Impossibility as the Lacanian Real
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-07-08 · 1:41:03 · 13,652 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticspoliticsliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencephilosophy-generaldemocracycapitalismcinema-art-culturereligion-theologyfascism-populismgeopolitics-warother
A seminar-style lecture and Q&A in which Žižek ranges across the structure of inherent transgression and social identification, the Lacanian Real as immanent formal impossibility (not a substantial outside), and the politics of 'pressing the wrong button', modest demands that expose the systemic point of impossibility (Greek debt, Obama's healthcare). He also develops an extended analysis of how contemporary power works through the open display of human weakness (Reagan, Berlusconi) rather than dignified insignia, and closes with discussions of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, the Burka/neighbour/face argument, and WikiLeaks/Snowden's function of forcing disavowal into visibility.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Big Other”
Lacan's symbolic-social order that regulates even apparent transgressions; here invoked to explain why Žižek's dirty public jokes are performed for authority rather than against it.
Transgressions that are secretly required by the social order itself, like KKK lynching in the Old South, so that refusing them excludes one from the community more surely than violating explicit rules.
as “reflexivity of the unconscious”
The Freudian-Hegelian dynamic in which repression of desire turns into desire for repression; obsessive rituals that suppress a pleasure become a pleasure in themselves.
The 'living dead' of the concentration camps described by Primo Levi; Žižek notes their depiction is almost comical, which is what makes it truly horrifying.
Excess enjoyment which is simultaneously always out of reach and impossible to fully rid oneself of; Žižek stresses the second half of this tension against simplified 'it always eludes us' readings.
as “the Real as immanent formal impossibility”
Žižek's reading of Lacan's Real not as a hard substantial outside but as the purely formal, self-generated structural impossibility internal to any symbolic order.
as “retroactive constitution of trauma”
Freud's insight, via the Wolfman, that a witnessed scene is not traumatic from the outset but is retroactively elevated into a trauma by later libidinal investments.
as “real abstraction / class antagonism as the Real”
The Marxist claim that class antagonism is the actual structuring Real of capitalist society, of which anti-Semitism constructs an external substitute object (the Jew) to obfuscate.
The specific, often seemingly minor, demand or button within a system that, if actually enacted, destabilises the entire edifice; the art of politics is to identify and press it.
as “politics of Bartleby”
Strategic withdrawal from engagement, 'I would prefer not to', as the appropriate move when any participation would be co-opted by the system.
Power's strategy of embracing its opponents (inviting them to dialogue) so tightly that they can no longer act; named after the boxing move, exemplified by Clinton's response to the Seattle WTO protests.
as “phallic signifier / castration”
The gap between an agent and the insignia of power that invests them with authority; having authority requires this alienation, it is not you but the insignia that speaks.
as “clown-master / post-dignified power”
The contemporary form of power in which the figure of authority displays weakness, vulgarity, and self-mockery and thereby paradoxically becomes more unassailable than the traditional dignified master.
The structure 'I know very well, but nonetheless…'; used here to describe how traditional authority works (the king is a jerk, but nonetheless he is king).
The subject stripped of all self-presentation; illustrated by the Terminator's bare metal skull still blinking, pure persisting drive with no ego surface.
as “the neighbour”
The Judeo-Christian/Lacanian figure of the radical abyss of the other; Žižek argues that the veiled face (Burka) makes this horror visible rather than hiding it, which is what provokes Western panic.
Badiou's formula for legalising immigrants; Žižek notes its double-edged quality, settlers in the West Bank used the same logic against Palestinians.
Heidegger's monstrous claim in the Black Notebooks that the Holocaust was the Jews' ontological self-annihilation because their own principle (modern technology) was applied to them.
The thesis that a great work or theory can be de-contextualised from its author's private pathologies and retain an independent truth, applied to both Wagner and Heidegger.
Stories he reaches for 8
An obsessive builds rituals to suppress a forbidden desire; the rituals themselves become a source of perverse pleasure, so the subject cannot get rid of jouissance even when trying to.
“these rituals themselves became a source of pleasure. You, in a perverse way, you enjoy them. So you know no matter how you want to get rid of it, you cannot”
Žižek says that unlike typical transgressive behaviour done privately when authority is absent, he performs his dirty jokes only publicly for the Big Other, and feels relieved in private to be a 'decent person', demonstrating the paradox of inherent transgression.
“since I compulsively play a certain role, almost a clown, dirty jokes and so on, I noticed that I do this not as a secret joke when authority does not watch you, but only for the authority”
People around Lacan wanted to know if he was 'just a normal warm guy' in private; those who knew him closely all reported he was exactly the same in private as in public, arrogant, playing his codified role. Žižek reads this as a genuinely anti-authoritarian gesture.
“In private he was exactly the same as in public. You never got him at his 'oh I am just an ordinary guy,' always these arrogant mannerisms”
Obama's healthcare campaign was modest by international standards but touched the impossible point of American ideological space, provoking denunciations of communism, proof that system-threatening demands need not be radical.
“in specific American ideological constellation, a demand for serious universal healthcare equals pushing that button”
When asked if he hosted Holocaust deniers, Reagan said 'Every time someone at my table claims there was no Holocaust, I oppose him', absurdly normalising the presence of deniers while posturing as opposed to them.
“no, I am not a Holocaust denier. Every time that someone at my table claims that there was no Holocaust, I oppose him”
French satirist Allais pointed at a woman in a restaurant and shouted 'beneath her dress she is totally naked', a formally correct observation that reveals how the surface is always already a mask covering another layer.
“in a restaurant he pointed at a woman and he started to shout at her, 'look, what a shame, beneath her dress she is totally naked'”
Heidegger claimed in his Black Notebooks that the Holocaust was ontologically the Jews' own self-annihilation because the principle of technological manipulation they introduced was simply applied to themselves by the Germans as unwitting instruments.
“Holocaust was ultimately ontologically just a Selbstvernichtung, self-annihilation of the Jews. Why? Because the principle that they introduced into the world…was just logically brought to the end, applied to them”
Freud's Wolfman witnessed his parents having sex but it was not immediately traumatic; it retroactively became trauma when later sexual fantasies re-activated the memory, showing that trauma is not a pre-existing hard Real but constructed backwards.
“It retroactively became a trauma when Wolfman was five, six years, and when he started to engage in all these sexual fantasies”
Works invoked 18
Grundrisse book
Marx; the introduction's question of why we still enjoy Homer is cited, though Žižek criticises Marx's evolutionary answer as potentially anti-Semitic.
Parsifal opera
Wagner; Žižek describes himself as 'an old Wagnerian' and notes that Parsifal has been 'kidnapped' by Left Jewish directors who found Wagner's own work staging a distance from its anti-Semitic texture.
If This Is a Man book
Primo Levi; described as 'almost a comical book' in its depiction of the Muselmänner, which is precisely what makes it one of the most terrifying books.
Trouble in Paradise book
Žižek's own book; forced to remove 'Communism' from subtitle by Penguin, which he cites as evidence of ideological prohibition. Contains a chapter on inherent transgression.
Hamlet film
Contemporary corporate-setting Hamlet with Kyle MacLachlan as the evil king; Žižek mentions it approvingly as a successful modernisation.
Gender Trouble book
Judith Butler; Žižek explicitly sets it aside in favour of The Psychic Life of Power.
Judith Butler; Žižek rates it her best book and most Freudian, for its analysis of how repression of desire turns into desire for repression.
Nixon (film) film
Oliver Stone; Žižek's favourite Stone film for treating Nixon as the last genuinely tragic president rather than simply as a villain.
Avatar film
James Cameron; Žižek says it 'would have been prohibited, burned publicly' in his universe.
Fifty Shades of Grey book
On Žižek's personal Goebbels-list of books he would not mind burning.
Richard II play
Shakespeare; Žižek prefers it to Richard III for its analysis of the king divested of symbolic insignia, what remains when the insignia are removed.
Lacan's seminar on Antigone and ate; Žižek calls it 'very dangerous' and 'revisionist' in its pseudo-Nietzschean description of transgression into the Real, it should carry trigger warnings for proper Lacanians.
Don Carlos play
Schiller; the king's tragedy of wanting a friend rather than just being a king, and the Inquisitor as the proto-model of modern totalitarian power (pure knowledge, not master).
Jean Genet; Žižek says it is more relevant today than when written for its analysis of how permissive societies use masks/insignia of power.
Alain Badiou; develops the Genet/Lacan analysis of how contemporary power works through the open display of human weakness rather than dignified insignia.
Heidegger's private notebooks; contain monstrous anti-Semitism and the Selbstvernichtung theory of the Holocaust, but Žižek argues this does not prove his philosophy is in its core Nazi.
The Terminator film
The end of the first film, metal skull with blinking light, is Žižek's paradigm image of the pure subject of drive.
Paul Claudel; Lacan's analysis of Sygne de Coûfontaine as anti-Antigone is preferred over Lacan's own Antigone reading in Seminar VII.
People invoked 44
Alberto Toscano positive
Credited for the formulation 'maybe reformism is today our greatest utopia.'
Bill Clinton negative
'The great master' of the clinching strategy, inviting Seattle protestors to dialogue to neutralise them.
Badiou's short book Pornography of the Present develops the Genet/mask analysis of contemporary power that Žižek endorses.
Primo Levi positive
If This Is a Man is described as almost comical in its depiction of the Muselmänner, which is why it is one of the most terrifying books.
Richard Nixon positive
Treated as the last genuinely tragic president; measured in domestic spending, the most 'leftist' American president; his character explored in Oliver Stone's film Nixon.
Udi Aloni positive
Jewish friend credited with the counter-formula: 'for the oppressed, violence is always legal, we just have to think when to use it.'
Silvio Berlusconi positive
Paradigmatic example of post-dignified power; his immediate offering of the 'Bunga Bunga room' to a visiting journalist is cited as the most dangerous form of power.
Edward Snowden positive
Important not for revealing new facts but for destroying the socially available disavowal of mass surveillance.
Richard Wagner positive
Paradigm of an artist more anti-Semitic than Heidegger at the biographical level whose work nonetheless has autonomous truth; Parsifal is now a favourite of Left Jewish directors who found anti-anti-Semitic readings in it.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Implicitly dismissed: Žižek argues in practice we know Levinas was wrong, human face is not an authentic encounter but itself the biggest mask.
Gianni Vattimo positive
Named as a legitimate Left Heideggerian.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical reference throughout; Žižek argues Lacan is a Hegelian not Kantian, a comic not tragic theorist, and praises Lacan's private refusal to drop his public mask as an anti-authoritarian gesture.
Žižek doesn't much like Stone's films generally but Nixon is his favourite of them.
Jean Genet positive
His play The Balcony is invoked as detecting how permissive societies use mask/insignia of power, more relevant today than when written.
Carlos Menem positive
Noted as beginning even before Berlusconi with the undignified clown-master style of power.
George Mikes positive
Hungarian-British satirist; his essay on how to be an alien includes the best theory of milk in tea as a mechanism to dampen excessive English enjoyment of tea.
Plays the evil king in a contemporary corporate Hamlet (Denmark Corporation) mentioned approvingly in passing.
Robert Pfaller positive
Austrian philosopher friend credited with the concept of 'clinching', power embracing its opponents to neutralise them.
Judith Butler positive
Žižek says he has a conflict with her over the Real but values her Hegelian-Freudian work in The Psychic Life of Power above Gender Trouble; he agrees with her that feminist strategy should force male chauvinists to openly acknowledge their authority.
Friedrich Schiller positive
Don Carlos is recommended for its analysis of the king who wants a friend, not just to be a king; the Inquisitor figure is identified as the proto-model of modern totalitarian power.
Described as 'basically a good guy' who was forced by economic circumstances to reduce benefits.
Žižek's 'favourite detective writer'; mentioned as example of the humanising publisher bio (noting her apartment was full of snails).
Paul Claudel positive
His play L'Otage (The Hostage) analysed by Lacan as presenting the anti-Antigone figure Sygne de Coûfontaine, a better Lacanian model than the Antigone-as-transgression reading.
Alain Badiou positive
Friendly debate partner; Žižek rejects Badiou's axiom of equality as the fundamental emancipatory demand but credits his concept of 'point of impossibility' and 'qui est ici est d'ici'.
Alexis Tsipras positive
Syriza's strategy of modest debt renegotiation is praised as intelligent political action, pressing the right button without demanding wholesale systemic overthrow.
Tariq Ali negative
One of those critics of Obama who are 'stupid', expecting Obama to introduce socialism.
Jacqueline Rose positive
Present in the audience; Žižek says her presence is 'extreme pressure' (affectionate), and she interjects substantive questions about perverse jouissance and community.
George Orwell positive
Žižek has 'great doubts about Orwell's overall vision' but credits his position that the main task against Nazism was to destroy fascism, not to worry about becoming like Hitler.
Samir Amin negative
Old non-aligned post-colonial theorist; Žižek had a shouting match with him over Amin's 'delink' strategy, which Žižek finds naively impractical.
Alphonse Allais positive
French turn-of-the-century satirist with 'Hegelian Lacanian ideas'; cited for the 'she is naked beneath her dress' observation and the dance of seven veils / Herod shouting 'further, further' when Salomé is already naked.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Invoked to support the case for strategic hypocrisy over the heroic gesture of stepping out.
Martin Heidegger positive
His Black Notebooks contain monstrous anti-Semitism including the Selbstvernichtung theory of the Holocaust; but Žižek argues this is symptomatic, not the inner core of his philosophy, which retains autonomous truth available to Left Heideggerians.
Jean-Luc Nancy positive
Named as one of the legitimate Left Heideggerians whose readings should not be dismissed as simple misreading.
Rumoured to have told Tsipras she would make a deal if she could but is constrained by German hardliners; Žižek takes this as an example of how power disavows itself.
Éric Laurent positive
Žižek calls him a 'right-winger' within Lacanian politics but acknowledges his text on political jouissance and racism as 'nice.'
Joschka Fischer negative
Wrote 'one of the most disgusting texts' politically (titled 'Tsipras in Dreamland'), repeating austerity platitudes about 'facing reality.'
Walter Benjamin positive
Metaphor of an image for which developers are discovered later, used to argue that Heidegger's text has truths readable only from later contexts.
Attacked Žižek in friendly terms for alleged inconsistency between Bartleby-style withdrawal and advocacy of revolutionary violence; Žižek accepts different strategies suit different situations.
Barack Obama positive
Žižek retains 'a certain respect for Obama' for not attacking Iraq or Syria; uses Obama's healthcare campaign as the paradigm example of pressing the point of impossibility.
Karl Marx positive
Repeatedly cited for the claim that equality remains within the capitalist horizon; also for the Grundrisse passage on why we still enjoy Homer, though Žižek faults Marx's answer as evolutionist and potentially anti-Semitic.
Sigmund Freud positive
Used for the Wolfman case (retroactive trauma), obsessive-neurotic structure, and as the deeper grounding of the Lacanian claims Žižek defends.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited throughout as the framework within which Lacan's Real should be understood (immanent impossibility rather than Kantian thing-in-itself); also for the de-contextualisation of great art.
Simon Critchley negative
His formula on violence ('sometimes necessary but never legal') is inverted by Udi Aloni's counter-formula which Žižek endorses.
Ronald Reagan positive
Identified as the first 'clown president', inaugurating the post-dignified form of power where self-mockery and displays of stupidity increase rather than decrease authority.
What it argues
inherent transgression as social gluethe Lacanian Real as immanent formal impossibilitymodest demands that touch the systemic point of impossibilitypost-dignified power and the clown-masterfetishist disavowal and the Big Otherthe face/mask/neighbour dialecticHeidegger's anti-Semitism vs. the autonomy of theory/art
Dialectical moves 12
“I say it publicly [the vulgar transgression], but when I am in private I feel relieved: now finally I do not have to play that stupid role.”
The apparent transgression (dirty public speech) is the regulated performance; private decency is the actual relief, inverting the expected structure of public propriety vs. private transgression.
“Transgressions which are part of the game do not violate the rules—they are the most tightly regulated part of it.”
Inherent transgressions appear to break social rules but actually constitute the hidden core of social regulation.
“If you violate the very rules of violation, you are much faster excluded than if you violate the explicit rules.”
The secret transgressive rituals that hold a community together are more binding than any official law.
“Real is ultimately totally immanent to the symbolic order as its own immanent impossibility.”
The Real is not a hard external substance that resists symbolisation but the internal failure/gap of the symbolic itself.
“The image of a hardcore impossible-to-approach Real trauma is itself the ultimate fantasy formation.”
What we imagine as the threatening kernel of reality is a defensive fiction that covers over the purely formal immanent obstacle.
“Far from being a private or secondary phenomenon, [transgressive behaviour] is there that we are most tightly regulated.”
The space of apparent freedom and excess is precisely where power's regulation is tightest.
“Today's figure of power: I appear as a total jerk and because of this I have power.”
The post-dignified master no longer needs the 'I know very well, but nonetheless', the undignified display itself is now the basis of authority.
“What you get when you see a face with Burka is precisely the true neighbour. Face is not covered, it's basically you see what is beneath the face: the horror.”
The Burka does not conceal the person; the uncovered face is itself the mask, removing it (via the veil) exposes the real abyss of subjectivity.
“Reformism is today our greatest utopia.”
In the current period it is modest incremental reform, not radical revolution, that is the truly impossible fantasy.
“The Greeks are on the side of cold pragmatic rationality; it's the big Western powers who are basically dreaming.”
The apparent realists (European creditors insisting on austerity) are the true dreamers; the supposed fantasists (Syriza) make the rational demand.
“The importance of WikiLeaks/Snowden: we are ordered, enjoined to—we cannot pretend that we don't know it.”
