How and Why Violence Functions

The ideas in it 16

in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here

Stories he reaches for 2

The 2005 Paris banlieue riots puzzled commentators, the youth burned local mosques first, making it clearly non-Islamist. Žižek reads it as 'phatic communication': a pure signal of 'we are here', which is why liberal pleas for peaceful protest missed the point.

“it was their way of saying hi we are here we want to be visible”

Gandhi as divine violence

Gandhi advocated nonviolence in the sense of not killing, yet his tax boycotts and civil disobedience campaigns were structurally extremely violent toward the British colonial state, we have ideologically forgotten this violent dimension.

“what he was organising in india was definitely not only protest these were very violent acts in the sense that through all those tax evading boycotting and so on he wanted very brutally to prevent the normal functioning of the english state”

Works invoked 6

Violence book

The book being presented; Žižek summarizes its central theses throughout the talk.

The Brothers Karamazov book

Dostoevsky's novel provides the formula 'if there is no God everything is permitted' which Žižek and Lacan both invert for different philosophical purposes.

The Shock Doctrine book

Naomi Klein's book; Žižek expresses broad sympathy with its focus on the violence required to establish capitalism, though not with all of her specific analyses.

Ivan the Terrible film

Used to illustrate the shift from divine to mythic violence: Eisenstein diagnosed within his own work how popular revolution becomes Stalinist legitimation.

October film

Used to illustrate divine/popular violence: the scene of workers smashing champagne bottles in the Winter Palace basement is his example of authentic emancipatory violence.

Our Posthuman Future book

Fukuyama's later book on biogenetics, cited as evidence that even Fukuyama had to concede that biogenetic manipulation reintroduces history and complicates the 'end of history' thesis.

People invoked 16

Henry Louis Taylor positive

American leftist writer cited for pointing out that King's economic radicalism has been forgotten in mainstream commemoration.

Mahatma Gandhi positive

Žižek's surprise example of divine violence: Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns were structurally violent toward the colonial state; ideology has since sanitized this violent dimension.

Jacques Lacan positive

Named as Žižek's primary theoretical reference; cited for inverting Dostoevsky's formula, if God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited, and for the concept of superego terror.

Francis Fukuyama negative

The 'end of history' thesis is the central target; Žižek argues structural antagonisms (ecology, biogenetics, IP, slums) make it untenable, though he notes Fukuyama himself partially conceded this in his later book.

Michael Palin negative

His travel documentary style is offered as the paradigm of 'sympathetic racist' patronizing understanding, amused liberal tolerance that reproduces cultural hierarchy.

Naomi Klein positive

Žižek expresses sympathy for The Shock Doctrine's focus on the violence required to establish and sustain free markets, though he does not endorse all her specific analyses.

Peter Mandelson negative

Cited for the formula 'we are all Thatcherites in economy' as a clean expression of post-political capitalist consensus; Žižek disagrees but concedes the formula is accurate.

George Orwell positive

Cited approvingly, despite political disagreement, for his 1930s writings on everyday decency and customs as the substrate of democratic life.

Martin Heidegger positive

Cited (though noted as 'problematic for some') to anchor the idea that language itself involves a constitutive violence, it determines the horizon of experience.

Rowan Williams

His controversy over incorporating sharia into British law is cited as an example of how the two sides in multicultural debates perceive the very difference differently, illustrating hegemonic language.

Hannah Arendt positive

Cited approvingly for the thesis that violence is typically the weapon of the impotent, used to ground Žižek's distinction between power and violence.

Walter Benjamin positive

His distinction between mythic violence and divine violence is the central theoretical framework of the talk, though Žižek gives it a distinctive Kierkegaardian-democratic inflection.

Søren Kierkegaard positive

The distinction between the ethical stage and the religious stage (Abraham and Isaac) is used to explain divine violence as going beyond morality without being simple criminality.

Sergei Eisenstein positive

His cinema is used to illustrate the shift from divine to mythic violence: early films (October) show emancipatory popular violence; Ivan the Terrible shows violence domesticated into Stalinist legitimation.

Martin Luther King Jr. positive

Used to demonstrate that racism is a problem of economic exploitation and legal rights, not tolerance; Žižek emphasizes King's forgotten radical economic phase (Memphis, 1968) against his ideologized 'dream' image.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive

The Brothers Karamazov formula 'if there is no God everything is permitted' is the starting point for Žižek's double inversion via Lacan.

What it argues

subjective vs. systemic/objective violenceideological critique of tolerance and multiculturalismthe need for a positive left alternative to global capitalismdivine violence vs. mythic violencepost-politics and the neutralization of conflict through cultural framinglanguage as violence and the battle for hegemonic termsthe limits of political correctness and harassment discourse

Dialectical moves 10

“If God doesn't exist, then everything is prohibited — not permitted. And if God does exist, then everything is permitted, because you are an instrument of God.”

Žižek inverts Dostoevsky's 'if God does not exist, everything is permitted' twice: without God we get superego terror and endless prohibition; with God, divine mandate licenses any atrocity.

“Violence is usually the arm of the impotent — true authority doesn't need it.”

Power and violence are inversely related: the more genuine the authority, the less it needs to resort to physical force, while resort to violence signals the breakdown of symbolic authority.

“Subjective violence is what we notice as violence, but what about the violence which has to go on precisely so that things go on normally?”

