How are we embedded in Ideology?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2007-11-16 · 1:15:40 · 10,166 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologycapitalismecology-climateliberalism-political-correctnesshistoryphilosophy-generalsubjectivityeveryday-liferace-antisemitismfascism-populismdemocracyrevolution-violence
In this lecture (delivered in Prague), Žižek argues that we live not in a post-ideological era but in one saturated with ideology operating through new mechanisms. He traces how contemporary ideology works through tolerance discourse, the Big Other's maintenance of appearances, the logic of the fetish, and habits/unwritten rules, drawing on Stalinism, Nazism, Hitchcock, Christian theology, ecology, and charity to make his case. He concludes with a Leninist call for theoretical engagement over activism or charity as the proper response to the present conjuncture.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The dominant self-understanding that we have moved beyond ideology, which Žižek argues is itself the central ideological illusion today.
as “tolerance as ideology”
Žižek argues that tolerance, as deployed today, is not an emancipatory category but an ideological one that depoliticizes conflicts by recasting social and economic problems as cultural/attitudinal ones.
as “post-political society”
A society in which economy and social administration are increasingly depoliticized, so that all conflicts get translated into cultural conflicts, providing the ground for both Fukuyama and Huntington.
as “global capitalism with a human face”
Žižek's ironic description of today's left's real horizon, analogous to the old dream of 'socialism with a human face,' but now accepting capitalism and seeking only to humanize it through tolerance and reduced racism.
as “clash of civilizations as remainder of politics”
Žižek's thesis that the Huntingtonian clash of civilizations is not opposed to Fukuyama's end of history but is precisely what remains of politics once history 'ends', cultural conflict is depoliticized politics.
Not simply another person with an inner life, but the disturbing, demonic dimension in the other that exceeds their social persona, the abyss that ideology and fantasy must manage.
Žižek's disturbing finding, following Suzuki, that Zen enlightenment (overcoming the self) was reframed as achievable through automatic military killing, illustrating how inner authenticity coexists with outer brutality.
as “fantasy (fantasma)”
Not an imagined substitute for what we lack, but the framework through which we learn what to desire and through which we structure our reality and manage the enigma of the Other's desire.
Implicit in the discussion of commodity fetishism: illusions that are practiced in social relations, not merely believed mentally.
Marx's concept invoked to show that ideology is not illusion in the head but illusion enacted in social relations, fantasma structures reality, not merely perception.
The fourth term missing from Rumsfeld's matrix: things we know but do not know that we know, the domain of ideological fantasy and unconscious beliefs that regulate behavior.
The site where unknown knowns reside at their purest, the embodied, unthematized rules that tell us how to take explicit rules and that form the real substance of ideology.
Background concept (Althusserian) implicit in the discussion of how ideology recruits subjects through habits and the obscene underside.
as “social obscenity”
The domain of unwritten meta-rules, the obscene underside of institutions, that tell us which explicit rules to violate or not take seriously, and that form the hidden core of group identification.
An offer or act that by its very structure must be declined, its meaning lies in the exchange itself rather than any literal content, functioning as ideological glue.
as “obscene underside of an institution”
The set of dark unwritten rules (e.g., 'Code Red' in the military, KKK practices behind Christian community facades) that are never publicly admitted but are more binding than the official rules.
Not God or a real controlling agency but the pure agency of appearance, the symbolic fiction for whom we must act as if, even when everyone knows the reality behind the performance.
Ideology functioning not as a symptom (repressed truth erupting) but as a fetish, a small lie that enables one to rationally acknowledge a truth while blocking its full existential impact.
The classical Marxist model in which ideology is a general lie from which repressed truth erupts through symptomatic details, contrasted with the fetishist mode now dominant.
as “ideology of charity”
Žižek's critique of personalized charity as the 'lowest ideology': paying to keep the poor 'there' while we remain 'here,' blocking systemic change while providing emotional satisfaction.
as “je sais bien mais quand même”
The fetishist split, 'I know very well, but nonetheless', which Žižek uses to describe our stance toward ecology: we know the crisis is real but cannot fully accept it because our embeddedness in the life-world blocks the impact.
as “ecology without nature”
Žižek's formula for the true ecological lesson: we must abandon the idea of Nature as a harmonious, balanced Mother Earth disturbed by human hubris, because nature itself is chaotic and without inherent balance.
as “surplus enjoyment / jouissance”
Implied background concept: the obscene enjoyment that circulates through the transgressive underside of institutions and in the fetishist logic of ideology.
Stories he reaches for 17
In the worst Gulag years, prisoners were gathered on Stalin's birthday to sign a congratulatory telegram to him, Žižek contrasts this with Auschwitz (Jews would never sign a telegram to Hitler) to show that Stalinism, unlike Nazism, maintained the fiction of universal reason even for its victims.
“they collected on Stalin's birthday all the prisoners who had to sign a telegram to Stalin wishing him all the best... This is meaningless in fascism.”
D.T. Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen, celebrated Japan's invasion of China as an 'act of love' and argued that automatic military obedience to a 'shoot, kill' order was the easiest path to satori for ordinary people.
“when you are a soldier and an officer gives you an order—shoot, kill—and you do it automatically, if you really can do it, you attain satori”
Job protests not his innocence but the meaninglessness of his suffering; at the end God vindicates Job and condemns the three theologians who insisted on meaning, God's speech amplifies the universe's meaninglessness.
“when at the end of the Book of Job, God enters the scene, He says everything that Job says is true, everything that the three theologians said is wrong.”
Žižek extends Rumsfeld's press-conference taxonomy (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns) to reveal the missing fourth term: unknown knowns, the ideological fantasies that regulated US behavior in Iraq.
“What is missing? The unknown knowns. Things we know, but we don't know that we know them. And this is fantasy.”
Žižek points out that MLK's civil rights speeches contain virtually no use of 'tolerance' or 'intolerance', for King, racism was a problem of unjust laws and economic exploitation, not attitudes.
“go on the internet, download the speeches by Martin Luther King and look for the word tolerance or intolerance. You will not find—the word is practically absent.”
Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they prefer wife or mistress: Marx says wife, Engels says mistress, Lenin says both, so he can tell each he's with the other, and uses the time to study. Žižek uses it to argue: reject both official career (wife) and false transgression (mistress) and actually think.
“Lenin said, 'So that when you are with your wife you can say you are with a mistress... you learn, learn and learn.'”
After being rude to Butler, Žižek apologizes; she says 'you don't owe me an apology', but she could only say this after receiving the apology, and he could not literally retract it. The exchange illustrates the empty gesture: literally meaningless but socially necessary.
“She said, 'You don't owe me an apology,' but she was able to say this only after I offered the apology.”
Aldous Huxley's biography of Cardinal Richelieu's right-hand man: an extremely brutal political manipulator who also wrote authentic, high-level Christian mystical meditations, the same person, with no contradiction visible in either register.
“how the same person can order poisoning, torture, manipulate and nonetheless you cannot find this in his meditations.”
Žižek and colleagues on a Yugoslav student journal found the perfect subversive act: not attacking fake elections but reporting on them AS IF they were real, 'Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power', which so disturbed the Party that they were called to the Central Committee.
“we just published on the evening of elections an extraordinary issue of the journal with the big title: 'Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power'”
The existence of oil requires imagining an unthinkable past ecological catastrophe, this proves that 'nature' is not a balanced, harmonious system but a chaotic, improvising, unpredictable process.
“can we even imagine what a totally unthinkable ecological catastrophe must have happened sometime in the past of the earth to produce oil? ... And this is nature.”
A friend whose wife died of cancer handled it calmly while playing with a hamster; when the hamster died months later, he tried to kill himself. The hamster was the fetish, the small lie enabling rational acknowledgment of the wife's death while blocking its existential weight.
“Through this fetish, he was able to accept rationally that the wife is dead... When half a year later the hamster died, he immediately tried to kill himself.”
Wittgenstein's WWI diaries reveal he thought about mathematical debates with friends while masturbating at the front, illustrating the psychoanalytic point that fantasy mediates even seemingly autonomous desires.
“he reports on, very honestly, what he was thinking about when he was masturbating at the front. It was, he wrote, debating with friends mathematical problems.”
After Beria's arrest, Soviet encyclopedia subscribers were mailed a new page to paste over his entry, replacing him with the Bering Strait, with photos, so the continuity was perfect. Žižek asks: whom were they deceiving? No one, it was pure Big Other maintenance.
“instead of Beria, they put Bering Strait... when you did this, the continuity was perfect. Now what is so mysterious here? It is: whom they were trying to deceive?”
In Vertigo, the Hays Code required that the heroine's drying underwear appear as abstract cloth so viewers could not 'prove' James Stewart had seen her naked, but ordinary viewers perceived underwear anyway. The censorship protected not the viewers but the innocent gaze of the Big Other.
“whom was the censorship protecting? Obviously not us. It was again that innocent gaze of the Big Other.”
The millions who marched against the Iraq war left both protesters and the Blair government satisfied, the left felt it had shown its strength, the government cited it as proof of democracy while ignoring it. Bush explicitly used it as justification for the war.
“those in the government, Blair and so on, were no less satisfied... they knew that they can simply ignore them.”
The film A Few Good Men depicts the military's 'Code Red', the network of unwritten obscene rules about how to deal with those who are 'not one of us', as the hidden core of military community that is never publicly admitted.
“every military community has a whole network of obscene implicit rules: how do you deal with those who are not one of us, how do you beat them... They have to remain—exact—”
The inner circle of Yugoslav Nomenklatura knew the economy was catastrophic but accumulated billions in debt to keep the dying Tito happy, 'the chicken (Tito) must not know.' Illustrates how the Big Other's innocence can drive an entire system to ruin.
“they accumulated a debt in a couple of years, billion dollars, just to keep Tito happy. The chicken shouldn't have known it.”
Works invoked 10
Vertigo film
Hitchcock's 'masterpiece', the underwear/Hays Code scene illustrates the Big Other as the agency of pure appearance.
The Book of Job other
Žižek calls it 'the first text of ideology critique', God vindicates Job's protest that suffering has no deeper meaning, condemning the three theologians who sought to provide one.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's study of Japanese Zen Buddhism's support for imperial military expansion; Žižek calls it 'a wonderful book' and recommends it.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's biography of Père Joseph, cited as the key example of the neighbor's abyss, brutal manipulator who was also an authentic mystic.
Das Kapital book
Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism is cited as still essential, ideology is enacted in social relations, not merely believed.
Gulag book
Anne Applebaum's history cited for the birthday telegram detail, evidence for Stalinism's maintenance of universal reason fictions.
A Few Good Men film
Described as 'interesting, not very good', the 'Code Red' concept illustrates the obscene underside of military institutions.
Reds film
Warren Beatty's film about John Reed, described as 'one of the worst films of all time', yet its structure (October Revolution as fantasy enabling the couple) is used analytically.
Button other
Patricia Highsmith short story about a man who murders to obtain a button-fetish that enables him to endure caring for his disabled child, the paradigm case for fetishist ideology.
On Totalitarianism book
Žižek's own book, briefly self-cited for the analysis of Stalinism vs. Nazism developed there.
People invoked 40
Used as a concrete substitution in the 'enemy is someone whose story we haven't heard' reductio, imagining Husák using the phrase to dismiss Soviet critics.
Cardinal Richelieu's brutal right-hand man who was also an authentic Christian mystic, the paradigm case of the neighbor as abyss.
Samuel Huntington negative
His 'clash of civilizations' thesis is not refuted but absorbed: Žižek argues it describes the remainder of politics at the end of history, complementing rather than opposing Fukuyama.
Director/star of Reds, described as 'one of the worst films of all time', but the film's structure (revolution as romantic fantasy) is used analytically.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek identifies as a Leninist twice, once for the 'freedom for whom to do what?' formulation applied to tolerance, and once for the joke about wife/mistress/learning as model for today's intellectuals.
His disappearance from the Soviet Encyclopedia, replaced by the Bering Strait, is the central example of Stalinist appearance-maintenance.
Mentioned as a star of A Few Good Men.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Cited as the perfect ideological figure for Western generalized hedonism, his spiritual message secretly tells Westerners that enlightenment will make them better businessmen and lovers.
Cited as the standard of authentic Christian mystical writing, used to calibrate the surprising quality of Père Joseph's meditations.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited as a 'good Darwinist' whose work demonstrates that nature is chaotic and improvising, not harmoniously balanced, supports the 'ecology without nature' argument.
Brian Victoria positive
Author of Zen at War, which documents Japanese Zen Buddhists' support for imperial military expansion; Žižek recommends the book as wonderful.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek's 'favorite' conservative theologian, cited for the claim that at the cross Christ becomes an atheist for a moment, making Christianity uniquely radical.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
Invoked ironically as a 'philosopher' whose known/unknown matrix inadvertently diagnoses the structure of ideology; Žižek extends and completes the analysis against him.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek argues his 'end of history' thesis is effectively accepted by the majority of today's radical left, making them de facto Fukuyamaists, though he does not entirely dismiss the thesis, he reframes it as partial truth.
Briefly mentioned as a type of Stalinist show-trial victim who still participated in universal reason to pronounce their own guilt.
Cited for his perverse response to Iraq war protests: 'I'm so glad about those demonstrations because that's why we are going to Iraq', the perfect statement of how protest can be ideologically absorbed.
Žižek's 'theoretical enemy, personally good friend', the apology anecdote illustrates the empty gesture; her feminist politics are implied as the context for the 'patriarchal obscenity' caveat.
Anne Applebaum positive
Her book Gulag is cited for the detail about prisoners signing birthday telegrams to Stalin, key evidence for Stalinism's maintenance of universal reason fictions.
Benedict XVI negative
His advice on bioethics ('don't do it') is criticized as identical to Habermas's, a failure to engage theoretically with unprecedented ethical problems.
Mentioned as Père Joseph's principal.
Patricia Highsmith positive
Žižek's 'favorite detective writer', her short story 'Button' is used to illustrate the fetishist logic of ideology.
Paul Claudel positive
Deeply conservative French poet-theologian who nonetheless grasped the radical implication that 'God is helpless without us, God needs our help', cited to support Žižek's reading of the Holy Spirit.
