Jealousy as a political category
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-04-24 · 1:28:39 · 12,112 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismcommunism-socialismrace-antisemitismfascism-populismgeopolitics-warreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesseconomicsphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture using the concept of jealousy as a structural category to analyze ideology, anti-Semitism, political Islam, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He distinguishes two modes of ideological mystification, liberal-democratic (false universality, symptom logic) and fascist-populist (false identification of the enemy, fetish logic), and argues that demystifying the latter is practically impossible. The talk then pivots to Marx's concept of general intellect, arguing that contemporary capitalism is marked by a 'becoming-rent-of-profit' dynamic, and concludes by calling for a return to the question of communism in light of global food and resource crises.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “neighbor”
Distinguished from the 'fellow-man' (semblable): the neighbor is the dimension of monstrous otherness, the 'undead' kernel in the other, rather than the mirror image of sameness, here mobilized as both theological category and political concept.
The structure of 'je sais bien mais quand même', 'I know very well [there is no God] but nonetheless [I act as if]', used here to characterize the typical functioning of ideology today and to interrogate Žižek's own relationship to Christianity.
as “materialism (new)”
Žižek argues with Badiou that today it is idealism/spirituality that insists on finitude and embeddedness, while materialism claims ontological incompleteness and actual multiplicity (Cantor's transfinite), inverting the 19th-century alignment.
as “big Other”
Implicitly operative in the discussion of the fantasy of non-existence and the subject's relationship to symbolic order; the Bolshevik joke stages the collapse of the big Other (God converted to communist ideology).
The fundamental subjective position of being reduced to a gaze that observes the world in the condition of one's own non-existence, as in the fantasy of witnessing one's own funeral or, structurally, the world without humanity.
Žižek defines jealousy as the fantasmatic structure of imagining a utopia of non-castrated jouissance from which one is a priori excluded, which underlies both personal and political forms of ideological attachment (anti-Semitism, homophobia, etc.).
Used here as the excessive, non-castrated enjoyment that the jealous subject imagines the Other (the Jew, the gay, the immigrant) as possessing in a fantasy space from which the subject is excluded.
Implicitly operative as the fetish object around which jealous fantasy is organized, the inaccessible surplus enjoyment attributed to the Other that structures ideological identification.
as “fetishism”
The denial of castration operative in fascist-populist ideology, where the Jew (or immigrant) functions as the fetish object, the last thing seen before confronting the real social antagonism (class struggle), elevating it into a cause.
The liberal-democratic mode of ideological mystification in which universal categories like freedom and equality implicitly privilege particular social strata (male, white, propertied) through hidden qualifications.
The fascist-populist mode of ideological mystification in which a real social antagonism (class struggle) is displaced onto a falsely identified enemy (the Jew, the immigrant), making demystification nearly impossible.
In liberal-democratic ideology, the gap between the explicit universal content (freedom, equality) and its hidden qualifications that belie it; demystification works by exposing this tension between form and content.
Used to describe the media's failure to register certain news items (e.g., Israeli settlement plans, South Korean land lease in Madagascar): facts appear in the media but lack the symbolic traction to produce real political effects.
Žižek's diagnosis of Italy (and by extrapolation the global future): a permanent state of exception that does not suspend everyday normality but supplements it with military presence and checkpoints, framed as 'detoxifying' the neighbor.
as “reasonable anti-Semitism”
Žižek cites Robert Brasillach's 1938 formula as a template now operative in European anti-immigrant politics: a 'moderate,' officially non-violent racism that nonetheless institutionalizes exclusion under the guise of preventing worse outbursts.
as “toxic neighbor”
The contemporary ideological figure in which the neighbor, the immigrant, the sexual other, is perceived as a pathological threat to be quarantined or 'detoxified,' merging psychological, natural, and political registers inconsistently.
Hannah Arendt's concept invoked to underscore that the difficulty of confronting evil is not its alien inhumanity but its ordinary human face, as staged by Jonathan Littell's novel narrated by an SS officer.
as “post-Fordism”
The reorganization of factory work into non-hierarchical, interactive teamwork, presented as the outcome of '68's attack on the factory, a left victory that produced a new form of capitalist domination.
as “privatization of the social”
The process by which postmodern capitalism extends market logic into spheres previously reserved for the state, education, prisons, security, as the unintended outcome of '68's attacks on factory, school, and family.
Marx's term from the Grundrisse for collectivized productive and social knowledge; Žižek argues that contemporary capitalism's key move is the privatization of this general intellect, converting profit into rent.
The form of capital dominant in postmodern capitalism, where value is produced through collective knowledge rather than labor time, enabling rent-extraction via intellectual property and quasi-monopoly positions.
as “becoming-rent-of-profit”
Žižek's (Deleuzian-inflected) term for the thesis, drawn from Carlo Vercellone, that cognitive capitalism returns to a rent logic: wealth is generated not by exploiting labor but by privatizing and controlling access to collectively produced knowledge and natural resources.
Invoked to explain the unconditional emergency character of the financial bailout: capital is our Real, it cannot be deconstructed or negotiated, only obeyed, revealing the material force of ideology.
Stories he reaches for 9
Gates became the world's richest man not by exploiting labor but by using Microsoft's quasi-monopoly to privatize general intellect (software as universal language), collecting rent from access to a collectively produced resource.
“with quasi-monopoly position of Microsoft he privatized what is de facto our general intellect, the universally spread Microsoft as the language, and he is getting rent for that.”
Forty years ago Afghanistan was one of the most secularized Muslim countries, with an enlightened king and an indigenous communist party that took power in a coup unsanctioned by Moscow; Western Cold War intervention destroyed this secular left and produced the fundamentalism we now see.
“It was a tolerant enlightened country which the way it was globalized pushed it into fundamentalism.”
Thomas Frank's book shows that Kansas, historically the heartland of radical left populism and home to John Brown, is now the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism, exemplifying Benjamin's thesis domestically.
“Kansas, which is now the absolute bedrock of Christian fundamentalism, is historically... the bedrock of all radical leftist populist movements.”
The media's moralizing treatment of Madoff as a uniquely corrupt Jewish villain is a classic case of fascist-populist mystification: his actions were not personal pathology but a more radical enactment of the system's own logic.
“he was just following more radically than others, I claim, the logic of the system.”
Žižek quotes Robert Brasillach's 1938 formula, we can admire Chaplin, Proust, Menuhin, but we must organize 'reasonable anti-Semitism' to prevent worse outbursts, and shows that contemporary European anti-immigrant politics reproduces this logic verbatim.
“We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism.”
The abandoned city of Pripyat after Chernobyl, with nature flourishing in the absence of humans, is the ironic centerpiece of Weisman's fantasy; the catastrophe produces the pre-castrated natural paradise.
“The exuberant nature taking over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat, which was abandoned, left the way it was.”
Clinton admitted at a UN World Food Day gathering that Western pressure to open and commodify third-world agriculture caused the global food crisis; Žižek uses this to argue that once you accept food, water, energy, environment, culture, and health as non-commodities, you must raise the question of communism.
“If you bring Clinton's reasoning to the end, we have to raise the question of communism again.”
A New York Times report reveals that Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley organized a class revolt of landless peasants against a small group of wealthy landlords, confirming that Islamist fundamentalism occupies the place of a failed secular-left revolution.
“The Taliban's ability to exploit class divisions adds a new moment to the insurgency... Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan.”
The childhood fantasy of witnessing one's own funeral (as in Twain) illustrates the Lacanian fantasy structure of observing the world from the position of one's own non-existence.
“the fantasy of witnessing one's own funeral, like you know, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
Works invoked 16
Grundrisse book
Marx's preparatory manuscripts; the general intellect passage is central to Žižek's analysis of cognitive capitalism, though Marx's conclusion from it is criticized as naive.
Žižek's own book, cited as evidence that his engagement with Christianity is not crypto-belief but a genuine exploration of what atheism can mean today.
Atlas Shrugged book
Ayn Rand's novel, returning to Amazon bestseller lists during the 2008 crisis it helped cause (via Greenspan's Objectivism); Žižek uses this as proof of ideology's material force.
Thomas Frank's book is cited approvingly as demonstrating Benjamin's thesis domestically: Kansas's transformation from radical left populism to Christian fundamentalism.
Lenin's book is called 'one of the worst books ever written' for its naive realist premise that idealists construct reality while materialists affirm its full ontological consistency.
Heidegger's Being and Time is cited as possibly the starting point of the inversion in which finitude becomes a spiritual/religious concern rather than a materialist one.
Emotional Vampires book
Albert Bernstein's book is grouped with Toxic People as an exemplar of the contemporary ideological genre of 'detoxifying the neighbor.'
Toxic People book
Lillian Glass's self-help book identifying '30 types of toxic people' is cited as a 'wonderful, in the disgusting sense' example of the ideological figure of the toxic neighbor.
The World Without Us book
Alan Weisman's book is called 'charming' and used as the primary illustration of the Lacanian fantasy structure (the subject reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of its own non-existence).
Stella Dallas film
Read through Joan Copjec's analysis as a staging of the jealous fantasy structure; Žižek is skeptical of feminist celebrations of the film as straightforwardly emancipatory.
Marilyn Chambers' film, cited as historically significant for including one of the first interracial sex scenes in mainstream adult film, challenging racist taboos described by Fanon.
Él (He) film
Buñuel's film on jealousy is cited as the cinematic standard against which Grossman's literary treatment is measured.
Her Body Knows book
David Grossman's novella collection; its first novella is praised as 'a masterpiece' that displays the phantasmatic coordinates of jealousy as compellingly as Buñuel's film.
Jonathan Littell's novel is acknowledged as 'too long' and not necessarily great, but used as the best refutation of the cliché 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.'
Sary Makdisi's book describes the Israeli occupation as Kafkaesque bureaucratic control through irrational regulations, supporting Žižek's 'what happens when nothing happens' argument.
Zizek's Ontology book
Adrian Johnston's book about Žižek, mentioned affectionately (Johnston was 'stupid enough to write a book about me') in the context of his intelligent private criticism.
People invoked 35
Bill Clinton positive
His UN speech 'We Blew It on Global Food' is used approvingly as a starting point, though Žižek notes Clinton's own policies contributed to the problem and pushes Clinton's logic further toward a communist conclusion.
Elie Wiesel negative
Cited as having fallen into the ideological trap of moralizing about Madoff as a personal moral failure ('scum') rather than as a symptom of systemic capitalist logic.
Frantz Fanon positive
Cited for having written about the asymmetry of interracial sexuality in racist culture: a white man with a black woman is acceptable, the reverse is not.
Jean-Pierre Taguieff negative
Cited for the inversion that 'Islam is the Marxism of the 21st century'; Žižek accepts the structural observation while rejecting the intended anti-Marxist implication.
Sary Makdisi positive
Author of Palestine Inside Out, used to support the analysis of Israeli occupation as Kafkaesque bureaucratic control rather than spectacular terror.
Thomas Frank positive
Author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, cited for demonstrating Benjamin's thesis domestically: Kansas's shift from radical left populism to Christian fundamentalism.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
The concept of 'symbolic efficiency' is invoked via reference to Lévi-Strauss when describing how certain news items appear in the media but fail to register politically.
Ayn Rand negative
She is 'the greatest' in a sardonic sense; her Atlas Shrugged returning to Amazon bestseller lists during the crisis she caused is Žižek's proof of ideology's material force. Her Objectivism is held responsible for Greenspan's policies.
Vladimir Lenin negative
Žižek retains friendship toward Lenin but calls Materialism and Empirio-criticism 'one of the worst books ever written' for its naive realist ontology.
Robert Brasillach negative
The French fascist intellectual whose 1938 formula of 'reasonable anti-Semitism' Žižek quotes at length as a 'disgusting' but highly operative ideological template that has now won in European anti-immigrant politics.
David Grossman positive
His novella in Her Body Knows is praised as a literary masterpiece that does for jealousy what Buñuel's Él did for cinema.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited as the authority on fantasy structure (the subject reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of its own non-existence) and on the fetish, both central to the talk's argument.
Alan Greenspan negative
His congressional admission of a 'flaw in his ideology' and his card-carrying Randian Objectivism are cited as proof that Ayn Rand's ideology caused the 2008 financial crisis.
Marilyn Chambers positive
Žižek dedicates his talk to the recently deceased porn star as a 'progressive fighter': her interracial sex scene and Ivory soap imagery challenged both racist taboos and patriarchal divisions between mother and sexual woman.
Pete Seeger positive
The PBS documentary on him was watched alongside Fox News Tea Party coverage; his left folk populism is structurally mirrored by right-wing Tea Party populism.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek partially uses Negri on general intellect and cognitive capital but criticizes him for misreading Marx's Grundrisse passage and for dreaming of the state's disappearance; prefers Hardt and Vercellone on the rent thesis.
Alain Badiou positive
Thinking 'together with' Badiou on materialism, infinity (Cantor), and the project of new materialism; Žižek half-jokes that Badiou may be 'half-bluffing' with his mathematical references but endorses his general direction.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His theory of the state of exception/emergency is the implicit framework for Žižek's analysis of Italy's 2008 emergency declaration as a template for the coming global emergency state.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Cited as one of those who draws the dangerous conclusion that anti-capitalism as such is today anti-Semitic, a position Žižek explicitly rejects.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited approvingly in passing when Žižek claims to follow Jameson in having 'nothing against' true fundamentalists like the Amish.
Adrian Johnston positive
Author of Zizek's Ontology; cited as a friend whose private criticism (about Žižek's crypto-Christian disavowal) is taken seriously and used to frame the opening discussion.
Carlo Vercellone positive
Italian economist whose work on cognitive capitalism and the transition from rent to profit to rent again is the theoretical basis for Žižek's analysis of Bill Gates and contemporary capitalism.
Barbet Schroeder positive
Director of a documentary on Jacques Vergès, cited as evidence for the dangerous 'anything goes if it's anti-American' logic.
Luis Buñuel positive
His film Él (He) is cited as the cinematic benchmark for displaying the phantasmatic coordinates of jealousy.
Hannah Arendt positive
Žižek invokes her 'banality of evil' thesis to make the point that what is traumatic about evil is its ordinary human face, not its alien inhumanity, though he notes he does not fully agree with her.
Walter Benjamin positive
His thesis that 'every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution' is the structural backbone of Žižek's analysis of Islamism, the Taliban, Kansas, and right-wing populism.
Joan Copjec positive
Cited for her reading of Stella Dallas as a film that stages the jealous structure of creating a utopian scene from which the subject is excluded, supporting Žižek's argument.
Moishe Postone positive
Cited positively for re-actualizing Marx's critique of political economy and for warning against alliances with anti-Semitic anti-imperialist movements; but Žižek rejects Postone's conclusion that leftists should therefore support successful capitalism.
Jacques Vergès negative
Described as a 'fascinating evil figure', an anti-colonialist leftist who ended up defending surviving Nazis like Klaus Barbie, exemplifying the wrong anti-imperialist alliance logic.
Georg Cantor positive
His transfinite mathematics is cited (via Badiou) as the moment when infinity becomes actual and multiple rather than spiritualized-One, enabling a materialist concept of infinity.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Cited as simultaneously the most spiritual and the most earth-like (material, heavy, wet) of modern filmmakers, illustrating the new materialism's conjunction of spirit and matter.
Noam Chomsky negative
Žižek 'respectfully disagrees' with Chomsky's view that no interpretation is needed, just telling people the facts is enough; Žižek argues this is too naive and ignores the material force of ideology.
Karl Marx positive
Both the indispensable foundation (Capital, commodity fetishism, class struggle) and the target of internal criticism: the Grundrisse's general intellect passage is praised but Marx's naive conclusion (capitalism will auto-dissolve) is rejected.
Michael Hardt positive
Cited more favorably than Negri as drawing on Vercellone's work on the becoming-rent-of-profit thesis.
Cited for his shock at discovering that Jewish farmers in the West Bank can dig wells as deep as they want while Palestinian farmers are limited to three feet, an absurd regulatory asymmetry.