The inversion: what we call 'normal' is already underwritten by violence; the real violence is not the disruption but the condition of undisturbed reproduction.

“Gandhi is my example of divine violence — the most visible pacifist in history was perpetrating acts of structural violence against the British colonial state.”

What appears as the purest nonviolence (Gandhi) is revealed as a form of the most radical structural violence, dissolving the opposition between nonviolence and violence.

“Tolerance today effectively means its opposite: 'do not harass me', which means 'stay far enough away from me' — tolerance as enforced distance.”

Contemporary tolerance has inverted into intolerance of proximity; the liberal norm of openness is revealed as an injunction to keep the Other at a safe remove.

“The true problem of multiculturalism is not how to understand the other, but how to be decent to each other without that shitty understanding coming into it.”

Understanding is reframed not as the solution to multicultural coexistence but as a violent and patronizing obstacle to it; coexistence requires discretion, not empathy.

“Ideology doesn't deal with pseudo-problems instead of real ones — it deals with very real problems but mystifies them.”

The standard critique of ideology (it's a distraction from reality) is inverted: ideology addresses genuine problems, but presents them in a form that forecloses their real solution.

“The most polite imposition can be the most brutal — the more polite it is, the more violent it really is.”

Politeness in multicultural dialogue does not reduce violence but may intensify it, since gentle coercion conceals the imposition more effectively than overt force.

“We are not anti-capitalist because things are secretly worse than they appear — on the contrary, we must admit that for 50 years in Western Europe large numbers of people lived in comparative freedom; the problem is that it cannot last.”

Žižek refuses the pseudo-leftist masochism that denies real capitalist achievements; the critique of capitalism is forward-looking (its trajectory), not backward-looking (its hidden horrors).

“The Paris car-burners first burned their local mosques — it was not an Islamist reaction but phatic communication: 'we are here, we want to be visible'.”

What looks like religiously or politically motivated violence is inverted into pure communication of presence, a demand for recognition rather than any substantive message.

Claims 21

asserts Systemic/objective violence is the foundational and more politically significant form of violence, yet it goes unnoticed precisely because we perceive only disturbances of the normal order, not the violence required to maintain that order.objective violence / systemic violence

asserts Subjective violence is typically a response to prior objective violence, yet recognizing this does not justify or excuse perpetrators of subjective violence.relationship between subjective and objective violence

asserts We are morally responsible for objective/systemic violence and cannot excuse ourselves by calling it anonymous or inevitable.ethical responsibility for structural violence

asserts The extreme contemporary sensitivity to subjective violence (political correctness, harassment discourse) is a dangerous ideological phenomenon that goes hand in hand with enhanced objective social violence.political correctness and harassment ideology

asserts Fundamentalist religious terrorism is mythic violence, not divine violence — it acts on behalf of God-as-authority and thus reinforces rather than ruptures the logic of power.divine vs. mythic violence / religious terrorism

asserts Every system of state power, however democratically legitimized, has an irreducible constitutive excess: the unspoken threat 'I can do with you whatever I want', without which power does not function.constitutive excess of state power

asserts Gandhi's campaign was a form of divine violence: organizationally nonviolent but structurally brutal toward the functioning of the British colonial state through boycotts, tax evasion, and economic disruption.Gandhi / nonviolent resistance as divine violence

asserts 'Tolerance' is an ideological category that depoliticizes real social conflicts (racism, exploitation) by recasting them as problems of cultural proximity and understanding rather than structural antagonism.tolerance as ideology

asserts For Martin Luther King, racism was not a problem of tolerance but of economic exploitation and legal rights — the contemporary framing of racism as a tolerance issue is itself ideological.racism / Martin Luther King's politics

rejects The multiculturalist motto 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' is false: it imposes an impossible and patronizing liberal demand for understanding that itself constitutes a form of violence.multiculturalist empathy / the ethics of understanding

asserts Pure multiculturalism without a shared set of underlying values or customs is impossible; genuine multicultural coexistence requires a 'leitkultur' — a common medium of decency — not merely a neutral legal space.multiculturalism / leitkultur

asserts Political correctness, by juridifying and explicitly codifying informal norms of decent interaction, is counterproductive: it destroys the organic social trust it aims to protect.political correctness / codification of norms

asserts Language is inherently violent: it always establishes a hegemonic field of meaning within which certain perspectives win and others are silenced, making genuine neutral dialogue impossible.language / symbolic violence

asserts The left must abandon single-issue postmodern politics and rehabilitate large-scale collective political acts aimed at global alternatives, since emergent micro-political interactions cannot solve structural crises.left strategy / global politics

asserts The real historical significance of 9/11 was the end of the Clintonian multiculturalist utopia of the 1990s, demonstrating that single-issue politics cannot address global antagonisms.9/11 / post-Cold War liberal optimism

rejects Fukuyama was wrong: the structural antagonisms of capitalism (ecology, biogenetics, intellectual property, slum apartheid) mean global liberal-democratic capitalism cannot be the final answer.Fukuyama's end of history thesis

asserts The trajectory of contemporary capitalism points toward a new authoritarian apartheid society unless the left invents a positive global alternative; survival with dignity will require inventing something new.future of capitalism / left alternatives

asserts The Porto Alegre movement failed because it was a pure protest movement with no positive vision — proof that protest coalitions without constructive programs disintegrate.Porto Alegre / World Social Forum

reframes The true legacy of May '68 is not the liberation of sexual and creative freedoms (easily absorbed by post-modern capitalism) but the vague sense that the global capitalist system is not enough.May 1968 / legacy of the sixties

asserts Intellectual property cannot properly be made into private property — there is a constitutive tension between the form of intellectual products and the form of private ownership.intellectual property / capitalism

asserts Authority that functions through genuine power does not need physical violence; violence is the weapon of the impotent, as a father who truly commands authority needs only a look.power vs. violence / authority