Mentioned as a type of Stalinist show-trial target, 'the lowest Trotskyite shit', to make the point about universal reason.
Friedrich Engels positive
Appears only in the Lenin/Marx/Engels joke as the hedonist who would choose a mistress.
Used as the limiting case against the 'enemy is someone whose story we haven't heard' motto, understanding Hitler's inner life does not dissolve the enemy relation.
Mentioned as a star of A Few Good Men.
D. T. Suzuki negative
The great Zen popularizer who celebrated Japan's Nanjing massacre as an 'act of love' and equated military killing with satori, cited as evidence that inner spiritual authenticity is no guarantee of ethical conduct.
The Czech Stalinist show-trial transcript is cited to illustrate how even condemned 'traitors' narrated their own guilt in the register of universal reason.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as an exemplar of charity ideology, 'while we live here, people are starving there' rhetoric that Žižek identifies as the lowest, most reactionary form of ideology.
Michelangelo positive
His drawing 'Christ on the Cross for Vittoria Colonna' is cited as a powerful image of radical despair, Christ's right hand gesturing like 'fuck you to God,' illustrating God's atheism.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo is cited as a masterpiece; the underwear/censorship scene illustrates the logic of the Big Other.
Jürgen Habermas negative
His alliance with Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on bioethics ('don't mess with it, keep a distance') is presented as a catastrophic non-answer to genuine ethical dilemmas of biogenetics.
Mentioned as a concrete substitution in the reductio against liberal empathy: 'you can replace Hitler with Brezhnev.'
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited approvingly as someone who correctly framed racism as a problem of unjust laws and economic exploitation rather than tolerance, evidence against tolerance ideology.
Aldous Huxley positive
Author of Grey Eminence (biography of Père Joseph), cited for the disturbing example of a brutal manipulator who was also an authentic mystic; Žižek notes Huxley 'tried to put the blame on Christianity' but ultimately disagrees.
Analyzed as the center of the Stalinist appearance-obsession, Žižek is clear he was evil but insists the real mystery of Stalinism is structural, not reducible to Stalin's personality.
Karl Marx positive
Das Kapital's commodity fetishism is cited approvingly as showing that ideology is enacted in social relations, not just believed in the mind; also appears in the Lenin/Marx/Engels wife-mistress joke.
The Yugoslav president whose desire for a happy death led the Nomenklatura to accumulate billions in debt, 'the chicken who must not know', illustrating Big Other logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
His wartime diaries are cited for the honest account of thinking about mathematics while masturbating, illustrating the psychoanalytic point about fantasy mediating desire.
Mentioned as the UK government figure who could ignore the Iraq war protests while still benefiting from them as proof of democracy.
What it argues
ideology as fetishism vs. symptomthe Big Other and the maintenance of appearancestolerance as contemporary ideological categorythe neighbor as uncanny abyssobscene underside of institutionshabits, unwritten rules, and social obscenityLeninist call for theory over activism
Dialectical moves 12
“Tolerance effectively means its exact opposite: I don't tolerate your proximity — 'Don't come too close to me, stay at a proper distance.'”
Contemporary tolerance discourse, far from welcoming the neighbor, encodes a withdrawal from the neighbor's disturbing closeness.
“The true content of 'an enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard' is that the stories people tell about themselves are as a rule a lie — understanding the inner life does not dissolve the enemy.”
Liberal empathy ideology is inverted: getting closer to the other's self-narrative brings us not to truth but to self-serving fiction.
“Fantasy is not opposed to reality — fantasma is what structures our reality.”
The usual opposition of fantasy (illusion) vs. reality is reversed: fantasy is the very frame through which reality is constituted.
“Fukuyama and Huntington are not opposites — the clash of civilizations is what remains of politics at the end of history.”
The two apparently opposed grand narratives are shown to be the same phenomenon seen from different angles.
“Rumsfeld's matrix has a missing fourth term: not unknown unknowns but unknown knowns — things we know without knowing that we know them.”
The politically dangerous blind spot is not the utterly foreign but what ideology has made invisible within our own knowledge.
“In Stalinism, it was prohibited to criticize Stalin — but this prohibition itself was prohibited; people had to act as if they were free.”
The second-order prohibition (prohibiting the prohibition) captures a structural feature of ideological domination more total than simple censorship.
“Only in Christianity does God himself become an atheist for a moment — at the cross, at the cry of abandonment.”
Christianity is unique not in claiming God exists but in staging God's own atheism, which is the point of genuine radicality.
“Today ideology is no longer symptomatic but fetishist — the fetish is not a moment of truth disturbing the general lie, but a small lie which enables you to confront the truth.”
The classical Marxist model of ideology-as-symptom is reversed: the ideological supplement now enables acknowledgment rather than blocking it.
“We need more alienation, not less — ecology without nature, not a return to the life-world.”
The standard ecological prescription (reconnect with nature, overcome alienation) is inverted: our embeddedness in the life-world is precisely what prevents us from confronting the crisis.
“The Stalinist leader applauds himself — not 'I, the leader' but 'I am with you, servant of the people, we are all part of the same enlightened reason.'”
The Stalinist gesture of self-applause signals a subjective position opposed to fascism: the leader presents himself as expression of collective reason, not its object.
“A protest can function as a superstitious act — you protest so that nothing will really change, so you can keep your conscience clear and go on with normal life.”
Left protest, apparently opposed to the status quo, is revealed as potentially its most effective reproducer.
“Charity is paying so that they remain there — the most charitable act preserves the conditions of its own necessity.”
The humanitarian impulse is its own negation: personalized charity maintains the systemic inequality it claims to address.
Claims 22
asserts
We live not in a post-ideological era but more than ever deep in ideology — the claim to be post-ideological is itself the central ideological operation.ideology
asserts
Tolerance is not an emancipatory category but one of the crucial ideological categories today, depoliticizing racism and other conflicts by recasting them as matters of cultural sensitivity rather than law, economics, or power.tolerance as ideology
asserts
Martin Luther King did not use the language of tolerance — for him racism was a problem of unjust laws and economic exploitation, not of attitudes.tolerance discourse and race
asserts
The Fukuyama end-of-history thesis and Huntington's clash of civilizations are not opposites but complements: cultural clash is the residue of politics once history 'ends.'Fukuyama and Huntington
rejects
The maxim 'an enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard' is false and dangerous — the stories people tell about themselves are typically self-serving lies, and understanding the inner life of a Hitler or Husák does not dissolve the enemy relation.liberal empathy as ideology critique
asserts
Fantasy is not the imaginary supplement to reality but the framework through which we learn what to desire and which structures reality itself — and at the social level, the anti-Semitic fantasy of 'the Jew' functions as an answer to social confusion.fantasy and ideology
asserts
Rumsfeld's epistemological matrix is missing a fourth term — 'unknown knowns,' things we know without knowing we know them — and this is the domain of ideology and fantasy.unknown knowns and ideology
asserts
Social life is always regulated not just by explicit rules but by meta-rules — unwritten rules about how to take explicit rules — and ideology is most effective at this level of habits and obscene background.habits and ideological reproduction
asserts
The Big Other is not God but the symbolic agency of pure appearance — the fictional observer for whom we maintain performances even when everyone including us knows the reality.the Big Other
asserts
Stalinism, unlike Nazism, was constitutively dependent on maintaining appearances and including even its victims within universal reason — which makes it part of the Enlightenment project in a horrifying way.Stalinism vs. Nazism
asserts
Today ideology functions predominantly in the fetishist mode — not as a symptom where repressed truth erupts, but as a fetish (small lie) that allows us to rationally acknowledge truth while blocking its full impact.fetishist mode of ideology
asserts
Nobody can be a perfect cynic — every cynic has their 'hamster,' a private fetish point that sustains their functioning.cynicism and fetishism
asserts
Charity ideology is the meanest, lowest ideology today — it allows the rich to feel good while preserving the systemic conditions that produce poverty.charity as ideology
asserts
Large protest demonstrations (as with the Iraq war) can themselves function as ideological acts — satisfying both protesters (conscience clear) and governments (proof of democracy), while changing nothing.left activism and ideology
asserts
The ecological crisis cannot be addressed by returning to immediate life-world experience or by blaming alienation — we need more alienation and must abandon the concept of Nature as harmonious balance.ecology and ideology
rejects
Biogenetic and ecological problems require theoretical engagement — the traditional Habermasian or papal advice to simply 'not do it' solves nothing.Habermas/Ratzinger on bioethics
asserts
Zen Buddhism is not immune to fascist co-optation — major figures like Suzuki actively supported Japanese imperial violence, and inner spiritual authenticity is compatible with outer brutality.Zen Buddhism and violence
asserts
Christ's cry of abandonment on the cross — 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani' — is the moment God himself becomes an atheist, which is what makes Christianity unique among religions.Christianity and atheism
asserts
The Book of Job is the first text of ideology critique — Job's protest is not that he is innocent but that his suffering has no deeper meaning, and God vindicates him, not his three theological friends.the Book of Job and ideology
rejects
The ideology of the emergency state ('for every sentence I speak, ten children die in Africa') is deeply reactionary — its message is 'do something, don't think,' short-circuiting the theoretical engagement we need.emergency state rhetoric
asserts
What we need today, more than activism or charity, is theoretical withdrawal and thought — the Lenin-joke formula of rejecting both wife (official career) and mistress (false transgression) to learn.the role of theory
asserts
Pedophilia in the Catholic Church is not a contingent failure of individual priests but a structurally generated obscene underside of the institution itself.Catholic Church and institutional obscenity
Quotes 20
“Tolerance effectively means: I don't tolerate your proximity. So tolerance effectively means: don't come too close to me, stay at a proper distance.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance as anti-neighbor ideology
“An enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard. Now this sounds very deep and human... I am totally opposed to this motto.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of liberal empathy ideology
“The story we are telling ourselves about ourselves in the innermost of our being, the way you make sense of your life, is as a rule a lie.”Slavoj Žižek · inner narrative as lie
“A neighbor is not another human person simply with his inner life. Neighbor is that which is in the other more than the other himself, in the sense of some demonic dimension.”Slavoj Žižek · the neighbor as uncanny excess
“Only in Christianity, Chesterton says, God himself becomes an atheist for a moment.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity's radical atheism
“Fantasy is not opposed to reality. Fantasma is what structures our reality.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy constitutes reality
“What is missing? The unknown knowns. Things we know, but we don't know that we know them. And this is fantasy.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns as ideology
“The Big Other is not God in the sense of the one who controls all, but much better it's to represent the Big Other as the agency of pure appearance, in the sense of the one for whom we have to pretend, act as if.”Slavoj Žižek · the Big Other as pure appearance
“It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but this prohibition itself was prohibited. People had to act as if it's not prohibited.”Slavoj Žižek · the double prohibition in Stalinism
“This is what makes Stalinism part of Enlightenment project. The idea is even if you are the lowest Trotskyite shit, whatever, you still have access to universal reason.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinism as perverted Enlightenment
“They function even if we all know, and even if we all know that we all know, still—still appearances still function.”Slavoj Žižek · the persistence of the symbolic
“Nobody can really be a total perfect cynic. Every cynic has his hamster.”Slavoj Žižek · the fetish beneath cynicism
“Fetish is not a moment of truth which disturbs the general lie. Fetish is a small lie which enables you to confront the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · the fetishist mode of ideology
“What we need more than ever today is to withdraw and to think.”Slavoj Žižek · Leninist call for theory
“I think it's a matter of survival even for us to remain intellectuals. Without this we are effectively lost.”Slavoj Žižek · the necessity of theory
“I think that charity deep in its heart, charity is a kind of a—you really pay so that they remain there.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as ideological reproduction of inequality
“We need ecology without nature — ecology without nature, to cut a long story short.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology without nature
“What today's left wants is global capitalism with a human face.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of mainstream left
“God's basic answer is not 'no, your suffering has a different meaning,' but 'you are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like that.'”Slavoj Žižek · God vindicates Job's protest against meaning
“The message of Christ is not 'trust me,' but 'I trust you.' And even a deeply conservative theologian like Paul Claudel knew this: 'God is helpless without us, God needs our help.'”Slavoj Žižek · Holy Spirit as collective trust