What it argues
jealousy as the structural form of ideological fantasytwo modes of ideological mystification: symptom (liberal) vs. fetish (fascist-populist)the impossibility of demystifying fetishist ideologyBenjamin's thesis: fascism occupies the place of a failed revolutionbecoming-rent-of-profit in cognitive capitalismthe toxic neighbor and the emergency stateIsrael-Palestine as a Kafkaesque bureaucratic occupation
Dialectical moves 10
“It is only materialism which can think actual infinity and ontological incompleteness; it is the religious/idealist position that insists on irreducible finitude.”
Žižek inverts the classical 19th-century coupling: the materialist is the one who thinks the infinite and incomplete, not the finite and closed.
“Jealousy is not the experience of being excluded from a paradise that others enjoy; it is the very act of constructing that paradise by excluding yourself from it.”
Exclusion is not the loss of a pre-existing fullness but the condition of possibility for fantasizing fullness, the subject's exclusion constitutes the non-castrated object.
“Apparently this is the ultimate castration—you are excluded—but no: precisely by being excluded, you construct the object as non-castrated.”
What looks like castration (exclusion) is in fact the mechanism that generates the fantasy of non-castration, the fetishist logic at the heart of jealousy.
“In liberal mystification, the surface is good (freedom, equality) but the hidden content is bad; in fascist-populist mystification, the explicit content is bad (anti-Semitism) but the implicit content is potentially good (class struggle).”
The two ideological modes have inverted structures of surface/depth, which is why demystification works for one and fails for the other.
“The left lost in its very victory: the targets of '68 were defeated but replaced by new, more flexible forms of capitalist domination.”
The emancipatory gesture that destroyed the old institutions (factory, school, family) cleared the way for the post-Fordist restructuring of capitalism, negation became affirmation.
“Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.”
Fascism/fundamentalism does not appear despite but because of the left's absence; it occupies and deforms the revolutionary potential that the left failed to mobilize.
“The most catastrophic conclusion—that since every crisis generates anti-Semitism, leftists should support successful capitalism—is itself the most dangerous ideological move.”
The 'safe' liberal anti-fascist position (avoid crisis to avoid anti-Semitism) secretly endorses capitalism as the lesser evil, foreclosing radical alternatives.
“Capital is the un-deconstructible condition of deconstruction; money is where you don't joke.”
The financial bailout emergency revealed that ideology's Real is capital itself: everything else (justice, democracy, meaning) can be deconstructed, but capital demands unconditional obedience.
“Islam is turning out to be the Marxism of the 21st century simply means that when the secular left fails, the populist right takes over the empty place.”
The comparison between Islam and Marxism is not a cultural or religious thesis but a structural one: both occupy the slot of the radical challenge to the liberal order when the left vacates it.
“What is going on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there? That is the key to the crisis.”
The real violence is not the spectacular terrorist event but the invisible continuous dispossession (settlement, bureaucratic strangulation) that the media cannot register as an event.
Claims 20
asserts
The structure of jealousy is identical to the structure of ideological fantasy: the subject imagines a utopia of non-castrated jouissance from which they are a priori excluded.jealousy and ideology
asserts
There are two fundamentally different modes of ideological mystification—liberal-democratic (false universality / symptom logic) and fascist-populist (false identification of the enemy / fetish logic)—and they must not be confused.ideology
asserts
It is practically impossible to demystify a fetishist ideological position (e.g., anti-Semitism) by exposing its real content (class struggle), whereas it is relatively easy to demystify a liberal democrat by exposing the gap between their universal claims and their implicit exclusions.ideological demystification
rejects
Anti-capitalism as such is not equivalent to anti-Semitism, contra Moishe Postone's and Bernard-Henri Lévy's implication that any leftist crisis politics tends toward anti-Semitism.anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism
asserts
The rise of Islamist fundamentalism is correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries, confirming Benjamin's thesis that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.Islamism and the failure of the secular left
rejects
Leftists who treat Muslim fundamentalist movements as basically anti-imperialist and excuse their anti-Semitism as 'really meaning' anti-Zionism reproduce the same apologetic logic one could use to redeem Hitler.left apologetics for Islamist anti-Semitism
asserts
While paying lip service to a two-state solution, Israel is systematically creating facts on the ground—through settlement expansion, bureaucratic regulation, and land seizure—that render a Palestinian state de facto impossible.Israeli-Palestinian conflict
reframes
The key question for understanding the Middle East is what happens 'when nothing happens'—the continuous slow work of dispossession that the media ignores.Israeli-Palestinian conflict
asserts
Contemporary capitalism is characterized by a 'becoming-rent-of-profit': the privatization of general intellect (collective knowledge, natural resources) converts profit into rent, exceeding the explanatory capacity of classical Marxist labor-time theory.cognitive capitalism and rent
rejects
Marx was naive in the Grundrisse in believing that the growth of general intellect would automatically dissolve capitalism; he failed to imagine that general intellect itself could be privatized.Marx's Grundrisse optimism
asserts
A strong regulatory state is needed more than ever in cognitive capitalism, because decisions about what can be privatized (intellectual property, DNA, etc.) are ultimately arbitrary and require state intervention.the state and cognitive capitalism
asserts
The left's attack on the three pillars of capitalism (factory, school, family) in 1968 resulted in victory at the level of form but defeat at the level of content: each domain was transformed into a more flexible form of capitalist domination.the legacy of 1968
asserts
Economic crises do not spontaneously generate ideological clarity; on the contrary, the first reaction is to cling more desperately to existing ideological positions.ideology and economic crisis
asserts
Today's neighbor is increasingly perceived as 'toxic,' and this culturally pervasive category inconsistently conflates natural, psychological, political, and cultural properties under a single ideological figure.the toxic neighbor
asserts
Robert Brasillach's formula of 'reasonable anti-Semitism' has won: European mainstream politics now operates through a 'reasonable anti-immigrant racism' that accepts the radical right's agenda while disavowing its violence.European anti-immigrant politics
asserts
The financial bailout emergency revealed that capital is our Real: unlike climate change or hunger, it mobilizes unconditional action, suspending democratic deliberation and demonstrating the material force of ideology.financial crisis and ideology
asserts
If food, water, energy, defense, environment, culture, and education are all not commodities like others, then the question of communism must be raised again.communism and commons
asserts
Today it is the religious/spiritualist/idealist position that insists on finitude and embeddedness, while materialism claims ontological incompleteness and infinity—the opposite of the 19th-century alignment.materialism and finitude
rejects
The proverb 'An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' is cheap pseudo-wisdom: hearing the enemy's story (as in Littell's novel or imagining Hitler's sentimentality) makes them no less an enemy.empathy and reconciliation
asserts
Authentic fundamentalists (like the Amish) do not exhibit the jealous fascination with the other's excessive enjoyment that characterizes false fundamentalists, distinguishing them from ideologically operative fundamentalism.fundamentalism and jealousy
Quotes 15
“This is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy as disembodied gaze / Lacanian fantasy structure
“You are excluded, that's the price to construct the object as non-castrated. You are excluded and precisely by this the object, the fantasy scene, is the one of non-castrated enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · exclusion as condition of fantasmatic fullness
“The Jew is the last thing you see before class struggle, and then you elevate that into [the cause].”Slavoj Žižek · the fetish object as displacement of class struggle
“Although once you are in, it seems so obvious, it is much easier to convince a liberal democrat that his universality is a false one than to convince a lower-middle-class anti-Semite that his real enemy is capital.”Slavoj Žižek · asymmetry of ideological demystification
“Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjamin's thesis on fascism and the failed left
“What happens when nothing happens? That is the key to the crisis.”Slavoj Žižek · invisible continuous dispossession vs. spectacular violence
“Show me one axis of evil fundamentalist who wasn't ten years ago a CIA agent.”Slavoj Žižek · Western blowback and Cold War proxy politics
“Money is the un-deconstructible condition of deconstruction.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as the Real / ideology's material force
“Le Pen said this openly: when asked why is his party slowly losing, he said 'Because we won. Because our agenda is generally accepted.'”Slavoj Žižek · radical right's agenda absorbed into mainstream European politics
“If you bring Clinton's reasoning to the end, we have to raise the question of communism again.”Slavoj Žižek · commons logic leads inevitably to communism
“The left lost in its very victory. The direct enemy was defeated, but replaced by a new form of capitalist domination.”Slavoj Žižek · 1968 as dialectical reversal / left victory as defeat
“An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard — you know this cheap stupidity.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of multicultural empathy-as-reconciliation
“It was a tolerant enlightened country which the way it was globalized pushed it into fundamentalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Western intervention producing the fundamentalism it fears
“The greatest spiritual loss of the fall of communism is the sudden fall of political jokes which are of the highest quality.”Slavoj Žižek · communist culture and the joke as form
“We need strong state more than ever. Here I totally disagree with those, up to a point Negri, who dream about the state is disappearing.”Slavoj Žižek · cognitive capitalism requires strong regulatory state
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here and I will directly start, not to be too long. Don’t be afraid, I hate to give a résumé of the book which is the official pretext of this appearance of mine. Only two things. First, the only common thing that the paper that I will deliver here has with the book is the topic of the neighbor. The book, of course, focuses on the neighbor as a Judeo-Christian theological category. I will rather focus on neighbor as precisely the one of whom we are jealous as a political category. So, but nonetheless, before I begin, I would like to, because some friends are criticizing me a lot, I would like to clarify a misunderstanding. As if, although I emphasize that I am not religious and so on, do I not play—that's an intelligent criticism that my friend who was stupid enough to write a book about me, *Zizek’s Ontology*, Adrian Johnston, formulated recently in a private communication letter to me—that does I write books somehow celebrating Christianity, but at the same time I emphasize all the time, you know, I am not religious privately and so on and so on. But on the other hand, I often describe this fetishist disavowal, typical functioning of ideology today: we practice beliefs, but we all claim "Oh, who takes it seriously, we don’t believe." So this logic of *je sais bien mais quand même*, I know very well there is no God but. Am I not falling into the same trap? That I think I'm just flirting with Christianity, really I’m an atheist, but what if, you know, I pretend to pretend, but in reality I am more caught into it. Well, I think those who worry about this, the book *The Monstrosity of Christ* should put them at ease. I have there long debates on precisely what atheism could mean today. And this is just part of a larger movement I’m engaged in—thinking here with Alain Badiou, Johnston himself, and others. I think very interesting things are going on today with topic of materialism. Did you notice how throughout the 19th century somehow the couple of materialism-idealism was attached to, was linked to or overdetermined by another couple, infinity-finitude. The idea was idealists focus on the worthlessness of finite material objects, the true is the eternal, infinite and so on, while materialists emphasize "No, only finite material actual objects really exist" and so on and so on. But I agree here again with Alain Badiou and some of his pupils who claim that not only today, but throughout the 20th century already, maybe starting with early Heidegger, *Sein und Zeit*, we have the exactly opposite topic. Today, I claim, it is the religious, spiritualists, idealists, however you call them, who like to emphasize our irreducible finitude, in the sense of we are embedded in certain life-world, we cannot overstep this limitation and so on and so on. Why? The idea is that precisely this ultimate limitation, the finitude of our condition, means that then there is a void, something inaccessible close to us where of course then the sacred can be located. So, no wonder that all the—or okay, one of the typical so-called postmodern ways to save spirituality is to precisely insist on irreducible finitude. No wonder—and here I would like to correct myself, my reading of Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian filmmaker—no wonder that he is at the same time maybe the most spiritual of modern 20th century filmmakers and the most earth-like. If there is a cinematographer who is so obsessed with materiality, precisely in this sense of heaviness, wet inertia of objects, the two go together. So, and then there is of course another opposition between full ontological consistency of reality and openness. Usually—this is why I still think with all my friendship towards Lenin that *Materialism and Empirio-criticism* is one of the worst books ever written—there you have this naive idea that idealists think about this, you know, constructing reality, unfinished, but that the basic materialist premise is things out there exist fully ontologically. I claim here also we should turn it around. It is only materialism which can think—so materialism today, and that's what Badiou develops in a very nice way with all the, maybe he is half-bluffing, I’m not sure, references to Cantor and so on. It's a very nice point that he makes then that before Cantor, infinity was limited to the One, then spiritualized One. With Cantor, infinity becomes actual infinity, again, in the sense of also multiplicity, totally changes its status. Which is why, maybe you know this from history of mathematics, that Cantor privately was a devout Catholic and this he knew. This is why he was bothered all the time with a terrible sense of guilt. He was even I think writing to the Pope like, he basically knew what he was doing. So, we have materialist infinity and materialist ontological incompleteness. So, to cut a long story short so that I will not get lost in these preliminary improvisations, the—okay, God, why not but—okay, this is the only joke you will hear today. Recently I read a collection of jokes from Soviet Union and I found one, I mean this is for me the greatest spiritual loss of the fall of communism, you know, that the this sudden fall of political jokes which are of the highest quality there. One joke I like, it's not very funny but the logic I like, the story—this is even an early joke before Stalinism—of early Bolshevik joke about where they still believed in their propaganda power, seriously, about a communist Bolshevik great propaganda worker who died. Of course as a communist he was sent to hell. There, being a great propaganda guy, he immediately talked his way into converting the guards to let him up to heaven, no? Then next week on the inspection of hell, devil noticed the absence, no? And went up to God and said "Wait a minute, this guy belongs to my domain, give it back to me" or whatever, no? And God—the idea is already converted by this propaganda, no?—God told him three things, no? First, no, he starts, devil: "Oh my Lord, please." God says "Stop! First, I’m not Lord, I’m comrade. Point two, I don’t exist, are you dreaming? Point three, don’t talk too much because if you talk too much I will miss my party meeting" and so on, no? This type of God, nothing against, no? Okay now, enough of jokes. I have some political serious patient stuff to do, let me do it. I will—would like to begin with a book which is a charming book: Alan Weisman’s *The World Without Us*. Do you know what it is? It offers a vision of what would have happened if humanity, and only humanity, were to disappear suddenly from the surface of the earth. Natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually regaining, re-occupying human artifacts. We humans are here, in this book, reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing as it were our own absence. As Lacan points out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence. Which is why one of the fundamental fantasies is precisely the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception or parental copulation, like how it is when I was not yet there. Or, of course, the other complementary fantasy, the fantasy of witnessing one’s own funeral, like you know, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Along the same lines, and this already brings us to jealousy, a jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his parents would react to his own death, putting at stake his own absence. So *The World Without Us*, this book, is thus a fantasy at its purest, witnessing the earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence before we humans spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example comes in this book from the catastrophe of Chernobyl. The exuberant nature taking over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat, which was abandoned, left the way it was. I claim—and this is all I will say about jealousy—I claim that this structure of imagining how it is, imagining a utopian scene from which I am a priori excluded, this is the structure of jealousy. And here I would like to take an example from a contemporary Israeli writer David Grossman in his *Her Body Knows*, a collection of two short stories, okay, short novels. The first novella I think is a great one. It does for jealousy in literature what Luis Buñuel did for jealousy with his film *Él* (He). Grossman produces a masterpiece which displays the basic phantasmatic coordinates of this notion. In jealousy, the subject, when for example if you are a man jealous of what your wife is doing, screwing like crazy your best friend or what while you are not there. All I want to do is to draw your attention to this purely formal aspect: you create, imagine a paradise, a utopia of non-castrated full *jouissance* from which you are a priori excluded. Even some Hollywood films which are otherwise celebrated by feminists should be read in this way. Maybe they are not as terribly emancipatory as they appear to be. There in—this is how Joan Copjec reads, you know, that masterpiece with Barbara Stanwyck, *Stella Dallas*, which was remade recently with Bette Midler, I don't think the remake was so good. You know what happens. The mother who is a little bit vulgar has a problem. Her daughter falls in love, wants to marry a rich guy’s—I simplify the story very much—guy from a rich family and the mother knows that her daughter is now divided. Will she—wants to be of course with the rich guy but she knows that this will exclude the mother. So to make it easy, the mother pretends to be much more vulgar than she is, enabling the daughter to drop her without feeling guilty, as it were. And then you have the famous melodramatic scene in a house enlightened, the marriage goes on, and from outside with a blessed face the mother observes it. I think this is precisely creating the utopia. The perfect couple, the family is recreated but you are excluded. And my point is simply that this same definition applies also to what one can call political jealousy. From the anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews, to the Christian