Their significance is not informational but performative: they destroy the socially available disavowal ('we knew but could pretend not to').
“Violence is always legal and legitimate for the oppressed; we just have to think well when to use it.”
Inverting Critchley's formula: legality of violence is not the question for the oppressed, only timing matters.
Claims 20
asserts
Transgressive behaviour (dirty jokes, rituals of violation) is not private subversion but the most tightly regulated zone of social life, enforced by the Big Other.inherent transgression / social regulation
asserts
Refusing to participate in a community's secret transgressive rituals leads to faster exclusion than violating its explicit rules.social identification and community
asserts
The Lacanian Real is not a substantial outside but the purely formal, immanent impossibility structuring any symbolic order.Lacanian Real
asserts
The image of a hard traumatic Real is itself a fantasy formation constructed to obfuscate the purely formal immanent obstacle.trauma / fantasy / Real
asserts
Anti-Semitism is the ideological operation of replacing the immanent class antagonism (the Real of society) with an external object, 'the Jews.'anti-Semitism / ideology
asserts
Because the Real is a formal immanent impossibility, psychoanalytic and political work through the symbolic can genuinely restructure and dissolve it.political change / psychoanalysis
rejects
Equality is not the fundamental communist demand; it remains within the horizon of capitalist exchange relations, as Marx repeatedly insisted.Badiou's axiom of equality as emancipatory foundation
asserts
The art of emancipatory politics today is to identify the specific—seemingly minor—point of impossibility and press it, not to demand wholesale systemic overthrow.emancipatory political strategy
asserts
Today reformism is the greatest utopia: the global capitalist system cannot in the long run afford even modest social-democratic reforms.reformism vs. radical change
asserts
Contemporary power increasingly operates through the open display of human weakness rather than dignified insignia, and this makes it more, not less, unassailable.structure of contemporary power / post-dignified authority
asserts
The 'humanisation' of authority figures (mentioning their private hobbies, confessing weaknesses) is a fake that sustains rather than undermines power.ideology of personality / humanisation of power
reframes
The panic about the Burka is not fear of the hidden face but fear of what the face itself always already hides: the abyss of the neighbour.Burka debate / fear of the Other
asserts
Human face is itself a mask; removing the face-mask (via Burka) reveals not a face but the more horrifying authentic subjectivity beneath.face / mask / subjectivity
rejects
Heidegger's anti-Semitism is historically important and symptomatic but does not constitute the inner core of his philosophy, which retains an autonomous truth.Heidegger's Black Notebooks / Heidegger as essentially Nazi
asserts
A great work of art is defined precisely by its capacity to survive de-contextualisation from the circumstances of its production.aesthetics / autonomy of art
asserts
WikiLeaks and Snowden matter not because they revealed new facts but because they destroyed the possibility of the socially necessary pretence of not-knowing.WikiLeaks / Snowden / public disavowal
asserts
Nixon was in measurable domestic-spending terms the most leftist American president; Reagan inaugurated the clown-master form of power.American presidential politics / structure of power
reframes
Politically correct linguistic substitutions (African-American, Native American) do not eliminate racism but merely displace it, often reproducing it in the very reformulation.political correctness / racism
asserts
The true ethical fiasco of our time is not those who openly advocate torture but those who accept it as a legitimate subject of debate.torture debate / Guantanamo / ethics
asserts
Lacan is fundamentally a comic, not a tragic, theorist; when things get really horrible, tragedy is a fake because it implies subjective dignity.Lacan / tragedy vs. comedy / psychoanalysis
Quotes 20
“when the Big Other is watching you, you cannot talk dirty.”Slavoj Žižek · inherent transgression / Big Other regulation of transgression
“if you violate the very rules of violation, as it were, the secret rituals which really sustains a community, you are much faster excluded than if you violate the explicit rules”Slavoj Žižek · inherent transgression as more binding than explicit rules
“the problem is not to learn rules. The problem is to learn higher-level secret rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules.”Slavoj Žižek · social integration requires learning meta-rules of transgression
“Real is ultimately totally immanent to the symbolic order as its own immanent impossibility.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian Real as formal immanence
“this image of trauma is the ultimate fantasy formation. It's to obfuscate what, precisely this purely formal game.”Slavoj Žižek · hard Real trauma is itself fantasy
“maybe reformism is today our greatest utopia.”Slavoj Žižek · reformism as the true impossible dream
“it's the Greeks who are on the side of cold pragmatic rationality. It's the big Western powers who are basically dreaming.”Slavoj Žižek · austerity politics as the real fantasy
“Today's figure of power: I appear as a total jerk and because of this I have power.”Slavoj Žižek · clown-master / post-dignified authority
“what you get when you see a face with Burka is precisely the true neighbour. Face is not covered, it's basically you see what is beneath the face: the horror.”Slavoj Žižek · face as mask / Burka reveals the neighbour
“Lacan is basically a comic theorist, I claim, which doesn't mean he is not talking about horrors.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan as fundamentally comic
“when things get really horrible, tragedy is a fake, because tragedy implies a certain subjective dignity.”Slavoj Žižek · comedy vs. tragedy in extremity
“I believe in theory, which means I don't accept that you look in dirty private secrets and then, 'ooh this is the true core of theory.'”Slavoj Žižek · autonomy of theory from biography
“the true ethical fiasco for me are those who even if they oppose [torture], accept it as a legitimate topic of a debate.”Slavoj Žižek · accepting a debate as ethical defeat
“we are ordered, enjoined to—we cannot pretend that we don't know it. And this is extremely important.”Slavoj Žižek · WikiLeaks destroys the performative disavowal
“For the oppressed, violence is always legal and legitimate, we just have to think well when to use it.”Slavoj Žižek · Udi Aloni's counter-formula on violence and legality
“hypocrisy is totally justified. There are situations when one should play the heroic role… But if there is a thing we can learn from Brecht is that the opposite also holds.”Slavoj Žižek · Brechtian case for strategic hypocrisy over heroic gesture
“Marx already. It's not that this scene as such was from the very beginning traumatic… It retroactively became a trauma.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution of trauma
“at the end of first Terminator… you get just mechanic head and just the light is still blinking. This is the subject, at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · Terminator as image of pure subject of drive
“no, I am not a Holocaust denier. Every time that someone at my table claims that there was no Holocaust, I oppose him.”Slavoj Žižek · Reagan normalising Holocaust denial while posing as opponent
“Marx struggles with this in that famous passage… the mystery is not how it was possible there, the mystery is why do we still enjoy it.”Slavoj Žižek · de-contextualisation and the autonomy of great art
Transcript 30 turns
unknown
I am
I am
Slavoj Žižek
honored that Jacqueline Rose is here, although I feel this as an extreme pressure, because where are now my dirty jokes, well? But I want to tell you something else, that it is much more complicated. Because I have written about this, I forgot where, I think in my last book Trouble in Paradise—I am not mentioning this to boast, but I like to repeat this. People say, oh, we live in a permissive society, everything is permitted. No, it is not. Look at the, you know the story, subtitle of the book Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism. The original subtitle was Communism after the End of History. They called me from Penguin and they told me, sorry, we are a big publisher, we cannot afford a book which has Communism in the title, you know. So that you do not get any illusions, you know. So what I want to say about this, when the Big Other is watching you, you cannot talk dirty. Maybe this is my old age, but with me it is more and more the exact opposite. Like, since I compulsively play a certain role, almost a clown, dirty jokes and so on, I noticed that I do this not as a, you know, secret joke when authority does not watch you, but only for the authority. You know what I mean? Like here to you, I can say, you know, like—I will not go into it what I can say, all the vulgar stuff, you know, like I will dig your mother out of her grave and screw her, whatever you want. But I say it publicly, but when I am in private, I feel kind of relieved, you know: my god, now finally I do not have to play that stupid role, I can be an ordinary decent person and so on. I love this. I think I do have in Trouble in Paradise a part of a chapter on this, how again the lesson of this, I think political very important one, is that what we experience as brutal transgressive behavior is not some kind of a private or secondary phenomenon, it is there that we are most tightly regulated by, whatever we call it, what Lacan calls Big Other, the system of social rules. That is to say, transgressions, fake transgressions, what I call inherent transgressions, transgressions which are part of the game, they do not limit—sorry, they do not violate the rules. On the—of course explicit rules are violated, but de facto they are the most tightly regulated part of it. I was told always when I visit different countries, from United States to China, I always ask my friends about this and I always get the same result. For example, okay, my big classic example that I quoted already ten times would have been: imagine a nice idyllic town in Old American South in 1920s, Ku Klux Klan and so on. Ku Klux Klan was publicly denied, but it was an inherent transgression. But my point is that, let us say the official ideology was Christian values, blah blah, whatever you want. Okay, weekend evening, we go out, we catch some black people, we rape women, we lynch the men and so on. This is not a violent transgression. This is even more than non-transgressive. This is, I would have said, this is the ultimate point of social identification. And I have noticed this phenomenon, it was described in many novels about the Old South, how a guy who is an honest, white, Christian, even a racist, but he finds this transgression too much. He does not want to participate in lynching and so on. He is excluded from community. That is what interests me. That is to say, if you violate the very rules of violation, as it were, the secret rituals which really sustains a community, you are much faster excluded than if you then—if you violate the explicit rules. Like you can, whatever, standard male chauvinist examples, you can cheat your wife, you can, I don't know, not be a good Christian, don't go to church, that is all okay. You know, to justify this you have all the stupid proverbs, you know, like "we are all human under our skin," "nobody is perfect," all that bullshit. But try not to participate in these secret rituals which keep a society together. And especially, somebody told me, you can correct me, I am not sure if it is true, that especially in British establishment, or at least the old academic standard establishment—I don't know how things are now—this was very important, this was one of the ways to defend the British class and national principle. You know, like in the times of the Empire, you get all those foreigners who come to study here, they may be rich sons of some Maharajas and so on, but they were of course secretly despised by British students. So they tried to learn the proper rituals, you know, how you should behave in English class society. And they succeeded. But the point is that they didn't learn how, what rules are made to be violated, where, you know, the true—when you want to enter a social system, whatever, I claim it goes from all levels, from a nation up to a family, the problem is not to learn rules. The problem is to learn higher-level secret rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules. Sorry, it is just somebody—you are allowed to interrupt me, and this is not an offer to be rejected, like. You have written quite a great deal about this, and it has always been really pervasive for me. So you are basically saying that in order to join a community you need to know what perverse jouissance is at stake in that community and you need to identify with that. Otherwise you will be excluded. But why not be excluded? Why not—can we just be excluded rather than identify with the—you know
honored that Jacqueline Rose is here, although I feel this as an extreme pressure, because where are now my dirty jokes, well? But I want to tell you something else, that it is much more complicated. Because I have written about this, I forgot where, I think in my last book Trouble in Paradise—I am not mentioning this to boast, but I like to repeat this. People say, oh, we live in a permissive society, everything is permitted. No, it is not. Look at the, you know the story, subtitle of the book Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism. The original subtitle was Communism after the End of History. They called me from Penguin and they told me, sorry, we are a big publisher, we cannot afford a book which has Communism in the title, you know. So that you do not get any illusions, you know. So what I want to say about this, when the Big Other is watching you, you cannot talk dirty. Maybe this is my old age, but with me it is more and more the exact opposite. Like, since I compulsively play a certain role, almost a clown, dirty jokes and so on, I noticed that I do this not as a, you know, secret joke when authority does not watch you, but only for the authority. You know what I mean? Like here to you, I can say, you know, like—I will not go into it what I can say, all the vulgar stuff, you know, like I will dig your mother out of her grave and screw her, whatever you want. But I say it publicly, but when I am in private, I feel kind of relieved, you know: my god, now finally I do not have to play that stupid role, I can be an ordinary decent person and so on. I love this. I think I do have in Trouble in Paradise a part of a chapter on this, how again the lesson of this, I think political very important one, is that what we experience as brutal transgressive behavior is not some kind of a private or secondary phenomenon, it is there that we are most tightly regulated by, whatever we call it, what Lacan calls Big Other, the system of social rules. That is to say, transgressions, fake transgressions, what I call inherent transgressions, transgressions which are part of the game, they do not limit—sorry, they do not violate the rules. On the—of course explicit rules are violated, but de facto they are the most tightly regulated part of it. I was told always when I visit different countries, from United States to China, I always ask my friends about this and I always get the same result. For example, okay, my big classic example that I quoted already ten times would have been: imagine a nice idyllic town in Old American South in 1920s, Ku Klux Klan and so on. Ku Klux Klan was publicly denied, but it was an inherent transgression. But my point is that, let us say the official ideology was Christian values, blah blah, whatever you want. Okay, weekend evening, we go out, we catch some black people, we rape women, we lynch the men and so on. This is not a violent transgression. This is even more than non-transgressive. This is, I would have said, this is the ultimate point of social identification. And I have noticed this phenomenon, it was described in many novels about the Old South, how a guy who is an honest, white, Christian, even a racist, but he finds this transgression too much. He does not want to participate in lynching and so on. He is excluded from community. That is what interests me. That is to say, if you violate the very rules of violation, as it were, the secret rituals which really sustains a community, you are much faster excluded than if you then—if you violate the explicit rules. Like you can, whatever, standard male chauvinist examples, you can cheat your wife, you can, I don't know, not be a good Christian, don't go to church, that is all okay. You know, to justify this you have all the stupid proverbs, you know, like "we are all human under our skin," "nobody is perfect," all that bullshit. But try not to participate in these secret rituals which keep a society together. And especially, somebody told me, you can correct me, I am not sure if it is true, that especially in British establishment, or at least the old academic standard establishment—I don't know how things are now—this was very important, this was one of the ways to defend the British class and national principle. You know, like in the times of the Empire, you get all those foreigners who come to study here, they may be rich sons of some Maharajas and so on, but they were of course secretly despised by British students. So they tried to learn the proper rituals, you know, how you should behave in English class society. And they succeeded. But the point is that they didn't learn how, what rules are made to be violated, where, you know, the true—when you want to enter a social system, whatever, I claim it goes from all levels, from a nation up to a family, the problem is not to learn rules. The problem is to learn higher-level secret rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules. Sorry, it is just somebody—you are allowed to interrupt me, and this is not an offer to be rejected, like. You have written quite a great deal about this, and it has always been really pervasive for me. So you are basically saying that in order to join a community you need to know what perverse jouissance is at stake in that community and you need to identify with that. Otherwise you will be excluded. But why not be excluded? Why not—can we just be excluded rather than identify with the—you know
unknown
why? Now I will accuse you.
why? Now I will accuse you.
