorry, this same guy after the wife died was absolutely ready all the time to talk about the most painful moments of the wife dying. you know, we didn't have to play any of these games or don't mention this in front of him. it will traumatize him. no, he was ready to talk about everything. so we doubt that, my god. we started to raise questions, what's going on with this guy? like did he love his wife at all? is he kind of a cruel? cynical subject or what? then we learned the secret. every time that he was talking about his dead wife and the most painful moments of her death, he was playing with a hamster. in his hands and the hamster was obviously his fetish. this was also the preferred pet animal of his wife. so in a way, playing with the hamster meant i can talk about it, but hamster was the fetish's stand-in for my wife is still alive. i don't accept she is dead. now you will say bullshit, this is primitive pseudo-analysis. how do i know it? unfortunately, i do know it because this hamster died half a year later and immediately the guy collapsed. start for a week every second day. made a suicide attempt and had to be immediately. so. so again i claim that from here you can see how interesting is socially, ideologically, the functioning of a fetish. fetishists are not idiots, like you have your fetish feet and see nothing else. no. fetishists can be very brutal, cynical, realistic. they pretend that they accept the life the way it is. why? because secretly their fetish enables them to acquire a distance, not to, as we put it in traditional terms, fully emotionally assume what they rationally know. uh for example, my thesis is that if you look at modern top managers, especially in the united states, one of the model fetishes is... what i ironically call western buddhism, this kind of a vague spirituality, transcendental meditation, whatsoever, that's their fetish. they can play all the dirty market games, but deep in themselves they think, oh, i know, this is just a game of appearances, the truth is in my inner self and so on and so on. so again, you know, i claim that you cannot really be a fully cynical subject. people who pretend to be brutally cynical, i don't have any ideals, i know life is just a brutal struggle and so on, i claim there always is a fetish. the question to ask them is, okay, okay, okay, but where is your hamster or whatever form this hamster? this hamster has and this hamster can also b, i don't have time to go into this direction, but nonetheless, externalized, like in the sense of you should strictly distinguish between your subjective beliefs in the sense of what you take seriously, what you believe and i will on purpose use this very clumsy. formulation and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it. i claim that the basic lesson of psychoanalysis today. still actual, fully actual today is death. it's exactly the opposite one of the one usually attributed to psychoanalysis, that we just pretend to believe beneath we are hedonists with all the dirty, obscene desires and so on. no, on the contrary, we believe much more than we know that we believe. like, you can think. i'm a totally cynical person, i don't care. but in your acts, there is a belief embodied. this category, again, is absolutely crucial today, i claim. i'm sorry now if i repeat a short joke, which i repeated at least 20 times, but it's just the pure structure of this paradox. you know, Niels Bohr, quantum physics once was visited at a country. in his country house by a friend, there he had above the entrance door a horseshoe. in central europe, the superstitious item signaling destined, that's the idea, to prevent evil spirits to enter the house. and the friend asked him, why do you have this here? are you stupid? are you superstitious? and Niels Bohr gave him a perfect answer. no, i'm not stupid. i'm a scientist. of course, i don't believe in it. but i have it there because i was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. that's ideology today. we don't believe in it, we are all cynics, but... tr, we believe in it much more. then we. ourselves are ready to admit that we believe. how can a theorist do here? how to deal with all this? i think the first one who provided the right direction although in a negative way was my favorite. catholic theology your own okay, not englishmen, but l. he lived in london, gilbert keith chesterton. in his. i think the man who was thursday novel he ironically but nonetheless seriously proposed to install i quote a special corps of policemen policemen who are also philosophers here is the quote the work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective the ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists the ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed we discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed we have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime end of quote now this may sound a crazy eccentric idea, but would thinkers as different as karl popper, theodor adorno and Emmanuel Levinas would they not subscribe all of them to maybe a slightly changed version of this idea where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime. is condensed in the notion of totality. the idea is that a straight road leads from philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism, or as we usually ironically put it, the line from plato to nato, you know and the task of philosophical police is to discover from a book of plato's dialogues or like rousseau's treatise on social contract that a political crime will be committed. the ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries. the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect the proponents of totality. so what should we reply to this accusation? i claim it hulk. we are doing this intellectuals, just not in the way chesterton thought. we are not. destroying. society we are doing something much more uncanny it... our best we so-called critical intellectuals we are demonstrating displaying rendering visible how. society necessarily undermines its own basic premises. like, what is our task is to do this. you, now i will be critical even, why not, against the 20th century communism. it is not enough for a critical intellectual to say, oh, communism was a noble idea and it was a simple contingent misapplication what they did to it in the stalinist soviet union. a critical intellectual should demonstrate how the distortion. of a notion of a noble idea its falsification its misinterpretation is somehow grounded in the idea itself. and if we do this with stalinism, we should be honest enough, i claim, to do it also with today's global capitalism. no, i am not anti-capitalist in some abstract, naive sense, but in the simple sense of what? for example. when you talk about today's global capitalism i would say don't talk only about countries which function more or less developed western countries mention also countries like for example the democratic republic of congo which doesn't even function as a country you have local warlords who have all exclusive contracts of course with big international mostly mining companies because you know that the metals used in all our computers and so on mostly come from congo and so on so the point is that this country which is a nightmare it doesn't function as a state it has the record number of children. drugged children turned into killing machines, etc. the point is to see the republic of congo not a simple deviation or they're still primitive this is not yet capitalism but precisely as part of the totality of today's capitalism. and i used here precisely. and with full awareness, as it were, the notion of totality. because i claim that this is one of the crucial critical notions that we should rehabilitate today totality doesn't mean this kind of a rehabilitation of all the crimes so that you say, but they. fit into a global harmony and play their role. this is the usual accusation of hegel. all the horrors are part of the divine plan. everything is justified. on the contrary, the hegelian notion of totality means precisely that if you observe a phenomenon, to observe it in its totality means that you should include also all its degenerations, symptoms, antagonisms, incon. dist and so on and so on. totality means, for example, that you cannot say when you talk about capitalism or places like congo or today's china, these are falsifications, this doesn't count. no, it counts. all the inconsistencies, horrors, contradictions and so on have to be included into the notion. or to put the same point in a different different way and this other way was also wonderfully formulated by chesterton this time in his orthodoxy. he demonstrates in a very nice way how critics of religion start with denouncing religion as the force of oppression which threatens human freedom. however, in fighting religion, they are compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus sacrificing precisely that which they wanted to defend. you know how to cut a long story short, you defend a certain phenomenon so fanatically that just to fight, to destroy what you perceive as the enemy, you are ready to sacrifice even this phenomenon itself, to be a little bit vicious like some warriors on terror, they like our freedom so much that they are ready even to torture people and so on just to. just to defend freedom and so on and so on. so again. i'm coming back to my initial uh question. how can we detect this dialectical analysis, this necessary inner distortions, the way things go wrong but for necessary. reasons. you have a certain idea, you actualize it, it turns more or less up to a point maybe, but nonetheless, it turns into its opposite. i will not go now into boring philosophical analysis. to conclude, i would just like to claim that what is needed here is something which was already deployed by kant. the german idealist immanuel kant, as what he called the public use of reason, as opposed to the private use of reason. what kant means by public use of reason is not simply public talk and so on. no, for kant, precisely state institutions like the church, legal system are a private use of reason, because they subordinate reason to some pre-established goal, organize religious life, the legal system and so on. for kant private use, sorry, public use of reason means use of reason subtracted. from the entire field of social authority and hierarchy. where you can, as it were, freely think deploying all the consequences and so on and so on. why is this so interesting? because today, i claim in europe, we are witnessing a great concentrated attack on this public use of reason. it's not only that you, by you i mean here in the united kingdom, with your... reform of proposed by the conservative government, reform of the university studies