fundamentalist’s fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays, lesbians and so on and so on. And as I already developed many times in my books, I think it’s precisely this phantasmatic logic of jealousy, a space, you know, for a Christian fundamentalist, all the horrible things they are doing, you try to imagine them. This is what distinguishes for me authentic fundamentalists from a fake one. I’m here ready to follow my friend Fred Jameson and claim "My God, I have nothing, I love true fundamentalists." I’m not idealizing them. For example, Amish. I know they have the highest percentage of family rapes in the United—but one thing you should say about the Amish—and I’m not totally bluffing, I talked with some of them—this kind of, you know, typically Christian fundamentalist jealousy, you know, and at the same time fascination. "Oh my God, what what are they doing, orgies, gay and so on." It’s totally absent. They don’t have this type of jealousy. Even the others of whom I often make fun, but nonetheless here one should confess, Tibetan Buddhists. Also, I’ve spoken with some of them when I visited their capital, Boulder, Colorado. Where, no it’s really their economic capital, there you have a pizzeria whose owner is Dalai Lama’s brother, no? That’s, that’s life, no? So but what I want to say is that really this kind of—there is none of this, you know, fascination as if the others whom I deplore have some kind of excessive enjoyment. So again, the structure here in jealousy is that of fetishism, fetishism as the denial of castration. Apparently you will say "But is not this the ultimate castration, you are excluded?" No, no, no, no. You are excluded, that’s the price to construct the object as non-castrated. You are excluded and precisely by this the object, the fantasy scene, is the one of non-castrated enjoyment. So how does this function in ideology? In what type of ideology, I already mentioned anti-Semitism, is this fetishist logic of jealousy predominant? Here now I would like to go on by distinguishing two different modes of, let's call it naively, ideological mystification. We should in no way confuse them. For simplistic terms, I will call them the Liberal-Democratic one and the Populist-Fascist one. It’s a very simple opposition but I think it works. And it’s especially actual today. The first one, Liberal-Democratic ideological mystification, concerns false universality. The subject advocates, let for example, freedom, equality, not being aware of implicit qualifications which in their very form constrain the scope of this universality. Privileging certain social strata, rich, male, belonging to a certain race of culture and so on and so on. So again, the logic here is the one of false universality, no? You claim human rights, but do you not privilege, does not your list of human rights privilege certain cultural, sexual, whatever identity. But then I claim the second, for simplistic terms, this is not a concept, it’s purely descriptive, I call it Fascist-Populist mystification, concerns, works in a totally different way. It concerns the false identification of the antagonism and of the enemy. As we all know, it’s the ABC of analysis of ideology. For example in anti-Semitism, class struggle is or social antagonism is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews. So that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the Jewish plot. And I mean these mechanisms are actual, I will return later to them, even today. For example, I’m not saying that how is he called, Bernard Madoff, it’s my best friend but I feel certain sympathy. For no, you know why? How to put it, did you notice this explosion of ideology how to put it, how his guilt was personalized, rendered into some kind of almost, it was almost anti-Semitic, as if you know he, the dirty Jew, a freak. Even Elie—how do you pronounce it—Elie Wiesel, the great knight, fell into this trap. Didn’t he say something like "you are a scum" and so on and so on? Wait a minute, he was just following more radically than others, I claim, the logic of the system. Don’t make him, don’t make him—it was a clear example of mystifying as a psychological category, you know, it’s something which is inscribed into the logic of the social process. It’s incredible this disgusting mystifying moralizing. Even the Pope fell into it recently. The Pope said how he warned us against, against craving for too much material wealth, gluttony and so on. My God, that’s not—in capitalism these categories are not psychological categories, they are inscribed into the functioning of the system. But what’s my point to go to the main line? So I will—would like to put it in very clear naive hermeneutic terms. In the first case, Liberal-Democratic mystification, we can say that when the subject says freedom and equality, he really means freedom of trade, equality only in front of the law, only of white male people and so on and so on. In the second case, when the subject says Jews are the cause of our misery, he really means, without knowing, big capital is the cause of our misery, mystifies it. But did you notice the difference of the whole logic of mystification? In the first case—I’m again consciously to keep it clear using very naive terms—in the first case, what is explicit is, to put it very naively, the good thing, the good content. Who is opposed to universal freedom, equality and so on. But the implicit content is bad. The surface is good: freedom, equality. The problem is what is hidden beneath, all the secret qualifications, no? Freedom for whom to do what? Equality of whom to do what? While in the second case, it is the explicit content which is to put it naively bad—anti-Semitism—but the implicit content is potentially good—why not, class struggle, hatred of exploitation and so on and so on. The logic of mystification is different. Now this of course fits the psychoanalytic couple of symptom and fetish. In the first case we have the logic of symptom: universal category betrayed, falsified by its symptoms, secret qualifications which again belie its explicit content. In the second case we have fetish. Almost literally, you know how Freud defines fetish. The last thing, usually, that usually the fetish object is the last thing the subject sees before seeing feminine genitals, the lack of. Here we can also say the Jew is the last thing you see before class struggle, no? and then you elevate that into. Now comes a very sad conclusion. This asymmetry has, I think, crucial consequences for the critico-ideological process of demystification. In the case of liberal egalitarianism, the interpretive demystification is relatively easy. You simply when you criticize a liberal democrat, all you have to do is to mobilize the tension between form and content. You—I mean you know what I mean—you can show him "Listen, you pretend, you say equality, freedom, but can’t you see that effectively you exclude some people?" and so on and so on. And which is this, then it is relatively easy to convince a liberal democrat. He will have to admit "Yeah, it’s true" and then he will have either to radicalize his position "Okay, we should include also some property equality against exploitation, whatever," or the usual way out, he will adopt some kind of a pragmatic cynicism. He will say "Okay, I agree with you, but if we realize equality too directly it will be counter-productive and it will, it will generate new, new domination, new forms of, whatever." But nonetheless, there interpretation works. While in the—this is true clinically as well as politically. Clinically in the sense that at Freud—as Freud knew very well—it is practically impossible to convert a fetishist. You know, you cannot convince a fetishist "It’s fetish, but really it is." And if there is a lesson from the history of politics is that in exactly the same way, although once you are in, if you are not even a Marxist, every liberal, most of them would accept this that anti-Semitism, that the Jew is the condensation displacement of fetishist ersatz for denying some basic social discontent, antagonism, whatever. Although it seems to us so obvious, but as the history of politics shows, it is much easier to convince a liberal democrat "Listen, your universality is a false one, you know, in reality those minorities blah blah are in a secondary position, it’s not true equality," than to convince, for example, a lower-middle-class anti-Semite that "You are attacking Jews, but can’t you see that your real enemy is the capital?" and so on. So why don’t you go directly to the point. It doesn’t work. It’s clinically and politically true. For example, there are many cases unfortunately in the opposite direction: disappointed communists turned anti-Semitic right-wingers. We all know how many—not too many, let’s not exaggerate, but nonetheless—no because sometimes if you read German history, is it as if the entire ex-communist party turned into Nazis. It wasn't as simple as that, no? But nonetheless, also in France, again let’s not exaggerate, but nonetheless many ex-communists did turn into Le Pen supporters. But these are other reasons. Unfortunately, you know that Le Pen is the only considerable political force today in France which refers to working class, protecting—that’s another story. But what I want to say is that you know, this process of mystification is much easier than the process of demystification. It’s practically impossible to demystify an anti-Semitic worker, to convince him "But can’t you see this is only a metaphor, a fetishist ersatz, can’t you see it’s really class struggle?" and so on and so on. Ah, now comes a problematic part and I would like now to offend everyone—anti-Zionists and anti-Arabs. First, with regard to today’s situation, this means that I think one should at least view with profound suspicion those leftists who argue that the Muslim fundamentalist populist movements are basically ours, anti-imperialist emancipatory movements, and that the fact that they often formulate their program in directly anti-Enlightenment, anti-universalist terms, something even close to direct anti-Semitism, that this is just the confusion—the understandable confusion, the story of "Okay, sometimes they sound as anti-Semitic but you should never forget that they really mean anti-Zionism," no? Okay, I have a problem with this. My problem is that in this way you can redeem even Hitler. I mean you can also say—and in a way at an interpretive level it is true—to say that when Hitler was attacking Jews he was really attacking financial capitalism, no? Okay, but so what, million, million people had to die, no? I mean I—how to put it—I don’t believe in this logic of "Okay, at some later point they will see that, that Jews are really just a metaphor for class enemy, so let’s make a strategic alliance, especially if it’s an anti-American one." I think this is—here I agree with Jewish critics of too much tolerance of anti-Semitism, like from Chicago Moishe Postone, who pointed out how this type of alliance with this naive hope that "Okay, this is just a contingent historical limitation and like to go to the extreme and ten years from now even Bin Laden will see that it’s not the Jews, that it’s really the capitalism or whatever," no? Because I think the point is not so much the Jews, the point is that these Arab movements, that's what for me makes them problematic, is that they define themselves as ultimately, most of them, not all, things are here much more refined, as ultimately radically anti-Enlightenment. If you read their programs, some of them I did, the enemy is not the Jew. The enemy is usually very clear: French Revolution with this destructuring and—that’s what I like most about French Revolution. Okay, so this is I think what makes very dangerous phenomena like, you know this fascinating evil figure, Barbet Schroeder did a documentary on him, Jacques Vergès. He was on the one hand radically anti-colonialist leftist figure who finished now defending all the big last surviving Nazis like Klaus Barbie and so on. It’s precisely this wrong alliance "anything goes if it’s anti-American," how to put it, no? So I reject this. On the other hand, the situation is much more tragic. Now comes if you are more pro-Palestinian the other side. Even in the case of clearly fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to trust the media. Let me take the extreme example: Taliban. They are in our media regularly presented as fundamentalist Islamist group enforcing its rule with terror and so on and so on. However, about a week and a half ago—from time to time truth emerges in our media—did you notice there was even in *New York Times*, I think, a wonderful report on what really happened when, you know now, the latest fear. You know that in Pakistan even the army withdrew from that Swat Valley, Taliban took over. It was mostly presented in our media as simple fundamentalist takeover and so on and so on. My God, we simply didn’t know what is going on there, namely that what the Taliban did is organize a class revolt which exploited profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants. It was a class revolution. Let me quote from *New York Times* so that you will not suspect me of some Arab propaganda. To quote, "In Swat, part of Pakistan where Taliban is now officially almost in power, accounts from those who have fled now make it clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power. To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that become their shock troops. The Taliban’s ability to exploit class divisions adds a new moment to the insurgency and its raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal. Mahmoob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer, said quote: 'The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution. Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan. The militants are promising more than just proscription on music and schooling. They are promising effective government and economic redistribution.'" So you see this is the other side that you get. My God, and this confirms the old thought of Walter Benjamin that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. So even if Taliban are—to use this fashionable but for me problematic term—Islamo-fascists, they are nonetheless enacting, taking over a revolutionary agenda which is missing. In other words, I think that in phenomena—it's clear to me—like there is nothing how should I put it, natural in the sense of spontaneous process in phenomena like Taliban. In it, the West is paying the price for its catastrophic politics throughout the decades of after World War II when it was making a judgment—catastrophic judgment—that the main danger are secular leftists, so anything goes, you can support all the fundamentalists just to screw the left. Now they have like, show me one—to put it in a cynical way, show me one axis of evil fundamentalist who wasn’t ten years ago a CIA agent, no? I mean that's the tragedy. In other words, I—you know this well-known argument, that liberal argument, that about the similarities between left and right extremisms. Hitler’s terror camps imitated Bolshevik terror. The Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda. I claim yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaces, takes the place of the leftist revolution. Its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there is a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction which the left was not able to mobilize. And again I think the same holds for what people sometimes call today Islamo-fascism. Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Let me take two—one will be enough—obvious example. Today’s Afghanistan. Today Afghanistan is portrayed as the ultimate fundamentalist country. But my God, if you are, and some of us here unfortunately are, old enough to remember at least thirty years of history back. At that point—are you aware that thirty, forty years ago Afghanistan was one of the most secularized Middle East Muslim—they had a king who was a kind of an enlightened pro-Western a little bit technocratic monarch. They had an autochthonous, very strong communist party which even in a coup d'état took power. And that’s important. As declassified documents show now, that takeover was not even orchestrated by Soviet Union. It took them by surprise. It’s only when it didn’t work that Soviet Union intervened. That’s the tragedy. Out of this—and there are other wonderful examples that I read about—how, for example thirty, forty years ago, it was extremely tolerant country where in some of the cities they even had this wonderful—I think sincerely without any irony—habit of people of different confessions visiting each other’s ritual. You know, Christians visited Muslims and so on. So how did Afghanistan become what it is? Through the disappearance of secular left, through its being caught in global politics. Again we should never forget this. It’s not some old primitive fundamentalist country which is resisting globalization. It was a tolerant enlightened country which the way it was globalized pushed it into fundamentalism. Not to mention that you have your own example in the United States of the same process: Kansas. You know Thomas Frank’s nice book, which demonstrates exactly this, literally this Benjamin’s thesis of how left populism, sorry right populism replaces the failure of the left. You know that Kansas, which is now the absolute bedrock of Christian fundamentalism, is historically—no wonder John Brown, maybe the most radical figure in American emancipatory politics was from Kansas. Kansas in the Roosevelt era and so on was the bedrock of all radical leftist populist movements. Now it’s the other way around. We all know anti-communist—the anti-communist characterization of Marxism as the Islam of the 20th century. The idea is that Marxism secularizes Islam’s abstract fanaticism. Jean-Pierre Taguieff, the liberal historian of anti-Semitism, turned this characterization around, claiming that Islam is turning out to be the Marxism of the 21st century, prolonging after the decline of communism its violent anti-capitalism. However, again, if we take into account Benjamin’s idea of fascism as occupying the place of a failed revolution, then the rational core of such inversions can be easily accepted. That is to say, of course the fact that Islam is turning out to be the Marxism of 21st century simply means that when the left, the secular left fails, populist right-wingers take over the empty place. The most catastrophic conclusion that can be drawn from this constellation is the one drawn among others by Moishe Postone, whom I otherwise, to avoid a misunderstanding, highly appreciate for his excellent work of re-actualizing Marxist critique of political economy. His conclusion is that since every crisis which opens up the space for radical left also gives rise to anti-Semitism—and then usually the right-wing populism and anti-Semitism win—it is better for us leftists to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Brought to its conclusion—and this conclusion was formulated by Bernard-Henri Lévy among others—this reasoning implies that ultimately anti-capitalism as such is today anti-Semitic. Now that’s dangerous for me. So what’s, where is the misunderstanding here? The difference between liberalism and the radical left is that although they refer to the same three elements—liberal center, populist right, radical left—they locate them in a radically different topology. For the liberal center, radical left and radical right are the two forms of appearance of the same totalitarian excess, while for the left the only true alternative is the one between itself, the left, and the liberal mainstream. The populist radical right is nothing but the symptom of the liberalism’s inability to deal with the leftist threat. This is why for a true leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is a false conflict, a vicious cycle of two poles generating presupposing each other. And that’s for me crucial. When we are dealing, for example, with a big conflict like the Middle East conflict. I think it’s absolutely crucial to insist that in a fundamental sense this is a false conflict. Even if there will be a world war and we will all die because of it. I cannot—you know what I mean—it’s not a true conflict. Both sides play a false game there. Some Arabs use this conflict to avoid their own modernization, to avoid their own revolution. Zionists play their own game. It’s a false conflict. So what is going on there? Let me give you now a short reading of how I see a situation there. I unconditionally, I hope it’s clear from what I said, oppose any type of anti-Semitism, even a soft one, you know in the sense of "Oh, we should forgive them because they are so screwed up by the Zionists that they can afford a little bit." No, I think—I think anti-Semitism is unconditionally, I don't know how to put it moralistically, totally evil, not only for obvious ethical reasons, but also because I think anti-Semitism is a kind of a—how should I put it—zero level of ideology, ideology as such. It’s a pure mechanism. You take an inherent immanent antagonism, you replace it by an external intruder to be liquidated to