Quotes 15

“Violence is usually the arm of the impotent.”
Slavoj Žižek · power vs. violence / authority

“What interests me is violence which is invisible systemic which goes on but we don't even notice it as violence because what we notice as violence is a disturbance of the established order.”
Slavoj Žižek · objective / systemic violence

“Our next ethical step is to learn to be, to accept to be responsible even for this objective violence. We cannot say sorry, it's objective, what can I do?”
Slavoj Žižek · ethical responsibility for structural violence

“Capitalist violence is much more anonymous — it is just in the system and so you cannot even say who is guilty.”
Slavoj Žižek · anonymous systemic violence of capitalism

“If god doesn't exist then everything is prohibited which incidentally a quick look at today's hedonists… you will see that these people who dedicate their life to pleasures live in a total superego terror.”
Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's reversal of Dostoevsky / superego terror

“There is always this unspoken threat of ultimately I can do with you whatever I want — I claim this is constitutive of power, political power as such.”
Slavoj Žižek · constitutive excess of state power

“An enemy is someone whose story you did not hear — here I have really a Joseph Goebbels reaction: I draw my gun.”
Slavoj Žižek · rejection of multiculturalist empathy ideology

“I am absolutely misanthropic: I don't want to understand people. I think ninety-five percent of the people are stupid idiots.”
Slavoj Žižek · rejection of understanding as ethical norm

“The true problem of multiculturalism is: you are Indian, I am Arab, he is Latin American, we live in the same bloc — how can we be decent, respectful to each other without this shitty understanding coming into it?”
Slavoj Žižek · code of discretion as alternative to empathy

“Ideology is not simply instead of the real problems we deal with pseudo-problems. Ideology deals with very real problems — it mystifies them.”
Slavoj Žižek · redefinition of ideology

“Tolerance today effectively means 'don't harass me', which means 'I don't tolerate your proximity' — tolerance means de facto stay far away enough from me.”
Slavoj Žižek · tolerance inverted into enforced distance

“The only ultimate choice today is: was Fukuyama right or not?”
Slavoj Žižek · end of history / capitalism as final answer

“The choice will not be between our liberal democratic capitalism and some idealized communist future — the choice to come will be between what this capitalism will develop into if we don't act, and something we will have to invent.”
Slavoj Žižek · future political choice / necessity of inventing alternatives

“Every stupid American school child knows the 'I have a dream' speech — but nobody knows what the dream was.”
Slavoj Žižek · ideology neutralizing radical legacy of MLK

“Fake it till you make it — at the level of hypocrisy: pretend, keep up appearances, because appearances matter.”
Slavoj Žižek · defense of hypocritical appearances / decency

Talks thinking the same things

nearest by shared concepts

16% A Reply to my Critics 5 shared talks 15% Maybe We Just Need a New Chicken 4 shared talks 14% [Breaking News]Slavoj Zizek: Political correctness solidifies hatred, it doesn't work 3 shared talks 13% On Violence 4 shared talks 13% The MATRIX or Two Sides of Perversion 3 shared talks 11% How are we embedded in Ideology? 4 shared talks 11% Wagner’s Ring as a Communist Narrative 3 shared talks 10% A Defence of Eurocentrism 3 shared talks 10% Ideology: The Terror of Permissive Biopolitics 3 shared talks 10% Syriza – A New Word for Freedom 3 shared talks