Slavoj Žižek
Now you awaken in me the worst Marxist and Stalinist approach. It is easy
Now you awaken in me the worst Marxist and Stalinist approach. It is easy
unknown
to say to a—maybe you are, I am probably—well-standing white liberal and so on. But imagine someone who is existentially bound to a certain community and okay, it is nice to say excluded, but where—where to go, you know? Even, I will—look, it is a little bit like Greece,
to say to a—maybe you are, I am probably—well-standing white liberal and so on. But imagine someone who is existentially bound to a certain community and okay, it is nice to say excluded, but where—where to go, you know? Even, I will—look, it is a little bit like Greece,
Slavoj Žižek
you know. Sorry for making this, this is unfair. I am not entering at this Grexit, no? Many leftists
you know. Sorry for making this, this is unfair. I am not entering at this Grexit, no? Many leftists
unknown
are saying, why don't they proudly step out and screw Europe, you know. What does this mean? I had a big conflict at some international
are saying, why don't they proudly step out and screw Europe, you know. What does this mean? I had a big conflict at some international
Slavoj Žižek
conference with an old non-aligned left colonial, post-colonial theorist Samir Amin, and we started almost shouting with each other because his precisely—his line was delink, like opposite of linking, that these marginalized exploited European countries should step out of Europe, establish links among themselves and so on and so on. I mean, easy to say, delink. Okay, where to go then? The problem is that, first, with all the criticism that I have about European Union, of course, although again, did I tell you yesterday this? I learned through my Greek friends that there really is almost a love affair, not quite, I am not claiming that, between Alexis Tsipras and Angela Merkel. No, no, it is not a bad joke, that she told him she really is not the—I am not saying she is good, but she is not the bad spirit. She, the rumor is all around Greece, that she told him openly that if it were for her, she would immediately have made a deal with him, but that okay, that is her opportunism, that the moment she does this she is finished politically in Germany. She is under pressure of hardliners and so on and so on. Now even this I take it, how do you call it in Latin, cum grano salis. Because, you know, this is what people who are—this is, this can also be read as the nastiest way of how power functions. You know, like, probably although I still have a certain respect for Obama for what he did and for what he didn't do—he resisted attacking Iraq, he resisted Syria and so on—but, you know, I guess if you would tell to Obama, but why didn't you close down Guantanamo or this or that or blah blah, he would probably have told you something like Angela Merkel, you know. "Oh my god, I would love to do it, but you know," and either he would say "I am finished politically" or he would tell you, maybe he would even use some kind of a pseudo-Marxist theory and tell you, "you know it is not me as a person who rules here, these are those anonymous military-industrial structures and I am powerless against them" and so on and so on. So you see what I am saying, it is the same problem. It is easy for you to say this, but what if, for example, you are—a pathetic example, I am sorry—you are a student who both of us nonetheless, especially me, we are not, you know. But incidentally, I cannot resist it even if Jacqueline is here, this is how I answered a guy, feminist, who attacked me for—is this male chauvinism that I married a younger wife, that my wife is years younger than me. And my idea was—it was of course a bad taste joke, but I like to say—you should look things into a context. With age, the difference is getting smaller, you know. Like now I am she is But wait a little bit, when—when she will be I will be only you know. I mean, this was a great defense, I am sorry. Just to go on, yes. Imagine you are a young poor student, you barely were able to enroll in certain prestigious institute and so on. And if—to add pathetics—your parents were—were putting aside money from when you were young and blah blah, and then, you know what I—I would even say no, why step out? Remain in and brutally counter-attack. Here I think, sorry to tell you, hypocrisy is totally justified. There are situations when one should play the heroic role, you know, you tell the truth and so on. But if there is a thing we can learn from Brecht is that the opposite also holds, you know, because in this heroic outburst, "no," you know, you bare your breast, "I step out, shoot me, I don't care" and so on. I always find such gestures suspicious, you know, they are great gestures of personal affirmation and so on and so on, screw that, what does it do for the cause? You know. Okay, but let me nonetheless—ah, this may—sorry, then I will go—today you will hear a lot of theory, but the latest, I cannot resist. You are all of you now my Big Other, things really exist socially if I tell them to you. To amuse you, I found now one of the late attacks again repeated on me in my own country, Slovenia. And I am telling it to you just to—you will see what madness is possible today. It concerns—that was my line of association, the above-mentioned wife of mine, who is younger. So, the point is, this was not a joke. This was circulated as a serious charge against me in all this blogosphere in Slovenia of right-wingers: that I, that this proves that I am—which was an old accusation against me, which is total madness—very high in the hierarchy of Free Masons. If you are high in Freemasonry, another guy who is slightly lower, when you are old and approaching death, it is a duty of your Freemason colleagues to make your last years happy. So one of them who has a young daughter is obliged to give you his daughter as a wife or sexual slave or whatever, so that the last years are—your last years are happy. So I love this, it is seriously considered that that is how I got—my god, when you hear total vulgar stupidities like this, I tell to myself, life still has a meaning, you know. In the—and now you will say this is a ridiculous example. No, we live in weird times. I read, did you read about what is happening now? Maybe it is already calming down, but some two months ago it was serious, in the Southeast of United States. Did you read it? It is very interesting as an ideological phenomenon. There was a great outcry, the idea was this one: United States Army announced for this fall great military exercises in Texas, New Mexico, there. The rumor was this one: that these exercises are just a pretext to an operation in two steps planned by Obama, who we all know is a secret Muslim and enslaved to Putin and Chinese and so on. The idea is that, first, the army will occupy Texas, New Mexico and so on, and then this is the first step towards delivering these Southwestern states to China. And the proof is—I like this madness—that Michelle Obama when she visited Beijing promised this to the Chinese. So, and then I like how you just have a crazy hypothesis and then of course once you have the hypothesis, proofs explode all the time, no? How—it was total coincidence, but some big Walmart stores were closed down for purely economic reasons. Now these paranoiacs immediately started to claim that they are just emptying these big storage places of Walmart to prepare them for the Chinese units which will enter it. Now comes the really sad thing, the really dangerous thing, which is that, okay, you will say this is the maximum in crazy circumstances percent of the lunatic right. Then you have the, let's call it normal Republican majority. Texas has now a Republican governor and so on. What is really shameful is that none of the big Republican figures in those states was ready to clearly distance himself or herself from this, you know, just to say clearly, "this is madness." No, the Governor of Texas said something like—like, "we don't know if this is true," you know, like "I am not saying I believe it, but I understand the concern of the people." And he, the Governor of Texas, formally ordered the National Guard to monitor exercises, military. So now the National Guard in Texas will control the—will control the—the army exercises, to watch for if they will try to occupy Texas. We again, you know, it is easy to claim, oh, these are—these are just extreme points of madness and so on and so on. Yeah, but they are signs of some—Žižek? Yes. You said something in the first week, the first day—I must interrupt you immediately. Either you call me Slavoj by name—No, Žižek—but no, if you do "Žižek," it's a bad joke. Then please, Professor, Doctor and so on. What would you like me to call you, Doctor or Professor J? Personal friend, I don't take myself seriously. If you say Professor Žižek, I look back where is the professor, it's not me. Sorry, go on please. Um, you said in the first week, the first day, that capital is the Real, the Lacanian Real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we want to know, how do you intervene in the Lacanian Real? Do you do it through the symbolic? How do you do it? Ah, I will now give you a lesson. You are obviously an agent of Judith Butler here, who is my friend personally and so on, no? And again I made this point, but it's extremely important. I even used it in some stupid, you know, I think a couple of a month ago Guardian did an opinion poll of what is impossible to say and I used precisely this example. Namely, first, good things about Judith. The best part in her for me, I am sorry, best book—I say forget *Gender Trouble* and so on—her best book for me, the most Freudian one, is *The Psychic Life of Power*. She has there some one—you know, in a very refined way she describes how, for example, the—this basic in a precise Hegelian sense reflexivity of the Freudian unconscious, how for example the repression of desire turns into desire for repression and so on. And this is what Freud, what is the truly new thing, I am repeating myself now I know, by Freud. It's not that fake Lacanian poetry of "oh, desire impossible, it always eludes us" and so on and this pseudo-tragedy. Lacan is basically a comic theorist, I claim, which doesn't mean he is not talking about horrors. The whole lesson of psychoanalysis is that, you know my old point, why are all good films about Holocaust usually comedies? That when things get really horrible, tragedy is a fake, because tragedy implies a certain subjective dignity and so on. When things are really—like with all the respect, that's the—my recognition of the greatness of the book, Primo Levi's *If This Is a Man* is
conference with an old non-aligned left colonial, post-colonial theorist Samir Amin, and we started almost shouting with each other because his precisely—his line was delink, like opposite of linking, that these marginalized exploited European countries should step out of Europe, establish links among themselves and so on and so on. I mean, easy to say, delink. Okay, where to go then? The problem is that, first, with all the criticism that I have about European Union, of course, although again, did I tell you yesterday this? I learned through my Greek friends that there really is almost a love affair, not quite, I am not claiming that, between Alexis Tsipras and Angela Merkel. No, no, it is not a bad joke, that she told him she really is not the—I am not saying she is good, but she is not the bad spirit. She, the rumor is all around Greece, that she told him openly that if it were for her, she would immediately have made a deal with him, but that okay, that is her opportunism, that the moment she does this she is finished politically in Germany. She is under pressure of hardliners and so on and so on. Now even this I take it, how do you call it in Latin, cum grano salis. Because, you know, this is what people who are—this is, this can also be read as the nastiest way of how power functions. You know, like, probably although I still have a certain respect for Obama for what he did and for what he didn't do—he resisted attacking Iraq, he resisted Syria and so on—but, you know, I guess if you would tell to Obama, but why didn't you close down Guantanamo or this or that or blah blah, he would probably have told you something like Angela Merkel, you know. "Oh my god, I would love to do it, but you know," and either he would say "I am finished politically" or he would tell you, maybe he would even use some kind of a pseudo-Marxist theory and tell you, "you know it is not me as a person who rules here, these are those anonymous military-industrial structures and I am powerless against them" and so on and so on. So you see what I am saying, it is the same problem. It is easy for you to say this, but what if, for example, you are—a pathetic example, I am sorry—you are a student who both of us nonetheless, especially me, we are not, you know. But incidentally, I cannot resist it even if Jacqueline is here, this is how I answered a guy, feminist, who attacked me for—is this male chauvinism that I married a younger wife, that my wife is years younger than me. And my idea was—it was of course a bad taste joke, but I like to say—you should look things into a context. With age, the difference is getting smaller, you know. Like now I am she is But wait a little bit, when—when she will be I will be only you know. I mean, this was a great defense, I am sorry. Just to go on, yes. Imagine you are a young poor student, you barely were able to enroll in certain prestigious institute and so on. And if—to add pathetics—your parents were—were putting aside money from when you were young and blah blah, and then, you know what I—I would even say no, why step out? Remain in and brutally counter-attack. Here I think, sorry to tell you, hypocrisy is totally justified. There are situations when one should play the heroic role, you know, you tell the truth and so on. But if there is a thing we can learn from Brecht is that the opposite also holds, you know, because in this heroic outburst, "no," you know, you bare your breast, "I step out, shoot me, I don't care" and so on. I always find such gestures suspicious, you know, they are great gestures of personal affirmation and so on and so on, screw that, what does it do for the cause? You know. Okay, but let me nonetheless—ah, this may—sorry, then I will go—today you will hear a lot of theory, but the latest, I cannot resist. You are all of you now my Big Other, things really exist socially if I tell them to you. To amuse you, I found now one of the late attacks again repeated on me in my own country, Slovenia. And I am telling it to you just to—you will see what madness is possible today. It concerns—that was my line of association, the above-mentioned wife of mine, who is younger. So, the point is, this was not a joke. This was circulated as a serious charge against me in all this blogosphere in Slovenia of right-wingers: that I, that this proves that I am—which was an old accusation against me, which is total madness—very high in the hierarchy of Free Masons. If you are high in Freemasonry, another guy who is slightly lower, when you are old and approaching death, it is a duty of your Freemason colleagues to make your last years happy. So one of them who has a young daughter is obliged to give you his daughter as a wife or sexual slave or whatever, so that the last years are—your last years are happy. So I love this, it is seriously considered that that is how I got—my god, when you hear total vulgar stupidities like this, I tell to myself, life still has a meaning, you know. In the—and now you will say this is a ridiculous example. No, we live in weird times. I read, did you read about what is happening now? Maybe it is already calming down, but some two months ago it was serious, in the Southeast of United States. Did you read it? It is very interesting as an ideological phenomenon. There was a great outcry, the idea was this one: United States Army announced for this fall great military exercises in Texas, New Mexico, there. The rumor was this one: that these exercises are just a pretext to an operation in two steps planned by Obama, who we all know is a secret Muslim and enslaved to Putin and Chinese and so on. The idea is that, first, the army will occupy Texas, New Mexico and so on, and then this is the first step towards delivering these Southwestern states to China. And the proof is—I like this madness—that Michelle Obama when she visited Beijing promised this to the Chinese. So, and then I like how you just have a crazy hypothesis and then of course once you have the hypothesis, proofs explode all the time, no? How—it was total coincidence, but some big Walmart stores were closed down for purely economic reasons. Now these paranoiacs immediately started to claim that they are just emptying these big storage places of Walmart to prepare them for the Chinese units which will enter it. Now comes the really sad thing, the really dangerous thing, which is that, okay, you will say this is the maximum in crazy circumstances percent of the lunatic right. Then you have the, let's call it normal Republican majority. Texas has now a Republican governor and so on. What is really shameful is that none of the big Republican figures in those states was ready to clearly distance himself or herself from this, you know, just to say clearly, "this is madness." No, the Governor of Texas said something like—like, "we don't know if this is true," you know, like "I am not saying I believe it, but I understand the concern of the people." And he, the Governor of Texas, formally ordered the National Guard to monitor exercises, military. So now the National Guard in Texas will control the—will control the—the army exercises, to watch for if they will try to occupy Texas. We again, you know, it is easy to claim, oh, these are—these are just extreme points of madness and so on and so on. Yeah, but they are signs of some—Žižek? Yes. You said something in the first week, the first day—I must interrupt you immediately. Either you call me Slavoj by name—No, Žižek—but no, if you do "Žižek," it's a bad joke. Then please, Professor, Doctor and so on. What would you like me to call you, Doctor or Professor J? Personal friend, I don't take myself seriously. If you say Professor Žižek, I look back where is the professor, it's not me. Sorry, go on please. Um, you said in the first week, the first day, that capital is the Real, the Lacanian Real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we want to know, how do you intervene in the Lacanian Real? Do you do it through the symbolic? How do you do it? Ah, I will now give you a lesson. You are obviously an agent of Judith Butler here, who is my friend personally and so on, no? And again I made this point, but it's extremely important. I even used it in some stupid, you know, I think a couple of a month ago Guardian did an opinion poll of what is impossible to say and I used precisely this example. Namely, first, good things about Judith. The best part in her for me, I am sorry, best book—I say forget *Gender Trouble* and so on—her best book for me, the most Freudian one, is *The Psychic Life of Power*. She has there some one—you know, in a very refined way she describes how, for example, the—this basic in a precise Hegelian sense reflexivity of the Freudian unconscious, how for example the repression of desire turns into desire for repression and so on. And this is what Freud, what is the truly new thing, I am repeating myself now I know, by Freud. It's not that fake Lacanian poetry of "oh, desire impossible, it always eludes us" and so on and this pseudo-tragedy. Lacan is basically a comic theorist, I claim, which doesn't mean he is not talking about horrors. The whole lesson of psychoanalysis is that, you know my old point, why are all good films about Holocaust usually comedies? That when things get really horrible, tragedy is a fake, because tragedy implies a certain subjective dignity and so on. When things are really—like with all the respect, that's the—my recognition of the greatness of the book, Primo Levi's *If This Is a Man* is
unknown
almost
almost
Slavoj Žižek
a comical book. This is why it is of course one of the most terrifying books, you know. Because you know when he describes the—the—the—the—when he describes the so-called *Muselmänner*, "Muslims," the living dead there, it is almost a comical
a comical book. This is why it is of course one of the most terrifying books, you know. Because you know when he describes the—the—the—the—when he describes the so-called *Muselmänner*, "Muslims," the living dead there, it is almost a comical
unknown
description of puppets making gestures and
description of puppets making gestures and
Slavoj Žižek
that's what makes it horrible. But going back to Judith and that—this reflexivity and jouissance, Lacan's point is not that jouissance, you cannot get it, "oh, it always eludes you, the incestuous object," all that bullshit. It's the
that's what makes it horrible. But going back to Judith and that—this reflexivity and jouissance, Lacan's point is not that jouissance, you cannot get it, "oh, it always eludes you, the incestuous object," all that bullshit. It's the
unknown
problem is
problem is
Slavoj Žižek
precisely to read this together with its opposite. Jouissance, yes, is always out of reach, but at the same time we cannot
precisely to read this together with its opposite. Jouissance, yes, is always out of reach, but at the same time we cannot
unknown
ever get
ever get
Slavoj Žižek