institutions and so on. that you are practicing one of the most radical versions of it the same process goes on all around. europe what we are witnessing is precisely an attempt to change. university as a space of freedom, illusory as it was, i know i took my marxist lesson, but nonetheless, as the space of freedom into work, into a socially useful factory of producing experts. what basically, to simplify it, society wants now, by society of course i don't mean all the people, but those in power, capital and so on, is to turn university into factories for producing experts. as french future minister told me years ago already i was in a debate in france he told me take. those demonstrations years ago, you remember in the suburb of paris where people were... youth was burning cars in the suburbs of paris. he told me, here we need intellectuals. we need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. we need urbanists to tell us how to restructure the suburbs so that crowds cannot gather and so on and so on. this is what they want us to do. is this intellectual life? no. i think this precisely is... this precisely is not what intellectuals should do and are needed doing today more than ever. a true intellectual doesn't resolve problems. posed by others. the first step of intellectual work is precisely to reflect on the problem itself. what if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem? what if the way we spontaneously formulate a problem mystifies the problem? i think that this is the task of it. now i will say something which maybe will come at least up to a point as a shock to you i claim that when we and i consider myself radical leftists think hear about conservatives claiming european legacy is in. we we have to protect judeo-christian legacy against whomever immigrants and so on instead of acting like liberals who like to feel guilty yeah yeah i know european imperialism we are guilty of all the crimes and so on and so on and plead for some abstract multiculturalism, yes, we have to learn a lot from other cultures. i think we should return the question to them, to conservatives, in the same way as, for example, chesterton says. you can criticize religion on behalf of freedom, but you endanger freedom itself. of course, i don't agree with him here. the point is clear in the same way we should say that yes the judeo-christian legacy is in crisis today, but the true threat to it are not poor pakistani or muslim or whatever immigrants. it's precisely... the so called defenders of europe who effectively are a threat to it and that should be i think your counterattack like here in england when you criticise this proposed university reforms this is what your conservative government is now doing with universities this is the truth this is the true threat to europe. this is the true threat to judeo-christian legacy, whose most noble part, we shouldn't be ashamed of it, is precisely public use of reason and so on and so on. so do you remember, i think it's from to be or not to be, that wonderful dialogue in ernst lich, again, yes, to be or not to be. between a polish actor who pretends to be a nazi officer and a german gestapo. officer i don't know what so. the polish guy who is very narcissistic asks the general. the gestapo guy, did you hear about a great Polish actor, Józef Tura? that's himself, he wants to see. and the guy tells him, this takes place in poland in 42 or when. the guy tells him, yes, yes, he was doing to, he is doing to shakespeare what we germans are now doing to germany, something like that, and like something like this you should say, you know, to all those defenders of judeo-christian christurope you are doing to judeo-christian legacy what hitler was doing to the jews or something like that. so again, you see my point here. do not concede. to the enemy to mark. what's the... underlying fact here it is that i claim today not only are we living in a... strange time where. the... public space of debate itself is more and more privatized is disappearing but where. uh the functioning of ideology itself is changing. in what sense? if in classical capitalism, the two main ideological mechanisms were law, legal system and church, or sorry, education rather education. education formed you as a bourgeois subject, legal system. provided the coordinates of your freedom today i claim it. market, the logic of market competition, which is progressively imposing itself as the hegemonic ideology for example in education. the classical bourgeois school obligatory equal for all citizens is elevated above the market is gradually being dismantled. and replaced by this formula lower costs high efficiency multiple forms of of private education in the organization and legitization of power. the is more and more presenting itself as simply a kind of a market operation where in elections we buy oui. by votes, we, as it were, on the market, select the best offer, the best party to do the job. i claim that even in the domain of emotional relations, we see this, let's call it self-modification. sorry self-commodification in what sense did you notice something strange if you. if you watch some of the recent hollywood movies, i always think, as already... try to demonstrate at the very beginning that they tell quite a lot about where we stand ideologically. for example, did you see the last james bond, quantum of solace? did you notice a strange thing about this film? i know it's politically progressive. basically james bond saves the evo morales regime from... capitalist coup but did you notice that there is no sex at the end? this is the first james bond film where at the end the couple just bond and the bond girl, they embrace themselves there to traumatize, nothing happens. now let's go even lower. then Dan Brown, we really cannot go lower. did you notice that in the Da Vinci Code? no sex. and i claim that's how you have to read the fact that poor jesus christ himself has to make love. there is sex up there. to cover up the fact that there is no sex here between robert langdon and. the grand-granddaughter of jesus christ. in the lost symbol, i think one of the candidates for the worst novel of all times, there is absolutely not even a sexual attraction. things are even more interesting in the lost than brown film angels and demons. there, there is sex in the novel. between robert langdon and the heroine, the italian scientist Vittoria Vetra, but not in the film. isn't this strange? like up till now we were saying hollywood is adding sex to make it more commercial. now hollywood is... deleting checks too many. why? i claim that, and this is part of subjective self-commodification. more and more, and here i am incurably romantic. even this idea of passionate sexual attachment or of passionate love is more and more perceived as potentially dangerous. this narcissistic, solipsistic, subjective economy. is getting so strong that, sorry to repeat my old joke, in the same way that we like to get today on the market, you know, like coffee without caffeine, sausages without fat. cakes without sugar, beer without alcohol, whatever we like. love without it's dangerous, traumatic moment without what? in english and in french, we use happily the same expression, tomber, to fall in love. and my friend Alain Badiou drew my attention to the fact that he found one. publicité, you know. in a daily newspaper in france for a certain matrimonial agency where they say precisely. we will enable you to be in love. without the fall, without falling in love. the idea is that that moment of, you know, exposing yourself, opening yourself to the danger of it should be controlled. now this then is our... universe today and here i must make just a couple of concluding remarks. here i would like to make a couple of points which are crucial first when i say that what is today's predominant ideology is market neoliberalism i am not making the same boring leftist point about fighting neoliberalism. i think that we should do apro neoliberalism the same thing as i proposed apro propos this judeo-christian legacy or whatever. we should always remember that neoliberalism is an ideology, not even an economic reality. nobody really practices it. do the united states practice neoliberalism? on the contrary look at their economy not only under obama but already under bush. hundreds of billions spent for state interventions and so on and so on. neoliberalism is i think mainly used to economize where you can, less education and so on or to put the pressure on third world countries. so it's not a reality. uh what then but? nonetheless in this ideological closure of course there are cracks in it things are happening now from egypt to greece and so on but there is still a problem here i think it's wonderful what is happening now again greece spain even here a little bit something change is in the air. but what i'm really afraid of, what really scares me is that what? recently i read a kind of manifesto of it. mass movement in spain. and it depressed me very much of those who insist on the squares, protests and so on. first uh. not only this totally apolitical character of the protest, we don't care about politics, we are neither left nor right, we just want decent life, dignity, and so on and so on. my god, to be brutal, every fascist would have signed that. what worries me even more it's that. although... these manifests are written. in a way to dismantle attack. renounce the entire political class, they like to emphasize, we are neither left nor right, the entire political class is corrupted and so on and so on. they nonetheless don't say we the people will do it. it's still a demand to someone. and this is, i claim, a dangerous situation when you attack all the politics and nonetheless you do not say like oh we the people ourselves we shall do it. but when you still address someone, then this place of the someone can be occupied by who knows whom. so we live in hopeful times but at the same time in very dangerous times. the problem is even more crucial here for me. like it's easy to, now i will tell you something horrible if you are a radical leftist like me. it's easy to criticize capitalism. i do it all the time. but do we really have even in the. vaguuest outline an alternate model to propose. like my friends from greece are telling me, you know, the situation is terrifying also in a good sense now in greece the system is almost disintegrating. people may take over. i told them, okay, wonderful. and what do you do then the day after when people take over, what will you do? will you play just some keynesianism? will you nationalize industries? they tell me, oh, it's wonderful what is happening in greece. we have egalitarianism. direct democracy. i mean. how can you translate this into? a new order into two. coordinates of a new order. you