Transcript 1 turns

Slavoj Žižek
if there is a central thesis of the book it is that we focus all too much. onto what i call subjective violence. our next ethical step is to learn to be. to accept to be responsible even for this objective violence. we cannot say sorry, it's objective. what can i do? innovate. we are responsible. i'm well aware that i should have introduced. many more refined, explicit distinctions which are in the background somehow presupposed. so although the book may appear popular, it presupposes something. for example, elementary distinction between power and violence. or power in the sense of authority usually people say oh it's authoritarian violence but no through authority precisely does not need violence as hannah arendt put it violence is usually the arm of the impotent i mean at the most elementary level this can be rendered clear like imagine a family isn't it true that even if it is painful if a father beats you physically physical violence there is always something slightly ridiculous impotent about it a father who is a true authority he just looks at you it's just the threat of violence threat is enough so again against this background i want to state that i use the term violence in a more general way i consciously opted for this more blurred non specific way of whatever is experienced as a violent intrusion violent measured by some neutral standard and it is here that my questions and where it begin if there is a central thesis of the book it is that we focus all too much to what i call subjective violence by this i do't mean as some people who reviewed my book complained subjective in the sense of not real just experience no it can be very real but by subjective violence i mean violence which is not just anonymous anonymous like an objective social process but where you have a clear subject agent who did it it can be a mob, it can be a singular cr criminal, it can be a terrorizing parent it can be secret police army you know who did it what interests me is that this kind of violence subjective violence is what we read in the media all the time but what interests me is violence which is invisible systemic which goes on but we don't even notice it as violence because what we notice as violence is a disturbance of the established order but my question is what about violence which has to go on not so that the normal run of things is disturbed but so that things go on like normal that invisible violence here for example to give you an example i am pretty much in sympathy with the last book by naomi klein think it is shock capitalism shock doctrine' not that i agree with all her peculiar analysis but i think the focus is the right one how capitalism, liberal capitalismism ist presented by the big media to us a means to bring non-violent development and so on. so either you have violent totalitarian regimes or you do it peacefully. but her point is precisely that in order to establish conditions for free market and in order to sustain free market, you need quite a lot of violence. there she is convincing. so these forms of violence interest me which is why, to give you another example, it's so simply to play because it's more subjective. to to play the game of who is responsible for communist crimes things are clear you can say it's stalin communist party and then we can play all this game of origins was it only stalin was it already lenin was it already marx was it already rousseau was it already christianity was it already plato then we can play this game from plato to nato one big line but capitalist violence is much more anonymous it is just in the system and so you cannot even say who is guilty just people experience it as a kind of pseudoatural catastrophe isn't isn't a big economic crisis where for example thousands of small shareholders lose everything they have thousands people get unemployed't this something which is experienced like kind of a political tsunami it just happens nobody is responsible and i think that is the underlying thesis of the book that to put it in somewhat bombastic terms if humanity is to survive confronting all the crises we have today the threat of ecological crisis the threat of social violence provoked by new forms of apartheid on the one hand gated communities on the other hand people living in excluded areas slums favelas and so on our next ethical step is to learn to b. to accept to be responsible even for this objective violence. we cannot say sorry, it's objective, what can i do? in a way we are responsible for it. this is if there is one thesis of the book. yes of course it's horrible subjective violence but the thing to do is to get the whole picture as a rule subjective violence is a response to objective violence let us take so called terrorism of course what is in the background is the the way well capitalism in its global dimension interrupted the. normal run of the thing in these countries now let me avoid a misunderstanding here my point is not to allow then those who perpetrate subjective violence to say oh so we are just a reaction so capitalism is to be blamed for everything no no no they should be punished whatever no problem there just we should get the entire picture the clearest example that i quote in my book is this subjective violence at its irrational purest like what happened two years ago i think and already last year a little bit this car burning in the suburbs of paris this was a much more mysterious phenomenon than it may appear because it wasn't as even some french commentators thought a to to certain forms of exploitation exclusion and it wasn't especially it wasn't a muslim fundamentalist reaction my god this young guys there the first thing they burned were their local mosques usually and so on so it was an example of what in the book i call ironically with the linguistic term phatic communication' where it's not a message it's just to establish the link it was their way of saying hi we are here we want to be visible which is why the liberal counterargument okay we got your point but couldn't you just do a peaceful protest doesn't work in that way nobody would notice them and so this is where i think one should complicate the picture the last most radical maybe thesis of the book is that we live in an era where violence is the big taboo like you know the whole point about political correctness harassment is that the threshold of violence is getting higher and higher in the sense of things which fifty years ago or even less would be perceived as maybe tasteless but normal are today violence i don't know a tragiomic example which happened to me in united states i look you into the eyes uh uh visual rape or whatever no that what fascinated me is how this much higher sensitivity to these forms of subjective intrusion violence goes hand in hand with much more brutal forms of objective violence or even social violence the paradox for me is that this extreme sensitivity to subjective violence is very dangerous ideological phenomenon something which goes hand in hand with even enhanced social violence. of, of course, this is a reference to, uh, this is a reference to. to uh walter benjamin. his opposition between mythic violence and divine violence. mythic violence is what usually we would have designated as divine violence. it's a violence constitutive of power or violence exerted on behalf of god. so when people told me, oh, so you mean fundamentalist terrorists, i said no, exactly the opposite. they are mythic violence. it's violence perpetrated on behalf of god in the sense in what sense here i like to quote that well-known motto from dostoevsky his brother karamazov if there is no god everything is permitted my theoretical point of reference jacques lacan. was quite right in turning this around his point is no if god doesn't exist then everything is prohibited which incidentally a quick look at today's hedonists like i don't know go to gay community in chelsea in new york you will see that these people who