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First, I'm very glad to be here and thank you very much. I hope you will not be too bored. Ideology is a category which is very problematic today. Most people think that we live in a post-ideological era. What I will try to demonstrate is how more than ever we are deep in ideology. Let me take a simple example: tolerance. Of course, everybody is today for tolerance and against intolerance. And of course, when I criticize tolerance, people then tell me, but are you crazy? Are you for intolerant attacks on homosexuals, on gypsies, and so on? My answer is nonetheless that tolerance is one of the crucial ideological categories today. Let's take racism. It is not self-evident that we perceive racism as a problem of tolerance. Do a simple experiment: go on the internet, download the speeches by Martin Luther King and look for the word tolerance or intolerance. You will not find—the word is practically absent. He doesn't use the word. For him, racism is not a problem of tolerance but a problem of unequal laws, unjust legality, economic exploitation, and so on, not of tolerance. The problem, so the problem is why do we perceive today racism as a problem of tolerance or intolerance? I think the reason is that we live in a so-called post-political society more and more. It is as if economy, social administration are more and more depoliticized. So all conflicts are then translated into conflicts of cultural conflicts, conflicts of different cultures. You know two big theses, theories even, about what is going on today: on the one hand, Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. We can laugh at Fukuyama, but I think that percent of us are—what would be the adverb?—Fukuyamaists. The majority even of radical left today accepts capitalism and parliamentary democracy; they just want more tolerance, more less racism and so on. They just want to organize things in a more tolerant, more equal way. Once when we were young, at least some of us, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face. This phrase was always interesting for me because it presupposed that what can be human about socialism is only the face, not the internal body. I think that what today's left wants is global capitalism with a human face. Then on the opposite end, we have Huntington, his theory of the clash of civilizations. I claim there is no opposition between the two, Fukuyama and Huntington. Clash of civilizations, that is to say cultural conflicts, is what remains of the politics at the end of history. Another indicator of this today's ideology of tolerance is the notion of—I don't know how to translate it—harassment in the sense of sexual harassment. What does harassment really mean? I think it presupposes an extremely narcissistic view of man. The idea is that whenever the other, as the neighbor precisely also in the religious sense, whenever the other comes too close to you, you feel harassed. And you just have to visit a leftist American university to see what this means. For example, if you look, if you're a man, a woman too long into the eye, I was already accused of visual rape. So I claim that in Western countries, developed Western Europe, United States, the ideology of tolerance means its exact opposite. Of course, I say this as a Leninist. You know how Lenin asked: freedom, but freedom for whom to do what? I think we should ask the same question apropos tolerance. Tolerance, but tolerance of what, tolerance against what? De facto, tolerance means: don't come too close to me, stay at a proper distance. So tolerance effectively means: I don't tolerate your proximity. So I think that to put it in even theological terms, the problem of tolerance is the problem of the neighbor. You know, like love your neighbor. And here things get—start to get really interesting. Our spontaneous ideology tells us that we must understand each other. You shouldn't reduce the other just to a figure of enemy. You should understand the other from within. The best formula for this ideology is this one: an enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard. Now this sounds very deep and human. The idea is once you hear how the other experiences the situation, you cannot hate him. I am totally opposed to this motto. Why? First, let's make a simple mental experiment. In this phrase, replace enemy with a concrete name. Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we didn't really hear his story? You can replace Hitler with Brezhnev, with whomever you want. I'm quite sure that if somebody were to ask Gustáv Husák in '69 would have asked him anti-Soviet questions, he would say no, Brezhnev is only your enemy because you didn't hear his story. There is a very difficult lesson to be learned from this. It is that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves in the innermost of our being, the way you make sense of your life, is as a rule a lie. The truth is not in there in the heart of your personality. I'm sure that if you were to look from real proximity at Stalin, Hitler and so on, you would discover that in their family they were very kind and so on. And we should go to the end here. I wonder if it's translated into your language. It's not translated into my language. In the book by Aldous Huxley, "Grey Eminence." It's the biography of Père Joseph, Father Joseph, a priest who was the right hand of Cardinal Richelieu. What intrigued Huxley is that Father Joseph was as a politician extremely brutal, cruel manipulator. One can even say with a comical exaggeration that he is most responsible for Hitler because Father Joseph organized the pact in the Thirty Years' War between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against the Austro-German Empire. And the result of this was that Germany delayed its unification and, as we all know, this created the ground for Hitler ultimately. So what fascinated Huxley was that this extremely brutal manipulator every evening after finishing his dirty job wrote incredibly spiritual top-level mystical meditations at the level of Teresa of Avila and so on. You cannot find them—weakness in them. They are authentic spiritual experience. And this is very difficult to accept: how the same person can order poisoning, torture, manipulate and nonetheless you cannot find this in his meditations. Huxley tried to put the blame on Christianity. So he, as you maybe know, turned towards Eastern spiritual experience. But I think things are the same there in Eastern spirituality. Let's take Eastern spirituality at its cleanest, most radical: Zen Buddhism. I really advise you to read a wonderful book written in English, Brian Victoria the author, "Zen at War." It demonstrates that the large majority of the millions of Japanese Zen Buddhists in 1930s and '40s totally supported Japanese imperialist war expansion. Maybe some of you know or remember Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen. He was well known in hippie times, and so on. It is less known that in 1930s, for example when Japanese army invaded China and did the well-known slaughter in Nanking, Suzuki wrote a text celebrating this attack as an act of love. He went even a step further. He claimed that for the majority of ordinary people who don't have time for years of meditation, a total military discipline is the easiest way to realize the goal of Zen, the overcoming of your self. He, Suzuki, wrote how when you are a soldier and an officer gives you an order—shoot, kill—and you do it automatically, if you really can do it, you attain satori, which is the Zen Buddhist term for enlightenment. So, but again, the horrible thing to admit is that if you read Suzuki, his spiritual description and experience of Zen is totally authentic. So this brings us close to the notion of neighbor. A neighbor is not another human person simply with his inner life. Neighbor is that which is in the other more than the other himself, in the sense of some demonic dimension that you yourself are not aware of. Probably it happened to you. You have a good friend, someone you think you really know. And then in some difficult situation this person does something. You see an obscene smile, an aggressive gesture and you ask yourself: "My God, is this the person that I knew?" And usually even the person itself is not aware of this dimension. Although I am an old-fashioned materialist, I have an incredibly great appreciation of Christian theology. Because I think you find this dimension in the very heart of Christianity. For example, the best Christian theologians got it: that this is the moment on the cross when Jesus Christ says that "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Father, why have you forsaken me?" Maybe some of you know it, there is a wonderful drawing, drawing not full painting, of crucifixion by Michelangelo Buonarroti. It's known as a portrait, "Christ on the Cross" for Vittoria Colonna, a neighbor. Michelangelo tried then to get the portrait back to destroy it. And it is, if you look at it closely, a terrible portrait. It shows Jesus Christ, his face in total despair. But the key is the right hand, it's like "fuck you to God," fuck you. This is the moment when Jesus Christ becomes truly a neighbor. And again, really radical theologians are aware of it. For example my favorite one, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He wrote that at that moment of despair at the cross, Jesus becomes for a moment an atheist. And he claims in a very convincing way that this is what makes Christianity absolutely unique. In other religions, of course they admit people who don't believe in God, who are atheists. Only in Christianity, Chesterton says, God himself becomes an atheist for a moment. And I think that it is crucial to connect here Jesus Christ with the figure of, how to put it in Czech, Job, J-O-B. Read the Book of Job. I think it's the first text of ideology critique, critique of ideology. What happens there? You know the story. Things turn really bad for Job. And what happens then? When things look bad, he loses his family, all the wealth and so on. Then three friends come, three theologians. And each of them tries to convince Job that his suffering, his misfortunes do have a deeper meaning. You know, the first one says God is just so even if you don't know what you did wrong you must have done something wrong because you suffer. So the other two give different versions but all of them give the same message: it's not meaningless, it has a deeper meaning. And why does Job protest? His protest is not that he is innocent. He just insists that his misfortune doesn't have a deeper meaning. And the big surprise, really if you don't believe me listen to me, when at the end of the Book of Job, God enters the scene, He says everything that God—sorry, that Job says is true, everything that the three theologians said is wrong. And in his terrifying speech, God then gives answers to Job by giving even further examples of the meaninglessness of the universe that He created. For example, God says, "But why do you think that the rain falls there on the rocks where there is no earth to fertilize it?" So God's basic answer is not "no, your suffering has a different meaning," but "you are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like that." Literally, read it. And so I think that we should read against this background the death of Christ on the cross. It's not that—what dies on the cross? Not a messenger from God. Which God? Do you know this disgusting theological metaphor? When we see something terrible, evil, it is as if when we look at a picture from too close and it appears to us a stain. But of course when you step back and see the whole picture, you learn how what appeared to you a stain contributes to the harmony of the picture. So the idea is what appears to us finite human mortals as evil is really just an element in a larger beautiful design by God. And I think that precisely this God is dead in Christianity. After the death of Christ, what comes? Holy Spirit. And Holy Spirit is the spirit of the community of believers. It's almost I would say the spirit of a revolutionary party. The message of Christ is not "trust me," but "I trust you." And even a deeply conservative theologian like the French poet Paul Claudel knew this when he says, "God is helpless without us, God needs our help." So let me jump a little bit ahead so that I will somehow—okay, just two more steps I will try to do in the next half an hour. First, we have now this terrifying dimension of the neighbor, the abyss of the other person. How do we, how can we survive the neighbor? Psychoanalysis has a precise answer: fantasy. Fantasy or fantasma is not simply "we cannot get what we want and then we imagine it." It's not that. Fantasy—sorry, the problem is but how do I know what I want? Because we humans do not have like an animal instincts which tell us what do we want. Through fantasy we learn to desire. So when we criticize, some people do, psychoanalysis because of pan-sexualism, this criticism totally misses the point. The point of psychoanalysis is not "whatever you are doing you really mean that," so that I don't know, for example in mathematics when I solve a problem like how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other, of course I think about that. The problem of psychoanalysis is: but what do I think when I am doing that? The idea is that when I'm alone with my lover doing sex, it's not enough, I have to have a fantasy. A couple of years ago they discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Dagebücher," diaries from First World War. And he there reports on, very honestly, what he was thinking about when he was masturbating at the front. It was, he wrote, debating with friends mathematical problems. In Hollywood they went even further. Maybe you saw one of the worst films of all time, Warren Beatty's "Reds," about that John Reed who participated in October Revolution. It's a film "Reds," mmm. There October Revolution itself is the fantasy which enables the creation of the couple, Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. For example when you fall in love with a woman or a man, fantasy is what makes you fall in love with that person. And there is another aspect which is crucial about fantasy. Fantasy is not so much the realization of your own desire but of other's desire. Because according to psychoanalysis, the original enigma of a human being already as a child is: what do others want from me? A small child experiences himself or herself as a—in the middle of desires, caught in other's desires. My father wants something from me, my mother wants something, brothers and so on. They all expect something from me, it's not clear to me what. And fantasy—we construct a fantasy to get an answer. And I think this goes also, if I simplify, at the social level, at the social level. Is it not—is the anti-Semitic fantasy not precisely an answer of a perplexed subject like, what's going on in society, what does society want from me? Yes, I mean is that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is the same fantasy. Imagine an ordinary German in 1920s. An ordinary person was totally confused. He saw moral degradation, economic crisis and so on. He didn't know what is going on. And Hitler provided the answer: the Jew is behind all of this. Another crucial element of fantasy is that fantasy is not opposed to reality. Fantasma is what structures our reality. This is why I still think one should read "Das Kapital" of Marx. When Marx speaks about commodity fetishism, he does not talk about some illusions in our head. He talks about illusions that we practice in our social relations. To make maybe these things—things more clear, I will give you a short report on a very interesting recent debate in American philosophy. It was a debate about what we know and what we don't know. Debate about—it was a debate about what we know and what we don't know. Now comes the joke: the philosopher in question is of course Donald Rumsfeld. In March he shocked everybody by the following meditation at a press conference. Sorry. So this is what Rumsfeld says: there are known knowns, there are things we know that we know. Like, I don't know, I am in—I know that I am in Prague, Praha, and I know that I know. Then Rumsfeld went on, but there are also—sorry, there are known unknowns, there are things that we know we don't know. Now, stop, it's clear what he wanted to say. Like, I don't know, to establish now how many cars are now outside this building. I don't know, but I know that I don't know it. Or a more unpleasant example which concerns us more: do I have a cancer or not, now? You know that you don't know it if you don't—if you didn't have a checkup yet. Okay. Then Rumsfeld went a little bit further and said, but there are also unknown unknowns, there are things we don't know that we don't know. The idea was they are so totally unknown they are simply outside our horizon of knowledge. This is clear what his point was there. Maybe Saddam Hussein has something so secret that we even don't know that we don't know it. But did you—and then he stopped here. And again, this is why Americans are losing Iraq. Why? I'm quite serious. Did you notice—three elements—but if you make a matrix of permutation of—it should be four. We have known knowns, things we know that we know. We have known unknowns, things that we know that we don't know. And we have unknown unknowns, things which are totally unknown. What is missing? The unknown knowns. Things we know, but we don't know that we know them. And this is fantasy. What is truly in United States when they invaded Iraq, they were—their behavior was regulated, dominated by their ideological fantasies: they will receive us there celebrating us and so on and so on. It's precisely the unknown knowns, things that you know but you do not even know that you know them. Where—now let's make a step further—where do we encounter these unknown knowns, things that we know without knowing at its purest? In a very mysterious thing we call habits. Now, what are habits? Ah, this I think is the most interesting phenomenon. Why? First let me emphasize the moment of—how shall I call it?