rid of it. You know and that would be a very simplistic classic interpretation for Lacan, for example, and I know what I am talking about because I am the one obsessive—I mean, you have only to look three seconds at me, you see that I am an obsessive neurotic—of obsessive symptoms. You have some desire doing some perverse things, you don't dare to do it, so to protect yourself you construct some obsessive compulsive rituals. What happens is of course that these rituals themselves became a source of pleasure. You, in a perverse way, you enjoy them. So you know no matter how you want to get rid of it, you cannot. Now back to your point. Why are you a—Butler revisionist? I always had this conflict with Judith. I think it concerns the notion of the Real. If you understand the Real in this substantial way, something too strong out of the symbolic, it's really out there, then of course the problem is what can we do about it. But I claim two things. First that, and I developed this repeatedly in my books, that Real for Lacan is not substantial at its most radical. You know you should forget about all this shitty pseudo-Nietzschean poetry which to which Lacan himself—now I am doing a comradely criticism of Lacan himself—that's why I think his seminar on the ethics, Seminar it's sorry to speak as a Stalinist, is very dangerous, should be censored, should be—for proper Lacanians in my orthodox Stalinist Lacanian school should be—what I was talking about yesterday—accompanied by trigger warnings, you know, like "danger revisionism." Namely, the way he describes the subjective position, he, Lacan in Seminar of Antigone as that—transgressing the our normal symbolic universe and for a moment entering that terrifying domain of *ate*, "living death," which is what, which is too strong, it blinds us, too strong for we cannot confront it for a long time, you have to just pass through it and then you have to return with your hair white in five minutes or whatever and just tell something about the horrors you have seen there. I think that's why Lacan, as I have often written, in his next seminar which is much better on interpretation, analyzes Paul Claudel's great play *L'Otage*, "The Hostage," where precisely the main hero—heroine, Sygne de Coûfontaine is, I think, anti-Antigone. It's none of that. So what I want to say is that this I find it crucial that the Real at its innermost for Lacan, it's a purely formal entity. Imagine a certain space, let's call it a symbolic space, structured around a certain central impossibility. But this impossibility for Lacan does not have a positive cause. It's not some Real from outside which puts—it's a totally immanent structure of impossibility. And for Lacan, this is one of the ways to read his "non-all." Every symbolic space is structured around a certain impossibility. And this would be the ultimate Real, as it were. In and—so in other words, Real is ultimately totally immanent to the symbolic order as its own immanent impossibility. This is why this pseudo-Kantian, this is why I always claim that Lacan is a—in this great formal sense—Hegelian not Kantian. Because the Kantian reading is "the Real is the thing in itself, we cannot get it directly, it's always through our transcendental subjective perspective." No, for Hegel, precisely imagine a certain symbolic space, it has a Real. Its Real is again some purely formal distortion which prevents you to say it all or whatever. And Lacan goes even a step further here, that the Real which is usually taken as the Lacanian Real, "there must be some horrible thing out there that's too strong for us," is basically a fetishized secondary effect. In order to avoid this immanent obstacle which is purely formal, we imagine that there is some horrible thing out there, which is why as Freud puts it very nicely—ah, now you think I am bullshitting, but I will give you—which you know probably better than me—the ultimate example of it. Look at Freud's ultimate example of traumatic scene, a Real which cannot be symbolized blah blah, from Wolfman. You know, the Wolfman young who saw his father screwing his mother *a tergo* or whatever. Now Freud says something which is extremely important here, Freud already. It's not that this scene as such was from the very beginning traumatic. The young Wolfman when he saw this, he just registered it. He didn't know what to do about it, but there wasn't a trauma. It retroactively became a trauma when Wolfman was, I don't know, five, six years, and when he started to engage in all these sexual fantasies and so on. Then he, as it were, retreated from his neutral memory and elevated it into a trauma. So in other words, that's important. It's not just that we have fantasy formations obfuscating a trauma, "oh, some hardcore impossible to approach." It's also the contrary, that this idea that there is behind some firm Real trauma, that it—this image of trauma is the ultimate fantasy formation. It's to obfuscate what, precisely this purely formal game. And let me give you the ultimate example here, very simple one, I use it all the time, it's obvious to you also. Anti-Semitism. Here I am an old-fashioned Marxist. The Real of a society is its class antagonism, what twists it, distorts its space. And the basic operation of anti-Semitism is that precisely you construct an external Real, "the Jews," penetrating from outside, who—you see this same operation. What is just an immanent and—now you got the point, I repeat myself too much. But what I want to say now is that the moment you define the Real like this, it becomes clear how—and that's the whole point of Lacan, he's more of an optimist here—for Lacan, the whole point of psychoanalytic treatment is that through the symbolic we can affect the Real. And why? Because you can—I like to use the old-fashioned word—revolutionize, rearrange, restructure radically a symbolic field so that this Real, what was its structuring Real, disappears. Okay, there is another Real, blah blah blah, but that's another point. What I want to say here is that let me give you an example. I had now a friendly debate, at the end we agreed with Alain Badiou. He elevated the notion of equality, you know all these French political stupidities, I don't buy it, that what is impossible for capitalism, the axiom of emancipatory politics should be—he calls it the axiom of equality, unconditional demand for equality. I follow here Marx, who explicitly repeatedly emphasized that, shocking as it may appear, that equality is not the fundamental communist demand, that equality, of course it's a good thing, but it's still within the horizon of capitalist universe. This simple egalitarianism. Marx repeatedly claimed this. So what I want to say is this, that and then Alain Badiou immediately accepted this point that—I try to be very precise here—that, you know, if anything is proven by this Greek case and by many other examples, it's that what Badiou calls nicely the point of impossibility of a certain system need not be some big fundamental feature like equality. It can be something that—that's the trick of intelligent political action—it can be something quite minor, which may appear contingent, "okay, why not, let's do that." But effectively it's the point of impossibility. And that's how I claim social systems function. You think we can do this, we can do that? Yes, formally. But there are points which may appear totally innocent. But, you know, it's like—I like these examples. I found a good—sorry, I cannot resist it, my nature to make these crazy jumps around. Yesterday I was with my son in the greatest cultural institution for me and for my son in London, that shop on Shaftesbury Avenue, you know, Forbidden Planet. And I found there a subsection, alternate history science fiction books. You find wonderful things there. But I found another thing, which I like even more. You know usually when big classical works of art are popularized, what you do is you take a great classical myth or story, a Shakespeare play, a—Homer, whatever, you know—or an ancient myth, and you translate it into a contemporary story. You do a comic based on *Macbeth* or whatever, you know, all that stuff, no? But I found there a wonderful example of doing the opposite. You know that some idiot—and the bad thing is I am not tempting you to buy it because I looked a little bit into it, it doesn't live up to its concept, it's not executed as well as it could have been, but I found the idea wonderful. All six Star Wars movies are retold as Shakespearean tragedies, you know. In that blank verse, then Yoda said, "I will tell you the words of wisdom" and so on. And I—I found this a wonderful idea, no? You see, the other way around. Not "let's tell I don't know what Hamlet as an ordinary story," it can be done in a funny way. I don't know if you saw the movie for example, I think it's *Hamlet*, Denmark Corporation, I forgot which version where—where—where that actor, my god, Kyle MacLachlan, the Twin Peaks guy, is the evil king and I forgot who—not Ewan McGregor, another guy is Hamlet—which is set into today's New York, the state is a big multinational corporation called Denmark Corporation and so on. And it works nicely, but nonetheless I find this much more attractive to take a cheap contemporary narrative and elevate it into, you know, treat it as—as the tragedy. But, sorry, back to my main line. So this point of impossibility, yes. What you find—I found some good science fiction novels there, while my son was looking for manga and all that stuff, no—where you know I always love this topic. You enter a room and everything seems equal there. You have some buttons, some whatever. But then you discover too late that if you press some wrong button, everything disappears, like the walls start to crumble and so on and so on. This would be, let's say, the point of impossibility. And isn't democracy basically our type of predominant parliamentary democracy always structured like that? Yes, you can vote whatever you want, but better not vote in a certain way, no? It's like that button which will destroy everything. Doesn't this—doesn't this account for the nervousness—very vulgar example—of the Greek—sorry—of the Brussels bureaucracy? It is as if the Greeks, by putting it on referendum, pressed the wrong button. You know, like, "okay, we have democracy but not for that, sorry," you know. So, just to finish, so what—now I will tell you a story, you I hope don't know it because I use it in one of my early books, but it's the closest I came to a perfect metaphysical experience. I was staying in—in an apartment of a friend of mine in Paris. One winter, it was a cold wave, everything was cold, very cold, all frozen. I did—my god, I don't know why everything that happens to me has to be dirty in some way—I—I went to the toilet. At the end I simply flushed the toilet. And I pressed the wrong button. You know why? Later it was explained to me, because nobody used that apartment for three, four weeks, so the—how do you call it, drain pipes were frozen, broken. And by pressing this button, and before I washed my hands with hot water, of course some water was de-frozen and so it can be simply explained. But imagine an effect on me. I'm like a vulgar guy sitting on the toilet, hmm, I finished, I flush the toilet. Water runs into the toilet, okay. Then water started to drip from the roof, then water started to flow. In minutes, the whole apartment was—was like—like—like half a feet at least of water, total—and I really for a moment I had this metaphysical experience, you know. What happened? Am I in science fiction, you know? You press a small button, everything falls apart. Now this is the lesson here is political, I claim. Because the art of politics today, where at least for the time being we cannot—not we cannot afford, we always can afford it. This is incidentally my—the favorite saying of my Jewish friend Udi Aloni, who, you know this he invented a wonderful counter-attack to Simon Critchley's formula which is something about violence, that violence is never legal, like it's—but sometimes you have to do it, it doesn't go other way. And Udi Aloni's formula is to turn this around. For the oppressed, violence is always legal and legitimate, we just have to think well when to use it, you know, that's the problem. But okay, so what I wanted to say is that at this political level, the art of politics today I claim, as I repeat it all the time, sorry if I repeat myself a little bit, is not to—this is the—the catastrophic policy of the Greek Communist Party—KKE, how do they call themselves, the KKE? Yeah, yeah, I always—some people made this remark, it sounds a little bit obscene almost, you know, like something like—I prefer not to tell you all my dirty associations just with the name, you know. This is incidentally also my problem, although I'm part of it, with that boycott divestment movement, BDS. Okay, but my dirty association is some kind of hard sado-maso gay club or whatever, you know, whatever. Let's go on. KKE is simply waiting for the big radical moment, no? For them Syriza is a social-democratic fake, blah blah, we need a—okay, and they comfortably wait, no? And the result was, as I was told, that for example in the past they hated so much other close-to-them left that they quite often voted with New Democracy against PASOK. You know, just, you know, getting credit for the big moment. No, the art is what Syriza did. They didn't want a great dismantling of the system. They just want to press on a very—what appears a very small button, you know. Just a little bit rearrangement of the debt and so on, which is a totally—as I told you yesterday when—a totally rational, a totally rational demand. Because everybody knows Greek debt will not be paid, everybody knows—for example, the American debt will never be paid and so on, the debt of the United States and so on. So I always laugh when they tell—oh, this is one of—I lost the last of faith into him—Joschka Fischer, the ex-radical green then foreign minister, who wrote one of the most disgusting texts that I've seen politically, the title was "Tsipras in Dreamland." And you know it's all these vulgarities like, "oh, it's easy to be opposition, you dream, but now you face reality, you have to"—no, the tragedy is that the whole politics of austerity is based on a dream of—as we all know—pretend and extend and so on and so on. Now I am not a priori against in this sense dreams, fantasies, in this simple sense, because our whole economic system lives on them, our banking system, that something is in principle possible but it should remain just possible, you shouldn't actualize it, use it. But again, in the Greek case, no, it's the Greeks who are on the side of cold pragmatic rationality. It's the big Western powers who are basically dreaming. Why are they dreaming? Oh, because it's in their profit to dream. But what I want to say is that so again, this would have been for me a change precisely what you asked me, which a simple modest demand, "why don't we rearrange the debt a little bit," it touched the Real obviously. Or even, I'm sorry if I repeat this point but I think it's crucial, with all the justified criticism of Obama, with his campaign for—however it was then diluted or whatever—but his campaign for universal healthcare obviously touched some Real impossible of the American political imaginary. Which is why, as you probably noticed, he was even denounced at Supreme Court proclaimed a communist and so on, whatever you want, you know. Because why was it a good choice, I claim? Because nobody could say this is crazy communism. He could have said "wait a minute, many developed capitalist countries have this, Canada has it, most of Western Europe—okay, they are dismantling it but still at least Germany has it, Scandinavian countries have it and so on, some kind of universal—France definitely." But you see, in specific American ideological constellation, a demand for serious universal healthcare equals pushing that button. And this is also as—and this is the art of politics. You know, you don't say, "oh, we want communism," you know. This is why I find stupid some critics of Obama like Tariq Ali who are disappointed by him. Fuck them, what did they expect? That Obama will introduce socialism? Yeah. Okay, what comes next? I mean, in the sense as well this—the arrangement you mentioned but—is—is the big rearrangement of the symbolic possible only after some kind of period of endurance as—as—because I've read in a text for today by Slavoj about the role of endurance in psychoanalysis and so on. Oh how do you actually—well—how do—sorry, I didn't find—point out the question. Okay, sorry. I mean, maybe you should stand up and assume the—the role of people's leader and address—I was just asking what—what the next step might be in the—well on the Greek case or for the movement for example, so I mean—because to wait for the—for the big event, for the—rearrangement of symbolic would seem on the surface, object like the—KKE position, just to—wait for the big moment, but on the other hand what is some kind of rational way of preparing for? There is—no, no, it's very simple. The whole trick of these small steps is precisely that they appear small, but once you do it you have to go further and further and further. Could you say something about this refusal of the jouissance, this perverse jouissance, by refusing guilt? Refusing guilt was very important in your paper. Ah, yeah. No, I don't have a big theory there, but I will say something else. This although I don't like Éric Laurent, follower of Lacan who is one of the right-wingers now, to get—yeah, unfortunately. But he did—he wrote a nice text on—on political jouissance and racism, where he had a nice idea that for Lacan—that Lacan supplements Freud here. For Freud, we know the foundational gesture of a society is to kill the father, the dead father returns as a symbolic authority, blah blah, all that. But for Laurent claimed that—that the fundamental level of social science—of social identity is envy and to kill the ones who stand for excessive jouissance of the other, no? It—you can find it, just put it "Laurent jouissance racism," you get it immediately on—on the—on the web, you know. It's a nice theory. But nonetheless I would like, sorry to return to your point. So you see, I'm totally—my point is of course these modest points, like universal healthcare today, of course they are not really innocent. That's why you press the button, but that's what I like it as a political strategy. You pretend to be modest, "sorry, you can have your big companies, I just want a little bit of that." And then, you know, to do that you have to go on, you have to go on, and the art is to pick up the right moment. Even what I improvised about yesterday, we live in sad times where even—my god—to seriously fight slavery today will maybe become again a serious task. Because I claim that capitalism is approaching—entering a new epoch where, even if it's not formal slavery, some kind of de facto slavery—all those immigrant workers without a legal status, in third-world countries and outside in our country, people who are de facto enslaved are obviously becoming an inherent part of how our societies function more and more. So back to your point. What I am saying is that again, the moment you define the Real in this way, not only you can change the Real through the symbolic, but—but the Real is just a name for some inner obstacle, purely formal structural impossibility of the symbolic order. In this sense again, and with this political—so again, I don't see what's your problem. I agree with you—okay, I'll put it like this. Peter Hallward once in a friendly way attacked me claiming that I am politically inconsistent, that sometimes I—I advocate the politics of what I call ironically the politics of Bartleby, "I would prefer not to." Sometimes I appear like waiting for a big terrorist act and so on, big revolution, and sometimes modest measures. Well, my—my answer to this reproach is a simple one. What's the problem? It's like criticizing me for eating for lunch pizza and for evening hamburger or whatever, why not all of them? There are situations definitely when any engagement can hurt our cause, so the only proper thing to do is to withdraw, to—because, you know, my Austrian friend philosopher Robert Pfaller developed this in a very nice way claiming that today's pseudo-liberal open governments, that they often when they face a serious opponent practice what—I think correct me if I am wrong—in boxing, boxing sport, is called clinching, you know. You try to control the enemy by embracing him closely so that he cannot, no? And he called this in—you know, I find it so ironic that you have CLI, "clinching," because Bill Clinton was the great master of this strategy. I remember when there was in Seattle, Battle for Seattle, you remember? Big politicians were in, demonstrators outside. And of course Clinton did immediately the clinching. He said, "we must listen to the voice of those outside, invite them in, let's have a dialogue" and so on and so on. No, at that point the right thing was no dialogue. Why? Because to accept dialogue in those terms there would have meant—because the only language, that was also maybe the tragedy of September sorry, not September where the only dialogue was to bomb it, no no—sorry, not September but Occupy Wall Street. You know, it was just a negative gesture, saying no. But the only—if we were to accept dialogue, it would have meant—meant speaking the language of the enemy, because they would immediately have involved but, "okay, you want this, but which taxes should we raise, how we do it, who," you know, all of a sudden we would be involved in this pragmatic dialogue. And of course I'm not saying the opponents would be bluffing. Within the existing system this