re-establish harmony. But what goes on in the Middle East? It is sometimes very productive to read two disparate different news items together. And then a new meaning like a spark explodes. For example, on March 1st, it was reported that the Israeli government—you see, it’s one of these small notes which appear in our media but lack what Lévi-Strauss would have called symbolic efficiency, no? Nobody even notices them. So you see, I’m here an optimist in the sense of if you read carefully the—we don’t need any secret sources. Everything is in a way in the media, you just have to to read it. You know what it says in our media, again my source is here *New York Times*, not any Palestinian or whatever propaganda. March 1st, check it. It was reported that the Israeli government has drafted plans to build more than new housing units in the occupied West Bank. If implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the West Bank by about And it’s clear what this means. The end of any dream of a West Bank Palestinian state. Because also if you look closely—it again, my source is here *New York Times*—you see how these new buildings, new plans for new settlements are not located close to already existing settlements, but they are nicely dispersed all around, you know, like to basically to make withdrawal meaningless, even the game that now officially the state of Israel likes to play, no? "Okay, we will more or less withdraw, just we will keep some, some territories where our settlements are concentrated." Well, this precisely this plan de-concentrates them. What happens then when this news exploded? An Israeli government spokesman dismissed this report saying that the plans were of limited relevance. The actual construction of new homes requires, he says, the approval of the defense minister and the prime minister. So this is the typical bureaucratic. He didn’t say it’s not true. He just, you know, engaged in this bureaucratic double-speak. However, of these plans have already been fully approved, so the process is going on. The conclusion is obvious. While paying lip service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on ground which will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The other item, news item. On the very same day this reports hit the media—one day later, okay, March the 2nd—Hillary Clinton, on the visit visiting Israel, criticizes the rocket fire from Gaza as cynical, claiming quote: "There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idle, idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks." End of quote. But I have a naive question: but should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day? That’s the problem. That is to say, when Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral symmetrical terms, admitting there are extremists on both sides who reject peace and so on and so on. One should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there? That is to say, when you know, no big terrorist attacks, no big bombings, like when nothing happens which is worth being noticed by the media. Well, what goes on is precisely this continuous slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank, the gradual strangling of Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land. For example, are you aware that, again, my source are here our own Western big media, are you aware that there are in the last years literally almost daily violent acts of by settlement groups of terrorizing West Bank Palestinian farmers? They go up to burning mosques but mostly small level like poisoning wells, burning the crops and so on and so on. Again, my source here are, again, *New York Times* and some definitely not pro-Palestinian, maybe liberal Israeli newspapers like *Haaretz* and so on. I think the way to approach the situation in Palestine is a Kafkaesque approach. There is an interesting book published in by, I hope I will pronounce the name correctly, Sary Makdisi, *Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation*, which describes nicely how occupation there works. It’s not predominantly terror. It’s occupation by bureaucracy, a kind of Foucauldian Kafkaesque dream of control. Totally irrational excessive small regulations. It’s a nightmare. For example, if you are an—if you are an Arab living in East Jerusalem to buy or change apartment or simple things like this, with many other crazy sub-regulations. For example, I don't know, ah my source here is—I heard him on British TV—Tony Blair. He was shocked when he visited his now European Union missionary whatever for—well, he said that he discovered crazy things like, do you know if you are on the West Bank a Jewish farmer you can dig well for water as deep as you want. If you are Palestinian farmer you can dig three feet deep. I don't know what’s the idea, that you can dig a tunnel or whatever, but there are hundreds regulations like this concerning freedom of movement and so on and so on. So what I’m saying is that this is the reality which would see. And to avoid any misunderstanding, I unconditionally oppose so-called terrorist attacks. Even more, to make it clear, I oppose that Hezbollah attack from Lebanon. Because this was probably part of Iran power play and there they even cannot claim that they have any—like, you know what I mean, in on the West Bank you can at least understand terrorist attacks. It’s their country, desperate acts and so on. I mean but the delimitation is clear in Lebanon. Nobody, you know what I mean, Israel doesn’t claim "it’s our land in the north," Lebanese don’t claim—like, clearly just some playing games and so I am not justifying this. But what I’m saying nonetheless is that we should be aware of this fundamental asymmetry. Again, what happens when nothing happens? That’s the key to the crisis. I’m not saying this justifies terror, and I mean this seriously. What I’m nonetheless saying that they are desperate, you know, their—how do you say when the woman is approaching menopause—their biological clock is ticking, or how should I put it, no? I mean five, five, ten years more and it will be even ridiculous to talk about two states. And this would be my accusation of the state of Israel. It was typical, I checked it, I read their government proclamation when the state of Israel, to put, one should admit, did try to contain this excesses, daily attacks on, on—of the illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers, you know, burning their crops, what I mentioned and so on. But it’s very interesting to read the how the officials addressed them, the settlers. And it was very ambiguous text which, if you cut the crap as we put it, the official state of Israel critique of them was "Ah, don’t you see that we are working in the same direction? With your brutality you will just, you will spoil everything. Leave us to do it slowly the way, the way it should be done." Okay, so let me go on. I am afraid to talk too long, so I will, sorry, jump a little bit. Now, okay, not to get lost, I would like now to pass from this ultimate example of ethnic tensions, Israel versus Palestinians, to—I would like to generalize it. I think that today—and this brings us to more general presupposition of this economy of jealousy—today I claim it’s that more and more a neighbor—other ethnic group, even other sex and so on—is perceived—and that’s all the point about sexual harassment and so on, multiculturalist tolerance—as toxic. And I mean this quite literally. I noticed a wonderful—in the disgusting sense—phenomenon: how did you notice how the notion and topic of toxic subject or toxic subjects is gaining ground recently? I counted almost ten books on different aspects of it like, one of them, Lillian Glass, *Toxic People*. The book identifies thirty types of toxic people, and identifying them through humorous labels like "the smiling two-faced sneaky backstabber" and so on and so on, and then gives strategies how to contain them, and so on and so on. Another book, Albert Bernstein, *Emotional Vampires*, dealing with people who drain you dry and so on. This idea that the neighbor is potentially toxic vampire, which incidentally I think it’s true but that’s another story, yeah. No, what interests me, and this account—this makes the category of toxic people strictly ideological—is that in a paradigmatic postmodern way the predicate topic tends to cover a series of properties which belong to totally different levels: natural, cultural, psychological, political. In a totally inconsistent way, if you are serious cognitively, they are brought together under the same category. A toxic subject can be an immigrant who with a deadly disease who should be quarantined. It can be a terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented. It can be a fundamentalist ideologist who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred. It can be a parent, a teacher, or a priest who abuses and corrupts children and so on and so on. And in a way, of course, this is true. For example with parents, I claim that of course there are no parents who are really fully non-toxic. In—it’s part of the very notion of mother, everybody knows this, mother is a bitch. I don’t know how good she is, she always manipulates at some level. Paternal authority also. I mean, the—so I think the conclusion that we should make here is precisely that ultimately subject, precisely subject in the sense of neighbor, in this radical Christian sense—not what is the radical Christian sense? It’s the sense opposed to fellow-men, the *semblable*, the one who is like us. Neighbor is precisely the monstrous otherness, the undead, like vampire-like, you know when you—there is a fellow-man, your best friend, then he does something horrible, a sneaky remark, and all of a sudden you say "My God, what a monster he is, I didn’t know he or she is able," more she than he. Yeah, yeah, this was just I wanted to annoy you, my God. It's my modest hope that I can—okay, so this is when—when the fellow-man becomes the neighbor. And I claim that part of our—we today, we are on one hand—I’m giving you a very simplified analysis—we are in a global society, all that stuff. At the same time, because we are lacking firm traditional symbolic identities, neighbors are getting more and more toxic. And here we should make a jump from this personal level to a more political level. I think Italy is here maybe the land of our future. Why? As if in an ironic nod to Giorgio Agamben’s theory about state of emergency and so on. Do you know that in July 2008—another of these small items that people even tend not to read, but everything is in the media I claim—the Italian government proclaimed the state of emergency in the entire Italy? Are you aware of this, that Italy is now, it’s let me count, July for almost a year, Italy is now formally under emergency state. And with a very precise implication which they are practicing. Emergency state means you are allowed to deploy army units not against an external enemy but inside the territory to guarantee peace and so on. It started typically against the toxic neighbors: army units were employed on the southern shores to prevent the flow of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Then in already in August the Italian government deployed armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities: train stations, commercial centers. And it goes on and on. Recently there are, I’m not kidding, serious plans to put army units into great parks to prevent, to protect women from rapes. Now you will tell me "But you exaggerate, my God, but it’s life goes normally in Italy." That’s why I think Italy is the country of future. Because this is how it will be: the forthcoming, this is my sad prediction, global emergency state. It will not be, you know, this "we will awaken and military dictatorship, curfew." Life will go on like normal, but as they will put it precisely to guarantee this normality, more and more armed units here there, more and more control checkpoints and so on and so on. Which is the logic underlying this process? Of course it’s the logic of let’s call it detoxifying the neighbor. How is this done? One of my intellectual heroes—bad joke, he is disgusting but typical—you know who was Robert Brasillach, the great French fascist intellectual. I am against his death penalty, not that I sympathize with him, but I think it was effectively—you know what was the problem of France in '45? The large majority of civil servants and so on collaborated with Vichy. And it’s typical to learn that the judge who condemned him to death was an old Vichy judge. So he thought "Aha, let me pass that sentence on this guy so that I will" and so on and so on. I mean, nobody—France really have has a problem here. Nobody was clean there. Mitterrand was still '43, Vichy. Then when he smelled the new direction of the wind, "Oh, let's change sides," no? Did you know Mitterrand was still '43, Vichy and so on? Okay, Brasillach in proposed a wonderful—in a terrifying sense—formula which I think is more and more operative today. He spoke of reasonable anti-Semitism. Here is a quote: "We"—with reference to names concerning the names that you will hear, bear in mind that this is written in '38—"We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half-Jew, at the movies, to admire Proust, a half-Jew, to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew, and"—I love this—"even the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz" and so on. I like this one. "We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism." I think, I don't—now I will stop any America-bashing, I don’t like it and I will be critical towards Europe because we Europeans I think are de facto much worse than you Americans here at this level of dangerous neighbor-detoxifying racism. This type of reasonable anti-Semitism—okay today of course we will talk about reasonable anti-immigrant racism—is simply the predominant politics in Europe. This was the true victory of the radical populist left. And Le Pen, who is not an idiot, said this openly. When asked why is his party slowly losing, he said "Because we won. Because our agenda is generally accepted." And it’s true. Listen to a typical—sometimes not some, often even Social Democratic government. How do they reason? They say "We totally reject any violence against immigrants. This is deplorable, this is in total contradiction with our civilized standards and so on and so on. But"—then comes a "but" which is the victory of Le Pen—"But we should nonetheless understand that too many immigrants arouse understandable anxieties and fear of ordinary people, and precisely in order to prevent violent outbursts of people we should pre-act preventively, controlling the immigrants and so on and so on." So let me imagine—I like this—a kind of a how today’s Robert Brasillach would put it, in Europe or in the United States: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and African singers and sportsmen, East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant politics." That’s the predominant, that’s the *doxa* today. Brasillach, the fascist, won. Now another point. I told you how crucial it is for the notion of this toxic neighbor to distinguish between neighbor as this abyss of otherness, horror, and fellow-man. What’s the most difficult for us to accept, it’s not the inhumanity of the neighbor but his, her, their humanity. This is why I think this Jonathan Littell’s novel *The Kindly Ones*, *Les Bienveillantes*, caused such a scandal. I’m not saying it’s a great novel, to be frank, it’s too long, pages and so on. But you know what the novel is about, no? It’s about the fate of course, memoirs, a fictional first-person account of the Holocaust from a German participant, the SS-Obersturmbannführer Maximilian Aue. So it precisely tells the story from his side. And as such, the book is the best argument against that allegedly deep multiculturalist slogan, which I think I mocked already the last time I was here. You know that pseudo-deep wisdom: "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." You know this cheap stupidity, like "I hate you only because I didn’t really hear to your side of the story. If I were to hear you, I would have seen you have your own anxieties, fears, dreams, and I would see I cannot hate you." Well here we do get the enemy’s story, no? and if anything he should be more enemy, no? That’s, and you see this is what we are not ready to accept. And although I don’t agree fully with Hannah Arendt, but this is also I think what renders so traumatic her thesis about the banality of evil. That, you know, imagine talking to Hitler. I mean he would—I definitely know he had moments of pathetic sentimentality, he liked small children. They are all warm human beings close up, no? That’s so difficult to accept, this, this dimension of it. So let me go on. So again, our situation today is this one: exposed to toxic neighbors. Ah, now just to finish a little bit of Marxism. How did we get here? I will start with the big protest. It focused its struggle, at least in Europe, against what was perceived as the three pillars of capitalism: factory, school, family. And as the result, each domain was submitted to what we call post-industrial transformation. Factory work is today more and more outsourced or in the developed world reorganized along the post-Fordist non-hierarchical interactive teamwork, all that story. Permanent flexible private education is more and more replacing universal public education. Multiple forms of flexible sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. And this is I think, here I don't agree with my good friend Alain Badiou who still sticks to this myth of '68. I think that again the targets were totally wrong. We can experience it today. Again, the big motto you remember was: against factory, against big state education, against family. Okay, they won and now what we get is even worse, to cut a long story short. The left lost in its very victory. The direct enemy was defeated, but replaced by a new form of capitalist domination. In postmodern capitalism, market is invading new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prison and security. We are thus in the middle of a new process of the privatization of the social. And to grasp these new forms of privatization, I claim one should critically transform Marxist conceptual apparatus. What is for me, to be very simple, I’m now following Postone and up to a point Negri and some Italian economists with all my naive ignorance of this topic. But my God I’m desperately trying to do because I think that, you know what’s so traumatic for me about this ongoing economic financial meltdown? And I’m saying this as some kind of a radical leftist. I think it was invented by some capitalists to show how impotent the left is. With all moral criticism how irrational capitalism is, I didn’t hear of any feasible leftist alternative to it. I mean it is as if to demonstrate that the left really doesn’t have an alternative. So, my point is the following one. Where was the limit of Marx? One should be very clear here. You know that in the famous passage in his *Grundrisse*—before *Capital*, preparatory works, manuscripts—Marx developed this notion of general intellect, which is the collectivized, collective productive and social knowledge and so on and so on. Now what was Marx’s point? I simplify it very much, I know, if you are whispering to her what a bullshit he is saying. Marx was thought, Marx accepted the premise that with the development of capitalism the source of wealth is more and more knowledge and no longer labor time. So he was well aware that at a certain point labor time will become meaningless as the measure of value. But I think this is again Marx also at his worst. Because the conclusion he draws then in this passage of *Grundrisse* is totally naive one, is that this means that capitalism simply will disintegrate at a certain point because it will become meaningless. You know, exploitation is based on exploitation of value, value is labor and so on. So when labor time is no longer source of value, it’s meaningless. For him the moment again wealth is socialized in general intellect, the source of wealth, capitalist exploitation becomes impossible. Here I think Negri who tries to save this notion of general intellect totally misses Marx’s point. What Marx was not able to imagine was I think what among other things is going on today, is that precisely general intellect itself—this collectivized productive knowledge and so on—can be privatized again. But now comes the catch. In this case, the source of what appears as profit, of privatized wealth—here I agree with some Italian economists who developed this very nicely, those who are the source of Michael Hardt’s recent work, here I agree more than with Negri, with Hardt—it’s for example Carlo Vercellone is the main one who wrote a book on this, namely on what. You know that in early capitalism we pass from rent to profit. First you have rent, for example, I don’t know, you have some property, you let the other guy use it, but you just—you are not involved in productive process, you just—so capitalism is more and more from rent to profit. The theory of Vercellone and his colleagues—I think