have again, on the one hand, this kind of a vague self-management notices, you know, local communities, people should take care of themselves and so on, which i think is precisely a model which cannot be universalized. you have on the other hand, some kind of abstract anti-corruption capitalism and our media are full of anti-capitalism. but i think this is the greatest triumph of capitalist ideology, where, you know, like you cannot open a newspaper without reading about how, oh my god, this company is employing child labor, that company is polluting environment, that bank is cheating, whatever. yeah, but it's always as an individual accidental distortion of the system with some greedy bad guys behind to be blamed for. this is not enough so is the change possible at all? here nonetheless i would like to conclude on a little bit more upbeat note you know when we read about what is possible and what is not possible? the first thing to note is how in what a strange way these two poles are disposed today on the one hand in the domains of well, mostly i would say technology and private life, private pleasures. we are being constantly told by the media that practically everything is possible you know they say through biogenetic mechanisms or whatever, we will be soon able to clone organs, parts of our body so you need. your're a new heart, you will no longer need time to wait for somebody who is like you to die in an accident, whatever. it will be possible for us to become practically immortal or just think about the domain of pleasures like i'm not kidding. i recently met in new york a guy. a surgeon whose specialty is to cut male penis into two. so you get two of them. so you can do it with two women at the same time, whatever. also here everything is possible. on the other hand when you turn to economy almost everything is becoming impossible. you want to raise expenditure for health impossible we will no longer be competitive' and so on and so on so we are in this strange situation where on the one hand almost everything seems possible technologically at the level of private lives but in the matters of social life economic decisions and so on practically nothing is. considered possible and this again i claim is the work of the material. power force rather sorry, of ideology. maybe, you know, it's easy to make fun of china, but maybe we are here even a little bit worse than china. why? in mid-april 2011 the media reported that chinese government. uh. uh uh. imposed wonderful for me wonderful in the crazy sense new law or rule, i don't know what. it is now prohibited in china to show on tv in movie theaters or. to make it part of the novels or comics, any stories which deal with time travel or alternate history. the idea is that such stories include frivolity, into serious historical matters are too frivolous shouldn't be allowed. of course, we know what's the point, that they consider even fictional narratives about possible alternate realities too dangerous. but we have maybe no right to make fun of the chinese here. they at least still have to prohibit it. what if with us ideology is so strong that we simply consider it impossible we don't even have to prohibit it and this i think is let us be realistic the task of i claim philosophers or more generally public intellectuals today. i don't think that we can really provide precise new solutions and so on, what to do with global warming. my god, what do i know what to do? what to do with economic crisis and so on. but we can maybe do something much more important. we can just open up a little bit. the space, this confines of ideology, the space just shift a little bit, the coordinates of the space which tells us what is possible, what is impossible, and so on. just for example, to do something, to... to make it palpable or sensible how maybe we will not become immortal maybe not every one of us wants to have a double penis but maybe we can nonetheless spend a little bit more for health care and education or whatsoever this may sound secondary but i think it's extremely important just to we cannot provide the solution but we can as it were open up the space for thinking about possible solutions and so on and so on. it may sound a very easy thing to do but i claim again in our ideological closure it's maybe the most difficult thing to do why because i'm not a paranoiac again great thinkers happening social unrest and so on but nonetheless don't underestimate the amount or how far ideology has penetrated our daily lives. for example, for me, ideology ideology are not these big things, you know, fight for freedom or whatever. nobody takes that seriously. ideology is bought. to conclude with by... example that i refer to all the time. ideology is going to the starbucks coffee. why? you know what happens when you enter it? you get all those posters there informing you yes, our coffee is more more expensive, but 1% goes to some stupid guatemala children, 1% to save trees and so on and so on. this is ideology at its wonderful purest. in the old times, we were at least aware that we are consumers, you know. so you have to do something, help, charity, socially conscious. starbucks has come with a wonderful ideological mechanism. why not include into the price of the commodity the anti-consumerist solidarity, whatever aspect so that the more you consume, the more at the same time you display know social solidarity and so on are already part of the commodity price. here is the material force of ideology. and i'm here suspect even of... green movement sometimes... making things out of best intentions where do you have their ideology let me be brutally frank i'm sorry if this line is known to some of you why do we really buy those half-rotten apples who cost twice more than those wonderful genetically manipulated apples.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
is it real?
is it real?
Slavoj Žižek
that we believe that they are substantially more healthy, better. i claim many of us do not believe it. we are too cynical. but, you know, it makes us feel warm. isn't it nice? by buying an apple, i'm doing something for the humanity also. i participate in the great movement of helping mother earth and all that and all that. here is the materiality of ideology. here we have to win. believe me or not, i finished. thanks very much. b. do, do you need... because i didn't touch it so. now i think it's like half an hour to pretend that we live in democracy.
that we believe that they are substantially more healthy, better. i claim many of us do not believe it. we are too cynical. but, you know, it makes us feel warm. isn't it nice? by buying an apple, i'm doing something for the humanity also. i participate in the great movement of helping mother earth and all that and all that. here is the materiality of ideology. here we have to win. believe me or not, i finished. thanks very much. b. do, do you need... because i didn't touch it so. now i think it's like half an hour to pretend that we live in democracy.
Moderator
absolutely.
absolutely.
Slavoj Žižek
yes, absolutely. to make it clear where we are.
yes, absolutely. to make it clear where we are.
Moderator
we're going to have some... questions now. could the lights come up a little bit? because i can't see a thing. you know what you've done to this microphone, slavooy, but it's. no didn't got any questions? brief questions, please. yes gentleman there.
we're going to have some... questions now. could the lights come up a little bit? because i can't see a thing. you know what you've done to this microphone, slavooy, but it's. no didn't got any questions? brief questions, please. yes gentleman there.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
i'll try to be brief. i'm taking one of your suggestions, which is to question the questions. so since you raised the question about what shall we do, what will we do, i want to return this question to you. i want to question these questions. and i want to do it in a... one of my favorite jokes is abbot and costello, who's on first, what's on second? i don know's on third? no? you know that? no.
i'll try to be brief. i'm taking one of your suggestions, which is to question the questions. so since you raised the question about what shall we do, what will we do, i want to return this question to you. i want to question these questions. and i want to do it in a... one of my favorite jokes is abbot and costello, who's on first, what's on second? i don know's on third? no? you know that? no.
Slavoj Žižek
sorry.
sorry.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
it's about abos and costello. yeah so the joke is about these two guys and one is a baseball coach. and he's telling to the other, we have funny people in our team, you know. who's on first? what's on second? i don't know who's on third. the other replies okay, so you're the manager. yes, so you should know the guy's name. yes, so tell me who's on first. who? yeah, that's what i'm asking you. yeah, what's the name of the guy who there is on first base? no, no, no. what is in second? no, i don't know. i don't want to know. no, no, i don't know he's on third. so and it's always going on like that. it's retaken in the rain band, by the way. so that who is something that for one is a question, for the other one is an answer. why?'s turning into a name. no sometimes with the language you have this, you have the melting of a name with a concept. but by the way, that's what i'm going to say
it's about abos and costello. yeah so the joke is about these two guys and one is a baseball coach. and he's telling to the other, we have funny people in our team, you know. who's on first? what's on second? i don't know who's on third. the other replies okay, so you're the manager. yes, so you should know the guy's name. yes, so tell me who's on first. who? yeah, that's what i'm asking you. yeah, what's the name of the guy who there is on first base? no, no, no. what is in second? no, i don't know. i don't want to know. no, no, i don't know he's on third. so and it's always going on like that. it's retaken in the rain band, by the way. so that who is something that for one is a question, for the other one is an answer. why?'s turning into a name. no sometimes with the language you have this, you have the melting of a name with a concept. but by the way, that's what i'm going to say
Slavoj Žižek
okay, yeah.
okay, yeah.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
yeah, so i want to return this question to you in the same problematic way. i mean, i would like you, i would like us possibly, i mean, we, all of us.
yeah, so i want to return this question to you in the same problematic way. i mean, i would like you, i would like us possibly, i mean, we, all of us.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah?
yeah?