rid of it. You know and that would be a very simplistic classic interpretation for Lacan, for example, and I know what I am talking about because I am the one obsessive—I mean, you have only to look three seconds at me, you see that I am an obsessive neurotic—of obsessive symptoms. You have some desire doing some perverse things, you don't dare to do it, so to protect yourself you construct some obsessive compulsive rituals. What happens is of course that these rituals themselves became a source of pleasure. You, in a perverse way, you enjoy them. So you know no matter how you want to get rid of it, you cannot. Now back to your point. Why are you a—Butler revisionist? I always had this conflict with Judith. I think it concerns the notion of the Real. If you understand the Real in this substantial way, something too strong out of the symbolic, it's really out there, then of course the problem is what can we do about it. But I claim two things. First that, and I developed this repeatedly in my books, that Real for Lacan is not substantial at its most radical. You know you should forget about all this shitty pseudo-Nietzschean poetry which to which Lacan himself—now I am doing a comradely criticism of Lacan himself—that's why I think his seminar on the ethics, Seminar it's sorry to speak as a Stalinist, is very dangerous, should be censored, should be—for proper Lacanians in my orthodox Stalinist Lacanian school should be—what I was talking about yesterday—accompanied by trigger warnings, you know, like "danger revisionism." Namely, the way he describes the subjective position, he, Lacan in Seminar of Antigone as that—transgressing the our normal symbolic universe and for a moment entering that terrifying domain of *ate*, "living death," which is what, which is too strong, it blinds us, too strong for we cannot confront it for a long time, you have to just pass through it and then you have to return with your hair white in five minutes or whatever and just tell something about the horrors you have seen there. I think that's why Lacan, as I have often written, in his next seminar which is much better on interpretation, analyzes Paul Claudel's great play *L'Otage*, "The Hostage," where precisely the main hero—heroine, Sygne de Coûfontaine is, I think, anti-Antigone. It's none of that. So what I want to say is that this I find it crucial that the Real at its innermost for Lacan, it's a purely formal entity. Imagine a certain space, let's call it a symbolic space, structured around a certain central impossibility. But this impossibility for Lacan does not have a positive cause. It's not some Real from outside which puts—it's a totally immanent structure of impossibility. And for Lacan, this is one of the ways to read his "non-all." Every symbolic space is structured around a certain impossibility. And this would be the ultimate Real, as it were. In and—so in other words, Real is ultimately totally immanent to the symbolic order as its own immanent impossibility. This is why this pseudo-Kantian, this is why I always claim that Lacan is a—in this great formal sense—Hegelian not Kantian. Because the Kantian reading is "the Real is the thing in itself, we cannot get it directly, it's always through our transcendental subjective perspective." No, for Hegel, precisely imagine a certain symbolic space, it has a Real. Its Real is again some purely formal distortion which prevents you to say it all or whatever. And Lacan goes even a step further here, that the Real which is usually taken as the Lacanian Real, "there must be some horrible thing out there that's too strong for us," is basically a fetishized secondary effect. In order to avoid this immanent obstacle which is purely formal, we imagine that there is some horrible thing out there, which is why as Freud puts it very nicely—ah, now you think I am bullshitting, but I will give you—which you know probably better than me—the ultimate example of it. Look at Freud's ultimate example of traumatic scene, a Real which cannot be symbolized blah blah, from Wolfman. You know, the Wolfman young who saw his father screwing his mother *a tergo* or whatever. Now Freud says something which is extremely important here, Freud already. It's not that this scene as such was from the very beginning traumatic. The young Wolfman when he saw this, he just registered it. He didn't know what to do about it, but there wasn't a trauma. It retroactively became a trauma when Wolfman was, I don't know, five, six years, and when he started to engage in all these sexual fantasies and so on. Then he, as it were, retreated from his neutral memory and elevated it into a trauma. So in other words, that's important. It's not just that we have fantasy formations obfuscating a trauma, "oh, some hardcore impossible to approach." It's also the contrary, that this idea that there is behind some firm Real trauma, that it—this image of trauma is the ultimate fantasy formation. It's to obfuscate what, precisely this purely formal game. And let me give you the ultimate example here, very simple one, I use it all the time, it's obvious to you also. Anti-Semitism. Here I am an old-fashioned Marxist. The Real of a society is its class antagonism, what twists it, distorts its space. And the basic operation of anti-Semitism is that precisely you construct an external Real, "the Jews," penetrating from outside, who—you see this same operation. What is just an immanent and—now you got the point, I repeat myself too much. But what I want to say now is that the moment you define the Real like this, it becomes clear how—and that's the whole point of Lacan, he's more of an optimist here—for Lacan, the whole point of psychoanalytic treatment is that through the symbolic we can affect the Real. And why? Because you can—I like to use the old-fashioned word—revolutionize, rearrange, restructure radically a symbolic field so that this Real, what was its structuring Real, disappears. Okay, there is another Real, blah blah blah, but that's another point. What I want to say here is that let me give you an example. I had now a friendly debate, at the end we agreed with Alain Badiou. He elevated the notion of equality, you know all these French political stupidities, I don't buy it, that what is impossible for capitalism, the axiom of emancipatory politics should be—he calls it the axiom of equality, unconditional demand for equality. I follow here Marx, who explicitly repeatedly emphasized that, shocking as it may appear, that equality is not the fundamental communist demand, that equality, of course it's a good thing, but it's still within the horizon of capitalist universe. This simple egalitarianism. Marx repeatedly claimed this. So what I want to say is this, that and then Alain Badiou immediately accepted this point that—I try to be very precise here—that, you know, if anything is proven by this Greek case and by many other examples, it's that what Badiou calls nicely the point of impossibility of a certain system need not be some big fundamental feature like equality. It can be something that—that's the trick of intelligent political action—it can be something quite minor, which may appear contingent, "okay, why not, let's do that." But effectively it's the point of impossibility. And that's how I claim social systems function. You think we can do this, we can do that? Yes, formally. But there are points which may appear totally innocent. But, you know, it's like—I like these examples. I found a good—sorry, I cannot resist it, my nature to make these crazy jumps around. Yesterday I was with my son in the greatest cultural institution for me and for my son in London, that shop on Shaftesbury Avenue, you know, Forbidden Planet. And I found there a subsection, alternate history science fiction books. You find wonderful things there. But I found another thing, which I like even more. You know usually when big classical works of art are popularized, what you do is you take a great classical myth or story, a Shakespeare play, a—Homer, whatever, you know—or an ancient myth, and you translate it into a contemporary story. You do a comic based on *Macbeth* or whatever, you know, all that stuff, no? But I found there a wonderful example of doing the opposite. You know that some idiot—and the bad thing is I am not tempting you to buy it because I looked a little bit into it, it doesn't live up to its concept, it's not executed as well as it could have been, but I found the idea wonderful. All six Star Wars movies are retold as Shakespearean tragedies, you know. In that blank verse, then Yoda said, "I will tell you the words of wisdom" and so on. And I—I found this a wonderful idea, no? You see, the other way around. Not "let's tell I don't know what Hamlet as an ordinary story," it can be done in a funny way. I don't know if you saw the movie for example, I think it's *Hamlet*, Denmark Corporation, I forgot which version where—where—where that actor, my god, Kyle MacLachlan, the Twin Peaks guy, is the evil king and I forgot who—not Ewan McGregor, another guy is Hamlet—which is set into today's New York, the state is a big multinational corporation called Denmark Corporation and so on. And it works nicely, but nonetheless I find this much more attractive to take a cheap contemporary narrative and elevate it into, you know, treat it as—as the tragedy. But, sorry, back to my main line. So this point of impossibility, yes. What you find—I found some good science fiction novels there, while my son was looking for manga and all that stuff, no—where you know I always love this topic. You enter a room and everything seems equal there. You have some buttons, some whatever. But then you discover too late that if you press some wrong button, everything disappears, like the walls start to crumble and so on and so on. This would be, let's say, the point of impossibility. And isn't democracy basically our type of predominant parliamentary democracy always structured like that? Yes, you can vote whatever you want, but better not vote in a certain way, no? It's like that button which will destroy everything. Doesn't this—doesn't this account for the nervousness—very vulgar example—of the Greek—sorry—of the Brussels bureaucracy? It is as if the Greeks, by putting it on referendum, pressed the wrong button. You know, like, "okay, we have democracy but not for that, sorry," you know. So, just to finish, so what—now I will tell you a story, you I hope don't know it because I use it in one of my early books, but it's the closest I came to a perfect metaphysical experience. I was staying in—in an apartment of a friend of mine in Paris. One winter, it was a cold wave, everything was cold, very cold, all frozen. I did—my god, I don't know why everything that happens to me has to be dirty in some way—I—I went to the toilet. At the end I simply flushed the toilet. And I pressed the wrong button. You know why? Later it was explained to me, because nobody used that apartment for three, four weeks, so the—how do you call it, drain pipes were frozen, broken. And by pressing this button, and before I washed my hands with hot water, of course some water was de-frozen and so it can be simply explained. But imagine an effect on me. I'm like a vulgar guy sitting on the toilet, hmm, I finished, I flush the toilet. Water runs into the toilet, okay. Then water started to drip from the roof, then water started to flow. In minutes, the whole apartment was—was like—like—like half a feet at least of water, total—and I really for a moment I had this metaphysical experience, you know. What happened? Am I in science fiction, you know? You press a small button, everything falls apart. Now this is the lesson here is political, I claim. Because the art of politics today, where at least for the time being we cannot—not we cannot afford, we always can afford it. This is incidentally my—the favorite saying of my Jewish friend Udi Aloni, who, you know this he invented a wonderful counter-attack to Simon Critchley's formula which is something about violence, that violence is never legal, like it's—but sometimes you have to do it, it doesn't go other way. And Udi Aloni's formula is to turn this around. For the oppressed, violence is always legal and legitimate, we just have to think well when to use it, you know, that's the problem. But okay, so what I wanted to say is that at this political level, the art of politics today I claim, as I repeat it all the time, sorry if I repeat myself a little bit, is not to—this is the—the catastrophic policy of the Greek Communist Party—KKE, how do they call themselves, the KKE? Yeah, yeah, I always—some people made this remark, it sounds a little bit obscene almost, you know, like something like—I prefer not to tell you all my dirty associations just with the name, you know. This is incidentally also my problem, although I'm part of it, with that boycott divestment movement, BDS. Okay, but my dirty association is some kind of hard sado-maso gay club or whatever, you know, whatever. Let's go on. KKE is simply waiting for the big radical moment, no? For them Syriza is a social-democratic fake, blah blah, we need a—okay, and they comfortably wait, no? And the result was, as I was told, that for example in the past they hated so much other close-to-them left that they quite often voted with New Democracy against PASOK. You know, just, you know, getting credit for the big moment. No, the art is what Syriza did. They didn't want a great dismantling of the system. They just want to press on a very—what appears a very small button, you know. Just a little bit rearrangement of the debt and so on, which is a totally—as I told you yesterday when—a totally rational, a totally rational demand. Because everybody knows Greek debt will not be paid, everybody knows—for example, the American debt will never be paid and so on, the debt of the United States and so on. So I always laugh when they tell—oh, this is one of—I lost the last of faith into him—Joschka Fischer, the ex-radical green then foreign minister, who wrote one of the most disgusting texts that I've seen politically, the title was "Tsipras in Dreamland." And you know it's all these vulgarities like, "oh, it's easy to be opposition, you dream, but now you face reality, you have to"—no, the tragedy is that the whole politics of austerity is based on a dream of—as we all know—pretend and extend and so on and so on. Now I am not a priori against in this sense dreams, fantasies, in this simple sense, because our whole economic system lives on them, our banking system, that something is in principle possible but it should remain just possible, you shouldn't actualize it, use it. But again, in the Greek case, no, it's the Greeks who are on the side of cold pragmatic rationality. It's the big Western powers who are basically dreaming. Why are they dreaming? Oh, because it's in their profit to dream. But what I want to say is that so again, this would have been for me a change precisely what you asked me, which a simple modest demand, "why don't we rearrange the debt a little bit," it touched the Real obviously. Or even, I'm sorry if I repeat this point but I think it's crucial, with all the justified criticism of Obama, with his campaign for—however it was then diluted or whatever—but his campaign for universal healthcare obviously touched some Real impossible of the American political imaginary. Which is why, as you probably noticed, he was even denounced at Supreme Court proclaimed a communist and so on, whatever you want, you know. Because why was it a good choice, I claim? Because nobody could say this is crazy communism. He could have said "wait a minute, many developed capitalist countries have this, Canada has it, most of Western Europe—okay, they are dismantling it but still at least Germany has it, Scandinavian countries have it and so on, some kind of universal—France definitely." But you see, in specific American ideological constellation, a demand for serious universal healthcare equals pushing that button. And this is also as—and this is the art of politics. You know, you don't say, "oh, we want communism," you know. This is why I find stupid some critics of Obama like Tariq Ali who are disappointed by him. Fuck them, what did they expect? That Obama will introduce socialism? Yeah. Okay, what comes next? I mean, in the sense as well this—the arrangement you mentioned but—is—is the big rearrangement of the symbolic possible only after some kind of period of endurance as—as—because I've read in a text for today by Slavoj about the role of endurance in psychoanalysis and so on. Oh how do you actually—well—how do—sorry, I didn't find—point out the question. Okay, sorry. I mean, maybe you should stand up and assume the—the role of people's leader and address—I was just asking what—what the next step might be in the—well on the Greek case or for the movement for example, so I mean—because to wait for the—for the big event, for the—rearrangement of symbolic would seem on the surface, object like the—KKE position, just to—wait for the big moment, but on the other hand what is some kind of rational way of preparing for? There is—no, no, it's very simple. The whole trick of these small steps is precisely that they appear small, but once you do it you have to go further and further and further. Could you say something about this refusal of the jouissance, this perverse jouissance, by refusing guilt? Refusing guilt was very important in your paper. Ah, yeah. No, I don't have a big theory there, but I will say something else. This although I don't like Éric Laurent, follower of Lacan who is one of the right-wingers now, to get—yeah, unfortunately. But he did—he wrote a nice text on—on political jouissance and racism, where he had a nice idea that for Lacan—that Lacan supplements Freud here. For Freud, we know the foundational gesture of a society is to kill the father, the dead father returns as a symbolic authority, blah blah, all that. But for Laurent claimed that—that the fundamental level of social science—of social identity is envy and to kill the ones who stand for excessive jouissance of the other, no? It—you can find it, just put it "Laurent jouissance racism," you get it immediately on—on the—on the web, you know. It's a nice theory. But nonetheless I would like, sorry to return to your point. So you see, I'm totally—my point is of course these modest points, like universal healthcare today, of course they are not really innocent. That's why you press the button, but that's what I like it as a political strategy. You pretend to be modest, "sorry, you can have your big companies, I just want a little bit of that." And then, you know, to do that you have to go on, you have to go on, and the art is to pick up the right moment. Even what I improvised about yesterday, we live in sad times where even—my god—to seriously fight slavery today will maybe become again a serious task. Because I claim that capitalism is approaching—entering a new epoch where, even if it's not formal slavery, some kind of de facto slavery—all those immigrant workers without a legal status, in third-world countries and outside in our country, people who are de facto enslaved are obviously becoming an inherent part of how our societies function more and more. So back to your point. What I am saying is that again, the moment you define the Real in this way, not only you can change the Real through the symbolic, but—but the Real is just a name for some inner obstacle, purely formal structural impossibility of the symbolic order. In this sense again, and with this political—so again, I don't see what's your problem. I agree with you—okay, I'll put it like this. Peter Hallward once in a friendly way attacked me claiming that I am politically inconsistent, that sometimes I—I advocate the politics of what I call ironically the politics of Bartleby, "I would prefer not to." Sometimes I appear like waiting for a big terrorist act and so on, big revolution, and sometimes modest measures. Well, my—my answer to this reproach is a simple one. What's the problem? It's like criticizing me for eating for lunch pizza and for evening hamburger or whatever, why not all of them? There are situations definitely when any engagement can hurt our cause, so the only proper thing to do is to withdraw, to—because, you know, my Austrian friend philosopher Robert Pfaller developed this in a very nice way claiming that today's pseudo-liberal open governments, that they often when they face a serious opponent practice what—I think correct me if I am wrong—in boxing, boxing sport, is called clinching, you know. You try to control the enemy by embracing him closely so that he cannot, no? And he called this in—you know, I find it so ironic that you have CLI, "clinching," because Bill Clinton was the great master of this strategy. I remember when there was in Seattle, Battle for Seattle, you remember? Big politicians were in, demonstrators outside. And of course Clinton did immediately the clinching. He said, "we must listen to the voice of those outside, invite them in, let's have a dialogue" and so on and so on. No, at that point the right thing was no dialogue. Why? Because to accept dialogue in those terms there would have meant—because the only language, that was also maybe the tragedy of September sorry, not September where the only dialogue was to bomb it, no no—sorry, not September but Occupy Wall Street. You know, it was just a negative gesture, saying no. But the only—if we were to accept dialogue, it would have meant—meant speaking the language of the enemy, because they would immediately have involved but, "okay, you want this, but which taxes should we raise, how we do it, who," you know, all of a sudden we would be involved in this pragmatic dialogue. And of course I'm not saying the opponents would be bluffing. Within the existing system this
unknown
is a problem. So again, one strategy is to know when not to act. And when my—then my pseudo—my liberal friends when they tell me "what about your dreams of terror, total revolution," you know, "isn't the politics of appeasement, slow reforms, the only viable one?" I said no, even you would admit it, there are clearly situations where you should fight brutally to the end. This—I always rejected abstract pacifism. If nothing else, I tell them: imagine World War Two. What you would have said? "No, we should not get in, we should
is a problem. So again, one strategy is to know when not to act. And when my—then my pseudo—my liberal friends when they tell me "what about your dreams of terror, total revolution," you know, "isn't the politics of appeasement, slow reforms, the only viable one?" I said no, even you would admit it, there are clearly situations where you should fight brutally to the end. This—I always rejected abstract pacifism. If nothing else, I tell them: imagine World War Two. What you would have said? "No, we should not get in, we should
Slavoj Žižek
not make it like Hitler, if we just fight Hitler, we are becoming like Hitler," you know this would be this shitty logic. "If we just fight Hitler, we are becoming like
not make it like Hitler, if we just fight Hitler, we are becoming like Hitler," you know this would be this shitty logic. "If we just fight Hitler, we are becoming like
unknown
Hitler." Yes, we should become even worse! Not in the terms of—but in the terms of even more violent, do it. Here I have great doubts about George Orwell by his overall vision, but here he was right when he said no, the main task now is not
Hitler." Yes, we should become even worse! Not in the terms of—but in the terms of even more violent, do it. Here I have great doubts about George Orwell by his overall vision, but here he was right when he said no, the main task now is not
unknown
peace, it's to destroy fascism with all—so there are—there are moments for radical action and there are moments for these concrete small steps. What is important when you do these small steps is—to be ready for the next step, where things will get more—more
peace, it's to destroy fascism with all—so there are—there are moments for radical action and there are moments for these concrete small steps. What is important when you do these small steps is—to be ready for the next step, where things will get more—more
unknown
complicated, no? And now—now comes the big metaphysical question, if this was your point. Now you will tell me, "okay, but then
complicated, no? And now—now comes the big metaphysical question, if this was your point. Now you will tell me, "okay, but then
Slavoj Žižek
why don't simply shouldn't we call it this good social-democratic reformism, step by step, step by step?" Because I would put it like this: I would have been for it
why don't simply shouldn't we call it this good social-democratic reformism, step by step, step by step?" Because I would put it like this: I would have been for it
unknown
totally if there
totally if there
Slavoj Žižek
were to be a chance that this really works. But I am too much of a pessimist. I claim that, and I quote here Alberto Toscano, the Historical Materialism guy, who—I don't always agree with him,
were to be a chance that this really works. But I am too much of a pessimist. I claim that, and I quote here Alberto Toscano, the Historical Materialism guy, who—I don't always agree with him,
unknown
but he said something
but he said something
Slavoj Žižek