it’s very nice theory—is that with the predominance of cognitive capital, of collective knowledge, and its privatization, we are returning to rent. That what explains today’s capitalism is to put it in this awkward Deleuzian terms, the "becoming rent of capital." How? Let me give you a simple example just to explain this, a stupid one generally known. Bill Gates. How did he become from years ago, you know, a nobody tinkering in his garage, now the richest man in the world. Okay, a year ago he was billion, now he is Big loss, I would like to be in that position to say I lost billion, I only have now, no? Okay, what I want is that I think it’s a little bit ridiculous to use the terms of—you have to stretch it, overstretch it too much to speak about exploitation here. You know like is he ultra—if anything, A: let’s be honest, he is paying his workers relatively well, so it’s not that. B: I also think you cannot play the game of extra profit from other—no I think it’s clear situation: where is, what’s the source of Bill Gates' wealth? Is that with quasi-monopoly position of Microsoft he privatized what is de facto our general intellect, the universally spread Microsoft as the language, and he is getting rent for that. I think the only consistent explanation is he is in a rent. And this also explains why for example even if other programs like Linux or all that stuff are, so hackers tell me I am too stupid to judge, are objectively better, nonetheless we are still paying how much, dollars to use Bill Gates because you have to be part of—the problem of Linux is that it’s not to such an extent part of general intellect. And I think it’s clear also that this is the reason why the price of Microsoft products is totally—okay, not totally but to a large extent—without any relation to the so-called costs of production. It’s not that Bill Gates says "Oh, now we have to work more here, invest so it will cost more." The cost is absolutely not decided in these terms. It’s totally different rent-controlling, how to put it, rent-controlling logic there. And I think the same goes for natural resources. With oil and so on it’s again what, what is Saudi Arabia and others doing? It’s rent. So this—okay, I don’t have time to conclude now, I don’t have time to to go into one direction which would have been very interesting here, into what does this mean politically? Here I have a pessimistic conclusion, which is the following one. Precisely because rent cannot be left in a simple way to the market to decide, the way if you produce something like bottle of water, you know there are others, Poland whatever, all of them I know with more bacteria than the simple tap water, we know the story and so on. But what I mean—here you can say "Okay with competition market decides how much to pay." With rent control or intellectual property, it’s not as simple as that. Because first here it’s clear what I am selling, this, the object, no? It’s no problem. But you know, where does Bill Gates’ private property that he is allowed to sell begin, where does common property stop? There is no natural law there. It has to be in an ultimately totally arbitrary way, it has to be state regulated. Which is why we need state. We need strong state more than ever. Here I totally disagree with those, up to a point Negri, who dream about the state is disappearing. No, for this becoming-rent-of-profit capitalism, a strong regulatory state is needed more than ever. And this state, I claim, in order to do this work of regulation—like to decide this is, this can be privatized, that can be privatized—and again I cannot emphasize to what extent these are totally, totally arbitrary decisions. Like you know some companies just following the market logic wanted to patent and this way privatize DNA structures. No, okay, the state intervened and so on. This is a totally contingent process. I claim that this I think gives a certain privilege to a strong authoritarian state. Okay, but that's another line of thought. To conclude, I would like to say now something more, that this structure where rent mixes with profit and so on renders the whole process much more mystified and non-transparent than the one described by Marx. Which is why I claim ideology is more and more materially efficient today. Happy those who think today’s meltdown means "Oh people will finally see the irrationality of capitalism" and so on. No, on the contrary. I think the first reaction in a crisis is that you cling even more desperately to your fundamental ideological positions. Let me give you simply a couple of proofs. I don’t know what you were doing, but on that very day—when was that, Tax Day, tea parties about a week or two ago, you know? I was tired as a dog, I just arrived from Europe, so I was sitting in a room, hotel room—I was already in the states, I think I was in, in, in L.A.—watching TV and I was jumping between the two programs where my love was divided. On the one hand, I cannot resist it, on PBS I think, and it went on, so I was jumping from one to the other—on the one side it was on PBS a documentary on that great, you know, left folk singer Pete Seeger, *Power of a Song*. On another program, I—this is the only news I I hear is Fox News, of course. Fuck it, they are the only interesting passionate ones, I hate that boring political correctness of CNN, I prefer Fox News, no? I think United States need a leftist violent Fox News with that spirit but leftist, no? Okay, so—and what I got on the Fox News was a live transmission of one of these tea parties in Austin, Texas, where some right-wing country singer was singing an anti-Obama, anti-democratic, whatever song. Two things did strike me. First, the incredible similarity between that song and Pete Seeger’s song. If you forget about political opposition, the basic constellation was the same. You know, we poor hard-working people, we will not allow to be exploited by the rich, financial ruined by speculations and so on and so on. That is to say, we all know this triumph of the populist right. Again, it’s another example of this, disappearing—this Benjamin wisdom, you know—disappearing left, the place taken, okay let’s not exaggerate, not by fascism, but by right-wing populism. The other thing which did strike me is, and here you can see if you need it, a brutal, brutally direct proof of how ideology functions, of the material force of ideology. The crazy irrationality of this scene. There was a guy singing "enough of it, we ordinary hard-working Texans"—which is why, did you hear the last joke, they want to secede now, no? they speak about—I love this. You will become—you laughed at us, you know, Balkan, balkanization, ha! You will get it, you will get it now, no? I mean seriously. No, what I want is that let’s be serious. I mean, don’t people know the basic facts? We can have, if you are a conservative economist, and I agree I’m skeptical, I hope Obama’s plan will more or less work, and I allow you all the doubts. But my point is one thing you cannot accuse Obama of, that he is taxing the ordinary people. I mean look at his tax plans. Over will pay lower taxes. Just some will pay of the richest wealthiest will pay higher taxes. So how can you get thousands to protest against ordinary people paying taxes for the rich and so on and so on? This ideological madness goes on. Like I read again and I follow news about her, she is the greatest, whatever you think, Ayn Rand, there is only one Ayn Rand. You know that her *Atlas Shrugged* is already again now at amazon.com? And and there is the whole movement now and like we need Ayn Rand again this "Obama socialism" and so on. But wait a minute. She is the cause of the shit you are in now. We all know—he admitted it, you know that historical hearing of congressional of Alan Greenspan where wonderfully he used the term "ideology," you know that "yes, there is a flaw in my ideology." But Alan Greenspan is a objectivist. Don’t you know this? He is a card-carrying Randian, how should I put it? So it’s—what I’m saying is that when you have this what rationally appears as clear irrationality, there are only two solutions: either people are stupid—and in spite of all I don’t think people are stupid—or ideology is alive as material force is alive more than ever. Why? Where do I see that authoritarian tendency which I already mentioned before today? Did you notice how—okay let me go now just briefly into this financial meltdown stuff. What did strike me is the absolutely unconditional character of the demand. We have to do something. Like the—how you remember when we fight global warming, AIDS, hunger, healthcare, there is always time to reflect, you know? "Yeah, yeah, it’s a serious problem, we will meet next year to debate it again" and so on, no? Like for example for hunger, everybody agrees and the big powers met, they dedicated billion dollars to it today. This looks—if you see them down, you don’t even lean down to pick them up, no? billion, what is this compared to? But what I want to say is that here you negotiate, but did you notice how when it was the question of the so-called bailout money, there was an absolute emergency. The Real was here. Even did you notice how you—by you I mean American political community—you went into practically a kind of emergency state in the sense of, do you remember how first the Congress rejected it? And then basically all of them got together. McCain, Obama, Bush twisted the arms and the message was: "Listen, democracy is nice, voting, but now this really needs to be done. Fuck off." It was kind of de facto emergency state. The message was clear: "Stop about voting, this has to be done." And it was done. You remember how, it was very mysterious, in one week they they turned it around. Here you can see how our Real is capital, how should I put it? You know, you can negotiate, reinterpret—no offense against you, Avital, you can deconstruct whatever—but money is the un-deconstructible condition of deconstruction. Justice, how should I put it? You know, here you don’t joke. This is—this is—this is the power of ideology. And here things are tragically clear. Let me finish—maybe I’m even repeating myself, I don't think so—by quoting the guy whom I don't otherwise excessively appreciate as a good guy, Bill Clinton. He did a nice thing. No, no, no, I am very much tempted to acknowledge that many people do nice thing. Like yesterday at my talk I mentioned—I wanted to dedicate her talk my talk here to her—Marilyn Chambers, you know the porn star who, my God, big progressive fighter, I’m not kidding. You know what she did? A: she was the first one to have a sex scene in her *Behind the Green Door* with a black guy, a black guy screwing her. This was extremely important because as already Frantz Fanon wrote, it’s easy acceptable for a racist for a white guy to screw a black girl, but it’s much more problematic publicly to accept the the other way around. Second thing, you know that publicity of her with some Ivory whatever powder holding a small child. This is—this is wonderful idea. Why these patriarchal divisions? Why either a clean mother or a sexualized woman? Why not both? Why not together? So all my heroes. Why not Bill Clinton if Marilyn Chambers, no? In—on October 23rd, Bill Clinton made—and we should read this, my God. Again everything is in the media. Here I respectfully disagree with a guy whom I otherwise respect, Noam Chomsky. As he said to a friend of mine, he really thinks that there is no need for interpretation today, we just have to tell people the truth, you know. People had to be—yeah, people basically know, I think. No, this is way too naive. What do I mean? Okay, on that date, Clinton at a UN—United Nations gathering marking the World Food Day, he gave a speech under the indicative title: "We Blew It on Global Food." And he made it very clear that today’s global crisis shows how—I quote Clinton—"we all blew it including me when I was president." How? And he goes on very consequently: by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world poor. So he is very clear here. Clinton puts the blame on international and Western big state bodies on forcing third world states into modernizing globalizing their agriculture, opening it up and so on and so on, and dropping government subsidies and all that stuff and so on and so on. And the result is clear: while crops are exported, farmers thrown out of their land are pushed into slums available for outsource sweatshops and countries had to rely more and more on imported food. This looks good. The problem is that when then for other reasons—the development of China and drought, global warming and so on—the prices of food goes up, you have a catastrophe and you end up where you are today in Haiti, where they are again, not again, selling mud cakes, literally. They are selling mud cakes on—because you get some minerals and they somehow fill you, fill your stomach. So Clinton got it here correctly. The problem is here what? The problem is that in spite of his proclamations—again read the news together—read this news on Clinton together with news a month later, in November of things which even terrified me. You know that it’s not, it’s even worse than Clinton admitted there. Again you read this, this is again one of those news, you know, here and there you get them, they tend to disappear. This is for me really horrible. I mean, usually I am a cynic, I don’t care, fuck off, the sooner we all drop dead the better, but not this. You know what happened? It’s really historical date. A group of South Korean companies basically negotiated a 99-year lease on million acres of the best farmland of Madagascar. It’s exactly half of its entire arable land. And they made it clear that they will not even use it to produce food, but mostly export industrial plants and so on and so on. And then I learn that in more and more countries this is going on, even in the countries which we usually associate with hunger. For example, British Sun Biofuels is planting biofuel crops in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, buying large parts of the best land. So again what Clinton is deploring, it’s going on even more recently because because now we all know we are approaching a time when there will be when—I mean with all the poetry of immaterial production of Negri and Hardt, the fact is that more and more there will be wars even for water, material resources and so on and so on. So basically Western countries are systematically already buying the best land in third world countries. It’s not even just making local economy change shift into export industrial plants or whatever. No, it’s simply directly, directly buying them. So what’s my problem here? My problem is that we shouldn’t moralize here. We should add to what Clinton says two things: how especially how the West is, the West is cheating here. That's the first note. You know, on the one hand we from the West were putting pressure on third world countries to, you know, open yourself to the market, no state subsidies and so on, while and we Europeans if anything are worse than you Americans. While we are saying no, in global economy self-sufficiency is outdated. But we take extreme care in the case of an emergency state so that we can survive of remaining self-sufficient. Like the whole European community works like this. My God, do you know that in European Union on average every cow gets euros a year support from Brussels, which is higher than the year per capita product of a third world typical country. So again the West doubly cheats here. It advises them to do what the West itself is not doing. Second thing where we should a little bit radicalize Clinton. I agree with him when he says food is not a commodity like others. But then let’s go on a little bit. Defense, as all patriots are aware, is not also not a commodity like others: arms, no? Then food, of course. Water, it’s not. Energy is not. Environment is not commodity like others. We need it. Culture is not. We need it. Education is not. Health is not. So what then remains? Maybe some stupid toys from China, cheap. In other words, if you bring Clinton’s reasoning to the end, we have to raise the question of communism again. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here and I will directly start, not to be too long. Don’t be afraid, I hate to give a résumé of the book which is the official pretext of this appearance of mine. Only two things. First, the only common thing that the paper that I will deliver here has with the book is the topic of the neighbor. The book, of course, focuses on the neighbor as a Judeo-Christian theological category. I will rather focus on neighbor as precisely the one of whom we are jealous as a political category. So, but nonetheless, before I begin, I would like to, because some friends are criticizing me a lot, I would like to clarify a misunderstanding. As if, although I emphasize that I am not religious and so on, do I not play—that's an intelligent criticism that my friend who was stupid enough to write a book about me, *Zizek’s Ontology*, Adrian Johnston, formulated recently in a private communication letter to me—that does I write books somehow celebrating Christianity, but at the same time I emphasize all the time, you know, I am not religious privately and so on and so on. But on the other hand, I often describe this fetishist disavowal, typical functioning of ideology today: we practice beliefs, but we all claim "Oh, who takes it seriously, we don’t believe." So this logic of *je sais bien mais quand même*, I know very well there is no God but. Am I not falling into the same trap? That I think I'm just flirting with Christianity, really I’m an atheist, but what if, you know, I pretend to pretend, but in reality I am more caught into it. Well, I think those who worry about this, the book *The Monstrosity of Christ* should put them at ease. I have there long debates on precisely what atheism could mean today. And this is just part of a larger movement I’m engaged in—thinking here with Alain Badiou, Johnston himself, and others. I think very interesting things are going on today with topic of materialism. Did you notice how throughout the 19th century somehow the couple of materialism-idealism was attached to, was linked to or overdetermined by another couple, infinity-finitude. The idea was idealists focus on the worthlessness of finite material objects, the true is the eternal, infinite and so on, while materialists emphasize "No, only finite material actual objects really exist" and so on and so on. But I agree here again with Alain Badiou and some of his pupils who claim that not only today, but throughout the 20th century already, maybe starting with early Heidegger, *Sein und Zeit*, we have the exactly opposite topic. Today, I claim, it is the religious, spiritualists, idealists, however you call them, who like to emphasize our irreducible finitude, in the sense of we are embedded in certain life-world, we cannot overstep this limitation and so on and so on. Why? The idea is that precisely this ultimate limitation, the finitude of our condition, means that then there is a void, something inaccessible close to us where of course then the sacred can be located. So, no wonder that all the—or okay, one of the typical so-called postmodern ways to save spirituality is to precisely insist on irreducible finitude. No wonder—and here I would like to correct myself, my reading of Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian filmmaker—no wonder that he is at the same time maybe the most spiritual of modern 20th century filmmakers and the most earth-like. If there is a cinematographer who is so obsessed with materiality, precisely in this sense of heaviness, wet inertia of objects, the two go together. So, and then there is of course another opposition between full ontological consistency of reality and openness. Usually—this is why I still think with all my friendship towards Lenin that *Materialism and Empirio-criticism* is one of the worst books ever written—there you have this naive idea that idealists think about this, you know, constructing reality, unfinished, but that the basic materialist premise is things out there exist fully ontologically. I claim here also we should turn it around. It is only materialism which can think—so materialism today, and that's what Badiou develops in a very nice way with all the, maybe he is half-bluffing, I’m not sure, references to Cantor and so on. It's a very nice point that he makes then that before Cantor, infinity was limited to the One, then spiritualized One. With Cantor, infinity becomes actual infinity, again, in the sense of also multiplicity, totally changes its status. Which is why, maybe you know this from history of mathematics, that Cantor privately was a devout Catholic and this he knew. This is why he was bothered all the time with a terrible sense of guilt. He was even I think writing to the Pope like, he basically knew what he was doing. So, we have materialist infinity and materialist ontological incompleteness. So, to cut a long story short so that I will not get lost in these preliminary improvisations, the—okay, God, why not but—okay, this is the only joke you will hear today. Recently I read a collection of jokes from Soviet Union and I found one, I mean this is for me the greatest spiritual loss of the fall of communism, you know, that the this sudden fall of political jokes which are of the highest quality there. One joke I like, it's not very funny but the logic I like, the story—this is even an early joke before Stalinism—of early Bolshevik joke about where they still believed in their propaganda power, seriously, about a communist Bolshevik great propaganda worker who died. Of course as a communist he was sent to hell. There, being a great propaganda guy, he immediately talked his way into converting the guards to let him up to heaven, no? Then next week on the inspection of hell, devil noticed the absence, no? And went up to God and said "Wait a minute, this guy belongs to my domain, give it back to me" or whatever, no? And God—the idea is already converted by this propaganda, no?