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
to carry on questioning this question. in the same way. is it? is it a contradiction in terms or is it a contradiction in reality? if it's a contradiction in reality, we have to carry on with that. so he's... no, i mean hegel. no, you were quoting hegel.
to carry on questioning this question. in the same way. is it? is it a contradiction in terms or is it a contradiction in reality? if it's a contradiction in reality, we have to carry on with that. so he's... no, i mean hegel. no, you were quoting hegel.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
hegel, the big difference to me between hegel and kant and the optimism of hegel referred to kant. is that hegel once went to meet the french army that was coming to free jena. yeah he came he went back. he wanted to see napoleon, maybe he was one of his spies. when he went back, his house was destroyed by fire, by the french soldiers. but yet again, he loved napoleon. and the big difference is that on s'engage et puis on voit. so let's do it and then we'll see. so there is only one way out. i think, and i think you think as well, which is to carry on putting under pressure. ideologically, i think you're doing a wonderful job.
hegel, the big difference to me between hegel and kant and the optimism of hegel referred to kant. is that hegel once went to meet the french army that was coming to free jena. yeah he came he went back. he wanted to see napoleon, maybe he was one of his spies. when he went back, his house was destroyed by fire, by the french soldiers. but yet again, he loved napoleon. and the big difference is that on s'engage et puis on voit. so let's do it and then we'll see. so there is only one way out. i think, and i think you think as well, which is to carry on putting under pressure. ideologically, i think you're doing a wonderful job.
Slavoj Žižek
uh.
uh.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
they. thank you. yeah, just shortly, because i love the guy. briefly, briefly. yes, so let's put them under pressure because the more we put them under pressure, the less space there will be for, you know. and you are doing a wonderful job on this. so please,.
they. thank you. yeah, just shortly, because i love the guy. briefly, briefly. yes, so let's put them under pressure because the more we put them under pressure, the less space there will be for, you know. and you are doing a wonderful job on this. so please,.
Slavoj Žižek
. i may be.
. i may be.
Audience Member (Abbott & Costello / Hegel question)
mor pessimist the new.
mor pessimist the new.
Slavoj Žižek
because i think precisely that in the ongoing situation. i cannot now. i would have to talk for another one hour and a half to develop why, but i think that maybe for some people this is good news, for some critical intellectual who like to spend their life putting the system under pressure, but not too much so that they can go endlessly putting the system under pressure. and the more you put system under pressure, the more you progress in academia and so on. i would say that this is we are maybe approaching a dangerous situation where... not that this is not enough in the sense that we want more. but look what's happening in greece now, for example. and don't fall into this racist trap thinking, oh, it's just greece, those primitive, lazy greeks. it will be spreading around, i claim. i'm a pessimist here. i think that... the system, by system, i don't mean anything paranoiac obvious, but the system in the simple sense of this relatively benevolent western european liberal democratic welfare state, as much as we still have it, not a lot, system is slowly reaching its limit. when people tell me, but you crazy communist, you really believe things can be changed, all i'm telling them is that i'm much more, i'm not a crazy communist optimist who there will be a revolution. i'm much more of a pessimist. i'm claiming that the only true utopia today is this old-time european nostalgia utopia. if we keep silent and just go on cautiously, somehow this beautiful, safe europe will survive. the only true utopia today is to think that. somehow with maybe small accommodations things can go on the way they are going on. i'm much more of a pessimist here first i think that everybody knows, every economist will tell you how all governments are in a panic. of a new financial crash much worse than two thousand eight second, ecology my god are we aware and i'm not a paranoiac here but nonetheless are we aware what those in power and they have the right to do, somebody has to. so it's not even a critique, are considering. what i read now, and it's just small note, but in like standard newspapers, this is not from some news of the world or other, these paranoiac fringe publications that, for example, big powers are now admitting that the time. to fight global warming with this lower carbon. emissions and so on has passed. we missed that moment. and they are seriously considering so-called geoengineering, which means large-scale intervention into global natural system. for example, spraying into the air. hundreds of tons of, it can be done inexpensively they claim, of salt water, which will then deflect the sun rays and many measures like that, which maybe we will have to do but at the same time, you know, you never know how nature is is interconnected. you do this, there can be another catastrophic consequence and so on and so on. so what i'm saying is that... is that uh... that's my first pessimistic conclusion which should push us to work. my point is not no things are not good enough we need a revolution or whatever. my point is if we do nothing we are approaching and new, it will not be the old totalitarian, fascist, whatever system, but a new form of authoritarianism. here i see again the lesson of china, singapore and so on. are we aware what is happening there? there was till now one good argument, i admit it, for capitalism. you had 10, 20 years of dictatorship here and there, but sooner or later, when things started to run, function again, capitalism did usually always engender a demand for democracy. i claim that with china, singapore, with what we poetically call capitalism with asian values, it's no longer true. we have a capitalism which is in a way even more dynamic, productive, productively destructive, has a stronger capitalist dynamic but precisely functions perfectly within the coordinates of an authoritarian political. system. things are changing. that's what i am saying. and just to answer this is beautiful. i'm so sad we don't have more time because this is of course the aspect, the question that i really like. hegel jena, no, you know what i referred to. no, this is the famous passage when hegel saw napoleon riding through jena, he said, i think i saw the world spirit there embodied. riding on a horse. and incidentally that would be my hegelian answer to your point that i may be confused or whatever like who... who and so on. incidentally, i love this. this is not a criticism. you here applied to me the same joke as it is applied. it's one of the best jokes about president bush. it's a long joke, but the basic point is that, you know, when the president of china was somebody called who? h you, no? and like president bush, when he was asked, Condoleezza Rice, can you tell me, the name of the president of china. and she says, wh. and he said, yeah, yeah, who is the president of china? and it goes on endlessly. and this joke has a wonderful end. at the end he said, listen, i don't care who is who, just bring me some chinese rice or something like this. but the last point i want to say, you know, good news, bad news, no? you know, the type of good news we are getting today remind me more and more of one of the most depressive, that's why i love them, jokes that a jewish friend, when i was a week ago in ramallah and tel aviv, told me, that it's a wonderful medical joke which happens with good news, but you will see what kind of good news. a guy has his wife operated and then, of course, who was seriously ill and then asks his friend, the surgeon, how did it go? and the doctor tells him, listen, there are some problems. it's okay, your wife survived and will live for 20,-30 years, but she cannot control her anal muscles so her shit will be. sleepipping out all the time there is some strange like mustard-like. sleazy stuff that will be all the time. sliding out of vagina so no sex she will no longer be and the guy is more and more desperate and you know how the jokes end. the doctor tells me, oh, don't worry, i was just kidding, everything is okay, she is dead, she died, and so on. this is the good things we are often getting today, you know.