dedicate their life to pleasures live in a total superere ego terror you know am i eating healthy and so on and so on but what's more important is two take into account the opposite statement which is also true it's not if god exists then many things are prohibited if god exists then everything is permitted namely for you insofar as you occupy the position of an instrument of god who can argue with you if you are dead so i will try to give as brief an indication as possible what i mean by divine violence first let's be clear every system of power every exercise of power no matter how uh how democratically legitimized it is always has an axis let's be clear the message of every state power is always okay okay limitations of power democratic representation ultimately there is always this unspoken threat of ultimately i can do with you whatever i want and i'm not saying this is some kind of a dark totalitarianism i claim this is constitutive of power political power as such it doesn't function you you have power or not it doesn't function limited power there must be this threat and what i'm tempted divine violence is for me a kind of a democratic popular counterovement that at a certain point you can also unconditionally explode it's something which it's divine in the sense more in the kierkegaardian sense where kierkegaard oppose us as we all know ethical stage to religious stage in the ethical stage you are bound by universal norms in the religious stage his model is of course abraham ordered to kill his son isaac you do something which is in a way beyond morality you obviously violate ethical norms but nonetheless it's not simple criminality and my idea is when oppressed people rebel when you have this moment of rebellion of course it's not ethical in a certain way you do violate rules innocent people get lost so i'm not saying that they are simply what i'm saying is that nonetheless in a way if it's through popular rebellion or resistance whatever you do not have the right to condemn them because it kind of a priori justified reaction against that excess of violence so i think that we that maybe dangerous for some people this that we have to accept this kind of emancipatory violence now i'm not saying we need the old political terror in no way because the interesting thing in all political terror. dictatorship it's precisely how the original moment of divine violence popular violence shifts then into a new form of mythical violence for example in if you look. i didn't have time to i mean there wasn't enough space the editor was very strict to include this into the book but how i always like cinema examples take the work of one and the same guy sergei eisenstein the great soviet classic in his early silent films you have wonderful moments of violence for example in his october no people but just how when the workers penetrate the winter palace, they enter the basement where there are thousands of bottles of champagne and they just smash everything. i know people when i watch the movie cried like my god, all that precious drink this kind of explosion. then later in his ivan the terrible eisenstein diagnosed the shift from this divine violence to mythic violence all this legitisation of stalinist purges and so on totally different violence so my point simply is let's not demonise violence in order precisely because of the zero level normal state of things already involved involves violence to get rid of it you need violence but of course not any violence to give you an example just to dispel the scare that somewhere in the back of my mind i want to impose on you or on the public a new form of terror you know who is for me a nice example of divine violence gandhi nonviolence of course he was for nonviolence i am also in the sense of don't kill people but wait a minute what he was organising in india in theirties and so on was definitely not only protest this with regard to the institutional structure of the british colonial state these were very violent acts in the sense that through all those tax evading boycotting and so on he wanted very brutally to prevent the normal functioning of the english state so when people ask me i hope this will dispel their fears where do i see divine violence for example i would say gandhi look at gandhi we tend to forget this today the violent aspect this maybe would be another nice example how ideology works today many phenomena which were perceived in a quite different way in their own era are today integrated in our collective ideology but in a very watered down way for example now that we were celebrating i think recently fort forty years of death of martin luther king there were some wonderful comments in american leftist newspapers where they pointed out that as one of them i think henry louis taylor put it every stupid american school child knows you know that i have a dream speech that martin luther had a dream then he went on wonderfully this guy but nobody of us knows what the dream was it wasn't what we think of racial equality this was sixty three sixty four the high point of popularity when martin luther king was received in the white house but then he moved way to the left he said no race is not the key struggle it's economic justice when he was killed in memphis tennessee he went there not to fight for racial equality but to support striking workers of all colours and so on that aspect of luther king disappeared so you see this is for me enacted violence the third type that i mentioned in the book is symbolic violence i mean where is violence as i speculate a little bit. referring to martin heidegger who is for some people very problematic i think he is nonetheless a great philosopher there is a certain violence in language as such not only at the level well analysed by different philosophers, sociologists and linguists so-called symbolic violence in the sense of how even if we act as if we have an equal communication, language itself embodies certain forms of patronizing domination and so on. this is a wonderful field of analysis of how even if explicitly i'm giving you a free choice respecting your autonomy, the very way i do it undermines it. but just to finish but i claim that there is a more radical violence in the sense of in so far as language determines the global horizon of how i experience reality it's always a very one sided view for example where is here violence let's say i live in the same block with one guy from latin america another guy from arab countries another guy from far east asia we can talk about the same things for example we talk about gold but gold can mean totally different things to us and it's really a battle of our state democracy art we may use the same word but who wins there it's violence it's violence we in language are never at the level of just equal mirror communication dialogue every dialogue presupposes a certain field which field of communication is hegemonic is violence and people bec are becoming more and more aware of it i think these are the true problems of multiculturalism of course in principle everybody is for multiculturalism religious tolerance and so on but the very terms in which you formulated it always include a certain form of violence violence in the sense of that something is imposed on you it can be a superficially polite way but it's really sometimes even the most polite the the more brutal it really is ah, here, if i may. disagree in a friendly way yes you can say at a certain level tax theory no longer apply but i think it applies even more because what you see in such conflictual situations for example it is clear when a western individualist liberal and an islamist i am not talking about dark fundamentalists but those who try to present themselves as open islamists when they debate although they again use the same words they both would agree we want a tolerant open society it is clear that they are speaking about different things so here we need more than ever of course not abstract theory but