—I will come later to that, two points if you allow me. First, habits, yes. Did you notice how whenever you are caught in a social event, member of some group, whatever, of course we all know interaction in a group from family to state is always regulated by rules? But if you look at it closely, things are always, and I claim for structurally necessary reasons, more complex. We never have simply rules, but we also have meta-rules, rules which tell us how are we to take explicit rules. And I know communism was terrible, but for me what was so fascinating about communist regime was how it manipulated this gap. On the one hand, we have rules which prohibit something, but between the lines the message is "don't take it seriously." Like, I mean, in socialism there were many rules like this, or at least this was my experience in serving with the army, doing the military service. Many things were there prohibited, but you were a total idiot if you followed the prohibition, no? Like, it was daily life in the army. You had to steal, you had to—you had to do it all. And I claim even the majority of sexual prohibitions are like this. "Don't mess with girls" means if you are a man, do it, and so on and so on. Sexuality is all about this, how to solicit something through prohibiting it. But what we find at its purest in communist regimes, but we find it in different forms also elsewhere, is the opposite. It's things that are explicitly given to us—we are allowed to do them on condition that—you know, we are given a choice on condition that we don't use it. And here things get truly—here things get truly mysterious. When you have like—it's given to you the right to criticize and so on, on condition that you don't use this right. The catch is of course that this second prohibition is itself prohibited. I read some transcripts from Politburo Central Committee session in Stalin's era, and it came a couple of times a situation was almost like this and came to a following conclusion. Let's make a wonderful mental experiment. We are Central Committee '37 Moscow. Okay, I am Stalin, and somebody, you, stand up and criticize me. Okay, it's clear: next day people will ask who saw you the last time, and so on. But let's imagine something else. Now I'm more serious. That then, I don't know, somebody else, you would stand up and tell him, "But what are you doing? Don't you know that here we don't criticize Comrade Stalin?" You would disappear even faster. You see the point. It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but this prohibition itself was prohibited. People had to act as if it's not prohibited, as if just Comrade Stalin is so great and so on there is nothing to criticize. So this I think is what I like to call the domain of this social obscenity. It's not that you are not free simply. You have to act as if you are free. The prohibition itself is prohibited. So this is what always fascinated me in a social field: this complex network of implicit rules which tell you how you are to deal with explicit rules, which rules you really should violate or which rules you shouldn't take seriously. And a Russian friend of mine told me, gave me a very simple explanation—I tend to believe it—of what went wrong in the Yeltsin era. In Soviet Union, classical, the pure one, it was clear what the rules are. Officially freedom of the press, but you knew what you were allowed to do. You wanted your children to go to a best school, you knew whom to bribe. You know the rules, you know whom to bribe to get a better hospital and so on. And the problem, key problem is that in Yeltsin years, people lost their orientation. For example, the law was you should of course pay, stop and pay when the policeman stops you and punishes you. But people didn't know now what does this really mean. Can I ignore a policeman? Should I bribe him? How much? and so on. These implicit unwritten rules collapsed. And they claim to me that this is one of the key reasons of this Putin stability. Not that anything great happened, but these unwritten rules stabilized themselves again. Now they know what is really prohibited or what is prohibited so that you should precisely violate it and so on and so on. This I think, at this level we have to look for fantasies, for ideology. Ideology at its purest for me are—and this always fascinated me—are so-called empty gestures. Like precisely things that you are offered, but you are offered them with the understanding that you have to reject them. Let me give you an example. There is a custom in my country, probably it's the same here. Let us say that we are the best friends and we compete for the same job. I lose, you win. In my country, it's a custom that if we are friends, you tell me, "Listen, I know that you really deserved it, so I step down and you will get it." But of course I'm not supposed to say, "Yes, perfect, no?" I'm supposed to politely say, "No, thank you." But nonetheless, you see, the result is zero, but our friendship maybe will survive in this way. Or is not this also the logic with apologies? I had a problem with my theoretical enemy, personally good friend, maybe she is known here, the big—okay, she doesn't want to be called—feminist Judith Butler. Once I used some dirty words with her and so on—okay, I was rude, I admit it. So I felt bad, then I called her and told her, "Listen, I'm really sorry," and so on and so on. And she said, "Slavoj, you know I like you, I know you didn't mean it, it's okay, you don't owe me an apology." But you see the catch. She said, "You don't owe me an apology," but she was able to say this only after I offered the apology. She would be mad and she would be fully justified being mad if I would not apologize. On the other hand, when she said, "You really I don't—you really don't owe me an apology," of course in my evil mind, my first reaction was "okay, then I take it back." This is also—no but you see the paradox. Such a—at the level of literal meaning, what happened was total nonsense. Like, I did something, she said it's not really necessary. But that was the function. It had—precisely in this way it had to be, it had to be done. That's one aspect of the ideology. The other aspect and on this I really more and more focus in my work is these unwritten rules insofar as they form what I call the—the obscene background of an institution, of a community and so on. For example, I don't know if it was shown here, probably it was, it's some years old, a film with Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and so on: "A Few Good Men." Interesting film, not very good, but it's the story about what in the army is called "Code Red." This—you know every military community has a whole network of obscene implicit rules: how do you deal with those who are not one of us, how do you beat them and so on. These rules are crucial, absolutely crucial, but you don't talk about them. They have to remain—exact—and so I think this is the first step always when you analyze an ideology: ask for its obverse set of these dark rules which are not publicly admitted, and there you can really hit it. For example, to give you a comical example—I'm not boasting, I wasn't any great dissident, a little bit—and I remember in the late seventies when things started to open up a little bit in ex-Yugoslavia, I was a member of a committee of some student journal and there were elections. Elections went—okay, they were not as bad in ex-Yugoslavia as in other communist countries. So the communists didn't get percent, they got always around like to make it a little bit more convincing, no? Okay, everybody knew it. So we had a problem: how to do it to make trouble, how shall I put it, no? We even played with this radical suicidal idea, "Why don't we publish an issue claiming these elections are really not free, they are a fake?" But what would have been the meaning of this? The issue would have been simply immediately prohibited and then we discovered people would also simply laugh at us. "Haha, big news, as if we don't know." But we found the solution. We said, if the communists claim that the elections are free—no, let's not attack them, let's treat them as free. No, no, not in the sense of like posing our own candidates and so on, but we just said let's report on them as if they are free. So we did nothing prohibited. We just published on the evening of elections an extraordinary issue of the journal with the big title: "Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power," and so on. "Everybody is waiting for the result." And the—the—the consequences were unbelievable. We were immediately called to the Central Committee and then we said, "But what did we do wrong? I mean it is true, you stayed in power, we made a very correct prediction and..." And it was incredible. Even now I sympathize with him, this mid-level bureaucrat who received us. He wasn't able to formally—he said, "Don't fuck with me, boys. You know what I mean." I said, "But tell us what do you mean? Don't mess with me, you know..." And this is what again, this is what fascinates me. Now let's go to the opposite side. An opposite—like in if you read, for example, the ancient United—okay, ancient, United States in the twenties, I think that Ku Klux Klan functioned like something like that. Imagine a small racist city in the south of the United States, 1920s. You have official community, Christian values, blah-blah-blah, but then you have in the night if you are white, we gather together, we go out, we rape some black women, we... and so on. And everybody, okay, most people participated in this, but it was much more—this is where all memoirs agree—you didn't publicly admit it. But it was much more dangerous for you to publicly denounce this obscene underside than to denounce the official ideology. If you say, "I don't want to go to church, I hate official ideology," they would say, "Okay, you are eccentric, so what." If you say, "Ku Klux Klan is not right," probably you will be next to be—to be lynched. This was the core of identification. And to go into a little bit more problematic water, I am tempted to claim that—you are not so bad I think, my country is pretty bad in this, Poland, Ireland, Austria—pedophilia in Catholic Church. I more and more think that this is their obscene underside. It's not simply "priests are also humans like us so of course there are those who like boys there." There is something in the very logic of institution which generates it. That's their obscene secret. So I think it should be—it should be—it should be treated as such. Okay, next point. All these unwritten rules form what—in psychoanalytic theory—we call the Big Other. The Big Other is not God in the sense of the one who controls all, but much better it's to represent the Big Other as the agency of pure appearance, in the sense of, how shall I put it, the one for whom we have to pretend, act as if. What do I mean by this? Let me go a little bit again into Stalinism. Why? Because, you know, what is so fascinating with Stalinism. I write so much about Stalinism that people already think that I am half Stalinist. But quite on the contrary, I think that the mystery is how neither the right nor the left, I think, does have a truly convincing theory of what was Stalinism. Fascism is much easier to explain. It's a conservative modernization, blah-blah-blah, anti-Enlightenment. But what went wrong in Stalinism? I mean you cannot play this simple game, Stalin an evil guy there. Of course he was, but that's not it. For example, I totally oppose this old thesis of Stalinism as a new class. What kind of new class when in the most dangerous place to be in Soviet Union was top Nomenklatura? You know that there in a year and a half, like percent of the Central Committee, percent of the army headquarters and so on, were liquidated. It was the point of madness. What was driving this madness? So what I want to draw your attention to is how Stalinism is usually dismissed as brutal regime, you know: "No problem, we have to build that channel, canal in Volga or what, okay, one million people die, so what." It was extremely brutal. But the mystery of Stalinism is how at the same level it much more depends on appearances. The obsession of Stalinism is to maintain appearances at every level. Let me give you a fascinating example which I read recently. In '53, you know after Stalin's death, Beria was soon arrested. But at that very point, so I read in a Soviet history book, I mean book about Soviet... ah... the first volume of the new edition of Great Soviet Encyclopedia appeared. And of course, it covered the letters A-B, so Beria. So of course there was two pages, one leaf, Beria. Now the problem was that as you know in July, I don't know when, Beria was arrested, proclaimed a non-person, no? So that's a problem for Soviet thinking, like how to do it. Ah, they did found an ingenious solution. Every subscriber to the encyclopedia, and it was printed in two, three million copies, got a letter from the publisher which contained one freshly printed page. And each subscriber was ordered to cut out the page with Beria and to put in a new page which reconstructed perfectly the continuity. Like it was the previous entry and then—this is the genius—instead of Beria, they put Bering Strait, you know, between United States, I mean Alaska and—and Asia. And so that with some photos, when you did this, the continuity was perfect. Now what is so mysterious here? It is: whom they were trying to deceive? Just ask this simple question: for whom were they doing this? People knew it, they had to do it. This is the—this is the—this is so mysterious about Stalinism: how with all its brutality it was terribly afraid, fanatically afraid of, how shall I put it, of disturbing—disturbing the appearances. And now so that we will not just put all the blame on beloved Comrade Stalin, and you can go to this logic to the end, I think there is here a big difference between Stalinism and Nazism. I think I develop this a little bit in my book on Totalitarianism. I'm not praising Stalinism, in a way it was even more horrible. But look, I think the proper way to do it is to start at the surface. If you look at old documentary films, you immediately notice a mysterious feature. When a fascist leader like Hitler gives a speech, at the end the people applaud, the leader just like accepts the applause. Look at the Stalinist speeches: no, the leader stands up and applauds himself. This—this signals a totally different subjective position. It's not "a leader," it's "I'm with you, servant of the people," and so on, "we are all part of the same enlightened reason." Which also accounts for two other features: Stalinist trials. Like you cannot imagine a similar trial in Nazi Germany. There was no trial in Nazi Germany where one would put together top figures, Jewish figures, and accuse them of Jewish plot. It's not part of their universe. You have Stalinist show trials. What is a crucial feature about them is that even if you are the lowest shit, traitor, Bukharin, Trotsky, whatever, you still participate in universal reason. That is to say, this is why it's so terrifying to read the transcripts of, for example, I read recently your guy Slánský trial. What's so horrible is that it starts somehow like: "How did you become the enemy of the people?" And Slánský, of course I know it was all trained, staged, but the point is precisely why did they need such stages? As if kind of objective observer, he starts with: "Already as a young—young boy, my parents because of their bourgeois upbringing educated me to hate the working class and blah-blah-blah." The horror is that he is scum, shit, but at the same time he has the access to universal reason to pronounce it. Which is why another fascinating thing, I read in a book, maybe it's translated, Anne Applebaum, "Gulag." How, you know that in the worst years of Gulag, she claims, they collected on Stalin's birthday all the prisoners who had to sign a telegram to Stalin wishing him all the best and blah-blah-blah. Now just think about it. This is meaningless in fascism. What, should they collect the Jews in Auschwitz to sign all the best for Hitler? The tragedy is that this feature makes Stalinism part of Enlightenment project. The idea is even if you are the lowest Trotskyite shit, whatever, you still have access to universal reason, reason, you can see the obvious truth. And again, this appearance had to be maintained. Okay, here we have the crazy, radical figure of this. But things are much more complex. Let me give you two other examples. One, do you know Hitchcock's masterpiece, My God, you should, "Vertigo"? Okay. You know there is a scene in the middle of the film when the girl, Madeleine, tries to kill herself—okay, it's a fake, we don't know it yet. Then the hero, James Stewart, saves her, drives her home, puts her into his bed and of course undresses her so that her clothes will dry up. And then we have a long so-called panning shot, camera moving, you see above a kitchen sink all her underwear drying up and then the camera moves to the door of the bedroom and so on. Now do something very simple. Put the image on freeze at that very moment when you see underwear, and look what you see. It's not underwear, it's just abstract pieces of cloth. You know what was the reason? Then I inquired into it, I learned in a book. The Hays Code of Hollywood censorship, which was still alive, said no, insisted that it shouldn't be really underwear because if it were to be underwear, then this would be a proof that James Stewart saw her naked. This cannot be admitted because they are not married. Now what's so mystical here? The mystical thing is that we ordinary viewers, we think that we see underwear. So again, who was the—whom was the censorship protecting? Obviously not us. It was again that innocent gaze of the Big Other. So again, we have a quite—we have a quite similar logic there. And I think that this idea that the Big Other shouldn't know is what is as it were the zero level of ideology. Probably you know the—this standard joke, it's repeated all the time, we all know it, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, about a madman who thinks he's a piece of grain, corn or whatever, and it's cured, but then comes running back. And the psychiatrist asks him, "But what's the problem?" The guy says, "I met a chicken and I was afraid the chicken will eat me." And the psychiatrist said, "But you know that you are not a piece of seed of corn but a human being." And, you know, okay, the guy says, "I know it, but does the chicken know it?" Now I think this is quite a realistic joke. This is how it works. A whole country can fall apart from this. I think this was maybe the key reason that Yugoslavia fell apart. The chicken was Tito, the president. In what sense? It's now clear from some memoirs that the inner circle of Nomenklatura knew it from the—early mid-seventies that economic situation is catastrophic. They knew that harsh measures will have to be taken. But they, at the same time, Tito was old, dying, they wanted Tito to die happy. The chicken shouldn't have known it. So literally, they—they accumulated a debt in a couple of years, billion dollars, just to keep Tito happy. Yugoslavia still appeared prosperous and so on and so on. Or to give a more dignified, not such a cynical, example, think—think about something much more pathetic. How, for example, when parents fight, they have a small child. They fight there on the edge of divorce, but the usual game is "let's hide it from the child, let's pretend in the eyes of the child that everything is okay." Things are here much more mysterious I claim, because usually of course the child knows, but he pretends not to notice, you know. This is I think the true mystery of the symbolic system: how appearances matter. They function even if we all know, and even if we all know that we all know, still—still appearances still function. So—uh—okay, let me now, do I have another just ten short minutes maybe if you allow me, if people will not die. Because I want—okay, very quickly, what I wanted to develop is now what can we do. What am I preaching here? Should we respect appearances or should we on the other hand go for this direct obscenity or whatever? I think it depends, both work. On the one hand, appearances sometimes can be of help. Appearances in the sense of simple politeness what you obey. For example, I was always fascinated by a beautiful story from apartheid South Africa, I read it somewhere, of how at big demonstrations police was disturbing the black crowd. Among the blacks was a nice lady, nicely dressed, who was of course running away. A white policeman was with a—how do you call it?