because i think precisely that in the ongoing situation. i cannot now. i would have to talk for another one hour and a half to develop why, but i think that maybe for some people this is good news, for some critical intellectual who like to spend their life putting the system under pressure, but not too much so that they can go endlessly putting the system under pressure. and the more you put system under pressure, the more you progress in academia and so on. i would say that this is we are maybe approaching a dangerous situation where... not that this is not enough in the sense that we want more. but look what's happening in greece now, for example. and don't fall into this racist trap thinking, oh, it's just greece, those primitive, lazy greeks. it will be spreading around, i claim. i'm a pessimist here. i think that... the system, by system, i don't mean anything paranoiac obvious, but the system in the simple sense of this relatively benevolent western european liberal democratic welfare state, as much as we still have it, not a lot, system is slowly reaching its limit. when people tell me, but you crazy communist, you really believe things can be changed, all i'm telling them is that i'm much more, i'm not a crazy communist optimist who there will be a revolution. i'm much more of a pessimist. i'm claiming that the only true utopia today is this old-time european nostalgia utopia. if we keep silent and just go on cautiously, somehow this beautiful, safe europe will survive. the only true utopia today is to think that. somehow with maybe small accommodations things can go on the way they are going on. i'm much more of a pessimist here first i think that everybody knows, every economist will tell you how all governments are in a panic. of a new financial crash much worse than two thousand eight second, ecology my god are we aware and i'm not a paranoiac here but nonetheless are we aware what those in power and they have the right to do, somebody has to. so it's not even a critique, are considering. what i read now, and it's just small note, but in like standard newspapers, this is not from some news of the world or other, these paranoiac fringe publications that, for example, big powers are now admitting that the time. to fight global warming with this lower carbon. emissions and so on has passed. we missed that moment. and they are seriously considering so-called geoengineering, which means large-scale intervention into global natural system. for example, spraying into the air. hundreds of tons of, it can be done inexpensively they claim, of salt water, which will then deflect the sun rays and many measures like that, which maybe we will have to do but at the same time, you know, you never know how nature is is interconnected. you do this, there can be another catastrophic consequence and so on and so on. so what i'm saying is that... is that uh... that's my first pessimistic conclusion which should push us to work. my point is not no things are not good enough we need a revolution or whatever. my point is if we do nothing we are approaching and new, it will not be the old totalitarian, fascist, whatever system, but a new form of authoritarianism. here i see again the lesson of china, singapore and so on. are we aware what is happening there? there was till now one good argument, i admit it, for capitalism. you had 10, 20 years of dictatorship here and there, but sooner or later, when things started to run, function again, capitalism did usually always engender a demand for democracy. i claim that with china, singapore, with what we poetically call capitalism with asian values, it's no longer true. we have a capitalism which is in a way even more dynamic, productive, productively destructive, has a stronger capitalist dynamic but precisely functions perfectly within the coordinates of an authoritarian political. system. things are changing. that's what i am saying. and just to answer this is beautiful. i'm so sad we don't have more time because this is of course the aspect, the question that i really like. hegel jena, no, you know what i referred to. no, this is the famous passage when hegel saw napoleon riding through jena, he said, i think i saw the world spirit there embodied. riding on a horse. and incidentally that would be my hegelian answer to your point that i may be confused or whatever like who... who and so on. incidentally, i love this. this is not a criticism. you here applied to me the same joke as it is applied. it's one of the best jokes about president bush. it's a long joke, but the basic point is that, you know, when the president of china was somebody called who? h you, no? and like president bush, when he was asked, Condoleezza Rice, can you tell me, the name of the president of china. and she says, wh. and he said, yeah, yeah, who is the president of china? and it goes on endlessly. and this joke has a wonderful end. at the end he said, listen, i don't care who is who, just bring me some chinese rice or something like this. but the last point i want to say, you know, good news, bad news, no? you know, the type of good news we are getting today remind me more and more of one of the most depressive, that's why i love them, jokes that a jewish friend, when i was a week ago in ramallah and tel aviv, told me, that it's a wonderful medical joke which happens with good news, but you will see what kind of good news. a guy has his wife operated and then, of course, who was seriously ill and then asks his friend, the surgeon, how did it go? and the doctor tells him, listen, there are some problems. it's okay, your wife survived and will live for 20,-30 years, but she cannot control her anal muscles so her shit will be. sleepipping out all the time there is some strange like mustard-like. sleazy stuff that will be all the time. sliding out of vagina so no sex she will no longer be and the guy is more and more desperate and you know how the jokes end. the doctor tells me, oh, don't worry, i was just kidding, everything is okay, she is dead, she died, and so on. this is the good things we are often getting today, you know.
Moderator
let's have some more questions. there's a lady over there, a gentleman there.
let's have some more questions. there's a lady over there, a gentleman there.
Audience Member (SWP question)
hi,. you're talking in front of... a majority bourgeois, capitalist, possibly socialist. audience tonight and granted this is an iq function whilst across the city sw the socialist workers party marxist conference is going on which i recognize you've not been invited to possibly because you were okay, but this is my point. why do the british left sect not get your theories, like the swp and the awl, or workers' power and such like? what ideology is functioning there? why has the left uk socialists, not the left liberal capitalist got it so wrong?
hi,. you're talking in front of... a majority bourgeois, capitalist, possibly socialist. audience tonight and granted this is an iq function whilst across the city sw the socialist workers party marxist conference is going on which i recognize you've not been invited to possibly because you were okay, but this is my point. why do the british left sect not get your theories, like the swp and the awl, or workers' power and such like? what ideology is functioning there? why has the left uk socialists, not the left liberal capitalist got it so wrong?
Slavoj Žižek
okay, i'm not sure i got all the background of your question. like all the milk or coffee sorry all the milk or cream implied in it as absent. what i only want to say is that in a certain way i have of course, a certain respect for socialist workers party and so on and so on but nonetheless there are for me a little bit of still in love with the 20th century. i think the 20th century is over. okay, everybody knows this, but in not just calendar sense, this means... all the big models for emancipatory movement, not only the two big official ones, that is to say. stalinist or whatever you call it state communism and social democratic welfare state, but now comes the more tricky part. all sorts. the dream of the entire 20th century left. 20th century radical left, trokists and so on, was always ready to criticize state socialism, stalinism, social democracy. the dream was that finally, there will be a moment we just have to be patient where workers will arise, install a kind of a direct self-management democracy and so on and so on i think that dream also. had to fall. 20th century is over. so i don't participate in this dreams which. at their most ridiculous. not many trokys buy it only some of them takes the form of. i'm consciously offering you a caricature now, but this is the model. like if only lenin were survived. three four years longer and were to make pact with trotsky to get rid of stalin that would have been it and so on. i'm not saying it wouldn't make a difference, but i doubt if it would make such a great difference i think that without renouncing great enthusiastic emancipatory moments in twentiethth century social democracy, communism and so on i nonetheless think that in its totality that forum was a failure that we have to as i wrote somewhere, i forgot where, i, as you reminded me, write too many books, that that forum is over. and this is, again, my only problem with them. you know, like whenever something happened in eastern europe, my trokite friends tried to convince me like in... serbia. no, it wasn't milosevic who it wasn't who overthrew milosevic. it was workers. it was only later kidnapped by nationalists. or they claim solidarity in poland. no, this was originally workers' revolution. it was only later that it was kidnapped by the church and so on and so on. they see a little bit too much putin. revolution around the corner just then in the last moment kidnapped. by the bad guys. i'm here much more if you want a pessimist a pessimist in the sense that the left let's be quite frank. does not yet have and of course you cannot have it in detail. i'm not demanding the impossible that you make the list exact of what to do. but okay, to be cynical, as already hinted at, i think let's say that today, as already said, government in greece collapses and then... some kind of people, committees, whatever takes over. what would they have done? what could they have done? i mean, will they be able, sorry in the future to do what? play keynesianism nationalize what? and this is the big problem for me in egypt, you know, to keep up this upbeat morals. i wrote that naive text miracle of tahrir square in guardian and so on, but let's not forget that the true struggle is going on now. how will all that great sublime upheaval, what will be its results in institutions, organizations of social life and so on? these sublime moments are cheap for me. they're beautiful. you cry, how beautiful all life was brought to a stop, millions in solidarity. what interests me much more is the day after. and here, i think... the left. does not yet have not even a general idea. you just hear this, like either it's more keynesianism or it's some kind of a vague local self-organization communities or whatever. correct me if i'm wrong, but i am not aware of any. even at the very general level. viable. model. and that, if you want, that's my problem with socialist workers party. they act as if they know. what to do. i don know and i don't think they really know.