very nicely. He said maybe reformism is today our greatest utopia, you know that we can just slowly reform it and so on. I claim that in the long term the global system cannot really afford even modest reforms. That's the point that I made yesterday about how if you look at what Syriza demanded, it's my god, measured with 1960s, it's much more modest than Swedish social democracy. It's very mainstream. But obviously we live in times where even to do an extremely modest social-democratic politics you are denounced and not just denounced, in a way you are a radical leftist. So you see my position here. I don't have any dreams big revolution. My communism is based on pessimism. I don't think that the state of things that we live in can go on indefinitely. I claim that at different levels, from ecology to now even international politics and so on, we are gradually approaching a dead end. So it's not the point that things are going on so-so and then I'm a madman who says who wants too much. No, things will go on and on even more. But allow me nonetheless now to move to the main point, because I speak too much. First, yesterday I promised you to do a little bit of—signification, China, religion. Heidegger. Yeah, Heidegger will come now. The problem with China and religion is that they confirmed to me, maybe they lied, I don't know, from London Review of Books that the text will appear there, today, tomorrow or this week, I don't know when, in the next issue, that my text will be in and also available for free on the web. So fuck it, I mean, read it there if you want to, you know. So I let's not lose time with that. Okay, before I go on to—to Heidegger and Stalinism, and we will go on with this tomorrow, I just wanted to point out—but again maybe I will give—I will distribute this to you at the end, I mean as a text. What really intrigued me—I wasn't just joking when I began with this, you know, "publicly I say fuck your mother in her grave, privately I'm a decent guy" and so on. I think that there is something in the structure of today's power which works like that. And I follow here Lacan who—and Badiou who read in this way, you know Jean Genet, his play *The Balcony*, *Le Balcon*. That's the basic—the importance of that play, it's more actual today than it was, is that it detected how in our so-called permissive societies the role of mask—mask not in this superficial sense of I have a mask of—mask in the sense of insignia of power. Mask in the sense of the elementary structure of castration. Don't be afraid. Don't take this as some big obscure point. By castration I mean simply castration phallic signifier, which I mean that phallic signifier is the signifier of castration. Let me explain it briefly, but then I will go on. You know Lacan's idea, I read it in a very simple way. Let's say, how do you become in traditional society a person of authority? Through a ritual of investiture, where you get some insignia. King gets a crown or whatever, you get as a stupid Oxford professor, whatever. But the catch is the—and that would be for Lacan the castrating dimension—that there is always a gap between that insignia and what you, to put it naively, effectively are in your stupid immediate identity. As we say, a king may be a dirty stupid coward, the moment he puts on the insignia, it's the state, the authority which speaks through him. But the catch is that there is again always a decenteredment here. You know, I am not directly my insignia. To exert authority you have to be castrated, castrated in this minimal sense that it's not me, is this radical alienation, my power is out there in the insignia. Okay, and the point developed already by Lacan in his reading of Genet's play—I don't know for sure in which seminar—and then Badiou in his nice short book *Pornography of the Present*, he develops this is that today's power functions in a—tends to function—we are not yet there, but we move towards a different functioning where the master does not rule, the figure of authority through his, her insignia covering up his weaknesses or her, you know. No, it's that the mask you wear it's precisely what I ironically referred to with regard to myself, "I'll dig your mother out of the grave," I display all my obscenity, weaknesses and so on, and paradoxically in this way I retain all my power. And it's precisely this open acknowledgment of "I am human like you, let's share some dirty joke" which, far from undermining my authority, strengthens it even more. This is today's typical boss in these postmodern digital companies. It's no longer a boss who demands you to wear a tie, properly dressed. No, it's a boss who comes to you, "what did you do yesterday evening, did you have a good fuck," all that comradely apparently approach, but you know through all this, not only he retains his authority, but even worse, his authority becomes even more unassailable, as it were. Because in this way when he acts as if he is your colleague, if you attack him he can play that "oh my god, why did you do it to me, aren't we friends" and so on and so on. So again, the structure of power where the figure of the master openly displays all its human, more or less openly all its human weaknesses, plays a clown, makes fun of himself and so on, but loses none of his or her real power. This displaying of the human side, the appearance of the figure of a master as stupid, confused and so on, not only—you know, that would be the nice point—the traditional structure of power, I'll put it like this, has the structure of fetishist disavowal. Let's say I would be a king and you look at me and you say "that crazy guy with all his tics, he is just a jerk." But you would say "nonetheless he is a king." So I know very well that this guy is an ordinary jerk, but nonetheless he occupies the position of authority, he is—he has authority. In today's figure of power more and more, it's no longer "I know very well but," the "but" disappears, it's "I appear as a total jerk and because of this I have power." It's precisely this, as it were, human side that—this open display of human side, which incidentally the relations are here much more complex. Already with the traditional figure of authority, the so-called human weaknesses functions as something that sustains power. You know where I—maybe you know this old example of mine—you know where I discovered this? You know I really hate this, in—when you publish a book, sometimes publishers ask you to put on the last page, you know where you are described blah blah, some personal features, you know, like I remember Patricia Highsmith, my favorite detective writer. Usually they add "In her free time Miss Highsmith, I don't know, grows tulips and—and eats snails," her apartment was full of snails incidentally. So you add some personal features, no? And I claim that this humanization is a fake, it's the ultimate fake. You know, like, I claim that one way to undermine power would have been precisely to force the figure of power to enact his or her whole monstrosity, none of this "but in my private life I listen to pop music, I like Star Wars movies," whatever. No, you should live up to the level of monstrosity that is power. Which incidentally I tried to do once—maybe you know this story, I like it, it's so dirty—when a publisher asked me could I add those two lines, you know, what I do in my free time, blah blah, no? And of course, don't be afraid, it's a lie. But I liked it as a provocation to demonstrate the fake of it. I—what I wrote is "In his free time Professor Žižek is teaching his small son pedophilia and is torturing cats slowly to death" and so on, no? And they exploded of course, but I told them of course I am not doing it, but that's your logic, you know. My god, I don't play this game of—and here I—I'm sorry if I repeat this story, here I appreciate Lacan, Jacques Lacan. Because I'm sorry if you know the story but it's a crucial one, subjectively. All the people around Lacan when he was still alive were bothered by this, you know, Lacan was even more of a clown that—than myself, although this is maybe difficult to imagine. He was playing a certain role in public, strictly codified. And of course all people wanted to know but tell me how is he in private. No, the idea was to discover—this is our stupidest, most disgusting humanist desire that "you know, don't worry, in private he is a good warm guy like ourselves." I asked many people about this who knew Lacan from close and I don't know if it's true, but they all told me the same story: that it was monstrous. In private he was exactly the same as in public. You never got him at his "oh I am just an ordinary guy," always these arrogant mannerisms and so on and so on. I—I find this a wonderful gesture, you know, that he refused to play—I claim that this gesture is much more anti-authoritarian than this gesture when you know the great king, you meet him in private and you discover, oh my god, he has some small weaknesses and so on and so on. This is why, what's the lesson from this? The lesson is a very simple one. It's that—and incidentally if you want to get at this, I propose you to read two works of art which I really like. One is of course Shakespeare's—I much prefer it to *Richard III*—*Richard II*. It's all about the king being divested of symbolic insignia and what you get. And the second one, please read it, although he is a disgusting reactionary at the end, it turned out to be as a poet, Friedrich Schiller—you get it for free, a good English translation on the web—*Don Carlos*, where the tragic figure of the king is precisely—his tragedy is precisely he wants to have a friend, not to be treated just as a king, and then okay, everything goes wrong and so on and so on. So incidentally at the end of *Don Carlos*, Schiller's play, you have a figure of the Inquisitor entering, which is I think ingenious. It's the first figure of modern post-patriarchal functioning of power. It's a blind old guy who is just pure knowledge, not a master, but the proto-model of totalitarian power. So what I want to say is that again something is changing fundamentally in the structure of power that you can find this even—I am sorry if you know some of you this point, I repeat it—it's how American presidents function. I don't like Oliver Stone's movies too much, and it will surprise you to learn which is nonetheless my favorite of his films: *Nixon*, with Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon. Because it's not simply an anti-Nixon movie. He treats Nixon as the last genuinely tragic president. He wanted to be a serious authority but he got corrupted and so on. And incidentally, you know that if you look at cold data, Nixon wasn't—listen, he did conclude—he did open up relations with China, he did conclude this in Vietnam, and if you look at Nixon's inner politics, every American Marxist will tell you, if you measure leftist politics in a vulgar way—how much did he raise money for education, healthcare services, all that bullshit—then you know that Nixon is the most leftist president. Already Jimmy Carter, who was basically a good guy, because of economic circumstances has to reduce benefits a little bit. But Nixon in this sense was still a figure of authority who broke down a tragic person. Carter is something special, but with Reagan we have a different logic, self-mocking becomes a rule, we have—Reagan was tragically the first clown president. And I mean it. I remember, look, it was unthinkable before Ronald Reagan. I remember at some press conference he gave, very few of them because he usually made stupid mistakes, you know. But at one conference, I remember, he was asked some specific point by a journalist and his answer was, "please don't ask me that, you know that I am too stupid to answer that question" and so on. You know, this self-mocking was part of his image. Which is why I remember I was at that point in the States when Reagan gave some speech, it was the big sport of all mainstream liberal media to attack him, and they even composed lists of his mistakes. And the result was his popularity grew. It was strictly this undignified, you know, stupid—it just helped him. It just helped him. And all this he made so many mistakes which precisely maybe provided means to have an—a vulgar identity: "oh he is ultimately vulgar like us" and so on. For example, I hope you don't yet know this story, in the past I often used it. I heard a press conference when he was asked, "is it true that—that you invite some Holocaust deniers for dinner at your table?" And Reagan gave an ingenious answer. He says, "no, I am not a Holocaust denier. Every time that someone at my table claims that there was no Holocaust, I oppose him." Okay, the obvious question: what kind of friends does he have if he has all the time to argue, you know. But again, it was—you know who really began with this is somebody here you are Brazil close, Argentina, Carlos Menem, even before, no, he played this totally undignified role. And I think this is maybe the most dangerous form of power. That's why I always claim that we are approaching a kind of a post-democratic system, but that it will not be a new Hitler, Stalin with dignity. It will be more kind of a Berlusconi type, you know, the guy who—I mean, I spoke with some journalist from—I don't know where, it was even when I was still friends with them, Guardian, who told me that two days ago he was in Rome speaking with Berlusconi. And you know, if Berlusconi were to be a dignified president, he would insist to talk only about big political issues. No, the first thing Berlusconi told him was "did you hear about that Bunga Bunga, you know that I organized, do you want to see the Bunga Bunga room" and so on, you know. You know this is what I definitely don't like. I here agree with Judith Butler who said that the most—he speaks here about—although she is not usually a feminist, a feminist emancipation that the way to deal today with male chauvinists is precisely to force them to openly acknowledge their authority. Because a typical male chauvinist today still asks a woman to do everything, but he pretends "oh but we are friends, equal" and so on and so on, no? The first feminist gesture is not to directly attack the man but to say "fuck you, we are not equal, so please act as what you really think you are, act as a master," no? Why is this an intelligent strategy? Because of the predominant ideology today, this is almost impossible. No masters wants to be openly a master. You know, we have secret masters. Stalin began with this, it is deeply significant that Stalin never acted as a master. Stalin acted as—even a moderate one among and so on, but it's a nice detail: privately his inner circle called him, if some of you know Russian, *Khozyain*, which is the Russian everyday term for master. But you see, it has to be repressed this point. So again, I am sorry we have no time to get—no I will say cynically, I take well care that we have no time since I talk too much. Okay, but so what I wanted to say is a couple of—things here, you know what? Let's do it with this stupid Heidegger stuff. I will add it to the list that I will send it to—say something because some people—but it's so boring, because—that's why I postpone it so much because it's so—okay, I will say something. But it's so self-evident. On the one—okay, I will give you just the history of the scandal. You know it's a scandal, how they now gradually are publishing so-called *Schwarze Hefte*, black notes, black notebooks by Heidegger, which were his private half-theoretical reflections notes. It will be a couple of volumes, each, it's from I think late 20s till late 50s, I don't know, spans all the time. The interesting thing which is ambiguous to read is why did Heidegger do it? Why—sorry, let me just finish something about the mask, then I will go on to Heidegger. It's important. You know what I want to say can be nicely—I developed this in one of my books—explained by the paradox of, how do you say it in English, what do Muslim women who want to or are ordered to do it wear, Burka, Burka? Okay, whatever, we know what it is. Why when I was in France, I was at some public debate small and I was surprised at how some French women—let's call them right-wing feminists—reacted in a panic towards it. They said that they are against it not only because they think that it oppressed Muslim women—we are even simple—but they said that they feel threatened by that. That it is as if you encounter a neighbor and by wearing veil, just the slit for eyes, it's as if you are encountering a monster who appears as an alien, doesn't want contact with you. So that's already the first interesting point. They began with "we want to protect the rights of Muslim women," they end up with "we are afraid, we feel threatened." And I did a simple analysis of what are they really afraid of. I claim it's the exact opposite of what they are claiming. It's not the mask, it's—they are well aware in practice they know that Levinas was wrong. They know that there is ultimately nothing authentic about human face. Human face as such is a mask, is the biggest embodied lie. This is why I will give you an empirical proof, proof okay, indication—this is why it's crucial for psychoanalysis that the patient and the analyst don't look into each other face to face. Because face to face introduces some kind of human communications where basically two ideal egos are communicating. Face—what does a face mask? Human face. The horror of what in Judeo-Christian tradition we call neighbor. This abyss of the other. And I claim that that's the paradox, that I quote when I wrote about it, I quote a nice line from Alphonse Allais. It's a French from the turn of the previous century satirical writer who had some ingenious Hegelian Lacanian ideas like—you know the best one that I often quote is that is that of Alphonse Allais is that for example it's very important it concerns precisely a mask, once in a restaurant he pointed at a woman and he started to shout at her, "look, what a shame, beneath her dress she is totally naked," you know. Absolutely correct point theoretically, no? And so Alphonse Allais had this idea that you have the dance of seven veils, Salomé. And then she takes off her dressing and then when she is naked, that the king, what was it Herod or I don't know which king, shouts "further, further," so she has to pull off her skin and so on, and in a way not physically, Herod was right: your skin, your surface is still a mask. And I claim that what you get when you see a face with Burka is precisely the true neighbor. Face is not covered, it's basically you see what is beneath the face: the horror. Because that's for Lacan, even for Hegel, a true subjectivity. The stupid face you laugh hypocritically as we are, it's a mask. It's just that you know when you have a Burka you are afraid of what is behind. Yes, but behind it's not a face, it's something much more horrible. And let me give you an empirical proof. What I did with my small son because I am a crazy evil father. Once I approached him with a mask on. He was afraid. I put the mask off—"ah, it's just your stupid dad," okay. Then comes the crucial point: I put the mask back on, he was afraid again. Although he knew very well that it's just his stupid dad behind. In a way he was afraid, when you put the mask on you open a space, an abyss behind the mask, which is not simply the stupid reality of. No, when you put the mask on, you can precisely see what is behind the mask of your space. This is I think the panic of against Burka. It's not "oh we want to be open communicating with each other," it's quite on the contrary, we want to go on with our hypocrisy. We are afraid of the neighbor, which is who is there. And again my son was also right: the evil subject, it's like you know whenever people ask me give me an image from cinema of pure subject, I tell them—and unfortunately the last one is total flop, this is one of my secret private pleasures to watch Bojo box office and all those, you know, hits—how many you know that Terminator, the last one earned only million which is ridiculously low, but at the end of first Terminator, the first one. You remember at the end when the Terminator figure is almost totally destroyed, just metal and you get just mechanic head and just the light is still blinking. This is the subject, at its purest. And it has—goes on, it moves on. This would be the pure subject of drive, where all self, self in the sense of self-presentation and so on is erased. And incidentally this is almost the only good thing I think James Cameron did, in my universe frankly, *Avatar* would have been prohibited, burned publicly. I claim that Goebbels did a horrible thing by burning books. But maybe this is my cynical version of: when you throw out the dirty water you shouldn't throw out the baby also, you know. But maybe he had the right principle, he just—he burned the wrong books, put it like this, no? Like I wouldn't mind burning Shades of Grey* and so on, I have my own Goebbels list here, you know. Okay, sorry, so let me go on. So this I think is the crucial point, this fear, fear of the neighbor. And I—and this is also my problem with political correctness, although of course my god, at the level of facts, when you have cases of real harassment and so on, I am totally brutally for correctness. But you know what—it's a little bit like what I described as that obsessive structure of prohibition and then you invest racist desire, or I mean into prohibition itself. Isn't it a little bit the same with politically correct rules? You know, you obey all the rules, you don't say black, you say African-American and so on, you don't get rid of racism in this way, it just displaces it and I can tell you my American friends are telling me dozens of dirty jokes which include this politically correct reformulation. For example, did you know that there is an entire game of changing in a politically correct way the titles of Hollywood classic films? But precisely, the point is it's racism, it's real racism. Like, you don't say *Creature from the Black Lagoon*, you know the classic horror, you say *Creature from the African-American Lagoon* and all that nonsense and so on. Now I am not for this, this is really racism. What I only want to tell you again is how this I think is the weakness of this politically correct translations, you know. You don't say Indian, you say Native American, which is for me horror: what, they are Native American and we are cultural American, sorry, you know. I also don't like it another nice way of racism. You know they are now discovering that so-called Indians, Native Americans, were not really the first people who lived there. That there was already another species, human there before. And some politically correct people exploded against this, like "oh they are trying to deprive Native Americans of their primacy there." But why, why should this—you know I find this tragically wrong logic. Why should be any advantage if you were there really the first and so on and so on? It's horribly displaced, as if we want them to be the really wise original people there. On the other hand, everything goes wrong with universal rules, they can be misused. Do you know my joke? I am sorry if I repeat myself immediately I give it to you. When I was in Israel—I respected BDS, it was—I did a public talk in Tel Aviv in a private bookstore. But it was a wonderful figure of soft state repression which reminds me of my socialist youth, you know when there were some half-dissident theater companies and the authorities didn't directly prohibit a performance. Their standard strategy was this one: you were poor modest theater company so of course you had to be in some dirty hall, whatever. Usually the evening before premiere, from sanitary service some—some people came and inspect "oh there is a danger of fire here, you can't," you know. And it was the same there. I did a talk, there were many people, so they put a big screen and some chairs in front of the house. We were half an hour into it when police came, nothing against me, but that neighbors are complaining that we are making too much noise and so on. So what happened to me there? You know that Alain Badiou's formula *qui est ici est d'ici*, which is meant for legalization of immigrants, let's not screw them. Those who are here are from here. The rejection of this, we are Western racism, we are really here, no? But when I used this in Tel Aviv, some people cynically started to applaud me. You know why? Because they told me you