—with a stick, yeah, yeah, was running after her. What then something very comical happened. The lady lost one of her shoes. And the policeman, although a racist and so on, at that moment he automatically reacted with this automatic politeness. "You see a lady losing her shoe." He picked the shoe, "Here lady." And then something miraculous happened. The lady looked at him, they looked at each other and what should she do now? Put the—put the—put the shoe on and then we... no. He was totally embarrassed, he just turned around, "Thank you, lady," and walked away. You see this, the lesson is not deep in his heart he was not a racist, probably he was, but appearances, politeness, did—did its role. On the opposite hand, I think that, and this is my problem with political correctness and so on, I think on the other hand that—how shall I put it?—to have a true contact with another as a neighbor, you cannot do it without obscenity. Obscenity is a mode—how do you signal to someone that it's not just this polite respect and so on, that you are truly a friend? It has to be a moment of obscenity. And here, if I may repeat a long story which is my favorite, it really happened to me: how did I become truly a friend? When I was serving in '75, '76, Yugoslav army, I became a friend with an Albanian soldier. They are very patriarchal, you shouldn't touch their father, mother and so on. So we were just friends. But one morning when he, the soldier, met me, instead of the usual "Good morning," he told me, "I fuck your mother." Now I knew this was an offer to real friendship, no? He then looked at me questioningly, he wanted an appropriate answer, and you can believe me I don't have problems with this. I immediately stepped back, "Go ahead after I finish with your sister." No, this is the... And you know what was so interesting? Now comes the miracle. After this was the signal, now we are true friends. But this did not mean that in this boring obscene way we were then all the time telling dirty jokes to each other. No, the only thing that changed is that every morning when we met, instead of "Good morning," we even didn't pronounce the whole phrase, not even as a joke. Just he told me "mother," I said "sister." Just not even with a smile. This meant we are still friends. This was kind of a—a stand-in, a guarantee. Now, of course I'm well aware what here is wrong in this example. Two things are wrong. First, it's a very patriarchal one. It's basically a joke about men exchanging women, no? So the least I can say for the feminists again among you is that I would like to be in a society where two women meet and one say, "Fuck your husband," "Go ahead after I finish with your brother," whatever. It would be nice to imagine the other. The second thing is that we were equal. If, for example, if I were to be an officer, no, it wouldn't be good for the other guy to approach me and tell me, "Fuck your mother" or what, no? So this—okay, I don't have time because what I could develop here is how I think that this is why I find the figure of post-modern master, which they no longer want to be called masters, it's "coordinator," no, "I just coordinate" and so on. The catch is that they are still masters, those who are the bosses, but they like to pretend that they are really one of us. So if you go to these ultra-modern American companies, the boss, you know, dresses ordinary, comes to you, tells you a dirty joke, "Let's take a drink" and so on. But still remains the boss. This I think if anything makes things worse. So okay, really now to conclude just with a concluding comment. So do we really live in post-ideological era? People think we do, and the main reason is that officially at least today nobody takes ideology seriously. Who cares about it? It's abstract, it's—I mean—I mean today the official ideology, let's be clear at least in the West, is what? It's some kind of a generalized hedonism, no? It's not "sacrifice yourself, do it for..." "Have a good life, realize your true self," and so on. That's why I think Dalai Lama is so popular in the West. He perfectly works as the secret message of his spiritual enlightenment is "a little bit of enlightenment will make you even a better businessman, more successful lover," and so on and so on. So that's clear. But so the idea is that the situation is cynical today. There are good reasons for it. My formative experience in ideology was—one of the formative experiences—'91, '92 I remember, in Germany, after reunification, in East Germany, there were some skinheads who were beating some Vietnam or Turkish people and then they were interviewed. And it shocked me what I heard there. They started with the usual reason, no: either ideological ones like, "Oh know they are foreigners in our culture, primitive," or more brutal ones like, "They are stealing our jobs," or even more brutal ones, "They get on my nerves, it makes me feel good to beat them." But interestingly enough, at the end they all started to talk almost like that split in Stalinist victims. One of them said, looking into the camera—asked why did he beat the Turkish workers or Vietnamese—"You know, when I was young I lacked the proper mother, maternal love, I lacked paternal authority," and so on. They all of a sudden started to talk like social theorists. This should be cynicism at its purest. Like, it's no longer as Marx thought, "They don't know that they are doing it, but they are doing it." They know what they are doing it and they are doing it. So the idea is, in this case, criticism of ideology is no longer operative. People know, you don't prevent things happening through enlightenment. What do I mean by this? You know that old Goebbels story, which is not even true about Goebbels, that he said, "Whenever I hear the word culture, I pick up my gun." You have two further variations of it. There is the variation from a Godard film where a cinema producer says, "Whenever I hear the word culture, I pick my checkbook," and so on, you see. And then you have the pathetic leftist version, "Whenever I hear guns, I reach for culture." The idea being interpretation can change things. Is this really over? I don't think so. Why? Because I claim that today the predominant—with this if I may conclude, now I'm really at the end—today ideology is—no—no longer functions what I'm tempted to call as the symptomatic mode. It's no longer that you live a lie and then here and there through symptoms the repressed returns. If this type of ideology is a general lie where details betray it, I claim today's functioning of ideology is more and more a fetishist one. Fetish is not a moment of truth which disturbs the general lie. Fetish is a small lie which enables you to—to confront the truth. Because what is effectively a fetish? Let me give you a simple—not simple, it's tragic example which really happened to a friend of mine. His wife died of breast cancer. It was absolutely traumatic for him and we his friends were all terribly shocked. Like he was able to talk normally about it. We didn't have to pretend, "No, let's not talk about it." He talked about the wife's last moments very coldly. And then we discovered what's going on. Whenever he was talking about his dead wife, he was playing with a small—how do you call it?—hamster. That was his fetish, a kind of a stand-in for the wife. Through this fetish, he was able to accept rationally that the wife is dead, but to put it in traditional terms, block totally the emotional or existential weight of it. He just in a cold impersonal way admitted it but blocking all the symbolic impact of the fact. The proof of it is that when half a year later the hamster died, he immediately tried to kill himself and was hospitalized and so on and so on. And what I claim is that this is how ideology today functions more and more. Ideology is that small hamster that we all have. It can be, I don't know, Oriental spirituality or whatever. You know, this is why I think that nobody can really be a total perfect cynic. Every cynic has his hamster, how shall I put it, no? This private point where he pretends to be—pretends to be—pretends to be authentic or whatever you want. There is a short story by my favorite detective writer Patricia Highsmith, which is wonderful. It's called "Button." About a guy who lives with a child who is total mongoloid, his life is ruined. Then one night he goes out, desperate, on the streets of New York, finds a helpless homeless man, beats him to death, tears off his button, returns home, and from that time on he was able to endure his life, take care of his son, because the button was the fetish, like "once I did strike back." And the button was there as a kind of a fetish. And that's the—that's the—that's the problem. So the message is, I would say, rather optimistic here. Let's not be too desperate. I mean theory can do its job. And if I may just with a final joke provoke you, in this sense I'm a Leninist. Which Leninist? Uh—you know—uh—we have a—a nice obscene joke from my youth, maybe some of you if you are old enough also know it. We have all in our classes when I was young, very young, still communist regime, the—this famous Lenin's advice to children what to do, no: learn, learn and learn. Okay, the joke goes, maybe you know it, I'm sorry. They asked Marx, Engels and Lenin, "What would you prefer to have, a wife or a mistress?" Marx, as a conservative, says a wife. Engels, more hedonist, said a mistress. Lenin said, "I want both." Everybody was shocked, "My God, Lenin is supposed to be ascetic, what does this mean? He is a secret hedonist." They asked him, "But why?" Lenin said, "So that when you are with your—well so that you can say to your wife that you are with a mistress and you can say to the mistress that you are with your wife." Then they asked him, "Okay, but what do you do?" And then Lenin said, "You guessed it, you learn, learn and learn." And this exactly is what we should do today, I claim. From all sides around, they try to blackmail us through charity, you know. What's the standard ideology today? I hate this. In America it's very popular: this rhetoric of emergency state. Like, for example, my God so often I heard this in the United States, someone giving a talk where there is a sentence like, "For every word that I read to you here, ten children died in Africa." Or if you are a feminist, "For every sentence that I read here, one woman was raped on our street," and so on. I think this is a deeply reactionary attitude. The message is "do something, don't think." The message is this false post-ideological one. Don't even try to understand, just do, let's do something. No, I think that what we need more than ever today is to withdraw and to think. We should really, like Lenin in the joke, reject—uh—wife and mistress. That is to say, if wife stands for official career, if mistress stands for false transgression, which is very fashionable today. Like this was my problem, for example, in England—this is the example of the mistress logic—when there were a couple of years ago big demonstrations against—against Iraq war. Millions on the street, the greatest demonstrations, so everybody was satisfied. And that was problematic for me. The leftists were satisfied, "You see, we brought millions to the street, we showed those in power." What is it? The mystery is that those in the government, Blair and so on, were no less satisfied. Because on the one hand they could say, "You see what a democratic country we are." On the other hand, they knew that they can simply ignore them, they didn't care for it. The best answer was given here by Bush. When he visited London at that point and a journalist asked him, "What do you think about big demonstrations against you?" he said, "I—I'm so glad about those demonstrations because," he said, "you see, that's why we are going to Iraq, so that something like this can happen also in Iraq." So everybody was satisfied. I think that a lot of leftism today is this kind of empty protest, how shall I put it. You protest not only although you are secretly aware that it will have no real effect, but you even know it and that's why you protest. You protest it, you know like this: "Okay, I did it, I keep my conscience clear, so now I can go on with my life like normal." It's almost that a protest can also function as a kind of a superstitious act: you really protest so that nothing will really change. And I claim this is also generally the problem with this charity and so on. I think that the—the meanest, lowest ideology is this ideology of charity, especially if it's personalized, you know, like some of my friends are doing it, it's horrible. Like you have a—you know, you have an African poor black guy, you send him dollars a day—sorry, a month—to get once a year a picture with a letter "oh" from him, and it makes you feel so good. But what makes you feel so good? I claim that he is there and you are here, how shall I put it? It stays like today. I think that charity deep in its heart, charity is a kind of a—you really pay so that they remain there, how shall I put it, so that... I mean it's—so—don't trust this rhetoric: "While we live here, people are out there starving," and so on. Bill Gates talks like—talks like this today. I mean we intellectuals at least should absolutely reject—if I may say, put it in brutal Leninist terms—this is the petit bourgeois sentimentality to fall into the trap of this blackmail. "How do you dare just study your abstract theory when people are starving there?" No, our theory is needed more than ever today. I claim we are today living in a unique era where even everyday problems we cannot solve them without reflection. For example, look at biogenetic problems: how far should we go in manipulating our genes? Are we aware that here we are confronting a situation where we have to make an ethical decision, but the traditional ethics cannot help us? Which is why no wonder that incredible alliances are made, like Habermas the great Enlightenment figure with Ratzinger, Benedict what-however-you-call-him, the Pope. And they both have the same advice, which is for me a catastrophe: "Don't do it, don't mess too much with it." This doesn't solve the problem. This is basically—it means let's not play with it, let's ignore it, let's keep a distance. It doesn't work. So what I'm trying to tell you is that in such an era of humanity like ours today, when because of ecological crisis... Ecological crisis is the same problem. I deeply distrust the new age attitude, which is technology, science objectivizes nature, it's responsible, which is why we should—we should return to our immediate life world experience. Originally we are part of a situation breathing with nature and so on. I don't think that's a solution, I think that's the problem. We need more alienation. Why? Let's imagine a very ordinary scene. You listen to a talk against—about ecology. The mystery is again fetishism, the split. We know we are in deep shit, it may be the end. But strangely, nobody is really ready to do anything. Why not? I claim, you know this famous fetishist logic in French: "Je sais bien mais quand même," I know very well, but I don't believe it. I claim that's our basic attitude towards ecology. We know, but somehow after hearing a talk about ecology you go out, you see the sky, the sun, you cannot really accept that all this will collapse. Why? Precisely because what those Lebenswelt phenomenologists praised so much as our embeddedness in a Lebenswelt, life world. I think that if anything we need more alienation in the sense of the lesson of ecology for me is ecological crisis is not that we should drop this reference to nature; we need ecology without nature, to cut a long story short. If by nature we understand nature as this Mother Earth or some kind of a harmonious, balanced system which then we humans with our hubris we disturbed it and now we have to reestablish the balance. The—the—the horror, horrible thing much more difficult to accept is that there is no nature in this sense. If you want a proof, think about oil. Do you—can we even imagine what a totally unthinkable ecological catastrophe must have happened sometime in the past of the earth to produce oil? I mean it must be unthinkable. And this is nature. If you read good Darwinists today, you can learn a lot of them, like Stephen Jay Gould and so on. Their lesson is no, nature is not a struggle where the best survives. Nature is crazy, nature is not harmonious balance, nature is totally chaotic. Somebody is a loser, then there is an earthquake, the rules change, the loser is the winner, everything is improvisation. So you see the—this is the true difficulty: to think about ecological crisis, which would be maybe even a better example than tolerance of how ideology works. Ideology is not dreaming; ideology is about very real problems, tolerance, exploitation or ecological catastrophe. What is problematic is how the very way the problem is perceived is part of the problem. It mystifies it, and for all this we need theory more than ever. We shouldn't feel not in the minimum guilty about being intellectuals. I think it's a matter of survival even for us to remain intellectuals. Without this we are effectively—we are effectively lost. So let's not lose our nerves, let's go on and we will see what will happen. Thank you very much.