okay, i'm not sure i got all the background of your question. like all the milk or coffee sorry all the milk or cream implied in it as absent. what i only want to say is that in a certain way i have of course, a certain respect for socialist workers party and so on and so on but nonetheless there are for me a little bit of still in love with the 20th century. i think the 20th century is over. okay, everybody knows this, but in not just calendar sense, this means... all the big models for emancipatory movement, not only the two big official ones, that is to say. stalinist or whatever you call it state communism and social democratic welfare state, but now comes the more tricky part. all sorts. the dream of the entire 20th century left. 20th century radical left, trokists and so on, was always ready to criticize state socialism, stalinism, social democracy. the dream was that finally, there will be a moment we just have to be patient where workers will arise, install a kind of a direct self-management democracy and so on and so on i think that dream also. had to fall. 20th century is over. so i don't participate in this dreams which. at their most ridiculous. not many trokys buy it only some of them takes the form of. i'm consciously offering you a caricature now, but this is the model. like if only lenin were survived. three four years longer and were to make pact with trotsky to get rid of stalin that would have been it and so on. i'm not saying it wouldn't make a difference, but i doubt if it would make such a great difference i think that without renouncing great enthusiastic emancipatory moments in twentiethth century social democracy, communism and so on i nonetheless think that in its totality that forum was a failure that we have to as i wrote somewhere, i forgot where, i, as you reminded me, write too many books, that that forum is over. and this is, again, my only problem with them. you know, like whenever something happened in eastern europe, my trokite friends tried to convince me like in... serbia. no, it wasn't milosevic who it wasn't who overthrew milosevic. it was workers. it was only later kidnapped by nationalists. or they claim solidarity in poland. no, this was originally workers' revolution. it was only later that it was kidnapped by the church and so on and so on. they see a little bit too much putin. revolution around the corner just then in the last moment kidnapped. by the bad guys. i'm here much more if you want a pessimist a pessimist in the sense that the left let's be quite frank. does not yet have and of course you cannot have it in detail. i'm not demanding the impossible that you make the list exact of what to do. but okay, to be cynical, as already hinted at, i think let's say that today, as already said, government in greece collapses and then... some kind of people, committees, whatever takes over. what would they have done? what could they have done? i mean, will they be able, sorry in the future to do what? play keynesianism nationalize what? and this is the big problem for me in egypt, you know, to keep up this upbeat morals. i wrote that naive text miracle of tahrir square in guardian and so on, but let's not forget that the true struggle is going on now. how will all that great sublime upheaval, what will be its results in institutions, organizations of social life and so on? these sublime moments are cheap for me. they're beautiful. you cry, how beautiful all life was brought to a stop, millions in solidarity. what interests me much more is the day after. and here, i think... the left. does not yet have not even a general idea. you just hear this, like either it's more keynesianism or it's some kind of a vague local self-organization communities or whatever. correct me if i'm wrong, but i am not aware of any. even at the very general level. viable. model. and that, if you want, that's my problem with socialist workers party. they act as if they know. what to do. i don know and i don't think they really know.
Moderator
thank you. there was a gentleman over there. hi lady.
thank you. there was a gentleman over there. hi lady.
Audience Member (ideology/Starbucks question)
yeah.
yeah.
Moderator
my question.
my question.
Audience Member (ideology/Starbucks question)
oh, sorry. my question is sort of in three parts. i was really intrigued by the fact that you refer a lot to the ideology and the fact that people are really sort of taken in by a particular ideology. and i was thinking about your example about starbucks and thinking, well. isn't it the case that people know that what they're doing is buying a coffee that will then in some sort of... self-serving way, make them feel better about themselves. i kind of wonder what you mean. by ideology if it isn't in the marxist sense of being some sort of smokeokes screen. know why we're buying something. and then i wonder if that in itself is more. why it's ideology and not discourse. that you're referring to. and finally, i wonder whether there is anywhere we can move beyond ideology because you refer to yourself as a pessimist, but i wonder. if ideology is in some senses the villain of the piece, then what can we get to? after it.
oh, sorry. my question is sort of in three parts. i was really intrigued by the fact that you refer a lot to the ideology and the fact that people are really sort of taken in by a particular ideology. and i was thinking about your example about starbucks and thinking, well. isn't it the case that people know that what they're doing is buying a coffee that will then in some sort of... self-serving way, make them feel better about themselves. i kind of wonder what you mean. by ideology if it isn't in the marxist sense of being some sort of smokeokes screen. know why we're buying something. and then i wonder if that in itself is more. why it's ideology and not discourse. that you're referring to. and finally, i wonder whether there is anywhere we can move beyond ideology because you refer to yourself as a pessimist, but i wonder. if ideology is in some senses the villain of the piece, then what can we get to? after it.
Slavoj Žižek
a very nice question. but let me first ask you, sorry, no, ask you, just clarify something. i think this precisely was my point that, and this is how so-called cynical reason functionsed. here, although he is definitely anti-communist conservative, i respect Peter Sloterdijk, the german guy who already 30 years ago now, i think, in his first big book, critique of cynical reason proposed this formula turning around marxist formula. they don't know what they are doing it, but they are doing it. and Sloterdijk's formula was, they know very well what they are doing, but nonetheless they are doing it. like, you know, it's no longer this kind of, in naive sense, false. consciousness in the sense of you don't know what you are doing. it's more a mystery of following something although you know it's false. like it's a lie but nonetheless you act as if it's the truth. this is the mystery today. this is why i think i mentioned before all those paradoxes of objectified belief. like you don't believe but you follow a belief. materialized in your social practical activity and i claim marx knew it. i've endlessly written about it, but nonetheless, i think this is the still eternal actuality of marx's notion of commodity fetishism. read capital carefully, what marx says there. he doesn't say we treat a commodity as a magical object, but in reality, commodity is just, i don't know, a not part of a network of social relations and so on. no. for marx, illusion is not in what we think. we can be realists. no capitalist is as stupid as to think, oh, commodity is something magical or whatever. illusion is not in what we think, illusion is in what we are doing. you may think you know what it is and you can really know what it is. let me give you a simple example of this vague analogy, very vague, but nonetheless with psychoanalysis. it's not even psychoanalysis, it's just naive notion of unconscious attitudes. if you are an adolescent. you may think... your father is an idiot and probably 99.999 like the stalinist elections cases, your father is an idiot. so you think your father is an idiot and your father is an idiot. but this is not all. if you observe this same person actually interacting with his father. you will see a totally different attitude of fear, respect, even love, even love, whatever. you know, that's the paradox. you may know how the truth is like that, but the illusion is in what you are doing. and again, at this level, ideology interests me. now when you said, can we change it? i think i'm not also, i'm not a pessimist here. i'm not this kind of a leftist paranoiac in the sense of, you know, the system is perfected, every transgression is already included and so on. that was my whole point, for example, of that hamster point., when a guy is cynical, don't push him into. are you really cynical? no, no, no. ask about his, don't try to convince him with how things truly are. he will accept that. hit him at his hamster point no? or for example, another example,, this is why i claim when you treat ideology as a discourse with a pretension at truth and you combat it at that level, you lose. my eternal example, sorry if i repeat myself, let's say we are in germany in 37. i am. i will be the bad guy. i am an anti-semitic nazi. you are a good liberal, whatever, leftist, and you try to convince me that i am wrong. in my anti-semitism. let's say you choose the path of convincing me, look but, these are prejudices that you say about jews. jews are not really like that. like measuring the truth value of my statements about jews. the moment you do this, you've already sold your soul to the devil. you totally miss the point. because let's imagine such a conversation. the result can only be, could only have been somewhere in between. you will have to concede that all jews are not good. of course they are not. my god, no. you will and for example, when the nazis claimed jews are exploiting us. some jews were rich. so in a totally formal sense they were exploiting germans. jews were seducing german girls. well, i hope they were. i hope they had good time. you know what i mean? you see my point. the true problem and not what nazis are saying about the jews true or not? ideology is not decided at this level so that if it's not true but just prejudices its ideology. i will go now up to the end, although this is not the case here, obviously. even if, but it's not. even if most of what nazis were telling about the jews were to be true, anti-semitism would still have been a reprehensible ideology. because what makes it an ideology is not its truth value or not. it's why the nazis, in order to sustain their entire vision needed a figure like a jew. you know, it's the same like Lacan has this wonderful, i'm sorry, it's male chauvinist, but nonetheless example where he says, if a husband is pathologically jealous, suspecting that his wife is sleeping around with multitudes in the negri sense, multitudes of men, and if even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is really doing this, his jealousy is still a pathology. because the point, the pathology of jealousy is not decided at the level is it true or not. but where does his fixation on jealousy come from? why does he need the form of jealousy to sustain his identity, the identity of his self? at this level, i think that we can fight ideology because, again, breaking out of ideology is not this question of aren't we all caught in some ideologies, can we break out into a totally objective view of how things really are. the opposite of ideology is not how things really are. okay, i don't have time to go on, but along these lines, i would have know to repeat a bad joke. i hope you will like it that often news. you know, i'm old enough to know in the 70s, 80s. when there was still marxism. there was a certain type of the title of the books fashionable, like marxism was already in crisis. so when you wrote a book on aesthetics. it was considered too self-assertive to. to name the book directly, theory of ideology. it was something like elements for a future theory of ideology. towards, just to signal there is crisis, we are not there. then the 90s. and early 21st century was the post-modmodern age, more than the 90s, where, already late 80s, basically, where i hope you noticed, in humanities, especially cultural studies, the formula was no longer these prolegomena for elements for towards words and so on, but a simple new formula dominated. poetic title, explanatory subtitle, like you know, hit me harder, darling, the motive of feminine masochism in 19th century poetry and so on, you know. and so, okay, the point of my joke, i hope, is clear. i didn't answer you. i gave you a kind of a 1980s this skeptical marxist, you know, prolegomena for a future answer to your question, but i hope i did so.