we have to move at a higher reflexive level not to bring peace but even to make it clear where is the difference i mean often when i read these debates you know for example you know it better than me all that scandal which exploded after rowan williams made the statement about the necessity to incorporate some parts of sharia law into the british judicial system what shocked me it was clear not only that there is difference but that i put it speculatively there was a difference in the very way how the difference was perceived it wasn't that the different sides were just thinking they perceived in a totally different way the very difference for english liberals it was us against the threat of this closed totalitarian muslim for muslims it was something totally different it was western liberals trying to ruin their way of life and so on and so on now what i will say now may surprise you i think i think that here i warn you the thesis that i will advocate now brought me many troubles with my multiculturalist leftist french. i am fully aware of all these cash colleagues. racist undercurrent twists which pertain to liberal position i accept all that my basic, maybe a little bit pessimist insight is the following one. it is almost a little bit a tragic conclusion two points the first point i do not think that simple pure multiculturalism is possible the right wingers not so much in england maybe also here in germany, for example, i think i mentioned this in the book. my book on violence how they had a debate on so called leitkultur leading predominant culture i think they had a point there because it's not enough to say you live in your culture i live in my culture or faith or whatever and then all we need is some kind of a neutral legal space to regulate how we tolerate each other it does not work at that level if. multiculturalism ist. really to thrive. we need to. a kind of a deeper or maybe even deeper' is the wrong word maybe it's even better to stay superficial a set of shared values of not so much tolerance in the usual sense but how i respect you and so on which we all share so when conservatives claim nonetheless we need to have our culture our values i would say yes let's fight for those values so let's not leave too easily the terrain to the enemy i think this is the lesson the left has to learn we should try to build our own consensus of i don't like the term values' i would rather say everyday customs i like this term customs rules of how you treat how we treat each other decently although i disagree with him politically he was way too soft for me but here already in the late thirties george orwell said some wonderful things i think we should take it very seriously about this everyday decency customs if this disintegrates things simply things fall apart here i see the danger of so called political correctness i know it is often mocked criticised in a wrong way basically of course it is a positive phenomenon the problems that political correctness attacks are the true problems racism sexism and so on but the problem is that what political correctness is dealing with are precisely things which can truly be resolved i claim only at the level of customs civility and so on an. what political correctness tends to do is to directly explicitly normativise them formulate the explicit rules or even penalise legalise them when you do this it is unfortunately counterproductive i think you know what i mean like let's say we are from totally different cultures i mean, you concede defeat in advance you introduce a universe of total guilt if you know i have to set follow the rules of how am i allowed to address you and so on. this is for me what is bad about liberalism. liberals like to feel guilty, you know, oh, i didn't reflect enough. maybe by treating you kindly i was still committing some sin of oppression. so it doesn't work in this way. let me give you sorry it's my nature coming from ex yugoslavia balkans to be a little bit obscene but decently obscene for the media i read somewhere that in a college in northwest united states this is the the politically correct territory they did something interesting towards which i am simply sympathetic they established in apparently purely politically correct right explicit rules of seduction and they put it on paper points like the basic rule being for every step you have to ask permission explicitly can i now unbutton your shirt can i put my hand on your breast' and so on and so on it worked but i will tell you why not because it worked literally but because in real life people eroticized these rules themselves you know used them ironically and so on. here you see it worked but because of customs immediately if they were to work immediately it would have been ridiculous, humiliating. i hope, even you, sorry to be, i like to be tasteless frank if somebody were trying to seduce you, isn't it that you would say, no, i don't want you to follow rules. i want you to seduce me in a decent way, simply in a decent way, you know what i mean, so that simply it must be as it were in your nature that you do. you know, i don't want you to, uh, can i do this? uh you know what i mean. this is a nice example of what i'm aiming at. we should be always more and more aware of how the true problem is this social trust set of organic values because if we talk even about democracy that's where i see a threat of democracy with what is happening today the growth of these separate not only gated communities but different ways of life and so on let's be clear and orwell was right here if we don't have i don't like the word patriotism' but some kind of what he meant by patriotic larger encompassing community identification if. our global community or nation is just a legal space for different ways of life to compete you don't have a democracy i claim you must have this more of a pathetic identification and again instead of rejecting this as oh you want organic unity you are a protoascist or what no we left should accept this and say no we should fight for what are these values i mean when conservatives try to emphas i was told now which one of their phrases is against this pure multiculturalism britishness no okay they have britishness we can invent something better maybe even a different call it britishness whatever you want i don't care but let us not leave the terrain to the enemy so here i see. the problem the problem with this uh totally totally permissive attitude of to put it radically that every imposition of some universal shared values is sh kind of a racist privileging of one culture no it's the only medium where multiculturalism can thrive so again we should accept this the other point i want to make along these same lines is this is why i do not like the word tolerance' it is not enough what does tolerance mean it's, i think an ideological category. i use here ideology almost in the old fashioned marxist way of false consciousness mystification what is ideology ideology is not simply instead of the real problems we deal with pseudo problems ideology deals with very real problems it mystifies them. so that is for me the big lesson today that's what we philosophers can do i cannot propose you how to solve racist problem how to solve ecological problem what i can do as a philosopher is i hope so. show how the very way you perceive you conceptualize. a very real problem may be part of the problem so and for me, a nice example is tolerance. it's true tolerance deals with very real problems sexism racism ethnic religious intolerance but are these problems really automatically problems of tolerance let us take racism i made a simple test abovementioned guy martin luther king go to the internet google him and put search tolerance' the word is practically absent from his work for him racism was not a problem of tolerance for him to say we blacks need more tolerance from the whites would be humiliating ridiculous it is the same as i hope you are. a good feminist wouldn't it be ridiculous