First, I'm very glad to be here and thank you very much. I hope you will not be too bored. Ideology is a category which is very problematic today. Most people think that we live in a post-ideological era. What I will try to demonstrate is how more than ever we are deep in ideology. Let me take a simple example: tolerance. Of course, everybody is today for tolerance and against intolerance. And of course, when I criticize tolerance, people then tell me, but are you crazy? Are you for intolerant attacks on homosexuals, on gypsies, and so on? My answer is nonetheless that tolerance is one of the crucial ideological categories today. Let's take racism. It is not self-evident that we perceive racism as a problem of tolerance. Do a simple experiment: go on the internet, download the speeches by Martin Luther King and look for the word tolerance or intolerance. You will not find—the word is practically absent. He doesn't use the word. For him, racism is not a problem of tolerance but a problem of unequal laws, unjust legality, economic exploitation, and so on, not of tolerance. The problem, so the problem is why do we perceive today racism as a problem of tolerance or intolerance? I think the reason is that we live in a so-called post-political society more and more. It is as if economy, social administration are more and more depoliticized. So all conflicts are then translated into conflicts of cultural conflicts, conflicts of different cultures. You know two big theses, theories even, about what is going on today: on the one hand, Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. We can laugh at Fukuyama, but I think that percent of us are—what would be the adverb?—Fukuyamaists. The majority even of radical left today accepts capitalism and parliamentary democracy; they just want more tolerance, more less racism and so on. They just want to organize things in a more tolerant, more equal way. Once when we were young, at least some of us, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face. This phrase was always interesting for me because it presupposed that what can be human about socialism is only the face, not the internal body. I think that what today's left wants is global capitalism with a human face. Then on the opposite end, we have Huntington, his theory of the clash of civilizations. I claim there is no opposition between the two, Fukuyama and Huntington. Clash of civilizations, that is to say cultural conflicts, is what remains of the politics at the end of history. Another indicator of this today's ideology of tolerance is the notion of—I don't know how to translate it—harassment in the sense of sexual harassment. What does harassment really mean? I think it presupposes an extremely narcissistic view of man. The idea is that whenever the other, as the neighbor precisely also in the religious sense, whenever the other comes too close to you, you feel harassed. And you just have to visit a leftist American university to see what this means. For example, if you look, if you're a man, a woman too long into the eye, I was already accused of visual rape. So I claim that in Western countries, developed Western Europe, United States, the ideology of tolerance means its exact opposite. Of course, I say this as a Leninist. You know how Lenin asked: freedom, but freedom for whom to do what? I think we should ask the same question apropos tolerance. Tolerance, but tolerance of what, tolerance against what? De facto, tolerance means: don't come too close to me, stay at a proper distance. So tolerance effectively means: I don't tolerate your proximity. So I think that to put it in even theological terms, the problem of tolerance is the problem of the neighbor. You know, like love your neighbor. And here things get—start to get really interesting. Our spontaneous ideology tells us that we must understand each other. You shouldn't reduce the other just to a figure of enemy. You should understand the other from within. The best formula for this ideology is this one: an enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard. Now this sounds very deep and human. The idea is once you hear how the other experiences the situation, you cannot hate him. I am totally opposed to this motto. Why? First, let's make a simple mental experiment. In this phrase, replace enemy with a concrete name. Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we didn't really hear his story? You can replace Hitler with Brezhnev, with whomever you want. I'm quite sure that if somebody were to ask Gustáv Husák in '69 would have asked him anti-Soviet questions, he would say no, Brezhnev is only your enemy because you didn't hear his story. There is a very difficult lesson to be learned from this. It is that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves in the innermost of our being, the way you make sense of your life, is as a rule a lie. The truth is not in there in the heart of your personality. I'm sure that if you were to look from real proximity at Stalin, Hitler and so on, you would discover that in their family they were very kind and so on. And we should go to the end here. I wonder if it's translated into your language. It's not translated into my language. In the book by Aldous Huxley, "Grey Eminence." It's the biography of Père Joseph, Father Joseph, a priest who was the right hand of Cardinal Richelieu. What intrigued Huxley is that Father Joseph was as a politician extremely brutal, cruel manipulator. One can even say with a comical exaggeration that he is most responsible for Hitler because Father Joseph organized the pact in the Thirty Years' War between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against the Austro-German Empire. And the result of this was that Germany delayed its unification and, as we all know, this created the ground for Hitler ultimately. So what fascinated Huxley was that this extremely brutal manipulator every evening after finishing his dirty job wrote incredibly spiritual top-level mystical meditations at the level of Teresa of Avila and so on. You cannot find them—weakness in them. They are authentic spiritual experience. And this is very difficult to accept: how the same person can order poisoning, torture, manipulate and nonetheless you cannot find this in his meditations. Huxley tried to put the blame on Christianity. So he, as you maybe know, turned towards Eastern spiritual experience. But I think things are the same there in Eastern spirituality. Let's take Eastern spirituality at its cleanest, most radical: Zen Buddhism. I really advise you to read a wonderful book written in English, Brian Victoria the author, "Zen at War." It demonstrates that the large majority of the millions of Japanese Zen Buddhists in 1930s and '40s totally supported Japanese imperialist war expansion. Maybe some of you know or remember Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen. He was well known in hippie times, and so on. It is less known that in 1930s, for example when Japanese army invaded China and did the well-known slaughter in Nanking, Suzuki wrote a text celebrating this attack as an act of love. He went even a step further. He claimed that for the majority of ordinary people who don't have time for years of meditation, a total military discipline is the easiest way to realize the goal of Zen, the overcoming of your self. He, Suzuki, wrote how when you are a soldier and an officer gives you an order—shoot, kill—and you do it automatically, if you really can do it, you attain satori, which is the Zen Buddhist term for enlightenment. So, but again, the horrible thing to admit is that if you read Suzuki, his spiritual description and experience of Zen is totally authentic. So this brings us close to the notion of neighbor. A neighbor is not another human person simply with his inner life. Neighbor is that which is in the other more than the other himself, in the sense of some demonic dimension that you yourself are not aware of. Probably it happened to you. You have a good friend, someone you think you really know. And then in some difficult situation this person does something. You see an obscene smile, an aggressive gesture and you ask yourself: "My God, is this the person that I knew?" And usually even the person itself is not aware of this dimension. Although I am an old-fashioned materialist, I have an incredibly great appreciation of Christian theology. Because I think you find this dimension in the very heart of Christianity. For example, the best Christian theologians got it: that this is the moment on the cross when Jesus Christ says that "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Father, why have you forsaken me?" Maybe some of you know it, there is a wonderful drawing, drawing not full painting, of crucifixion by Michelangelo Buonarroti. It's known as a portrait, "Christ on the Cross" for Vittoria Colonna, a neighbor. Michelangelo tried then to get the portrait back to destroy it. And it is, if you look at it closely, a terrible portrait. It shows Jesus Christ, his face in total despair. But the key is the right hand, it's like "fuck you to God," fuck you. This is the moment when Jesus Christ becomes truly a neighbor. And again, really radical theologians are aware of it. For example my favorite one, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He wrote that at that moment of despair at the cross, Jesus becomes for a moment an atheist. And he claims in a very convincing way that this is what makes Christianity absolutely unique. In other religions, of course they admit people who don't believe in God, who are atheists. Only in Christianity, Chesterton says, God himself becomes an atheist for a moment. And I think that it is crucial to connect here Jesus Christ with the figure of, how to put it in Czech, Job, J-O-B. Read the Book of Job. I think it's the first text of ideology critique, critique of ideology. What happens there? You know the story. Things turn really bad for Job. And what happens then? When things look bad, he loses his family, all the wealth and so on. Then three friends come, three theologians. And each of them tries to convince Job that his suffering, his misfortunes do have a deeper meaning. You know, the first one says God is just so even if you don't know what you did wrong you must have done something wrong because you suffer. So the other two give different versions but all of them give the same message: it's not meaningless, it has a deeper meaning. And why does Job protest? His protest is not that he is innocent. He just insists that his misfortune doesn't have a deeper meaning. And the big surprise, really if you don't believe me listen to me, when at the end of the Book of Job, God enters the scene, He says everything that God—sorry, that Job says is true, everything that the three theologians said is wrong. And in his terrifying speech, God then gives answers to Job by giving even further examples of the meaninglessness of the universe that He created. For example, God says, "But why do you think that the rain falls there on the rocks where there is no earth to fertilize it?" So God's basic answer is not "no, your suffering has a different meaning," but "you are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like that." Literally, read it. And so I think that we should read against this background the death of Christ on the cross. It's not that—what dies on the cross? Not a messenger from God. Which God? Do you know this disgusting theological metaphor? When we see something terrible, evil, it is as if when we look at a picture from too close and it appears to us a stain. But of course when you step back and see the whole picture, you learn how what appeared to you a stain contributes to the harmony of the picture. So the idea is what appears to us finite human mortals as evil is really just an element in a larger beautiful design by God. And I think that precisely this God is dead in Christianity. After the death of Christ, what comes? Holy Spirit. And Holy Spirit is the spirit of the community of believers. It's almost I would say the spirit of a revolutionary party. The message of Christ is not "trust me," but "I trust you." And even a deeply conservative theologian like the French poet Paul Claudel knew this when he says, "God is helpless without us, God needs our help." So let me jump a little bit ahead so that I will somehow—okay, just two more steps I will try to do in the next half an hour. First, we have now this terrifying dimension of the neighbor, the abyss of the other person. How do we, how can we survive the neighbor? Psychoanalysis has a precise answer: fantasy. Fantasy or fantasma is not simply "we cannot get what we want and then we imagine it." It's not that. Fantasy—sorry, the problem is but how do I know what I want? Because we humans do not have like an animal instincts which tell us what do we want. Through fantasy we learn to desire. So when we criticize, some people do, psychoanalysis because of pan-sexualism, this criticism totally misses the point. The point of psychoanalysis is not "whatever you are doing you really mean that," so that I don't know, for example in mathematics when I solve a problem like how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other, of course I think about that. The problem of psychoanalysis is: but what do I think when I am doing that? The idea is that when I'm alone with my lover doing sex, it's not enough, I have to have a fantasy. A couple of years ago they discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Dagebücher," diaries from First World War. And he there reports on, very honestly, what he was thinking about when he was masturbating at the front. It was, he wrote, debating with friends mathematical problems. In Hollywood they went even further. Maybe you saw one of the worst films of all time, Warren Beatty's "Reds," about that John Reed who participated in October Revolution. It's a film "Reds," mmm. There October Revolution itself is the fantasy which enables the creation of the couple, Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. For example when you fall in love with a woman or a man, fantasy is what makes you fall in love with that person. And there is another aspect which is crucial about fantasy. Fantasy is not so much the realization of your own desire but of other's desire. Because according to psychoanalysis, the original enigma of a human being already as a child is: what do others want from me? A small child experiences himself or herself as a—in the middle of desires, caught in other's desires. My father wants something from me, my mother wants something, brothers and so on. They all expect something from me, it's not clear to me what. And fantasy—we construct a fantasy to get an answer. And I think this goes also, if I simplify, at the social level, at the social level. Is it not—is the anti-Semitic fantasy not precisely an answer of a perplexed subject like, what's going on in society, what does society want from me? Yes, I mean is that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is the same fantasy. Imagine an ordinary German in 1920s. An ordinary person was totally confused. He saw moral degradation, economic crisis and so on. He didn't know what is going on. And Hitler provided the answer: the Jew is behind all of this. Another crucial element of fantasy is that fantasy is not opposed to reality. Fantasma is what structures our reality. This is why I still think one should read "Das Kapital" of Marx. When Marx speaks about commodity fetishism, he does not talk about some illusions in our head. He talks about illusions that we practice in our social relations. To make maybe these things—things more clear, I will give you a short report on a very interesting recent debate in American philosophy. It was a debate about what we know and what we don't know. Debate about—it was a debate about what we know and what we don't know. Now comes the joke: the philosopher in question is of course Donald Rumsfeld. In March he shocked everybody by the following meditation at a press conference. Sorry. So this is what Rumsfeld says: there are known knowns, there are things we know that we know. Like, I don't know, I am in—I know that I am in Prague, Praha, and I know that I know. Then Rumsfeld went on, but there are also—sorry, there are known unknowns, there are things that we know we don't know. Now, stop, it's clear what he wanted to say. Like, I don't know, to establish now how many cars are now outside this building. I don't know, but I know that I don't know it. Or a more unpleasant example which concerns us more: do I have a cancer or not, now? You know that you don't know it if you don't—if you didn't have a checkup yet. Okay. Then Rumsfeld went a little bit further and said, but there are also unknown unknowns, there are things we don't know that we don't know. The idea was they are so totally unknown they are simply outside our horizon of knowledge. This is clear what his point was there. Maybe Saddam Hussein has something so secret that we even don't know that we don't know it. But did you—and then he stopped here. And again, this is why Americans are losing Iraq. Why? I'm quite serious. Did you notice—three elements—but if you make a matrix of permutation of—it should be four. We have known knowns, things we know that we know. We have known unknowns, things that we know that we don't know. And we have unknown unknowns, things which are totally unknown. What is missing? The unknown knowns. Things we know, but we don't know that we know them. And this is fantasy. What is truly in United States when they invaded Iraq, they were—their behavior was regulated, dominated by their ideological fantasies: they will receive us there celebrating us and so on and so on. It's precisely the unknown knowns, things that you know but you do not even know that you know them. Where—now let's make a step further—where do we encounter these unknown knowns, things that we know without knowing at its purest? In a very mysterious thing we call habits. Now, what are habits? Ah, this I think is the most interesting phenomenon. Why? First let me emphasize the moment of—how shall I call it?