a very nice question. but let me first ask you, sorry, no, ask you, just clarify something. i think this precisely was my point that, and this is how so-called cynical reason functionsed. here, although he is definitely anti-communist conservative, i respect Peter Sloterdijk, the german guy who already 30 years ago now, i think, in his first big book, critique of cynical reason proposed this formula turning around marxist formula. they don't know what they are doing it, but they are doing it. and Sloterdijk's formula was, they know very well what they are doing, but nonetheless they are doing it. like, you know, it's no longer this kind of, in naive sense, false. consciousness in the sense of you don't know what you are doing. it's more a mystery of following something although you know it's false. like it's a lie but nonetheless you act as if it's the truth. this is the mystery today. this is why i think i mentioned before all those paradoxes of objectified belief. like you don't believe but you follow a belief. materialized in your social practical activity and i claim marx knew it. i've endlessly written about it, but nonetheless, i think this is the still eternal actuality of marx's notion of commodity fetishism. read capital carefully, what marx says there. he doesn't say we treat a commodity as a magical object, but in reality, commodity is just, i don't know, a not part of a network of social relations and so on. no. for marx, illusion is not in what we think. we can be realists. no capitalist is as stupid as to think, oh, commodity is something magical or whatever. illusion is not in what we think, illusion is in what we are doing. you may think you know what it is and you can really know what it is. let me give you a simple example of this vague analogy, very vague, but nonetheless with psychoanalysis. it's not even psychoanalysis, it's just naive notion of unconscious attitudes. if you are an adolescent. you may think... your father is an idiot and probably 99.999 like the stalinist elections cases, your father is an idiot. so you think your father is an idiot and your father is an idiot. but this is not all. if you observe this same person actually interacting with his father. you will see a totally different attitude of fear, respect, even love, even love, whatever. you know, that's the paradox. you may know how the truth is like that, but the illusion is in what you are doing. and again, at this level, ideology interests me. now when you said, can we change it? i think i'm not also, i'm not a pessimist here. i'm not this kind of a leftist paranoiac in the sense of, you know, the system is perfected, every transgression is already included and so on. that was my whole point, for example, of that hamster point., when a guy is cynical, don't push him into. are you really cynical? no, no, no. ask about his, don't try to convince him with how things truly are. he will accept that. hit him at his hamster point no? or for example, another example,, this is why i claim when you treat ideology as a discourse with a pretension at truth and you combat it at that level, you lose. my eternal example, sorry if i repeat myself, let's say we are in germany in 37. i am. i will be the bad guy. i am an anti-semitic nazi. you are a good liberal, whatever, leftist, and you try to convince me that i am wrong. in my anti-semitism. let's say you choose the path of convincing me, look but, these are prejudices that you say about jews. jews are not really like that. like measuring the truth value of my statements about jews. the moment you do this, you've already sold your soul to the devil. you totally miss the point. because let's imagine such a conversation. the result can only be, could only have been somewhere in between. you will have to concede that all jews are not good. of course they are not. my god, no. you will and for example, when the nazis claimed jews are exploiting us. some jews were rich. so in a totally formal sense they were exploiting germans. jews were seducing german girls. well, i hope they were. i hope they had good time. you know what i mean? you see my point. the true problem and not what nazis are saying about the jews true or not? ideology is not decided at this level so that if it's not true but just prejudices its ideology. i will go now up to the end, although this is not the case here, obviously. even if, but it's not. even if most of what nazis were telling about the jews were to be true, anti-semitism would still have been a reprehensible ideology. because what makes it an ideology is not its truth value or not. it's why the nazis, in order to sustain their entire vision needed a figure like a jew. you know, it's the same like Lacan has this wonderful, i'm sorry, it's male chauvinist, but nonetheless example where he says, if a husband is pathologically jealous, suspecting that his wife is sleeping around with multitudes in the negri sense, multitudes of men, and if even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is really doing this, his jealousy is still a pathology. because the point, the pathology of jealousy is not decided at the level is it true or not. but where does his fixation on jealousy come from? why does he need the form of jealousy to sustain his identity, the identity of his self? at this level, i think that we can fight ideology because, again, breaking out of ideology is not this question of aren't we all caught in some ideologies, can we break out into a totally objective view of how things really are. the opposite of ideology is not how things really are. okay, i don't have time to go on, but along these lines, i would have know to repeat a bad joke. i hope you will like it that often news. you know, i'm old enough to know in the 70s, 80s. when there was still marxism. there was a certain type of the title of the books fashionable, like marxism was already in crisis. so when you wrote a book on aesthetics. it was considered too self-assertive to. to name the book directly, theory of ideology. it was something like elements for a future theory of ideology. towards, just to signal there is crisis, we are not there. then the 90s. and early 21st century was the post-modmodern age, more than the 90s, where, already late 80s, basically, where i hope you noticed, in humanities, especially cultural studies, the formula was no longer these prolegomena for elements for towards words and so on, but a simple new formula dominated. poetic title, explanatory subtitle, like you know, hit me harder, darling, the motive of feminine masochism in 19th century poetry and so on, you know. and so, okay, the point of my joke, i hope, is clear. i didn't answer you. i gave you a kind of a 1980s this skeptical marxist, you know, prolegomena for a future answer to your question, but i hope i did so.
Moderator
we're fast running out of time. let's just have one more quick question. a quickie, a quickie. oh, gentleman over there in the white shirt.
we're fast running out of time. let's just have one more quick question. a quickie, a quickie. oh, gentleman over there in the white shirt.
Audience Member (university marketization question)
.
.
Moderator
just wait for the microphone to come.
just wait for the microphone to come.
Slavoj Žižek
bit louder, please, i have problem.
bit louder, please, i have problem.
Audience Member (university marketization question)
just wait,. hello, you were talking earlier on about the marketization of university education. i was wondering do you think i don't.
just wait,. hello, you were talking earlier on about the marketization of university education. i was wondering do you think i don't.
Slavoj Žižek
that was irony.
that was irony.