just provided the best motto for West Bank settlers. Screw you Palestinians with your original, "we are here so we are from here" and so on and so on. So you know it's easy to use this great crazy slogans or whatever things get complicated. So screw you if I may put it, you will not get over my dead body the Heidegger today. You will get it—no, but as I already told you, what I wanted to do is on the one hand to fully report on the horror of what Heidegger does there. Because it is horrible. For example, not only the usual stuff, the danger of *Weltjudentum*, world jewelry and so on, anti-Semitism which lasted to the end, but at the same time he has a very weird, the most maybe terrifying that I've read theory of Holocaust. He claimed that Jews stand for the spirit of technological manipulation of nature, exploitation and so on. And in—he claimed that Holocaust was ultimately ontologically just a *Selbstvernichtung*, self-annihilation of the Jews. Why? Because the principle that they introduced into the world, that they stand for, the principle of modern technology with its cold manipulation industrial destruction, was just logically brought to the end, applied to them. So he explicitly said the Germans who did the Holocaust were just unconscious tools of the Jewish self-annihilation. Okay, you find horrors like this. But nonetheless I claim that what is wrong is—I remember the title of the review of these Black Notebooks in Guardian where they say "it's now proven something like that Heidegger's philosophy is in its very core at its core Nazi." No it's not, I claim. It's strictly secondary. By saying secondary I am not saying it's not important. It has a symptomatic value. For me it's absolutely legitimate to ask the question: how was it possible for Heidegger to fall into that? But he fell into that. And the proof is—the problem are and I think they are the true target of this campaign against Heidegger now. We have many—I don't agree with them, but they are definitely leftists—people from Jean-Luc Nancy to—to Gianni Vattimo to I don't know Reiner Schürmann who died and so on, up to a point John Caputo. Definitely let's call them "Left Heideggerians." Should we dismiss them as people who were simply too stupid to understand Heidegger properly? Even did you read it, a black activist in United States, after these Black Notebooks were published, he wrote a wonderful text like "why a Nazi philosopher helped me in my fight for black identity," something like that. A wonderful example of how with the reference to Heidegger's thinking he was able to theorize his and so on. So what I am saying is this. I would like to do with Heidegger the same as I tried to do with Wagner. If anything at the level of his private statements and so on Wagner is even more disgusting than Heidegger in his anti-Semitism and so on. But I claim that this historicist contextualization, you know, you demonstrate how in the context what you know is not the ultimate truth about the work. That's the general as it were aesthetic-ontological thesis that I wanted to make. That a great work of art is designed precisely by the fact that it can survive its de-contextualization. Marx struggles with this in that famous passage of his introduction to *Grundrisse*, you know when he asks why do we still admire Homer ancient Greek literature. He says it's clearly that it was conditioned by that early stage of development, so why do we still—he says very nicely—the mystery is not how it was possible there, the mystery is why do we still enjoy it. Marx unfortunately I think gives a catastrophically wrong evolutionary answer. He says because Greeks stand for the innocence of our childhood and we as mature men, we—I think this is even a potentially anti-Semitic point because you know in typical romantic mythology to which Marx refers there implicitly, Greeks were the good aesthetic children and aha, Jews were the bad, naughty children, you know. But what I want to say is that look, this is why Shakespeare is great. You can have a Classicist Shakespeare, Romantic Shakespeare, even postmodern Shakespeare and so on. He survives. And this is—so my point is that let's take an opera which is full of anti-Semitic texture details, *Parsifal*. But isn't it the most beautiful thing for me as an old Wagnerian, how Wagner was recently totally kidnapped. It's almost now Wagner is the favorite opera composer for left Jewish opera directors, you know. And it was a triumphant operation, because Wagner nonetheless was a true artist. Which means in his very work if you read it closely he already staged a distance, even a self-refutal, refusal of his anti-Semitism. And I claim in the same way Heidegger was an authentically great philosopher. Which means that you cannot say these modern leftist readings simply misread Heidegger. No, there is no proper reading. Heidegger is open, is inconsistent, there is no ultimate truth about Heidegger. It's like, you know, that famous metaphor by Walter Benjamin of you have an image for which developers are only discovered later. So it's only afterwards from a different context that you can see the truth. We should accept the same for Heidegger. Even if you look incidentally at the level of facts, they are much more complex. I think Heidegger was opportunistically anti-Semitic, but he always followed the fashion. For example, it's now confirmed from memoirs, do you know that in the 60s, even before, Heidegger systematically voted for Willy Brandt, for social democracy and so on? It's incredible. I mean, so you know what I mean, like I'll put it like this: I believe in theory, which means I don't accept that you look in dirty private secrets and then, "ooh this is the true core of theory." No, theory has in the same as art, Wagner's work has an autonomy. You can de-contextualize it and you get the truth. The truth is, and this is for me the only proper Marxist approach even. Marxism is not this cheap historicism. Marxism is always a proper formalism. Okay, you will get this one. Yes please. Yes, yes. Um, can you say a little bit about how on the one hand, it is persuasive, this idea that power has to be secret, right? And so this what you were saying about how the kind of performance of friendship. But how does that live simultaneously with the very real violence and increased militarization and brutality of power also as it is exercised, right? So it's not—it doesn't just say "oh look, the state is your best friend," it also—No, I—I see, I see. I cannot develop it now, yes. I would have said that's precisely this anonymization of power where nobody wants to fully stand for the power, we are all human, wonderfully opens up the space for even greater actual brutality. But this is what I also tried to hint at yesterday. This is the paradox of our time. On the one hand this extreme sensitivity, you know, "I look you into the eye, I visually raped you," all these trigger warnings. This is for me strictly the obverse of the growing actual brutality of our times. We are much more—as I wrote what worries me more than those who openly—I wrote this about apropos Guantanamo and so on, all that debate waterboarding. The true horror for me is not those who openly advocate torture. They are—the true ethical fiasco for me are those who even if they oppose it, accept it as a legitimate topic of a debate. And that is for me a big ethical fiasco, a big victory of our enemies, that we even have to debate about it. You know, it's like the example that I already used here, I don't want to debate about should we rape women or not. I want to live in a society where you don't debate this. Even if we agree that we shouldn't rape women, but the very—I would if all of a sudden we would have to debate and argue for it, it would have been something horrible. So what—what I would have said is that this is what characterizes our times and I even claim that we who live in our cocooned Western societies have a wonderful medium of neutralization: it's the TV news, you know, there you see all the horrors but it's on screen, it's not part of your world. Which is why for Americans it was such a trauma, the September I mean. What they were up till that point looking only on screen, there it really—it really happened. So again back to your point, I don't see any problem here because this the brutality of today's power is not the old brutality of a total tyrant, you know, it's anonymous administrative brutality. It's brutality done by people who—that's the horror—but it's not secret. It's not masked, right? No, what is secret is more or less the power structure because—ah, it's more complicated, I would have said this. It's not secret but it's nonetheless disavowed in its very visibility. Like you see, I always remember the Iraq War, how we saw all those pictures of precision so-called precision bombing and so on, but you rarely saw the destruction down there. Like it's all there but it's extremely controlled as to at what level does it affect you and so on and so on. On the other hand, it's not secret, I would say this: yes, I totally agree with you, but it's still disavowed. That's why, I will give you another example. I think to be provocative, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks are important. Although we really, let's face it, didn't discover anything really new, my god. Who didn't already at least suspect that we are all listened to. You know why? Because our everyday attitude was everyday conformist majority. We know they are doing it, we know but we don't want to know it. Let them do it secretly, discreetly.
very nicely. He said maybe reformism is today our greatest utopia, you know that we can just slowly reform it and so on. I claim that in the long term the global system cannot really afford even modest reforms. That's the point that I made yesterday about how if you look at what Syriza demanded, it's my god, measured with 1960s, it's much more modest than Swedish social democracy. It's very mainstream. But obviously we live in times where even to do an extremely modest social-democratic politics you are denounced and not just denounced, in a way you are a radical leftist. So you see my position here. I don't have any dreams big revolution. My communism is based on pessimism. I don't think that the state of things that we live in can go on indefinitely. I claim that at different levels, from ecology to now even international politics and so on, we are gradually approaching a dead end. So it's not the point that things are going on so-so and then I'm a madman who says who wants too much. No, things will go on and on even more. But allow me nonetheless now to move to the main point, because I speak too much. First, yesterday I promised you to do a little bit of—signification, China, religion. Heidegger. Yeah, Heidegger will come now. The problem with China and religion is that they confirmed to me, maybe they lied, I don't know, from London Review of Books that the text will appear there, today, tomorrow or this week, I don't know when, in the next issue, that my text will be in and also available for free on the web. So fuck it, I mean, read it there if you want to, you know. So I let's not lose time with that. Okay, before I go on to—to Heidegger and Stalinism, and we will go on with this tomorrow, I just wanted to point out—but again maybe I will give—I will distribute this to you at the end, I mean as a text. What really intrigued me—I wasn't just joking when I began with this, you know, "publicly I say fuck your mother in her grave, privately I'm a decent guy" and so on. I think that there is something in the structure of today's power which works like that. And I follow here Lacan who—and Badiou who read in this way, you know Jean Genet, his play *The Balcony*, *Le Balcon*. That's the basic—the importance of that play, it's more actual today than it was, is that it detected how in our so-called permissive societies the role of mask—mask not in this superficial sense of I have a mask of—mask in the sense of insignia of power. Mask in the sense of the elementary structure of castration. Don't be afraid. Don't take this as some big obscure point. By castration I mean simply castration phallic signifier, which I mean that phallic signifier is the signifier of castration. Let me explain it briefly, but then I will go on. You know Lacan's idea, I read it in a very simple way. Let's say, how do you become in traditional society a person of authority? Through a ritual of investiture, where you get some insignia. King gets a crown or whatever, you get as a stupid Oxford professor, whatever. But the catch is the—and that would be for Lacan the castrating dimension—that there is always a gap between that insignia and what you, to put it naively, effectively are in your stupid immediate identity. As we say, a king may be a dirty stupid coward, the moment he puts on the insignia, it's the state, the authority which speaks through him. But the catch is that there is again always a decenteredment here. You know, I am not directly my insignia. To exert authority you have to be castrated, castrated in this minimal sense that it's not me, is this radical alienation, my power is out there in the insignia. Okay, and the point developed already by Lacan in his reading of Genet's play—I don't know for sure in which seminar—and then Badiou in his nice short book *Pornography of the Present*, he develops this is that today's power functions in a—tends to function—we are not yet there, but we move towards a different functioning where the master does not rule, the figure of authority through his, her insignia covering up his weaknesses or her, you know. No, it's that the mask you wear it's precisely what I ironically referred to with regard to myself, "I'll dig your mother out of the grave," I display all my obscenity, weaknesses and so on, and paradoxically in this way I retain all my power. And it's precisely this open acknowledgment of "I am human like you, let's share some dirty joke" which, far from undermining my authority, strengthens it even more. This is today's typical boss in these postmodern digital companies. It's no longer a boss who demands you to wear a tie, properly dressed. No, it's a boss who comes to you, "what did you do yesterday evening, did you have a good fuck," all that comradely apparently approach, but you know through all this, not only he retains his authority, but even worse, his authority becomes even more unassailable, as it were. Because in this way when he acts as if he is your colleague, if you attack him he can play that "oh my god, why did you do it to me, aren't we friends" and so on and so on. So again, the structure of power where the figure of the master openly displays all its human, more or less openly all its human weaknesses, plays a clown, makes fun of himself and so on, but loses none of his or her real power. This displaying of the human side, the appearance of the figure of a master as stupid, confused and so on, not only—you know, that would be the nice point—the traditional structure of power, I'll put it like this, has the structure of fetishist disavowal. Let's say I would be a king and you look at me and you say "that crazy guy with all his tics, he is just a jerk." But you would say "nonetheless he is a king." So I know very well that this guy is an ordinary jerk, but nonetheless he occupies the position of authority, he is—he has authority. In today's figure of power more and more, it's no longer "I know very well but," the "but" disappears, it's "I appear as a total jerk and because of this I have power." It's precisely this, as it were, human side that—this open display of human side, which incidentally the relations are here much more complex. Already with the traditional figure of authority, the so-called human weaknesses functions as something that sustains power. You know where I—maybe you know this old example of mine—you know where I discovered this? You know I really hate this, in—when you publish a book, sometimes publishers ask you to put on the last page, you know where you are described blah blah, some personal features, you know, like I remember Patricia Highsmith, my favorite detective writer. Usually they add "In her free time Miss Highsmith, I don't know, grows tulips and—and eats snails," her apartment was full of snails incidentally. So you add some personal features, no? And I claim that this humanization is a fake, it's the ultimate fake. You know, like, I claim that one way to undermine power would have been precisely to force the figure of power to enact his or her whole monstrosity, none of this "but in my private life I listen to pop music, I like Star Wars movies," whatever. No, you should live up to the level of monstrosity that is power. Which incidentally I tried to do once—maybe you know this story, I like it, it's so dirty—when a publisher asked me could I add those two lines, you know, what I do in my free time, blah blah, no? And of course, don't be afraid, it's a lie. But I liked it as a provocation to demonstrate the fake of it. I—what I wrote is "In his free time Professor Žižek is teaching his small son pedophilia and is torturing cats slowly to death" and so on, no? And they exploded of course, but I told them of course I am not doing it, but that's your logic, you know. My god, I don't play this game of—and here I—I'm sorry if I repeat this story, here I appreciate Lacan, Jacques Lacan. Because I'm sorry if you know the story but it's a crucial one, subjectively. All the people around Lacan when he was still alive were bothered by this, you know, Lacan was even more of a clown that—than myself, although this is maybe difficult to imagine. He was playing a certain role in public, strictly codified. And of course all people wanted to know but tell me how is he in private. No, the idea was to discover—this is our stupidest, most disgusting humanist desire that "you know, don't worry, in private he is a good warm guy like ourselves." I asked many people about this who knew Lacan from close and I don't know if it's true, but they all told me the same story: that it was monstrous. In private he was exactly the same as in public. You never got him at his "oh I am just an ordinary guy," always these arrogant mannerisms and so on and so on. I—I find this a wonderful gesture, you know, that he refused to play—I claim that this gesture is much more anti-authoritarian than this gesture when you know the great king, you meet him in private and you discover, oh my god, he has some small weaknesses and so on and so on. This is why, what's the lesson from this? The lesson is a very simple one. It's that—and incidentally if you want to get at this, I propose you to read two works of art which I really like. One is of course Shakespeare's—I much prefer it to *Richard III*—*Richard II*. It's all about the king being divested of symbolic insignia and what you get. And the second one, please read it, although he is a disgusting reactionary at the end, it turned out to be as a poet, Friedrich Schiller—you get it for free, a good English translation on the web—*Don Carlos*, where the tragic figure of the king is precisely—his tragedy is precisely he wants to have a friend, not to be treated just as a king, and then okay, everything goes wrong and so on and so on. So incidentally at the end of *Don Carlos*, Schiller's play, you have a figure of the Inquisitor entering, which is I think ingenious. It's the first figure of modern post-patriarchal functioning of power. It's a blind old guy who is just pure knowledge, not a master, but the proto-model of totalitarian power. So what I want to say is that again something is changing fundamentally in the structure of power that you can find this even—I am sorry if you know some of you this point, I repeat it—it's how American presidents function. I don't like Oliver Stone's movies too much, and it will surprise you to learn which is nonetheless my favorite of his films: *Nixon*, with Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon. Because it's not simply an anti-Nixon movie. He treats Nixon as the last genuinely tragic president. He wanted to be a serious authority but he got corrupted and so on. And incidentally, you know that if you look at cold data, Nixon wasn't—listen, he did conclude—he did open up relations with China, he did conclude this in Vietnam, and if you look at Nixon's inner politics, every American Marxist will tell you, if you measure leftist politics in a vulgar way—how much did he raise money for education, healthcare services, all that bullshit—then you know that Nixon is the most leftist president. Already Jimmy Carter, who was basically a good guy, because of economic circumstances has to reduce benefits a little bit. But Nixon in this sense was still a figure of authority who broke down a tragic person. Carter is something special, but with Reagan we have a different logic, self-mocking becomes a rule, we have—Reagan was tragically the first clown president. And I mean it. I remember, look, it was unthinkable before Ronald Reagan. I remember at some press conference he gave, very few of them because he usually made stupid mistakes, you know. But at one conference, I remember, he was asked some specific point by a journalist and his answer was, "please don't ask me that, you know that I am too stupid to answer that question" and so on. You know, this self-mocking was part of his image. Which is why I remember I was at that point in the States when Reagan gave some speech, it was the big sport of all mainstream liberal media to attack him, and they even composed lists of his mistakes. And the result was his popularity grew. It was strictly this undignified, you know, stupid—it just helped him. It just helped him. And all this he made so many mistakes which precisely maybe provided means to have an—a vulgar identity: "oh he is ultimately vulgar like us" and so on. For example, I hope you don't yet know this story, in the past I often used it. I heard a press conference when he was asked, "is it true that—that you invite some Holocaust deniers for dinner at your table?" And Reagan gave an ingenious answer. He says, "no, I am not a Holocaust denier. Every time that someone at my table claims that there was no Holocaust, I oppose him." Okay, the obvious question: what kind of friends does he have if he has all the time to argue, you know. But again, it was—you know who really began with this is somebody here you are Brazil close, Argentina, Carlos Menem, even before, no, he played this totally undignified role. And I think this is maybe the most dangerous form of power. That's why I always claim that we are approaching a kind of a post-democratic system, but that it will not be a new Hitler, Stalin with dignity. It will be more kind of a Berlusconi type, you know, the guy who—I mean, I spoke with some journalist from—I don't know where, it was even when I was still friends with them, Guardian, who told me that two days ago he was in Rome speaking with Berlusconi. And you know, if Berlusconi were to be a dignified president, he would insist to talk only about big political issues. No, the first thing Berlusconi told him was "did you hear about that Bunga Bunga, you know that I organized, do you want to see the Bunga Bunga room" and so on, you know. You know this is what I definitely don't like. I here