—God told him three things, no? First, no, he starts, devil: "Oh my Lord, please." God says "Stop! First, I’m not Lord, I’m comrade. Point two, I don’t exist, are you dreaming? Point three, don’t talk too much because if you talk too much I will miss my party meeting" and so on, no? This type of God, nothing against, no? Okay now, enough of jokes. I have some political serious patient stuff to do, let me do it. I will—would like to begin with a book which is a charming book: Alan Weisman’s *The World Without Us*. Do you know what it is? It offers a vision of what would have happened if humanity, and only humanity, were to disappear suddenly from the surface of the earth. Natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually regaining, re-occupying human artifacts. We humans are here, in this book, reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing as it were our own absence. As Lacan points out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence. Which is why one of the fundamental fantasies is precisely the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception or parental copulation, like how it is when I was not yet there. Or, of course, the other complementary fantasy, the fantasy of witnessing one’s own funeral, like you know, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Along the same lines, and this already brings us to jealousy, a jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his parents would react to his own death, putting at stake his own absence. So *The World Without Us*, this book, is thus a fantasy at its purest, witnessing the earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence before we humans spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example comes in this book from the catastrophe of Chernobyl. The exuberant nature taking over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat, which was abandoned, left the way it was. I claim—and this is all I will say about jealousy—I claim that this structure of imagining how it is, imagining a utopian scene from which I am a priori excluded, this is the structure of jealousy. And here I would like to take an example from a contemporary Israeli writer David Grossman in his *Her Body Knows*, a collection of two short stories, okay, short novels. The first novella I think is a great one. It does for jealousy in literature what Luis Buñuel did for jealousy with his film *Él* (He). Grossman produces a masterpiece which displays the basic phantasmatic coordinates of this notion. In jealousy, the subject, when for example if you are a man jealous of what your wife is doing, screwing like crazy your best friend or what while you are not there. All I want to do is to draw your attention to this purely formal aspect: you create, imagine a paradise, a utopia of non-castrated full *jouissance* from which you are a priori excluded. Even some Hollywood films which are otherwise celebrated by feminists should be read in this way. Maybe they are not as terribly emancipatory as they appear to be. There in—this is how Joan Copjec reads, you know, that masterpiece with Barbara Stanwyck, *Stella Dallas*, which was remade recently with Bette Midler, I don't think the remake was so good. You know what happens. The mother who is a little bit vulgar has a problem. Her daughter falls in love, wants to marry a rich guy’s—I simplify the story very much—guy from a rich family and the mother knows that her daughter is now divided. Will she—wants to be of course with the rich guy but she knows that this will exclude the mother. So to make it easy, the mother pretends to be much more vulgar than she is, enabling the daughter to drop her without feeling guilty, as it were. And then you have the famous melodramatic scene in a house enlightened, the marriage goes on, and from outside with a blessed face the mother observes it. I think this is precisely creating the utopia. The perfect couple, the family is recreated but you are excluded. And my point is simply that this same definition applies also to what one can call political jealousy. From the anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews, to the Christian fundamentalist’s fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays, lesbians and so on and so on. And as I already developed many times in my books, I think it’s precisely this phantasmatic logic of jealousy, a space, you know, for a Christian fundamentalist, all the horrible things they are doing, you try to imagine them. This is what distinguishes for me authentic fundamentalists from a fake one. I’m here ready to follow my friend Fred Jameson and claim "My God, I have nothing, I love true fundamentalists." I’m not idealizing them. For example, Amish. I know they have the highest percentage of family rapes in the United—but one thing you should say about the Amish—and I’m not totally bluffing, I talked with some of them—this kind of, you know, typically Christian fundamentalist jealousy, you know, and at the same time fascination. "Oh my God, what what are they doing, orgies, gay and so on." It’s totally absent. They don’t have this type of jealousy. Even the others of whom I often make fun, but nonetheless here one should confess, Tibetan Buddhists. Also, I’ve spoken with some of them when I visited their capital, Boulder, Colorado. Where, no it’s really their economic capital, there you have a pizzeria whose owner is Dalai Lama’s brother, no? That’s, that’s life, no? So but what I want to say is that really this kind of—there is none of this, you know, fascination as if the others whom I deplore have some kind of excessive enjoyment. So again, the structure here in jealousy is that of fetishism, fetishism as the denial of castration. Apparently you will say "But is not this the ultimate castration, you are excluded?" No, no, no, no. You are excluded, that’s the price to construct the object as non-castrated. You are excluded and precisely by this the object, the fantasy scene, is the one of non-castrated enjoyment. So how does this function in ideology? In what type of ideology, I already mentioned anti-Semitism, is this fetishist logic of jealousy predominant? Here now I would like to go on by distinguishing two different modes of, let's call it naively, ideological mystification. We should in no way confuse them. For simplistic terms, I will call them the Liberal-Democratic one and the Populist-Fascist one. It’s a very simple opposition but I think it works. And it’s especially actual today. The first one, Liberal-Democratic ideological mystification, concerns false universality. The subject advocates, let for example, freedom, equality, not being aware of implicit qualifications which in their very form constrain the scope of this universality. Privileging certain social strata, rich, male, belonging to a certain race of culture and so on and so on. So again, the logic here is the one of false universality, no? You claim human rights, but do you not privilege, does not your list of human rights privilege certain cultural, sexual, whatever identity. But then I claim the second, for simplistic terms, this is not a concept, it’s purely descriptive, I call it Fascist-Populist mystification, concerns, works in a totally different way. It concerns the false identification of the antagonism and of the enemy. As we all know, it’s the ABC of analysis of ideology. For example in anti-Semitism, class struggle is or social antagonism is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews. So that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the Jewish plot. And I mean these mechanisms are actual, I will return later to them, even today. For example, I’m not saying that how is he called, Bernard Madoff, it’s my best friend but I feel certain sympathy. For no, you know why? How to put it, did you notice this explosion of ideology how to put it, how his guilt was personalized, rendered into some kind of almost, it was almost anti-Semitic, as if you know he, the dirty Jew, a freak. Even Elie—how do you pronounce it—Elie Wiesel, the great knight, fell into this trap. Didn’t he say something like "you are a scum" and so on and so on? Wait a minute, he was just following more radically than others, I claim, the logic of the system. Don’t make him, don’t make him—it was a clear example of mystifying as a psychological category, you know, it’s something which is inscribed into the logic of the social process. It’s incredible this disgusting mystifying moralizing. Even the Pope fell into it recently. The Pope said how he warned us against, against craving for too much material wealth, gluttony and so on. My God, that’s not—in capitalism these categories are not psychological categories, they are inscribed into the functioning of the system. But what’s my point to go to the main line? So I will—would like to put it in very clear naive hermeneutic terms. In the first case, Liberal-Democratic mystification, we can say that when the subject says freedom and equality, he really means freedom of trade, equality only in front of the law, only of white male people and so on and so on. In the second case, when the subject says Jews are the cause of our misery, he really means, without knowing, big capital is the cause of our misery, mystifies it. But did you notice the difference of the whole logic of mystification? In the first case—I’m again consciously to keep it clear using very naive terms—in the first case, what is explicit is, to put it very naively, the good thing, the good content. Who is opposed to universal freedom, equality and so on. But the implicit content is bad. The surface is good: freedom, equality. The problem is what is hidden beneath, all the secret qualifications, no? Freedom for whom to do what? Equality of whom to do what? While in the second case, it is the explicit content which is to put it naively bad—anti-Semitism—but the implicit content is potentially good—why not, class struggle, hatred of exploitation and so on and so on. The logic of mystification is different. Now this of course fits the psychoanalytic couple of symptom and fetish. In the first case we have the logic of symptom: universal category betrayed, falsified by its symptoms, secret qualifications which again belie its explicit content. In the second case we have fetish. Almost literally, you know how Freud defines fetish. The last thing, usually, that usually the fetish object is the last thing the subject sees before seeing feminine genitals, the lack of. Here we can also say the Jew is the last thing you see before class struggle, no? and then you elevate that into. Now comes a very sad conclusion. This asymmetry has, I think, crucial consequences for the critico-ideological process of demystification. In the case of liberal egalitarianism, the interpretive demystification is relatively easy. You simply when you criticize a liberal democrat, all you have to do is to mobilize the tension between form and content. You—I mean you know what I mean—you can show him "Listen, you pretend, you say equality, freedom, but can’t you see that effectively you exclude some people?" and so on and so on. And which is this, then it is relatively easy to convince a liberal democrat. He will have to admit "Yeah, it’s true" and then he will have either to radicalize his position "Okay, we should include also some property equality against exploitation, whatever," or the usual way out, he will adopt some kind of a pragmatic cynicism. He will say "Okay, I agree with you, but if we realize equality too directly it will be counter-productive and it will, it will generate new, new domination, new forms of, whatever." But nonetheless, there interpretation works. While in the—this is true clinically as well as politically. Clinically in the sense that at Freud—as Freud knew very well—it is practically impossible to convert a fetishist. You know, you cannot convince a fetishist "It’s fetish, but really it is." And if there is a lesson from the history of politics is that in exactly the same way, although once you are in, if you are not even a Marxist, every liberal, most of them would accept this that anti-Semitism, that the Jew is the condensation displacement of fetishist ersatz for denying some basic social discontent, antagonism, whatever. Although it seems to us so obvious, but as the history of politics shows, it is much easier to convince a liberal democrat "Listen, your universality is a false one, you know, in reality those minorities blah blah are in a secondary position, it’s not true equality," than to convince, for example, a lower-middle-class anti-Semite that "You are attacking Jews, but can’t you see that your real enemy is the capital?" and so on. So why don’t you go directly to the point. It doesn’t work. It’s clinically and politically true. For example, there are many cases unfortunately in the opposite direction: disappointed communists turned anti-Semitic right-wingers. We all know how many—not too many, let’s not exaggerate, but nonetheless—no because sometimes if you read German history, is it as if the entire ex-communist party turned into Nazis. It wasn't as simple as that, no? But nonetheless, also in France, again let’s not exaggerate, but nonetheless many ex-communists did turn into Le Pen supporters. But these are other reasons. Unfortunately, you know that Le Pen is the only considerable political force today in France which refers to working class, protecting—that’s another story. But what I want to say is that you know, this process of mystification is much easier than the process of demystification. It’s practically impossible to demystify an anti-Semitic worker, to convince him "But can’t you see this is only a metaphor, a fetishist ersatz, can’t you see it’s really class struggle?" and so on and so on. Ah, now comes a problematic part and I would like now to offend everyone—anti-Zionists and anti-Arabs. First, with regard to today’s situation, this means that I think one should at least view with profound suspicion those leftists who argue that the Muslim fundamentalist populist movements are basically ours, anti-imperialist emancipatory movements, and that the fact that they often formulate their program in directly anti-Enlightenment, anti-universalist terms, something even close to direct anti-Semitism, that this is just the confusion—the understandable confusion, the story of "Okay, sometimes they sound as anti-Semitic but you should never forget that they really mean anti-Zionism," no? Okay, I have a problem with this. My problem is that in this way you can redeem even Hitler. I mean you can also say—and in a way at an interpretive level it is true—to say that when Hitler was attacking Jews he was really attacking financial capitalism, no? Okay, but so what, million, million people had to die, no? I mean I—how to put it—I don’t believe in this logic of "Okay, at some later point they will see that, that Jews are really just a metaphor for class enemy, so let’s make a strategic alliance, especially if it’s an anti-American one." I think this is—here I agree with Jewish critics of too much tolerance of anti-Semitism, like from Chicago Moishe Postone, who pointed out how this type of alliance with this naive hope that "Okay, this is just a contingent historical limitation and like to go to the extreme and ten years from now even Bin Laden will see that it’s not the Jews, that it’s really the capitalism or whatever," no? Because I think the point is not so much the Jews, the point is that these Arab movements, that's what for me makes them problematic, is that they define themselves as ultimately, most of them, not all, things are here much more refined, as ultimately radically anti-Enlightenment. If you read their programs, some of them I did, the enemy is not the Jew. The enemy is usually very clear: French Revolution with this destructuring and—that’s what I like most about French Revolution. Okay, so this is I think what makes very dangerous phenomena like, you know this fascinating evil figure, Barbet Schroeder did a documentary on him, Jacques Vergès. He was on the one hand radically anti-colonialist leftist figure who finished now defending all the big last surviving Nazis like Klaus Barbie and so on. It’s precisely this wrong alliance "anything goes if it’s anti-American," how to put it, no? So I reject this. On the other hand, the situation is much more tragic. Now comes if you are more pro-Palestinian the other side. Even in the case of clearly fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to trust the media. Let me take the extreme example: Taliban. They are in our media regularly presented as fundamentalist Islamist group enforcing its rule with terror and so on and so on. However, about a week and a half ago—from time to time truth emerges in our media—did you notice there was even in *New York Times*, I think, a wonderful report on what really happened when, you know now, the latest fear. You know that in Pakistan even the army withdrew from that Swat Valley, Taliban took over. It was mostly presented in our media as simple fundamentalist takeover and so on and so on. My God, we simply didn’t know what is going on there, namely that what the Taliban did is organize a class revolt which exploited profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants. It was a class revolution. Let me quote from *New York Times* so that you will not suspect me of some Arab propaganda. To quote, "In Swat, part of Pakistan where Taliban is now officially almost in power, accounts from those who have fled now make it clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power. To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that become their shock troops. The Taliban’s ability to exploit class divisions adds a new moment to the insurgency and its raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal. Mahmoob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer, said quote: 'The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution. Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan. The militants are promising more than just proscription on music and schooling. They are promising effective government and economic redistribution.'" So you see this is the other side that you get. My God, and this confirms the old thought of Walter Benjamin that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. So even if Taliban are—to use this fashionable but for me problematic term—Islamo-fascists, they are nonetheless enacting, taking over a revolutionary agenda which is missing. In other words, I think that in phenomena—it's clear to me—like there is nothing how should I put it, natural in the sense of spontaneous process in phenomena like Taliban. In it, the West is paying the price for its catastrophic politics throughout the decades of after World War II when it was making a judgment—catastrophic judgment—that the main danger are secular leftists, so anything goes, you can support all the fundamentalists just to screw the left. Now they have like, show me one—to put it in a cynical way, show me one axis of evil fundamentalist who wasn’t ten years ago a CIA agent, no? I mean that's the tragedy. In other words, I—you know this well-known argument, that liberal argument, that about the similarities between left and right extremisms. Hitler’s terror camps imitated Bolshevik terror. The Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda. I claim yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaces, takes the place of the leftist revolution. Its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there is a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction which the left was not able to mobilize. And again I think the same holds for what people sometimes call today Islamo-fascism. Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Let me take two—one will be enough—obvious example. Today’s Afghanistan. Today Afghanistan is portrayed as the ultimate fundamentalist country. But my God, if you are, and some of us here unfortunately are, old enough to remember at least thirty years of history back. At that point—are you aware that thirty, forty years ago Afghanistan was one of the most secularized Middle East Muslim—they had a king who was a kind of an enlightened pro-Western a little bit technocratic monarch. They had an autochthonous, very strong communist party which even in a coup d'état took power. And that’s important. As declassified documents show now, that takeover was not even orchestrated by Soviet Union. It took them by surprise. It’s only when it didn’t work that Soviet Union intervened. That’s the tragedy. Out of this—and there are other wonderful examples that I read about—how, for example thirty, forty years ago, it was extremely tolerant country where in some of the cities they even had this wonderful—I think sincerely without any irony—habit of people of different confessions visiting each other’s ritual. You know, Christians visited Muslims and so on. So how did Afghanistan become what it is? Through the disappearance of secular left, through its being caught in global politics. Again we should never forget this. It’s not some old primitive fundamentalist country which is resisting globalization. It was a tolerant enlightened country which the way it was globalized pushed it into fundamentalism. Not to mention that you have your own example in the United States of the same process: Kansas. You know Thomas Frank’s nice book, which demonstrates exactly this, literally this Benjamin’s thesis of how left populism, sorry right populism replaces the failure of the left. You know that Kansas, which is now the absolute bedrock of Christian fundamentalism, is historically—no wonder John Brown, maybe the most radical figure in American emancipatory politics was from Kansas. Kansas in the Roosevelt era and so on was the bedrock of all radical leftist populist movements. Now it’s the other way around. We all know anti-communist—the anti-communist characterization of Marxism as the Islam of the 20th century. The idea is that Marxism secularizes Islam’s abstract fanaticism. Jean-Pierre Taguieff, the liberal historian of anti-Semitism, turned this characterization around, claiming that Islam is turning out to be the Marxism of the 21st century, prolonging after the decline of communism its violent anti-capitalism. However, again, if we take into account Benjamin’s idea of fascism as occupying the place of a failed revolution, then the rational core of such inversions can be easily accepted. That is to say, of course the fact that Islam is turning out to be the Marxism of 21st century simply means that when the left, the secular left fails, populist right-wingers take over the empty place. The most catastrophic conclusion that can be drawn from this constellation is the one drawn among others by Moishe Postone, whom I otherwise, to avoid a misunderstanding, highly appreciate for his excellent work of re-actualizing Marxist critique of political economy. His conclusion is that since every crisis which opens up the space for radical left also gives rise to anti-Semitism—and then usually the right-wing populism and anti-Semitism win—it is better for us leftists to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Brought to its conclusion—and this conclusion was formulated by Bernard-Henri Lévy among others—this reasoning implies that ultimately anti-capitalism as such is today anti-Semitic. Now that’s dangerous for me. So what’s, where is the misunderstanding here? The difference between liberalism and the radical left is that although they refer to the same three elements—liberal center, populist right, radical left—they locate them in a radically different topology. For the liberal center, radical left and radical right are the two forms of appearance of the same totalitarian excess, while for the left the only true alternative is the one between itself, the left, and the liberal mainstream. The populist radical right is nothing but the symptom of the liberalism’s inability to deal with the leftist threat. This is why for a true leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is a false conflict, a vicious cycle of two poles generating presupposing each other. And that’s for me crucial. When we are dealing, for example, with a big conflict like the Middle East conflict. I think it’s absolutely crucial to insist that in a fundamental sense this is a false conflict. Even if there will be a world war and we will all die because of it. I cannot—you know what I mean—it’s not a true conflict. Both sides play a false game there. Some Arabs use this conflict to avoid their own modernization, to avoid their own revolution. Zionists play their own game. It’s a false conflict. So what is going on there? Let me give you now a short reading of how I see a situation there. I unconditionally, I hope it’s clear from what I said, oppose any type of anti-Semitism, even a soft one, you know in the sense of "Oh, we should forgive them because they are so screwed up by the Zionists that they can afford a little bit." No, I think—I think anti-Semitism is unconditionally, I don't know how to put it moralistically, totally evil, not only for obvious ethical reasons, but also because I think anti-Semitism is a kind of a—how should I put it—zero level of ideology, ideology as such. It’s a pure mechanism. You take an inherent immanent antagonism, you replace it by an external intruder to be liquidated to re-establish harmony. But what goes on in the Middle East? It is sometimes very productive to read two disparate different news items together. And then a new meaning like a spark explodes. For example, on March 1st, it was reported that the Israeli government—you see, it’s one of these small notes which appear in our media but lack what Lévi-Strauss would have called symbolic efficiency, no? Nobody even notices them. So you see, I’m here an optimist in the sense of if you read carefully the—we don’t need any secret sources. Everything is in a way in the media, you just have to to read it. You know what it says in our media, again my source is here *New York Times*, not any Palestinian or whatever propaganda. March 1st, check it. It was reported that the Israeli government has drafted plans to build more than new housing units in the occupied West Bank. If implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the West Bank by about And it’s clear what this means. The end of any dream of a West Bank Palestinian state. Because also if you look closely—it again, my source is here *New York Times*—you see how these new buildings, new plans for new settlements are not located close to already existing settlements, but they are nicely dispersed all around, you know, like to basically to make withdrawal meaningless, even the game that now officially the state of Israel likes to play, no? "Okay, we will more or less withdraw, just we will keep some, some territories where our settlements are concentrated." Well, this precisely this plan de-concentrates them. What happens then when this news exploded? An Israeli government spokesman dismissed this report saying that the plans were of limited relevance. The actual construction of new homes requires, he says, the approval of the defense minister and the prime minister. So this is the typical bureaucratic. He didn’t say it’s not true. He just, you know, engaged in this bureaucratic double-speak. However, of these plans have already been fully approved, so the process is going on. The conclusion is obvious. While paying lip service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on ground which will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The other item, news item. On the very same day this reports hit the media—one day later, okay, March the 2nd—Hillary Clinton, on the visit visiting Israel, criticizes the rocket fire from Gaza as cynical, claiming quote: "There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idle, idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks." End of quote. But I have a naive question: but should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day? That’s the problem. That is to say, when Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral symmetrical terms, admitting there are extremists on both sides who reject peace and so on and so on. One should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there? That is to say, when you know, no big terrorist attacks, no big bombings, like when nothing happens which is worth being noticed by the media. Well, what goes on is precisely this continuous slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank, the gradual strangling of Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land. For example, are you aware that, again, my source are here our own Western big media, are you aware that there are in the last years literally almost daily violent acts of by settlement groups of terrorizing West Bank Palestinian farmers? They go up to burning mosques but mostly small level like poisoning wells, burning the crops and so on and so on. Again, my source here are, again, *New York Times* and some definitely not pro-Palestinian, maybe liberal Israeli newspapers like *Haaretz* and so on. I think the way to approach the situation in Palestine is a Kafkaesque approach. There is an interesting book published in by, I hope I will pronounce the name correctly, Sary Makdisi, *Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation*, which describes nicely how occupation there works. It’s not predominantly terror. It’s occupation by bureaucracy, a kind of Foucauldian Kafkaesque dream of control. Totally irrational excessive small regulations. It’s a nightmare. For example, if you are an—if you are an Arab living in East Jerusalem to buy or change apartment or simple things like this, with many other crazy sub-regulations. For example, I don't know, ah my source here is—I heard him on British TV—Tony Blair. He was shocked when he visited his now European Union missionary whatever for—well, he said that he discovered crazy things like, do you know if you are on the West Bank a Jewish farmer you can dig well for water as deep as you want. If you are Palestinian farmer you can dig three feet deep. I don't know what’s the idea, that you can dig a tunnel or whatever, but there are hundreds regulations like this concerning freedom of movement and so on and so on. So what I’m saying is that this is the reality which would see. And to avoid any misunderstanding, I unconditionally oppose so-called terrorist attacks. Even more, to make it clear, I oppose that Hezbollah attack from Lebanon. Because this was probably part of Iran power play and there they even cannot claim that they have any—like, you know what I mean, in on the West Bank you can at least understand terrorist attacks. It’s their country, desperate acts and so on. I mean but the delimitation is clear in Lebanon. Nobody, you know what I mean, Israel doesn’t claim "it’s our land in the north," Lebanese don’t claim—like, clearly just some playing games and so I am not justifying this. But what I’m saying nonetheless is that we should be aware of this fundamental asymmetry. Again, what happens when nothing happens? That’s the key to the crisis. I’m not saying this justifies terror, and I mean this seriously. What I’m nonetheless saying that they are desperate, you know, their—how do you say when the woman is approaching menopause—their biological clock is ticking, or how should I put it, no? I mean five, five, ten years more and it will be even ridiculous to talk about two states. And this would be my accusation of the state of Israel. It was typical, I checked it, I read their government proclamation when the state of Israel, to put, one should admit, did try to contain this excesses, daily attacks on, on—of the illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers, you know, burning their crops, what I mentioned and so on. But it’s very interesting to read the how the officials addressed them, the settlers. And it was very ambiguous text which, if you cut the crap as we put it, the official state of Israel critique of them was "Ah, don’t you see that we are working in the same direction? With your brutality you will just, you will spoil everything. Leave us to do it slowly the way, the way it should be done." Okay, so let me go on. I am afraid to talk too long, so I will, sorry, jump a little bit. Now, okay, not to get lost, I would like now to pass from this ultimate example of ethnic tensions, Israel versus Palestinians, to—I would like to generalize it. I think that today—and this brings us to more general presupposition of this economy of jealousy—today I claim it’s that more and more a neighbor—other ethnic group, even other sex and so on—is perceived—and that’s all the point about sexual harassment and so on, multiculturalist tolerance—as toxic. And I mean this quite literally. I noticed a wonderful—in the disgusting sense—phenomenon: how did you notice how the notion and topic of toxic subject or toxic subjects is gaining ground recently? I counted almost ten books on different aspects of it like, one of them, Lillian Glass, *Toxic People*. The book identifies thirty types of toxic people, and identifying them through humorous labels like "the smiling two-faced sneaky backstabber" and so on and so on, and then gives strategies how to contain them, and so on and so on. Another book, Albert Bernstein, *Emotional Vampires*, dealing with people who drain you dry and so on. This idea that the neighbor is potentially toxic vampire, which incidentally I think it’s true but that’s another story, yeah. No, what interests me, and this account—this makes the category of toxic people strictly ideological—is that in a paradigmatic postmodern way the predicate topic tends to cover a series of properties which belong to totally different levels: natural, cultural, psychological, political. In a totally inconsistent way, if you are serious cognitively, they are brought together under the same category. A toxic subject can be an immigrant who with a deadly disease who should be quarantined. It can be a terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented. It can be a fundamentalist ideologist who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred. It can be a parent, a teacher, or a priest who abuses and corrupts children and so on and so on. And in a way, of course, this is true. For example with parents, I claim that of course there are no parents who are really fully non-toxic. In—it’s part of the very notion of mother, everybody knows this, mother is a bitch. I don’t know how good she is, she always manipulates at some level. Paternal authority also. I mean, the—so I think the conclusion that we should make here is precisely that ultimately subject, precisely subject in the sense of neighbor, in this radical Christian sense—not what is the radical Christian sense? It’s the sense opposed to fellow-men, the *semblable*, the one who is like us. Neighbor is precisely the monstrous otherness, the undead, like vampire-like, you know when you—there is a fellow-man, your best friend, then he does something horrible, a sneaky remark, and all of a sudden you say "My God, what a monster he is, I didn’t know he or she is able," more she than he. Yeah, yeah, this was just I wanted to annoy you, my God. It's my modest hope that I can—okay, so this is when—when the fellow-man becomes the neighbor. And I claim that part of our—we today, we are on one hand—I’m giving you a very simplified analysis—we are in a global society, all that stuff. At the same time, because we are lacking firm traditional symbolic identities, neighbors are getting more and more toxic. And here we should make a jump from this personal level to a more political level. I think Italy is here maybe the land of our future. Why? As if in an ironic nod to Giorgio Agamben’s theory about state of emergency and so on. Do you know that in July 2008—another of these small items that people even tend not to read, but everything is in the media I claim—the Italian government proclaimed the state of emergency in the entire Italy? Are you aware of this, that Italy is now, it’s let me count, July for almost a year, Italy is now formally under emergency state. And with a very precise implication which they are practicing. Emergency state means you are allowed to deploy army units not against an external enemy but inside the territory to guarantee peace and so on. It started typically against the toxic neighbors: army units were employed on the southern shores to prevent the flow of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Then in already in August the Italian government deployed armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities: train stations, commercial centers. And it goes on and on. Recently there are, I’m not kidding, serious plans to put army units into great parks to prevent, to protect women from rapes. Now you will tell me "But you exaggerate, my God, but it’s life goes normally in Italy." That’s why I think Italy is the country of future. Because this is how it will be: the forthcoming, this is my sad prediction, global emergency state. It will not be, you know, this "we will awaken and military dictatorship, curfew." Life will go on like normal, but as they will put it precisely to guarantee this normality, more and more armed units here there, more and more control checkpoints and so on and so on. Which is the logic underlying this process? Of course it’s the logic of let’s call it detoxifying the neighbor. How is this done? One of my intellectual heroes—bad joke, he is disgusting but typical—you know who was Robert Brasillach, the great French fascist intellectual. I am against his death penalty, not that I sympathize with him, but I think it was effectively—you know what was the problem of France in '45? The large majority of civil servants and so on collaborated with Vichy. And it’s typical to learn that the judge who condemned him to death was an old Vichy judge. So he thought "Aha, let me pass that sentence on this guy so that I will" and so on and so on. I mean, nobody—France really have has a problem here. Nobody was clean there. Mitterrand was still '43, Vichy. Then when he smelled the new direction of the wind, "Oh, let's change sides," no? Did you know Mitterrand was still '43, Vichy and so on? Okay, Brasillach in proposed a wonderful—in a terrifying sense—formula which I think is more and more operative today. He spoke of reasonable anti-Semitism. Here is a quote: "We"—with reference to names concerning the names that you will hear, bear in mind that this is written in '38—"We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half-Jew, at the movies, to admire Proust, a half-Jew, to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew, and"—I love this—"even the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz" and so on. I like this one. "We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism." I think, I don't—now I will stop any America-bashing, I don’t like it and I will be critical towards Europe because we Europeans I think are de facto much worse than you Americans here at this level of dangerous neighbor-detoxifying racism. This type of reasonable anti-Semitism—okay today of course we will talk about reasonable anti-immigrant racism—is simply the predominant politics in Europe. This was the true victory of the radical populist left. And Le Pen, who is not an idiot, said this openly. When asked why is his party slowly losing, he said "Because we won. Because our agenda is generally accepted." And it’s true. Listen to a typical—sometimes not some, often even Social Democratic government. How do they reason? They say "We totally reject any violence against immigrants. This is deplorable, this is in total contradiction with our civilized standards and so on and so on. But"—then comes a "but" which is the victory of Le Pen—"But we should nonetheless understand that too many immigrants arouse understandable anxieties and fear of ordinary people, and precisely in order to prevent violent outbursts of people we should pre-act preventively, controlling the immigrants and so on and so on." So let me imagine—I like this—a kind of a how today’s Robert Brasillach would put it, in Europe or in the United States: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and African singers and sportsmen, East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant politics." That’s the predominant, that’s the *doxa* today. Brasillach, the fascist, won. Now another point. I told you how crucial it is for the notion of this toxic neighbor to distinguish between neighbor as this abyss of otherness, horror, and fellow-man. What’s the most difficult for us to accept, it’s not the inhumanity of the neighbor but his, her, their humanity. This is why I think this Jonathan Littell’s novel *The Kindly Ones*, *Les Bienveillantes*, caused such a scandal. I’m not saying it’s a great novel, to be frank, it’s too long, pages and so on. But you know what the novel is about, no? It’s about the fate of course, memoirs, a fictional first-person account of the Holocaust from a German participant, the SS-Obersturmbannführer Maximilian Aue. So it precisely tells the story from his side. And as such, the book is the best argument against that allegedly deep multiculturalist slogan, which I think I mocked already the last time I was here. You know that pseudo-deep wisdom: "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." You know this cheap stupidity, like "I hate you only because I didn’t really hear to your side of the story. If I were to hear you, I would have seen you