Audience Member (university marketization question)
i
i
Slavoj Žižek
democratization what is going now here.
democratization what is going now here.
Audience Member (university marketization question)
marketization.
marketization.
Slavoj Žižek
marketization, yeah, yeah, yeah.
marketization, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Audience Member (university marketization question)
i was just wondering, do you think we should go back to a period like in the 19th century where everyone studied the humanities, philosophy, the classics?
i was just wondering, do you think we should go back to a period like in the 19th century where everyone studied the humanities, philosophy, the classics?
Slavoj Žižek
uh... not quite, but why do you put it in these terms as if the only choice is 19th century or where it is moving now? i think in very simple terms that, for example, the system that we had in the 70s and 80s, i'm not saying it was good, it's definitely better than what is coming now. i mean, i at least think this because, and this is not any kind of hardline marxism, quite the opposite. i'm here very naively pro-intellectual. i think that even in hard sciences. practically no great inventions were produced in this planned way. let's train the experts. from einstein onwards, or really great breakthrough where what we call in rational, what they call, i don't pretend to be one of them, although i like them, in rational choice theory, necessary byproducts, you know, or to put it in popular military terms, collateral damage, you know, like you research something and quite by chance, oh my god, you stumble upon something else. and i think don't underestimate estimate how even in the top modern science and even where it may appear that everything has to be done in a large planned way, like all those certain laboratories, particle accelerators and so on and so on. so this is my problem. i'm not saying most of us should study or like at that point in oxford, i think i read somewhere that till the early 20th century or wrote even that if for students of cambridge and oxford, their point of honor was that even privately they were speaking latin to each other. no, i'm not saying we should move to that. all i'm saying is that we need this kind of an open space of apparently useless. you have to have a free space or to give you another. example of the same logic. the reason i don't like amazon com is that this is like this new expert education. you buy there mostly only books you already in advance want to buy. like but i cannot even imagine such a great number of books that really meant a lot to me. i stumbled upon them in a much more open contingent way you know like i was looking what i wanted to check up then i looked around a little bit and so on and so on this is also for example for me. but i'm not a conservative here. but nonetheless, the horror of checking news on yahoo or i don't know where, the digital news, because there again, you have to make choices in the sense that you are interested in this topic. i like precisely the newspaper experience where... you get what you want, but also many things that you don't want. and precisely by it's totally contingent, jumping up and down. you usually discovered the most precious thing and so on. i really i'm worried here. no wonder that isn't this said to give you a concrete example, i think we will be lagging soon behind united states here. don't underestimate the united states. they have there a group which i don't like very much, but they are nonetheless not idiots. the so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians. Robert Brandom, John McDowell and so on. and one of the students there told me that already around half of their students are germans. you know what this means? you know where we are. i mean, i don't mean this cynically. it's great for germany united, but nonetheless that if a german student, german today wants to understand hegel, the best of them go to united states to do it. that's the result of it. so again, i'm not making here any big ultra-marxist point or whatever. i'm just claiming that, and this is for me precisely the big lesson of stalinism, that overpecialization. precisely engenders its opposite. it's not productive. no, my god, i believe even be pro-capitalist. i will say that the advantage of capitalism was precisely it's, you know, apparently. irrational expenditures and so on and so on. the deepest insight into stalinism for me, one of the is that we should totally drop these liberal clichés that in stalinism we were all turned into. automatic like puppet subject, every free thought was squashed, everything was planned. total stupidity. if you read or talk with old people who lived in soviet union or read really good books on stalinism, you will discover that beneath the surface of total control and planning, stalinist soviet union was much more chaotic and disorganized than a western liberal democracy. nothing functioned. so you had all the time to behave as an extreme egotist, to improvise all the time and. one tremont. so it's just common sense that i was telling you there.
uh... not quite, but why do you put it in these terms as if the only choice is 19th century or where it is moving now? i think in very simple terms that, for example, the system that we had in the 70s and 80s, i'm not saying it was good, it's definitely better than what is coming now. i mean, i at least think this because, and this is not any kind of hardline marxism, quite the opposite. i'm here very naively pro-intellectual. i think that even in hard sciences. practically no great inventions were produced in this planned way. let's train the experts. from einstein onwards, or really great breakthrough where what we call in rational, what they call, i don't pretend to be one of them, although i like them, in rational choice theory, necessary byproducts, you know, or to put it in popular military terms, collateral damage, you know, like you research something and quite by chance, oh my god, you stumble upon something else. and i think don't underestimate estimate how even in the top modern science and even where it may appear that everything has to be done in a large planned way, like all those certain laboratories, particle accelerators and so on and so on. so this is my problem. i'm not saying most of us should study or like at that point in oxford, i think i read somewhere that till the early 20th century or wrote even that if for students of cambridge and oxford, their point of honor was that even privately they were speaking latin to each other. no, i'm not saying we should move to that. all i'm saying is that we need this kind of an open space of apparently useless. you have to have a free space or to give you another. example of the same logic. the reason i don't like amazon com is that this is like this new expert education. you buy there mostly only books you already in advance want to buy. like but i cannot even imagine such a great number of books that really meant a lot to me. i stumbled upon them in a much more open contingent way you know like i was looking what i wanted to check up then i looked around a little bit and so on and so on this is also for example for me. but i'm not a conservative here. but nonetheless, the horror of checking news on yahoo or i don't know where, the digital news, because there again, you have to make choices in the sense that you are interested in this topic. i like precisely the newspaper experience where... you get what you want, but also many things that you don't want. and precisely by it's totally contingent, jumping up and down. you usually discovered the most precious thing and so on. i really i'm worried here. no wonder that isn't this said to give you a concrete example, i think we will be lagging soon behind united states here. don't underestimate the united states. they have there a group which i don't like very much, but they are nonetheless not idiots. the so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians. Robert Brandom, John McDowell and so on. and one of the students there told me that already around half of their students are germans. you know what this means? you know where we are. i mean, i don't mean this cynically. it's great for germany united, but nonetheless that if a german student, german today wants to understand hegel, the best of them go to united states to do it. that's the result of it. so again, i'm not making here any big ultra-marxist point or whatever. i'm just claiming that, and this is for me precisely the big lesson of stalinism, that overpecialization. precisely engenders its opposite. it's not productive. no, my god, i believe even be pro-capitalist. i will say that the advantage of capitalism was precisely it's, you know, apparently. irrational expenditures and so on and so on. the deepest insight into stalinism for me, one of the is that we should totally drop these liberal clichés that in stalinism we were all turned into. automatic like puppet subject, every free thought was squashed, everything was planned. total stupidity. if you read or talk with old people who lived in soviet union or read really good books on stalinism, you will discover that beneath the surface of total control and planning, stalinist soviet union was much more chaotic and disorganized than a western liberal democracy. nothing functioned. so you had all the time to behave as an extreme egotist, to improvise all the time and. one tremont. so it's just common sense that i was telling you there.
Moderator
well, i think on that note, we'll say thank you very much, lavoy, for an absolutely fascinating and brilliant talk.
well, i think on that note, we'll say thank you very much, lavoy, for an absolutely fascinating and brilliant talk.
Slavoj Žižek
i am grateful to you and... sin. mm sincerely i want to apologize. because... i couldn't. present you any really radically new stuff but if you really like my work you will like the reason because i'm totally in a kind of a half d. drugged state because for the last year apart from some talk here and there i was doing a mega book on hegel. i'm now finishing it just correcting 800 pages on hegel. this will be my last. totally useless. deserves a round of applause for that. thanks very much. i appreciate.
i am grateful to you and... sin. mm sincerely i want to apologize. because... i couldn't. present you any really radically new stuff but if you really like my work you will like the reason because i'm totally in a kind of a half d. drugged state because for the last year apart from some talk here and there i was doing a mega book on hegel. i'm now finishing it just correcting 800 pages on hegel. this will be my last. totally useless. deserves a round of applause for that. thanks very much. i appreciate.