agree with Judith Butler who said that the most—he speaks here about—although she is not usually a feminist, a feminist emancipation that the way to deal today with male chauvinists is precisely to force them to openly acknowledge their authority. Because a typical male chauvinist today still asks a woman to do everything, but he pretends "oh but we are friends, equal" and so on and so on, no? The first feminist gesture is not to directly attack the man but to say "fuck you, we are not equal, so please act as what you really think you are, act as a master," no? Why is this an intelligent strategy? Because of the predominant ideology today, this is almost impossible. No masters wants to be openly a master. You know, we have secret masters. Stalin began with this, it is deeply significant that Stalin never acted as a master. Stalin acted as—even a moderate one among and so on, but it's a nice detail: privately his inner circle called him, if some of you know Russian, *Khozyain*, which is the Russian everyday term for master. But you see, it has to be repressed this point. So again, I am sorry we have no time to get—no I will say cynically, I take well care that we have no time since I talk too much. Okay, but so what I wanted to say is a couple of—things here, you know what? Let's do it with this stupid Heidegger stuff. I will add it to the list that I will send it to—say something because some people—but it's so boring, because—that's why I postpone it so much because it's so—okay, I will say something. But it's so self-evident. On the one—okay, I will give you just the history of the scandal. You know it's a scandal, how they now gradually are publishing so-called *Schwarze Hefte*, black notes, black notebooks by Heidegger, which were his private half-theoretical reflections notes. It will be a couple of volumes, each, it's from I think late 20s till late 50s, I don't know, spans all the time. The interesting thing which is ambiguous to read is why did Heidegger do it? Why—sorry, let me just finish something about the mask, then I will go on to Heidegger. It's important. You know what I want to say can be nicely—I developed this in one of my books—explained by the paradox of, how do you say it in English, what do Muslim women who want to or are ordered to do it wear, Burka, Burka? Okay, whatever, we know what it is. Why when I was in France, I was at some public debate small and I was surprised at how some French women—let's call them right-wing feminists—reacted in a panic towards it. They said that they are against it not only because they think that it oppressed Muslim women—we are even simple—but they said that they feel threatened by that. That it is as if you encounter a neighbor and by wearing veil, just the slit for eyes, it's as if you are encountering a monster who appears as an alien, doesn't want contact with you. So that's already the first interesting point. They began with "we want to protect the rights of Muslim women," they end up with "we are afraid, we feel threatened." And I did a simple analysis of what are they really afraid of. I claim it's the exact opposite of what they are claiming. It's not the mask, it's—they are well aware in practice they know that Levinas was wrong. They know that there is ultimately nothing authentic about human face. Human face as such is a mask, is the biggest embodied lie. This is why I will give you an empirical proof, proof okay, indication—this is why it's crucial for psychoanalysis that the patient and the analyst don't look into each other face to face. Because face to face introduces some kind of human communications where basically two ideal egos are communicating. Face—what does a face mask? Human face. The horror of what in Judeo-Christian tradition we call neighbor. This abyss of the other. And I claim that that's the paradox, that I quote when I wrote about it, I quote a nice line from Alphonse Allais. It's a French from the turn of the previous century satirical writer who had some ingenious Hegelian Lacanian ideas like—you know the best one that I often quote is that is that of Alphonse Allais is that for example it's very important it concerns precisely a mask, once in a restaurant he pointed at a woman and he started to shout at her, "look, what a shame, beneath her dress she is totally naked," you know. Absolutely correct point theoretically, no? And so Alphonse Allais had this idea that you have the dance of seven veils, Salomé. And then she takes off her dressing and then when she is naked, that the king, what was it Herod or I don't know which king, shouts "further, further," so she has to pull off her skin and so on, and in a way not physically, Herod was right: your skin, your surface is still a mask. And I claim that what you get when you see a face with Burka is precisely the true neighbor. Face is not covered, it's basically you see what is beneath the face: the horror. Because that's for Lacan, even for Hegel, a true subjectivity. The stupid face you laugh hypocritically as we are, it's a mask. It's just that you know when you have a Burka you are afraid of what is behind. Yes, but behind it's not a face, it's something much more horrible. And let me give you an empirical proof. What I did with my small son because I am a crazy evil father. Once I approached him with a mask on. He was afraid. I put the mask off—"ah, it's just your stupid dad," okay. Then comes the crucial point: I put the mask back on, he was afraid again. Although he knew very well that it's just his stupid dad behind. In a way he was afraid, when you put the mask on you open a space, an abyss behind the mask, which is not simply the stupid reality of. No, when you put the mask on, you can precisely see what is behind the mask of your space. This is I think the panic of against Burka. It's not "oh we want to be open communicating with each other," it's quite on the contrary, we want to go on with our hypocrisy. We are afraid of the neighbor, which is who is there. And again my son was also right: the evil subject, it's like you know whenever people ask me give me an image from cinema of pure subject, I tell them—and unfortunately the last one is total flop, this is one of my secret private pleasures to watch Bojo box office and all those, you know, hits—how many you know that Terminator, the last one earned only million which is ridiculously low, but at the end of first Terminator, the first one. You remember at the end when the Terminator figure is almost totally destroyed, just metal and you get just mechanic head and just the light is still blinking. This is the subject, at its purest. And it has—goes on, it moves on. This would be the pure subject of drive, where all self, self in the sense of self-presentation and so on is erased. And incidentally this is almost the only good thing I think James Cameron did, in my universe frankly, *Avatar* would have been prohibited, burned publicly. I claim that Goebbels did a horrible thing by burning books. But maybe this is my cynical version of: when you throw out the dirty water you shouldn't throw out the baby also, you know. But maybe he had the right principle, he just—he burned the wrong books, put it like this, no? Like I wouldn't mind burning Shades of Grey* and so on, I have my own Goebbels list here, you know. Okay, sorry, so let me go on. So this I think is the crucial point, this fear, fear of the neighbor. And I—and this is also my problem with political correctness, although of course my god, at the level of facts, when you have cases of real harassment and so on, I am totally brutally for correctness. But you know what—it's a little bit like what I described as that obsessive structure of prohibition and then you invest racist desire, or I mean into prohibition itself. Isn't it a little bit the same with politically correct rules? You know, you obey all the rules, you don't say black, you say African-American and so on, you don't get rid of racism in this way, it just displaces it and I can tell you my American friends are telling me dozens of dirty jokes which include this politically correct reformulation. For example, did you know that there is an entire game of changing in a politically correct way the titles of Hollywood classic films? But precisely, the point is it's racism, it's real racism. Like, you don't say *Creature from the Black Lagoon*, you know the classic horror, you say *Creature from the African-American Lagoon* and all that nonsense and so on. Now I am not for this, this is really racism. What I only want to tell you again is how this I think is the weakness of this politically correct translations, you know. You don't say Indian, you say Native American, which is for me horror: what, they are Native American and we are cultural American, sorry, you know. I also don't like it another nice way of racism. You know they are now discovering that so-called Indians, Native Americans, were not really the first people who lived there. That there was already another species, human there before. And some politically correct people exploded against this, like "oh they are trying to deprive Native Americans of their primacy there." But why, why should this—you know I find this tragically wrong logic. Why should be any advantage if you were there really the first and so on and so on? It's horribly displaced, as if we want them to be the really wise original people there. On the other hand, everything goes wrong with universal rules, they can be misused. Do you know my joke? I am sorry if I repeat myself immediately I give it to you. When I was in Israel—I respected BDS, it was—I did a public talk in Tel Aviv in a private bookstore. But it was a wonderful figure of soft state repression which reminds me of my socialist youth, you know when there were some half-dissident theater companies and the authorities didn't directly prohibit a performance. Their standard strategy was this one: you were poor modest theater company so of course you had to be in some dirty hall, whatever. Usually the evening before premiere, from sanitary service some—some people came and inspect "oh there is a danger of fire here, you can't," you know. And it was the same there. I did a talk, there were many people, so they put a big screen and some chairs in front of the house. We were half an hour into it when police came, nothing against me, but that neighbors are complaining that we are making too much noise and so on. So what happened to me there? You know that Alain Badiou's formula *qui est ici est d'ici*, which is meant for legalization of immigrants, let's not screw them. Those who are here are from here. The rejection of this, we are Western racism, we are really here, no? But when I used this in Tel Aviv, some people cynically started to applaud me. You know why? Because they told me you just provided the best motto for West Bank settlers. Screw you Palestinians with your original, "we are here so we are from here" and so on and so on. So you know it's easy to use this great crazy slogans or whatever things get complicated. So screw you if I may put it, you will not get over my dead body the Heidegger today. You will get it—no, but as I already told you, what I wanted to do is on the one hand to fully report on the horror of what Heidegger does there. Because it is horrible. For example, not only the usual stuff, the danger of *Weltjudentum*, world jewelry and so on, anti-Semitism which lasted to the end, but at the same time he has a very weird, the most maybe terrifying that I've read theory of Holocaust. He claimed that Jews stand for the spirit of technological manipulation of nature, exploitation and so on. And in—he claimed that Holocaust was ultimately ontologically just a *Selbstvernichtung*, self-annihilation of the Jews. Why? Because the principle that they introduced into the world, that they stand for, the principle of modern technology with its cold manipulation industrial destruction, was just logically brought to the end, applied to them. So he explicitly said the Germans who did the Holocaust were just unconscious tools of the Jewish self-annihilation. Okay, you find horrors like this. But nonetheless I claim that what is wrong is—I remember the title of the review of these Black Notebooks in Guardian where they say "it's now proven something like that Heidegger's philosophy is in its very core at its core Nazi." No it's not, I claim. It's strictly secondary. By saying secondary I am not saying it's not important. It has a symptomatic value. For me it's absolutely legitimate to ask the question: how was it possible for Heidegger to fall into that? But he fell into that. And the proof is—the problem are and I think they are the true target of this campaign against Heidegger now. We have many—I don't agree with them, but they are definitely leftists—people from Jean-Luc Nancy to—to Gianni Vattimo to I don't know Reiner Schürmann who died and so on, up to a point John Caputo. Definitely let's call them "Left Heideggerians." Should we dismiss them as people who were simply too stupid to understand Heidegger properly? Even did you read it, a black activist in United States, after these Black Notebooks were published, he wrote a wonderful text like "why a Nazi philosopher helped me in my fight for black identity," something like that. A wonderful example of how with the reference to Heidegger's thinking he was able to theorize his and so on. So what I am saying is this. I would like to do with Heidegger the same as I tried to do with Wagner. If anything at the level of his private statements and so on Wagner is even more disgusting than Heidegger in his anti-Semitism and so on. But I claim that this historicist contextualization, you know, you demonstrate how in the context what you know is not the ultimate truth about the work. That's the general as it were aesthetic-ontological thesis that I wanted to make. That a great work of art is designed precisely by the fact that it can survive its de-contextualization. Marx struggles with this in that famous passage of his introduction to *Grundrisse*, you know when he asks why do we still admire Homer ancient Greek literature. He says it's clearly that it was conditioned by that early stage of development, so why do we still—he says very nicely—the mystery is not how it was possible there, the mystery is why do we still enjoy it. Marx unfortunately I think gives a catastrophically wrong evolutionary answer. He says because Greeks stand for the innocence of our childhood and we as mature men, we—I think this is even a potentially anti-Semitic point because you know in typical romantic mythology to which Marx refers there implicitly, Greeks were the good aesthetic children and aha, Jews were the bad, naughty children, you know. But what I want to say is that look, this is why Shakespeare is great. You can have a Classicist Shakespeare, Romantic Shakespeare, even postmodern Shakespeare and so on. He survives. And this is—so my point is that let's take an opera which is full of anti-Semitic texture details, *Parsifal*. But isn't it the most beautiful thing for me as an old Wagnerian, how Wagner was recently totally kidnapped. It's almost now Wagner is the favorite opera composer for left Jewish opera directors, you know. And it was a triumphant operation, because Wagner nonetheless was a true artist. Which means in his very work if you read it closely he already staged a distance, even a self-refutal, refusal of his anti-Semitism. And I claim in the same way Heidegger was an authentically great philosopher. Which means that you cannot say these modern leftist readings simply misread Heidegger. No, there is no proper reading. Heidegger is open, is inconsistent, there is no ultimate truth about Heidegger. It's like, you know, that famous metaphor by Walter Benjamin of you have an image for which developers are only discovered later. So it's only afterwards from a different context that you can see the truth. We should accept the same for Heidegger. Even if you look incidentally at the level of facts, they are much more complex. I think Heidegger was opportunistically anti-Semitic, but he always followed the fashion. For example, it's now confirmed from memoirs, do you know that in the 60s, even before, Heidegger systematically voted for Willy Brandt, for social democracy and so on? It's incredible. I mean, so you know what I mean, like I'll put it like this: I believe in theory, which means I don't accept that you look in dirty private secrets and then, "ooh this is the true core of theory." No, theory has in the same as art, Wagner's work has an autonomy. You can de-contextualize it and you get the truth. The truth is, and this is for me the only proper Marxist approach even. Marxism is not this cheap historicism. Marxism is always a proper formalism. Okay, you will get this one. Yes please. Yes, yes. Um, can you say a little bit about how on the one hand, it is persuasive, this idea that power has to be secret, right? And so this what you were saying about how the kind of performance of friendship. But how does that live simultaneously with the very real violence and increased militarization and brutality of power also as it is exercised, right? So it's not—it doesn't just say "oh look, the state is your best friend," it also—No, I—I see, I see. I cannot develop it now, yes. I would have said that's precisely this anonymization of power where nobody wants to fully stand for the power, we are all human, wonderfully opens up the space for even greater actual brutality. But this is what I also tried to hint at yesterday. This is the paradox of our time. On the one hand this extreme sensitivity, you know, "I look you into the eye, I visually raped you," all these trigger warnings. This is for me strictly the obverse of the growing actual brutality of our times. We are much more—as I wrote what worries me more than those who openly—I wrote this about apropos Guantanamo and so on, all that debate waterboarding. The true horror for me is not those who openly advocate torture. They are—the true ethical fiasco for me are those who even if they oppose it, accept it as a legitimate topic of a debate. And that is for me a big ethical fiasco, a big victory of our enemies, that we even have to debate about it. You know, it's like the example that I already used here, I don't want to debate about should we rape women or not. I want to live in a society where you don't debate this. Even if we agree that we shouldn't rape women, but the very—I would if all of a sudden we would have to debate and argue for it, it would have been something horrible. So what—what I would have said is that this is what characterizes our times and I even claim that we who live in our cocooned Western societies have a wonderful medium of neutralization: it's the TV news, you know, there you see all the horrors but it's on screen, it's not part of your world. Which is why for Americans it was such a trauma, the September I mean. What they were up till that point looking only on screen, there it really—it really happened. So again back to your point, I don't see any problem here because this the brutality of today's power is not the old brutality of a total tyrant, you know, it's anonymous administrative brutality. It's brutality done by people who—that's the horror—but it's not secret. It's not masked, right? No, what is secret is more or less the power structure because—ah, it's more complicated, I would have said this. It's not secret but it's nonetheless disavowed in its very visibility. Like you see, I always remember the Iraq War, how we saw all those pictures of precision so-called precision bombing and so on, but you rarely saw the destruction down there. Like it's all there but it's extremely controlled as to at what level does it affect you and so on and so on. On the other hand, it's not secret, I would say this: yes, I totally agree with you, but it's still disavowed. That's why, I will give you another example. I think to be provocative, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks are important. Although we really, let's face it, didn't discover anything really new, my god. Who didn't already at least suspect that we are all listened to. You know why? Because our everyday attitude was everyday conformist majority. We know they are doing it, we know but we don't want to know it. Let them do it secretly, discreetly.
unknown
I think the main target of WikiLeaks are not those who are doing the tortures, but it's our hypocrisy.
I think the main target of WikiLeaks are not those who are doing the tortures, but it's our hypocrisy.
Slavoj Žižek
We cannot any longer play
We cannot any longer play
unknown
the game that we don't know it. We ordinary people are cornered here. We
the game that we don't know it. We ordinary people are cornered here. We
Slavoj Žižek
are—ordered, enjoined to—we cannot pretend that we don't know it. And this is extremely important. For example, this is the importance about Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech, condemnation of—Stalin. Why did it have such a shocking impact? Did anyone learn anything really new there? Absolutely not, I claim. Everyone knew it. Just they were not able to pretend that they don't know it. That's why so many communist nomenclature members even killed themselves and so on. Sorry but I don't want to eat other person's time and you have some stupid coffee now or whatever, no? I would prohibit coffee, everything. And you know which is—are you British, if you are British, how can you drink tea with milk in it? It's a classical "how to be an alien," satirical writing of George Mikes. He has there the best theory of tea with milk. He developed how British people enjoy tea, but they enjoy it too much. So they want to find simple means to make it disgusting. And then they made many tests and they discovered that if you put milk into it, it looks more like, you know, after you—after you wash your dishes, the dirty water that you have there. So that this is for me the only meaning of adding milk to tea. Okay, tomorrow we have the big two hours theory.
are—ordered, enjoined to—we cannot pretend that we don't know it. And this is extremely important. For example, this is the importance about Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech, condemnation of—Stalin. Why did it have such a shocking impact? Did anyone learn anything really new there? Absolutely not, I claim. Everyone knew it. Just they were not able to pretend that they don't know it. That's why so many communist nomenclature members even killed themselves and so on. Sorry but I don't want to eat other person's time and you have some stupid coffee now or whatever, no? I would prohibit coffee, everything. And you know which is—are you British, if you are British, how can you drink tea with milk in it? It's a classical "how to be an alien," satirical writing of George Mikes. He has there the best theory of tea with milk. He developed how British people enjoy tea, but they enjoy it too much. So they want to find simple means to make it disgusting. And then they made many tests and they discovered that if you put milk into it, it looks more like, you know, after you—after you wash your dishes, the dirty water that you have there. So that this is for me the only meaning of adding milk to tea. Okay, tomorrow we have the big two hours theory.