for you to say we women want more tolerance from men my god this is ridiculous no rac racism was for martin luther king a problem of economic exploitation legal rights and so on and so on so it is not an innocent thing that today we perceive racism automatically is a problem of tolerance i think this is part of our what i call in that book and i develop this morning other of my books post political society where social political life or steak. rule is more and more reduced to rational administration like we don't debate about economy as peter mandelson put it nicely two or three years ago of course i disagree with it but the formulas were he said let's admit it we are all thatcherites in economy so the only thing we can do is you know when i was young we were still dreaming about socialism with a human face. his point was all we can do is global capitalism with a human face. no we change a little bit more tolerant laws more rights to this that, more social security but you accept the rules of the game. in this state of things all conflicts are politically neutralized they are no longer perceived as politico economic conflicts they are restated as cultural conflicts. in this sense they are natural and of course with cultures different ways of life all you can do is tolerate the resolution of the conflict is not i will make you disappear or you will kill me but let's tolerate a nice example is here in mexico i read mexican poor farmers uh tr to formulate their fight against exploitation of poor farmers nobody was interested you know the moment you complain in this way there is always some neoliberal guy who says yes but sorry that's a nice word structural readjustments are necessary. they did something intelligent as a manipulation. they reformulated their struggle as the struggle the cultural struggle of indigenous people against spanish cultural imperialism. all of a sudden they became much more popular. a nice example but i think for me a rather sad example of how to be heard at all you have to calculate j. your predicament so this is my problem of tolerance the second problem i have with tolerance is that precisely because of this tolerance often i claim in in some of our developed societies for its opposite in what sense what does it effectively mean for example in the united states even here up to a point today tolerance it means don't harass me the opposite of tolerance, a name for intolerance is harassment. okay, what does it mean harassment? again, the same ideological critique. it's a very real thing, harassment. of course there is harassment. there is rape and whatever. and my god, i'm a madman here. i mean i advocate death penalty for rapists. i'm one of the few people that i know who are for death penalty. so i'm not what i'm just saying is that there is also another dimension in harassment, which is 's late capitalist subjectivity, fear of the proximity of the other, you know what i mentioned before you come too close to me, you are invading my space, you talk to me dirty, you are verbally raping me or rather you or whatever. so what i'm saying is that isn't this a nice example of how the same term harassment covers a real problem but a attach to it to mystify it it's a whole set of ideology of not invade my space distance' so i claim paradoxically that what we mean by tolerance today is avoid harassment which means i don't tolerate your proximity' tolerance means de facto stay far away enough from me which is why tolerance can well work also in a much more suspicious upper class way like tolerance can also mean like i like poor people but they should stay there don't come too close and so on and so on so this is my problem with tolerance another problem i have with tolerance is that it usually is combined with this plea for understanding the ideology of tolerance that i really hate can be best condensed in one motto and here i have really a joseph goebbels reaction i draw my gun it is the famous multiculturalist motto an enemy is someone whose story you did not hear. start shooting why it sounds very noble you are my enemy insofar as i objectivise you back i should give you a chance try to hear your side of the story from within as it were and then i see you are human like me you have your dreams your desires. okay okay sounds nice up to a certain level it works but but yeah yeah yeah yeah just replace it with hitler you know and it's totally so but i go here further now it's not only that your insights stories you are telling about yourself are a lies but i think this very idea this pressure of i have to understand you in order to be open to you it's false it's again an impossible liberal blackmail i know i will never understand you so we all feel guilty all the time no i am here absolutely misanthropic i don't want to understand people i think ninety five percent of the people are stupid idiots i don't want i am not interested in them the true problem of racism is not i should know your inner life to be no the true problem of multiculturalism is you are indian i am arab he is latin american we live in the same bloc how can we be decent respectful to each other without this shitty understanding coming into it? that's the actual problem it's totally wrong to put it in this encompassing understanding. so here i quote it in the book i quite agree with otherwise i i'm totally opposed to him pet let's not. let's avoid a misunderstanding if i take power he goes to gulak immediately but he made a nice point when he said we don't need more understanding we need a new code of discretion how you know i don't try to understand there is something very violent and at the same time i claim patronising in understanding for me you know who is your greatest racist i mean it's sympathetic to watch him but this pure racist patronising understanding the monty python guy who does all these travelogues michael palin is this you know with this ironic smile he comes you can see the patronizing amused humor and so on that that's what one has to avoid i mean, that's what one has to avoid. but that's where i see the tragedy again this i to put it disappearance of general as it were politics and reducing everything to particular issues this is for me the key aspect or form of appearance of postitics and i think that is the whole point of the book towards the end that we are now confronting problems which like ecology i don't think you can solve it treating it as a special issue it's a global issue it concerns us all radically our very survival and also other issues like the issue of those excluded in favelas i have a whole series of these issues where i think that this typically postmodern late capitalist politics of single issues and then you can build all possible coalitions and so on i think that if there is a lesson from today's decade it is that that is not enough so if people ask me what would be for you the historical meaning of september eleventh we all know it wasn't really such a like every week ten thousand sorry ten times more children die in congo than did there but if there is a historical meaning to september elevenventh it is precisely the death multiculturalist. utopia of the clinton nineties we can do everything with these issues politically that we are at the end of that we need to rehabilitate global politics by global politics i mean politics which is global in the sense that it. is political in this radical sense engaging all your being not just one issue and point two also global in the sense that it's universal in its targeting all humanity ultimately but even in a more radical third sense . global in the sense that i think that we should rehabilitate the notion of large collective acts the big victim of the defeat of socialism and social democratic welfare state were these large collective acts the idea is that the moment you propose a big political collective act it was said didn't you learn the lesson ah do you want gulach or what the fashionable terms were uh. micro micromanagement