—I will come later to that, two points if you allow me. First, habits, yes. Did you notice how whenever you are caught in a social event, member of some group, whatever, of course we all know interaction in a group from family to state is always regulated by rules? But if you look at it closely, things are always, and I claim for structurally necessary reasons, more complex. We never have simply rules, but we also have meta-rules, rules which tell us how are we to take explicit rules. And I know communism was terrible, but for me what was so fascinating about communist regime was how it manipulated this gap. On the one hand, we have rules which prohibit something, but between the lines the message is "don't take it seriously." Like, I mean, in socialism there were many rules like this, or at least this was my experience in serving with the army, doing the military service. Many things were there prohibited, but you were a total idiot if you followed the prohibition, no? Like, it was daily life in the army. You had to steal, you had to—you had to do it all. And I claim even the majority of sexual prohibitions are like this. "Don't mess with girls" means if you are a man, do it, and so on and so on. Sexuality is all about this, how to solicit something through prohibiting it. But what we find at its purest in communist regimes, but we find it in different forms also elsewhere, is the opposite. It's things that are explicitly given to us—we are allowed to do them on condition that—you know, we are given a choice on condition that we don't use it. And here things get truly—here things get truly mysterious. When you have like—it's given to you the right to criticize and so on, on condition that you don't use this right. The catch is of course that this second prohibition is itself prohibited. I read some transcripts from Politburo Central Committee session in Stalin's era, and it came a couple of times a situation was almost like this and came to a following conclusion. Let's make a wonderful mental experiment. We are Central Committee '37 Moscow. Okay, I am Stalin, and somebody, you, stand up and criticize me. Okay, it's clear: next day people will ask who saw you the last time, and so on. But let's imagine something else. Now I'm more serious. That then, I don't know, somebody else, you would stand up and tell him, "But what are you doing? Don't you know that here we don't criticize Comrade Stalin?" You would disappear even faster. You see the point. It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but this prohibition itself was prohibited. People had to act as if it's not prohibited, as if just Comrade Stalin is so great and so on there is nothing to criticize. So this I think is what I like to call the domain of this social obscenity. It's not that you are not free simply. You have to act as if you are free. The prohibition itself is prohibited. So this is what always fascinated me in a social field: this complex network of implicit rules which tell you how you are to deal with explicit rules, which rules you really should violate or which rules you shouldn't take seriously. And a Russian friend of mine told me, gave me a very simple explanation—I tend to believe it—of what went wrong in the Yeltsin era. In Soviet Union, classical, the pure one, it was clear what the rules are. Officially freedom of the press, but you knew what you were allowed to do. You wanted your children to go to a best school, you knew whom to bribe. You know the rules, you know whom to bribe to get a better hospital and so on. And the problem, key problem is that in Yeltsin years, people lost their orientation. For example, the law was you should of course pay, stop and pay when the policeman stops you and punishes you. But people didn't know now what does this really mean. Can I ignore a policeman? Should I bribe him? How much? and so on. These implicit unwritten rules collapsed. And they claim to me that this is one of the key reasons of this Putin stability. Not that anything great happened, but these unwritten rules stabilized themselves again. Now they know what is really prohibited or what is prohibited so that you should precisely violate it and so on and so on. This I think, at this level we have to look for fantasies, for ideology. Ideology at its purest for me are—and this always fascinated me—are so-called empty gestures. Like precisely things that you are offered, but you are offered them with the understanding that you have to reject them. Let me give you an example. There is a custom in my country, probably it's the same here. Let us say that we are the best friends and we compete for the same job. I lose, you win. In my country, it's a custom that if we are friends, you tell me, "Listen, I know that you really deserved it, so I step down and you will get it." But of course I'm not supposed to say, "Yes, perfect, no?" I'm supposed to politely say, "No, thank you." But nonetheless, you see, the result is zero, but our friendship maybe will survive in this way. Or is not this also the logic with apologies? I had a problem with my theoretical enemy, personally good friend, maybe she is known here, the big—okay, she doesn't want to be called—feminist Judith Butler. Once I used some dirty words with her and so on—okay, I was rude, I admit it. So I felt bad, then I called her and told her, "Listen, I'm really sorry," and so on and so on. And she said, "Slavoj, you know I like you, I know you didn't mean it, it's okay, you don't owe me an apology." But you see the catch. She said, "You don't owe me an apology," but she was able to say this only after I offered the apology. She would be mad and she would be fully justified being mad if I would not apologize. On the other hand, when she said, "You really I don't—you really don't owe me an apology," of course in my evil mind, my first reaction was "okay, then I take it back." This is also—no but you see the paradox. Such a—at the level of literal meaning, what happened was total nonsense. Like, I did something, she said it's not really necessary. But that was the function. It had—precisely in this way it had to be, it had to be done. That's one aspect of the ideology. The other aspect and on this I really more and more focus in my work is these unwritten rules insofar as they form what I call the—the obscene background of an institution, of a community and so on. For example, I don't know if it was shown here, probably it was, it's some years old, a film with Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and so on: "A Few Good Men." Interesting film, not very good, but it's the story about what in the army is called "Code Red." This—you know every military community has a whole network of obscene implicit rules: how do you deal with those who are not one of us, how do you beat them and so on. These rules are crucial, absolutely crucial, but you don't talk about them. They have to remain—exact—and so I think this is the first step always when you analyze an ideology: ask for its obverse set of these dark rules which are not publicly admitted, and there you can really hit it. For example, to give you a comical example—I'm not boasting, I wasn't any great dissident, a little bit—and I remember in the late seventies when things started to open up a little bit in ex-Yugoslavia, I was a member of a committee of some student journal and there were elections. Elections went—okay, they were not as bad in ex-Yugoslavia as in other communist countries. So the communists didn't get percent, they got always around like to make it a little bit more convincing, no? Okay, everybody knew it. So we had a problem: how to do it to make trouble, how shall I put it, no? We even played with this radical suicidal idea, "Why don't we publish an issue claiming these elections are really not free, they are a fake?" But what would have been the meaning of this? The issue would have been simply immediately prohibited and then we discovered people would also simply laugh at us. "Haha, big news, as if we don't know." But we found the solution. We said, if the communists claim that the elections are free—no, let's not attack them, let's treat them as free. No, no, not in the sense of like posing our own candidates and so on, but we just said let's report on them as if they are free. So we did nothing prohibited. We just published on the evening of elections an extraordinary issue of the journal with the big title: "Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power," and so on. "Everybody is waiting for the result." And the—the—the consequences were unbelievable. We were immediately called to the Central Committee and then we said, "But what did we do wrong? I mean it is true, you stayed in power, we made a very correct prediction and..." And it was incredible. Even now I sympathize with him, this mid-level bureaucrat who received us. He wasn't able to formally—he said, "Don't fuck with me, boys. You know what I mean." I said, "But tell us what do you mean? Don't mess with me, you know..." And this is what again, this is what fascinates me. Now let's go to the opposite side. An opposite—like in if you read, for example, the ancient United—okay, ancient, United States in the twenties, I think that Ku Klux Klan functioned like something like that. Imagine a small racist city in the south of the United States, 1920s. You have official community, Christian values, blah-blah-blah, but then you have in the night if you are white, we gather together, we go out, we rape some black women, we... and so on. And everybody, okay, most people participated in this, but it was much more—this is where all memoirs agree—you didn't publicly admit it. But it was much more dangerous for you to publicly denounce this obscene underside than to denounce the official ideology. If you say, "I don't want to go to church, I hate official ideology," they would say, "Okay, you are eccentric, so what." If you say, "Ku Klux Klan is not right," probably you will be next to be—to be lynched. This was the core of identification. And to go into a little bit more problematic water, I am tempted to claim that—you are not so bad I think, my country is pretty bad in this, Poland, Ireland, Austria—pedophilia in Catholic Church. I more and more think that this is their obscene underside. It's not simply "priests are also humans like us so of course there are those who like boys there." There is something in the very logic of institution which generates it. That's their obscene secret. So I think it should be—it should be—it should be treated as such. Okay, next point. All these unwritten rules form what—in psychoanalytic theory—we call the Big Other. The Big Other is not God in the sense of the one who controls all, but much better it's to represent the Big Other as the agency of pure appearance, in the sense of, how shall I put it, the one for whom we have to pretend, act as if. What do I mean by this? Let me go a little bit again into Stalinism. Why? Because, you know, what is so fascinating with Stalinism. I write so much about Stalinism that people already think that I am half Stalinist. But quite on the contrary, I think that the mystery is how neither the right nor the left, I think, does have a truly convincing theory of what was Stalinism. Fascism is much easier to explain. It's a conservative modernization, blah-blah-blah, anti-Enlightenment. But what went wrong in Stalinism? I mean you cannot play this simple game, Stalin an evil guy there. Of course he was, but that's not it. For example, I totally oppose this old thesis of Stalinism as a new class. What kind of new class when in the most dangerous place to be in Soviet Union was top Nomenklatura? You know that there in a year and a half, like percent of the Central Committee, percent of the army headquarters and so on, were liquidated. It was the point of madness. What was driving this madness? So what I want to draw your attention to is how Stalinism is usually dismissed as brutal regime, you know: "No problem, we have to build that channel, canal in Volga or what, okay, one million people die, so what." It was extremely brutal. But the mystery of Stalinism is how at the same level it much more depends on appearances. The obsession of Stalinism is to maintain appearances at every level. Let me give you a fascinating example which I read recently. In '53, you know after Stalin's death, Beria was soon arrested. But at that very point, so I read in a Soviet history book, I mean book about Soviet... ah... the first volume of the new edition of Great Soviet Encyclopedia appeared. And of course, it covered the letters A-B, so Beria. So of course there was two pages, one leaf, Beria. Now the problem was that as you know in July, I don't know when, Beria was arrested, proclaimed a non-person, no? So that's a problem for Soviet thinking, like how to do it. Ah, they did found an ingenious solution. Every subscriber to the encyclopedia, and it was printed in two, three million copies, got a letter from the publisher which contained one freshly printed page. And each subscriber was ordered to cut out the page with Beria and to put in a new page which reconstructed perfectly the continuity. Like it was the previous entry and then—this is the genius—instead of Beria, they put Bering Strait, you know, between United States, I mean Alaska and—and Asia. And so that with some photos, when you did this, the continuity was perfect. Now what is so mysterious here? It is: whom they were trying to deceive? Just ask this simple question: for whom were they doing this? People knew it, they had to do it. This is the—this is the—this is so mysterious about Stalinism: how with all its brutality it was terribly afraid, fanatically afraid of, how shall I put it, of disturbing—disturbing the appearances. And now so that we will not just put all the blame on beloved Comrade Stalin, and you can go to this logic to the end, I think there is here a big difference between Stalinism and Nazism. I think I develop this a little bit in my book on Totalitarianism. I'm not praising Stalinism, in a way it was even more horrible. But look, I think the proper way to do it is to start at the surface. If you look at old documentary films, you immediately notice a mysterious feature. When a fascist leader like Hitler gives a speech, at the end the people applaud, the leader just like accepts the applause. Look at the Stalinist speeches: no, the leader stands up and applauds himself. This—this signals a totally different subjective position. It's not "a leader," it's "I'm with you, servant of the people," and so on, "we are all part of the same enlightened reason." Which also accounts for two other features: Stalinist trials. Like you cannot imagine a similar trial in Nazi Germany. There was no trial in Nazi Germany where one would put together top figures, Jewish figures, and accuse them of Jewish plot. It's not part of their universe. You have Stalinist show trials. What is a crucial feature about them is that even if you are the lowest shit, traitor, Bukharin, Trotsky, whatever, you still participate in universal reason. That is to say, this is why it's so terrifying to read the transcripts of, for example, I read recently your guy Slánský trial. What's so horrible is that it starts somehow like: "How did you become the enemy of the people?" And Slánský, of course I know it was all trained, staged, but the point is precisely why did they need such stages? As if kind of objective observer, he starts with: "Already as a young—young boy, my parents because of their bourgeois upbringing educated me to hate the working class and blah-blah-blah." The horror is that he is scum, shit, but at the same time he has the access to universal reason to pronounce it. Which is why another fascinating thing, I read in a book, maybe it's translated, Anne Applebaum, "Gulag." How, you know that in the worst years of Gulag, she claims, they collected on Stalin's birthday all the prisoners who had to sign a telegram to Stalin wishing him all the best and blah-blah-blah. Now just think about it. This is meaningless in fascism. What, should they collect the Jews in Auschwitz to sign all the best for Hitler? The tragedy is that this feature makes Stalinism part of Enlightenment project. The idea is even if you are the lowest Trotskyite shit, whatever, you still have access to universal reason, reason, you can see the obvious truth. And again, this appearance had to be maintained. Okay, here we have the crazy, radical figure of this. But things are much more complex. Let me give you two other examples. One, do you know Hitchcock's masterpiece, My God, you should, "Vertigo"? Okay. You know there is a scene in the middle of the film when the girl, Madeleine, tries to kill herself—okay, it's a fake, we don't know it yet. Then the hero, James Stewart, saves her, drives her home, puts her into his bed and of course undresses her so that her clothes will dry up. And then we have a long so-called panning shot, camera moving, you see above a kitchen sink all her underwear drying up and then the camera moves to the door of the bedroom and so on. Now do something very simple. Put the image on freeze at that very moment when you see underwear, and look what you see. It's not underwear, it's just abstract pieces of cloth. You know what was the reason? Then I inquired into it, I learned in a book. The Hays Code of Hollywood censorship, which was still alive, said no, insisted that it shouldn't be really underwear because if it were to be underwear, then this would be a proof that James Stewart saw her naked. This cannot be admitted because they are not married. Now what's so mystical here? The mystical thing is that we ordinary viewers, we think that we see underwear. So again, who was the—whom was the censorship protecting? Obviously not us. It was again that innocent gaze of the Big Other. So again, we have a quite—we have a quite similar logic there. And I think that this idea that the Big Other shouldn't know is what is as it were the zero level of ideology. Probably you know the—this standard joke, it's repeated all the time, we all know it, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, about a madman who thinks he's a piece of grain, corn or whatever, and it's cured, but then comes running back. And the psychiatrist asks him, "But what's the problem?" The guy says, "I met a chicken and I was afraid the chicken will eat me." And the psychiatrist said, "But you know that you are not a piece of seed of corn but a human being." And, you know, okay, the guy says, "I know it, but does the chicken know it?" Now I think this is quite a realistic joke. This is how it works. A whole country can fall apart from this. I think this was maybe the key reason that Yugoslavia fell apart. The chicken was Tito, the president. In what sense? It's now clear from some memoirs that the inner circle of Nomenklatura knew it from the—early mid-seventies that economic situation is catastrophic. They knew that harsh measures will have to be taken. But they, at the same time, Tito was old, dying, they wanted Tito to die happy. The chicken shouldn't have known it. So literally, they—they accumulated a debt in a couple of years, billion dollars, just to keep Tito happy. Yugoslavia still appeared prosperous and so on and so on. Or to give a more dignified, not such a cynical, example, think—think about something much more pathetic. How, for example, when parents fight, they have a small child. They fight there on the edge of divorce, but the usual game is "let's hide it from the child, let's pretend in the eyes of the child that everything is okay." Things are here much more mysterious I claim, because usually of course the child knows, but he pretends not to notice, you know. This is I think the true mystery of the symbolic system: how appearances matter. They function even if we all know, and even if we all know that we all know, still—still appearances still function. So—uh—okay, let me now, do I have another just ten short minutes maybe if you allow me, if people will not die. Because I want—okay, very quickly, what I wanted to develop is now what can we do. What am I preaching here? Should we respect appearances or should we on the other hand go for this direct obscenity or whatever? I think it depends, both work. On the one hand, appearances sometimes can be of help. Appearances in the sense of simple politeness what you obey. For example, I was always fascinated by a beautiful story from apartheid South Africa, I read it somewhere, of how at big demonstrations police was disturbing the black crowd. Among the blacks was a nice lady, nicely dressed, who was of course running away. A white policeman was with a—how do you call it?