have your own anxieties, fears, dreams, and I would see I cannot hate you." Well here we do get the enemy’s story, no? and if anything he should be more enemy, no? That’s, and you see this is what we are not ready to accept. And although I don’t agree fully with Hannah Arendt, but this is also I think what renders so traumatic her thesis about the banality of evil. That, you know, imagine talking to Hitler. I mean he would—I definitely know he had moments of pathetic sentimentality, he liked small children. They are all warm human beings close up, no? That’s so difficult to accept, this, this dimension of it. So let me go on. So again, our situation today is this one: exposed to toxic neighbors. Ah, now just to finish a little bit of Marxism. How did we get here? I will start with the big protest. It focused its struggle, at least in Europe, against what was perceived as the three pillars of capitalism: factory, school, family. And as the result, each domain was submitted to what we call post-industrial transformation. Factory work is today more and more outsourced or in the developed world reorganized along the post-Fordist non-hierarchical interactive teamwork, all that story. Permanent flexible private education is more and more replacing universal public education. Multiple forms of flexible sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. And this is I think, here I don't agree with my good friend Alain Badiou who still sticks to this myth of '68. I think that again the targets were totally wrong. We can experience it today. Again, the big motto you remember was: against factory, against big state education, against family. Okay, they won and now what we get is even worse, to cut a long story short. The left lost in its very victory. The direct enemy was defeated, but replaced by a new form of capitalist domination. In postmodern capitalism, market is invading new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prison and security. We are thus in the middle of a new process of the privatization of the social. And to grasp these new forms of privatization, I claim one should critically transform Marxist conceptual apparatus. What is for me, to be very simple, I’m now following Postone and up to a point Negri and some Italian economists with all my naive ignorance of this topic. But my God I’m desperately trying to do because I think that, you know what’s so traumatic for me about this ongoing economic financial meltdown? And I’m saying this as some kind of a radical leftist. I think it was invented by some capitalists to show how impotent the left is. With all moral criticism how irrational capitalism is, I didn’t hear of any feasible leftist alternative to it. I mean it is as if to demonstrate that the left really doesn’t have an alternative. So, my point is the following one. Where was the limit of Marx? One should be very clear here. You know that in the famous passage in his *Grundrisse*—before *Capital*, preparatory works, manuscripts—Marx developed this notion of general intellect, which is the collectivized, collective productive and social knowledge and so on and so on. Now what was Marx’s point? I simplify it very much, I know, if you are whispering to her what a bullshit he is saying. Marx was thought, Marx accepted the premise that with the development of capitalism the source of wealth is more and more knowledge and no longer labor time. So he was well aware that at a certain point labor time will become meaningless as the measure of value. But I think this is again Marx also at his worst. Because the conclusion he draws then in this passage of *Grundrisse* is totally naive one, is that this means that capitalism simply will disintegrate at a certain point because it will become meaningless. You know, exploitation is based on exploitation of value, value is labor and so on. So when labor time is no longer source of value, it’s meaningless. For him the moment again wealth is socialized in general intellect, the source of wealth, capitalist exploitation becomes impossible. Here I think Negri who tries to save this notion of general intellect totally misses Marx’s point. What Marx was not able to imagine was I think what among other things is going on today, is that precisely general intellect itself—this collectivized productive knowledge and so on—can be privatized again. But now comes the catch. In this case, the source of what appears as profit, of privatized wealth—here I agree with some Italian economists who developed this very nicely, those who are the source of Michael Hardt’s recent work, here I agree more than with Negri, with Hardt—it’s for example Carlo Vercellone is the main one who wrote a book on this, namely on what. You know that in early capitalism we pass from rent to profit. First you have rent, for example, I don’t know, you have some property, you let the other guy use it, but you just—you are not involved in productive process, you just—so capitalism is more and more from rent to profit. The theory of Vercellone and his colleagues—I think it’s very nice theory—is that with the predominance of cognitive capital, of collective knowledge, and its privatization, we are returning to rent. That what explains today’s capitalism is to put it in this awkward Deleuzian terms, the "becoming rent of capital." How? Let me give you a simple example just to explain this, a stupid one generally known. Bill Gates. How did he become from years ago, you know, a nobody tinkering in his garage, now the richest man in the world. Okay, a year ago he was billion, now he is Big loss, I would like to be in that position to say I lost billion, I only have now, no? Okay, what I want is that I think it’s a little bit ridiculous to use the terms of—you have to stretch it, overstretch it too much to speak about exploitation here. You know like is he ultra—if anything, A: let’s be honest, he is paying his workers relatively well, so it’s not that. B: I also think you cannot play the game of extra profit from other—no I think it’s clear situation: where is, what’s the source of Bill Gates' wealth? Is that with quasi-monopoly position of Microsoft he privatized what is de facto our general intellect, the universally spread Microsoft as the language, and he is getting rent for that. I think the only consistent explanation is he is in a rent. And this also explains why for example even if other programs like Linux or all that stuff are, so hackers tell me I am too stupid to judge, are objectively better, nonetheless we are still paying how much, dollars to use Bill Gates because you have to be part of—the problem of Linux is that it’s not to such an extent part of general intellect. And I think it’s clear also that this is the reason why the price of Microsoft products is totally—okay, not totally but to a large extent—without any relation to the so-called costs of production. It’s not that Bill Gates says "Oh, now we have to work more here, invest so it will cost more." The cost is absolutely not decided in these terms. It’s totally different rent-controlling, how to put it, rent-controlling logic there. And I think the same goes for natural resources. With oil and so on it’s again what, what is Saudi Arabia and others doing? It’s rent. So this—okay, I don’t have time to conclude now, I don’t have time to to go into one direction which would have been very interesting here, into what does this mean politically? Here I have a pessimistic conclusion, which is the following one. Precisely because rent cannot be left in a simple way to the market to decide, the way if you produce something like bottle of water, you know there are others, Poland whatever, all of them I know with more bacteria than the simple tap water, we know the story and so on. But what I mean—here you can say "Okay with competition market decides how much to pay." With rent control or intellectual property, it’s not as simple as that. Because first here it’s clear what I am selling, this, the object, no? It’s no problem. But you know, where does Bill Gates’ private property that he is allowed to sell begin, where does common property stop? There is no natural law there. It has to be in an ultimately totally arbitrary way, it has to be state regulated. Which is why we need state. We need strong state more than ever. Here I totally disagree with those, up to a point Negri, who dream about the state is disappearing. No, for this becoming-rent-of-profit capitalism, a strong regulatory state is needed more than ever. And this state, I claim, in order to do this work of regulation—like to decide this is, this can be privatized, that can be privatized—and again I cannot emphasize to what extent these are totally, totally arbitrary decisions. Like you know some companies just following the market logic wanted to patent and this way privatize DNA structures. No, okay, the state intervened and so on. This is a totally contingent process. I claim that this I think gives a certain privilege to a strong authoritarian state. Okay, but that's another line of thought. To conclude, I would like to say now something more, that this structure where rent mixes with profit and so on renders the whole process much more mystified and non-transparent than the one described by Marx. Which is why I claim ideology is more and more materially efficient today. Happy those who think today’s meltdown means "Oh people will finally see the irrationality of capitalism" and so on. No, on the contrary. I think the first reaction in a crisis is that you cling even more desperately to your fundamental ideological positions. Let me give you simply a couple of proofs. I don’t know what you were doing, but on that very day—when was that, Tax Day, tea parties about a week or two ago, you know? I was tired as a dog, I just arrived from Europe, so I was sitting in a room, hotel room—I was already in the states, I think I was in, in, in L.A.—watching TV and I was jumping between the two programs where my love was divided. On the one hand, I cannot resist it, on PBS I think, and it went on, so I was jumping from one to the other—on the one side it was on PBS a documentary on that great, you know, left folk singer Pete Seeger, *Power of a Song*. On another program, I—this is the only news I I hear is Fox News, of course. Fuck it, they are the only interesting passionate ones, I hate that boring political correctness of CNN, I prefer Fox News, no? I think United States need a leftist violent Fox News with that spirit but leftist, no? Okay, so—and what I got on the Fox News was a live transmission of one of these tea parties in Austin, Texas, where some right-wing country singer was singing an anti-Obama, anti-democratic, whatever song. Two things did strike me. First, the incredible similarity between that song and Pete Seeger’s song. If you forget about political opposition, the basic constellation was the same. You know, we poor hard-working people, we will not allow to be exploited by the rich, financial ruined by speculations and so on and so on. That is to say, we all know this triumph of the populist right. Again, it’s another example of this, disappearing—this Benjamin wisdom, you know—disappearing left, the place taken, okay let’s not exaggerate, not by fascism, but by right-wing populism. The other thing which did strike me is, and here you can see if you need it, a brutal, brutally direct proof of how ideology functions, of the material force of ideology. The crazy irrationality of this scene. There was a guy singing "enough of it, we ordinary hard-working Texans"—which is why, did you hear the last joke, they want to secede now, no? they speak about—I love this. You will become—you laughed at us, you know, Balkan, balkanization, ha! You will get it, you will get it now, no? I mean seriously. No, what I want is that let’s be serious. I mean, don’t people know the basic facts? We can have, if you are a conservative economist, and I agree I’m skeptical, I hope Obama’s plan will more or less work, and I allow you all the doubts. But my point is one thing you cannot accuse Obama of, that he is taxing the ordinary people. I mean look at his tax plans. Over will pay lower taxes. Just some will pay of the richest wealthiest will pay higher taxes. So how can you get thousands to protest against ordinary people paying taxes for the rich and so on and so on? This ideological madness goes on. Like I read again and I follow news about her, she is the greatest, whatever you think, Ayn Rand, there is only one Ayn Rand. You know that her *Atlas Shrugged* is already again now at amazon.com? And and there is the whole movement now and like we need Ayn Rand again this "Obama socialism" and so on. But wait a minute. She is the cause of the shit you are in now. We all know—he admitted it, you know that historical hearing of congressional of Alan Greenspan where wonderfully he used the term "ideology," you know that "yes, there is a flaw in my ideology." But Alan Greenspan is a objectivist. Don’t you know this? He is a card-carrying Randian, how should I put it? So it’s—what I’m saying is that when you have this what rationally appears as clear irrationality, there are only two solutions: either people are stupid—and in spite of all I don’t think people are stupid—or ideology is alive as material force is alive more than ever. Why? Where do I see that authoritarian tendency which I already mentioned before today? Did you notice how—okay let me go now just briefly into this financial meltdown stuff. What did strike me is the absolutely unconditional character of the demand. We have to do something. Like the—how you remember when we fight global warming, AIDS, hunger, healthcare, there is always time to reflect, you know? "Yeah, yeah, it’s a serious problem, we will meet next year to debate it again" and so on, no? Like for example for hunger, everybody agrees and the big powers met, they dedicated billion dollars to it today. This looks—if you see them down, you don’t even lean down to pick them up, no? billion, what is this compared to? But what I want to say is that here you negotiate, but did you notice how when it was the question of the so-called bailout money, there was an absolute emergency. The Real was here. Even did you notice how you—by you I mean American political community—you went into practically a kind of emergency state in the sense of, do you remember how first the Congress rejected it? And then basically all of them got together. McCain, Obama, Bush twisted the arms and the message was: "Listen, democracy is nice, voting, but now this really needs to be done. Fuck off." It was kind of de facto emergency state. The message was clear: "Stop about voting, this has to be done." And it was done. You remember how, it was very mysterious, in one week they they turned it around. Here you can see how our Real is capital, how should I put it? You know, you can negotiate, reinterpret—no offense against you, Avital, you can deconstruct whatever—but money is the un-deconstructible condition of deconstruction. Justice, how should I put it? You know, here you don’t joke. This is—this is—this is the power of ideology. And here things are tragically clear. Let me finish—maybe I’m even repeating myself, I don't think so—by quoting the guy whom I don't otherwise excessively appreciate as a good guy, Bill Clinton. He did a nice thing. No, no, no, I am very much tempted to acknowledge that many people do nice thing. Like yesterday at my talk I mentioned—I wanted to dedicate her talk my talk here to her—Marilyn Chambers, you know the porn star who, my God, big progressive fighter, I’m not kidding. You know what she did? A: she was the first one to have a sex scene in her *Behind the Green Door* with a black guy, a black guy screwing her. This was extremely important because as already Frantz Fanon wrote, it’s easy acceptable for a racist for a white guy to screw a black girl, but it’s much more problematic publicly to accept the the other way around. Second thing, you know that publicity of her with some Ivory whatever powder holding a small child. This is—this is wonderful idea. Why these patriarchal divisions? Why either a clean mother or a sexualized woman? Why not both? Why not together? So all my heroes. Why not Bill Clinton if Marilyn Chambers, no? In—on October 23rd, Bill Clinton made—and we should read this, my God. Again everything is in the media. Here I respectfully disagree with a guy whom I otherwise respect, Noam Chomsky. As he said to a friend of mine, he really thinks that there is no need for interpretation today, we just have to tell people the truth, you know. People had to be—yeah, people basically know, I think. No, this is way too naive. What do I mean? Okay, on that date, Clinton at a UN—United Nations gathering marking the World Food Day, he gave a speech under the indicative title: "We Blew It on Global Food." And he made it very clear that today’s global crisis shows how—I quote Clinton—"we all blew it including me when I was president." How? And he goes on very consequently: by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world poor. So he is very clear here. Clinton puts the blame on international and Western big state bodies on forcing third world states into modernizing globalizing their agriculture, opening it up and so on and so on, and dropping government subsidies and all that stuff and so on and so on. And the result is clear: while crops are exported, farmers thrown out of their land are pushed into slums available for outsource sweatshops and countries had to rely more and more on imported food. This looks good. The problem is that when then for other reasons—the development of China and drought, global warming and so on—the prices of food goes up, you have a catastrophe and you end up where you are today in Haiti, where they are again, not again, selling mud cakes, literally. They are selling mud cakes on—because you get some minerals and they somehow fill you, fill your stomach. So Clinton got it here correctly. The problem is here what? The problem is that in spite of his proclamations—again read the news together—read this news on Clinton together with news a month later, in November of things which even terrified me. You know that it’s not, it’s even worse than Clinton admitted there. Again you read this, this is again one of those news, you know, here and there you get them, they tend to disappear. This is for me really horrible. I mean, usually I am a cynic, I don’t care, fuck off, the sooner we all drop dead the better, but not this. You know what happened? It’s really historical date. A group of South Korean companies basically negotiated a 99-year lease on million acres of the best farmland of Madagascar. It’s exactly half of its entire arable land. And they made it clear that they will not even use it to produce food, but mostly export industrial plants and so on and so on. And then I learn that in more and more countries this is going on, even in the countries which we usually associate with hunger. For example, British Sun Biofuels is planting biofuel crops in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, buying large parts of the best land. So again what Clinton is deploring, it’s going on even more recently because because now we all know we are approaching a time when there will be when—I mean with all the poetry of immaterial production of Negri and Hardt, the fact is that more and more there will be wars even for water, material resources and so on and so on. So basically Western countries are systematically already buying the best land in third world countries. It’s not even just making local economy change shift into export industrial plants or whatever. No, it’s simply directly, directly buying them. So what’s my problem here? My problem is that we shouldn’t moralize here. We should add to what Clinton says two things: how especially how the West is, the West is cheating here. That's the first note. You know, on the one hand we from the West were putting pressure on third world countries to, you know, open yourself to the market, no state subsidies and so on, while and we Europeans if anything are worse than you Americans. While we are saying no, in global economy self-sufficiency is outdated. But we take extreme care in the case of an emergency state so that we can survive of remaining self-sufficient. Like the whole European community works like this. My God, do you know that in European Union on average every cow gets euros a year support from Brussels, which is higher than the year per capita product of a third world typical country. So again the West doubly cheats here. It advises them to do what the West itself is not doing. Second thing where we should a little bit radicalize Clinton. I agree with him when he says food is not a commodity like others. But then let’s go on a little bit. Defense, as all patriots are aware, is not also not a commodity like others: arms, no? Then food, of course. Water, it’s not. Energy is not. Environment is not commodity like others. We need it. Culture is not. We need it. Education is not. Health is not. So what then remains? Maybe some stupid toys from China, cheap. In other words, if you bring Clinton’s reasoning to the end, we have to raise the question of communism again. Thank you very much.