interaction nomadic, autopoietic, like let the particular agents interact. and the global dimension will erreichen. autoopoetically. there's a kind of how do they call it emergent property. we cannot rely on that i mean it is even clear to those in power this is why all this pressure for the kyoto agreement and so on obviously we have not yet learned the lesson because with the last negotiations where were they in bali i think it was praised as a success but what they agreed is that they will continue to meet first of all it is a very interesting ideological phenomenon this how we all know it is really an example of what in psychoanalysis we call fetishistic split je sais bien mais quand i know very well but we know very well how serious things are but we cannot we cannot it's a very interesting ideological phenomenon i was often attacked for using the metaphor that i perceive myself as a magician presenting you every time a new head but there is never a big fat rabbit that i would pull out no. because i think that the problem is much more radical than it may appear, let's be clear. i'm radically a leftist i buy everything up to a certain amount of divine violence and so on but the problem is elsewhere the problem is does a left really, chef? a global alternate vision to offer look at the the only bright hope which was the porto alegre movement. it's slowly dying away. why? precisely because there was no positive vision. all that was, was a protest movement where they were all together, from conservative ecologists to those who religiously, because it's sinful, oppose capitalism, to communists, radical leftists, anarchists, whatever you want. of course, they all agreed, and some people even celebrated this as post-modern, non-heerarchic movement. yeah, it because it was a pure protest movement. the moment you try to opposed to it a positive project it did not work so here is my position i see a whole series of. okay i'll put it in this way my position is. the only ultimate choice today is was fukuyama right or not it's easy to make fun of fukuyama's thesis on the end of history that is to say his thesis that ultimately we found a formula liberal capitalism with democratic rights and so on. it's easy to make fun of him. like oh that idiot who thought history is at an end but let's be frank aren't we all inclusive of the 99% of today's left, aren't we all, how put it fukuyama? isn't it that we all look at what the left is debating nobody debates these old big questions is capitalism here to stay do we need a state no this is all accepted the point is just as i said before how to make it a little bit better more tolerance more this more that. so that's my big question. my answer is unfortunately no no in the sense that no it will not work there are a whole series of problems where i think that they have a strong enough antagonistic potential that it will not be able in the long term to save them to resolve them to live with them within the context of global capitalism again ecology problems of biogenetics interestingly enough he is a conservative but an honest intelligent one fukuyama himself in his later book on human andhuman future whatever had to admit this that the very fact of biogenetic manipulations complicates everything and introduces history again makes unworkable his whole thesis on the end of history. then in capitalism intellectual the problem of intellectual property. it's clear that. so-called intellectual properties, how to put it, don't fit the form of private property. it's a constant tension how to translate them into private property. and then the mega problem new slums, favelas, new gated apartheid and so on. so what i see is the following that here problems are arising and. i'm not anti capitalistist in the naive sense you know those who try to convince you apparently we live well but there are millions suffering really this is the high masochistic pleasure of pseudo leftists they try to convince you how you think you are living well but you are not aware that it's worse than ever know like when i was young there were crazies who said okay in the east they may have gulacs but isn't our consumerist society one mega gulac my god i would really that guy to spend one week in the real gulag. no, but so again, we have to give the devil what belongs to the devil. let's be frank. now i will say something horrible for leftists. in spite of all, of course it's exploitation of third world and so on, but nonetheless, isn't it that if you take western europe for the last 50 years, can you honestly say that there was maybe there was but very little any period in the history of humanity where such a large number of people lived in comparable freedom safety and so on my problem is not to fight this my problem is that it cannot last we see how welfare state social is gradually being dismantled we see that's my problem with torture i'm a realist here i'm not hypocritical i know in other countries they torture probably much more than the united states the true scandal is for me the appearance how is it that we can all of a sudden publicly talk about torture this is for me a kind of ethical fiasco i believe in appearances, decency appearances and for hypocrisy at this level pretend, you know, how would it act it till you make it or how did they put it alcoholic anonymous no fake it till you make it you know but what i fear we should counteract not what capitalism is today but where it is moving that is i read all the signs torture new gated communities ecological problems as signs that in the long term capitalism the way we know it today in the developed countries's relativ. good not to mention the mega problem of what does it mean for third world countries this makes even more argument for me. it moves in a direction where it will undermine itself so we should counteract that the choice is either we let it drift and then we will all of a sudden end in some kind of a new very exclusive authoritarian apartheid society or we will be literally push. to invent something new it will be a question of survival with dignity the choice will be not between our liberal democratic capitalism and some idealized communist future i'm not naive the choice will be the choice to come between what this capitalism will develop into if we don't act against and something we will have to invent now there are signs what this may be but no i am here an honest honest not pessimist but honestly ignorant i am not saying i have that model certainly not as some people accuse me that i believe that some old fashioned leninist party will arise again that is even at a common level of theoretical decency the duty of intellectuals today to make people aware that we still have to think radically by this i mean not imposing onto reality some crazy crazy utopias but simply to made them aware that maybe what we have now globally as a system is not the final answer here i see the legacy of since we are now two months from it of may 68. no it's not for me. may68 is for me an ambiguous phenomenon. there is one aspect of may sixty68 which i hate which was easily appropriated into ruling ideologies may sixty68 as creativity explosion of sexual freedom and so on, so-called post-mod modern capitalism. can perfectly integrate this we are all hedonists today and so on but there is another may sixty68 which for example, signaled by facts which are totally forgotten today, like workers. sorry students demonstrating joined workers and so on and then behind all this. the basic question of sixty and eight was not academic freedom student but was a kind of a vague inside deck the global capitalist system we have is not enough that's the legacy of 68 that's the legacy not these shitty freedoms or whatever that's where i see the problem so again i'm much more modest here i'm not a crazy radical who says we need a total communist revolution i'm just saying the game we are playing today our global system cannot go on forever. and we have to keep our minds open.