—with a stick, yeah, yeah, was running after her. What then something very comical happened. The lady lost one of her shoes. And the policeman, although a racist and so on, at that moment he automatically reacted with this automatic politeness. "You see a lady losing her shoe." He picked the shoe, "Here lady." And then something miraculous happened. The lady looked at him, they looked at each other and what should she do now? Put the—put the—put the shoe on and then we... no. He was totally embarrassed, he just turned around, "Thank you, lady," and walked away. You see this, the lesson is not deep in his heart he was not a racist, probably he was, but appearances, politeness, did—did its role. On the opposite hand, I think that, and this is my problem with political correctness and so on, I think on the other hand that—how shall I put it?—to have a true contact with another as a neighbor, you cannot do it without obscenity. Obscenity is a mode—how do you signal to someone that it's not just this polite respect and so on, that you are truly a friend? It has to be a moment of obscenity. And here, if I may repeat a long story which is my favorite, it really happened to me: how did I become truly a friend? When I was serving in '75, '76, Yugoslav army, I became a friend with an Albanian soldier. They are very patriarchal, you shouldn't touch their father, mother and so on. So we were just friends. But one morning when he, the soldier, met me, instead of the usual "Good morning," he told me, "I fuck your mother." Now I knew this was an offer to real friendship, no? He then looked at me questioningly, he wanted an appropriate answer, and you can believe me I don't have problems with this. I immediately stepped back, "Go ahead after I finish with your sister." No, this is the... And you know what was so interesting? Now comes the miracle. After this was the signal, now we are true friends. But this did not mean that in this boring obscene way we were then all the time telling dirty jokes to each other. No, the only thing that changed is that every morning when we met, instead of "Good morning," we even didn't pronounce the whole phrase, not even as a joke. Just he told me "mother," I said "sister." Just not even with a smile. This meant we are still friends. This was kind of a—a stand-in, a guarantee. Now, of course I'm well aware what here is wrong in this example. Two things are wrong. First, it's a very patriarchal one. It's basically a joke about men exchanging women, no? So the least I can say for the feminists again among you is that I would like to be in a society where two women meet and one say, "Fuck your husband," "Go ahead after I finish with your brother," whatever. It would be nice to imagine the other. The second thing is that we were equal. If, for example, if I were to be an officer, no, it wouldn't be good for the other guy to approach me and tell me, "Fuck your mother" or what, no? So this—okay, I don't have time because what I could develop here is how I think that this is why I find the figure of post-modern master, which they no longer want to be called masters, it's "coordinator," no, "I just coordinate" and so on. The catch is that they are still masters, those who are the bosses, but they like to pretend that they are really one of us. So if you go to these ultra-modern American companies, the boss, you know, dresses ordinary, comes to you, tells you a dirty joke, "Let's take a drink" and so on. But still remains the boss. This I think if anything makes things worse. So okay, really now to conclude just with a concluding comment. So do we really live in post-ideological era? People think we do, and the main reason is that officially at least today nobody takes ideology seriously. Who cares about it? It's abstract, it's—I mean—I mean today the official ideology, let's be clear at least in the West, is what? It's some kind of a generalized hedonism, no? It's not "sacrifice yourself, do it for..." "Have a good life, realize your true self," and so on. That's why I think Dalai Lama is so popular in the West. He perfectly works as the secret message of his spiritual enlightenment is "a little bit of enlightenment will make you even a better businessman, more successful lover," and so on and so on. So that's clear. But so the idea is that the situation is cynical today. There are good reasons for it. My formative experience in ideology was—one of the formative experiences—'91, '92 I remember, in Germany, after reunification, in East Germany, there were some skinheads who were beating some Vietnam or Turkish people and then they were interviewed. And it shocked me what I heard there. They started with the usual reason, no: either ideological ones like, "Oh know they are foreigners in our culture, primitive," or more brutal ones like, "They are stealing our jobs," or even more brutal ones, "They get on my nerves, it makes me feel good to beat them." But interestingly enough, at the end they all started to talk almost like that split in Stalinist victims. One of them said, looking into the camera—asked why did he beat the Turkish workers or Vietnamese—"You know, when I was young I lacked the proper mother, maternal love, I lacked paternal authority," and so on. They all of a sudden started to talk like social theorists. This should be cynicism at its purest. Like, it's no longer as Marx thought, "They don't know that they are doing it, but they are doing it." They know what they are doing it and they are doing it. So the idea is, in this case, criticism of ideology is no longer operative. People know, you don't prevent things happening through enlightenment. What do I mean by this? You know that old Goebbels story, which is not even true about Goebbels, that he said, "Whenever I hear the word culture, I pick up my gun." You have two further variations of it. There is the variation from a Godard film where a cinema producer says, "Whenever I hear the word culture, I pick my checkbook," and so on, you see. And then you have the pathetic leftist version, "Whenever I hear guns, I reach for culture." The idea being interpretation can change things. Is this really over? I don't think so. Why? Because I claim that today the predominant—with this if I may conclude, now I'm really at the end—today ideology is—no—no longer functions what I'm tempted to call as the symptomatic mode. It's no longer that you live a lie and then here and there through symptoms the repressed returns. If this type of ideology is a general lie where details betray it, I claim today's functioning of ideology is more and more a fetishist one. Fetish is not a moment of truth which disturbs the general lie. Fetish is a small lie which enables you to—to confront the truth. Because what is effectively a fetish? Let me give you a simple—not simple, it's tragic example which really happened to a friend of mine. His wife died of breast cancer. It was absolutely traumatic for him and we his friends were all terribly shocked. Like he was able to talk normally about it. We didn't have to pretend, "No, let's not talk about it." He talked about the wife's last moments very coldly. And then we discovered what's going on. Whenever he was talking about his dead wife, he was playing with a small—how do you call it?—hamster. That was his fetish, a kind of a stand-in for the wife. Through this fetish, he was able to accept rationally that the wife is dead, but to put it in traditional terms, block totally the emotional or existential weight of it. He just in a cold impersonal way admitted it but blocking all the symbolic impact of the fact. The proof of it is that when half a year later the hamster died, he immediately tried to kill himself and was hospitalized and so on and so on. And what I claim is that this is how ideology today functions more and more. Ideology is that small hamster that we all have. It can be, I don't know, Oriental spirituality or whatever. You know, this is why I think that nobody can really be a total perfect cynic. Every cynic has his hamster, how shall I put it, no? This private point where he pretends to be—pretends to be—pretends to be authentic or whatever you want. There is a short story by my favorite detective writer Patricia Highsmith, which is wonderful. It's called "Button." About a guy who lives with a child who is total mongoloid, his life is ruined. Then one night he goes out, desperate, on the streets of New York, finds a helpless homeless man, beats him to death, tears off his button, returns home, and from that time on he was able to endure his life, take care of his son, because the button was the fetish, like "once I did strike back." And the button was there as a kind of a fetish. And that's the—that's the—that's the problem. So the message is, I would say, rather optimistic here. Let's not be too desperate. I mean theory can do its job. And if I may just with a final joke provoke you, in this sense I'm a Leninist. Which Leninist? Uh—you know—uh—we have a—a nice obscene joke from my youth, maybe some of you if you are old enough also know it. We have all in our classes when I was young, very young, still communist regime, the—this famous Lenin's advice to children what to do, no: learn, learn and learn. Okay, the joke goes, maybe you know it, I'm sorry. They asked Marx, Engels and Lenin, "What would you prefer to have, a wife or a mistress?" Marx, as a conservative, says a wife. Engels, more hedonist, said a mistress. Lenin said, "I want both." Everybody was shocked, "My God, Lenin is supposed to be ascetic, what does this mean? He is a secret hedonist." They asked him, "But why?" Lenin said, "So that when you are with your—well so that you can say to your wife that you are with a mistress and you can say to the mistress that you are with your wife." Then they asked him, "Okay, but what do you do?" And then Lenin said, "You guessed it, you learn, learn and learn." And this exactly is what we should do today, I claim. From all sides around, they try to blackmail us through charity, you know. What's the standard ideology today? I hate this. In America it's very popular: this rhetoric of emergency state. Like, for example, my God so often I heard this in the United States, someone giving a talk where there is a sentence like, "For every word that I read to you here, ten children died in Africa." Or if you are a feminist, "For every sentence that I read here, one woman was raped on our street," and so on. I think this is a deeply reactionary attitude. The message is "do something, don't think." The message is this false post-ideological one. Don't even try to understand, just do, let's do something. No, I think that what we need more than ever today is to withdraw and to think. We should really, like Lenin in the joke, reject—uh—wife and mistress. That is to say, if wife stands for official career, if mistress stands for false transgression, which is very fashionable today. Like this was my problem, for example, in England—this is the example of the mistress logic—when there were a couple of years ago big demonstrations against—against Iraq war. Millions on the street, the greatest demonstrations, so everybody was satisfied. And that was problematic for me. The leftists were satisfied, "You see, we brought millions to the street, we showed those in power." What is it? The mystery is that those in the government, Blair and so on, were no less satisfied. Because on the one hand they could say, "You see what a democratic country we are." On the other hand, they knew that they can simply ignore them, they didn't care for it. The best answer was given here by Bush. When he visited London at that point and a journalist asked him, "What do you think about big demonstrations against you?" he said, "I—I'm so glad about those demonstrations because," he said, "you see, that's why we are going to Iraq, so that something like this can happen also in Iraq." So everybody was satisfied. I think that a lot of leftism today is this kind of empty protest, how shall I put it. You protest not only although you are secretly aware that it will have no real effect, but you even know it and that's why you protest. You protest it, you know like this: "Okay, I did it, I keep my conscience clear, so now I can go on with my life like normal." It's almost that a protest can also function as a kind of a superstitious act: you really protest so that nothing will really change. And I claim this is also generally the problem with this charity and so on. I think that the—the meanest, lowest ideology is this ideology of charity, especially if it's personalized, you know, like some of my friends are doing it, it's horrible. Like you have a—you know, you have an African poor black guy, you send him dollars a day—sorry, a month—to get once a year a picture with a letter "oh" from him, and it makes you feel so good. But what makes you feel so good? I claim that he is there and you are here, how shall I put it? It stays like today. I think that charity deep in its heart, charity is a kind of a—you really pay so that they remain there, how shall I put it, so that... I mean it's—so—don't trust this rhetoric: "While we live here, people are out there starving," and so on. Bill Gates talks like—talks like this today. I mean we intellectuals at least should absolutely reject—if I may say, put it in brutal Leninist terms—this is the petit bourgeois sentimentality to fall into the trap of this blackmail. "How do you dare just study your abstract theory when people are starving there?" No, our theory is needed more than ever today. I claim we are today living in a unique era where even everyday problems we cannot solve them without reflection. For example, look at biogenetic problems: how far should we go in manipulating our genes? Are we aware that here we are confronting a situation where we have to make an ethical decision, but the traditional ethics cannot help us? Which is why no wonder that incredible alliances are made, like Habermas the great Enlightenment figure with Ratzinger, Benedict what-however-you-call-him, the Pope. And they both have the same advice, which is for me a catastrophe: "Don't do it, don't mess too much with it." This doesn't solve the problem. This is basically—it means let's not play with it, let's ignore it, let's keep a distance. It doesn't work. So what I'm trying to tell you is that in such an era of humanity like ours today, when because of ecological crisis... Ecological crisis is the same problem. I deeply distrust the new age attitude, which is technology, science objectivizes nature, it's responsible, which is why we should—we should return to our immediate life world experience. Originally we are part of a situation breathing with nature and so on. I don't think that's a solution, I think that's the problem. We need more alienation. Why? Let's imagine a very ordinary scene. You listen to a talk against—about ecology. The mystery is again fetishism, the split. We know we are in deep shit, it may be the end. But strangely, nobody is really ready to do anything. Why not? I claim, you know this famous fetishist logic in French: "Je sais bien mais quand même," I know very well, but I don't believe it. I claim that's our basic attitude towards ecology. We know, but somehow after hearing a talk about ecology you go out, you see the sky, the sun, you cannot really accept that all this will collapse. Why? Precisely because what those Lebenswelt phenomenologists praised so much as our embeddedness in a Lebenswelt, life world. I think that if anything we need more alienation in the sense of the lesson of ecology for me is ecological crisis is not that we should drop this reference to nature; we need ecology without nature, to cut a long story short. If by nature we understand nature as this Mother Earth or some kind of a harmonious, balanced system which then we humans with our hubris we disturbed it and now we have to reestablish the balance. The—the—the horror, horrible thing much more difficult to accept is that there is no nature in this sense. If you want a proof, think about oil. Do you—can we even imagine what a totally unthinkable ecological catastrophe must have happened sometime in the past of the earth to produce oil? I mean it must be unthinkable. And this is nature. If you read good Darwinists today, you can learn a lot of them, like Stephen Jay Gould and so on. Their lesson is no, nature is not a struggle where the best survives. Nature is crazy, nature is not harmonious balance, nature is totally chaotic. Somebody is a loser, then there is an earthquake, the rules change, the loser is the winner, everything is improvisation. So you see the—this is the true difficulty: to think about ecological crisis, which would be maybe even a better example than tolerance of how ideology works. Ideology is not dreaming; ideology is about very real problems, tolerance, exploitation or ecological catastrophe. What is problematic is how the very way the problem is perceived is part of the problem. It mystifies it, and for all this we need theory more than ever. We shouldn't feel not in the minimum guilty about being intellectuals. I think it's a matter of survival even for us to remain intellectuals. Without this we are effectively—we are effectively lost. So let's not lose our nerves, let's go on and we will see what will happen. Thank you very much.