Karl Marx and Hegel
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013-03-08 · 1:37:40 · 11,333 words
capitalismcommunism-socialismideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsdemocracyrevolution-violencecinema-art-culturegeopolitics-wareconomicsrace-antisemitismliberalism-political-correctnesshistoryphilosophy-general
Delivered in São Paulo (likely around Hugo Chávez's death in March 2013), Žižek uses Chávez as a springboard to discuss the politics of exclusion under global capitalism, the failure of protest movements to become organized revolutionary forces, and the ideological role of debt and entrepreneurship-of-the-self. He then moves through themes of violence as impotence, Eurocentrism and colonial modernity, the Hegelian concept of absolute recoil, and concludes by arguing that cynicism is itself an ideological illusion and that critique of ideology is more necessary than ever in a self-styled post-ideological age.
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 “charity capitalism”
A mode of capitalism (exemplified by Starbucks) that integrates charitable donation into commodity consumption so that buying more simultaneously assuages guilt and reproduces the system.
The emerging global division in which slum-dwelling populations excluded from economic and political life constitute a structural separation more rigid than classical class society.
Lacanian formula invoked to explain how popular/horror genre films articulate social truths (class struggle, racial violence) that cannot be stated in serious mainstream narrative.
Hegelian-Marxist distinction between chaotic spontaneous protest (in-itself) and organized movement with a program capable of transforming society (for-itself), used to diagnose why contemporary rebellions fail to become revolutions.
as “multitude / self-organized multitude”
Negri/Deleuzian concept of leaderless horizontal politics, critically examined: Žižek concedes its appeal but argues it cannot sustain organizational structures needed to address global crises.
Psychoanalytic concept applied to revolutionary politics: subjects who do not yet know what they want require a leader who appears to know on their behalf, making the leader-function structurally necessary rather than proto-fascist.
Žižek's test for revolutionary seriousness: what actually changes in ordinary daily life after the ecstatic collective moment passes, he argues that liberals love spectacular outbursts precisely because they leave daily life untouched.
as “violence as sign of impotence”
The thesis that political violence (Stalinist terror, forced collectivization, femicide rituals) is never the real problem but a symptom of a flaw in the underlying project or social formation that cannot be resolved through the available means.
Psychoanalytic term for a compulsive acting-out that Žižek uses to describe Stalinist terror and Cultural Revolution violence as symptoms of an inability to really solve the underlying political problem.
Violence against women (femicide in Ciudad Juárez, rape of native women in Canada, church pedophilia) understood not as individual pathology but as an institutionalized, quasi-sacred obscene ritual that reasserts collective identity in moments of social panic.
as “absoluter Gegenstoß (absolute recoil)”
Hegel's Logic concept, foregrounded by Žižek, that a thing does not precede its loss but emerges only through its loss, used to argue that colonized peoples' emancipatory dreams are themselves products of the colonial rupture, not pre-existing authentic essences.
as “language as torture machine”
Žižek's formulation, partly drawn from Jelinek, that language forces a fundamental violence on its speakers (as poetry and cinematic montage show), and that torturing language is the alternative to torturing people.
as “Inventions of Tradition”
Hobsbawm's thesis, cited approvingly, that national 'roots' (kilts, ancient texts) are retrospective constructions, used to support the Hegelian point that we create what we are returning to in the very act of return.
as “cynicism as ideology”
The claim, contra Sloterdijk and Jameson's post-ideological thesis, that cynical 'realism' (no bullshit, it's only about money and power) is itself the deepest ideological illusion because it renders invisible the material power of illusions.
Freudian-Lacanian clinical category used to argue that cynics (perverts in the clinical sense) have the most repressed unconscious, their apparent openness conceals maximum ideological blindness.
Marx's concept invoked to argue that ideological illusions are not superstructural distortions of a real base but are constitutive of real commodity exchange itself, hence critique of ideology cannot be dissolved by cynical demystification.
Lazzarato's concept of a new subject-form under financial capitalism where permanent indebtedness replaces overt coercion as the mechanism of ideological control and self-discipline.
as “entrepreneurship of the self”
The ideological operation by which debt-financed consumption and education are reframed as self-investment by a small capitalist-subject, obscuring de facto wage-slavery under the guise of autonomy and freedom.
as “Super-ego as impossible demand”
Freudian concept applied to debt: the creditor's authority depends on the debtor never fully repaying, the point of the demand is its permanent non-fulfillment, keeping the subject in perpetual subjection.
as “rent vs. profit”
Žižek's theoretical provocation that contemporary capitalism is reverting from profit (return on exploitation of labor) toward rent (appropriation of collectively produced general intellect), exemplified by Bill Gates privatizing the digital commons.
Marx's concept from the Grundrisse of collective social knowledge, cited to argue that digital monopolies (Microsoft) function by privatizing and renting back this common intellectual substance.
Žižek's label for the Marxist-messianic eschatology ('where danger is greatest, salvation also grows') that he rejects in favor of a more tragic Hegelian view: failure is necessary and the test is whether one continues after it.
Stanley Cavell's genre category used as an analogy for revolutionary process: genuine transformation requires a first failed attempt before the authentic second union, mirroring the Hegelian necessity of failure.
Stories he reaches for 13
Starbucks charges more for its coffee but donates a percentage to Guatemala children or the rainforest, so the customer can be a consumerist with a clear conscience, the more you spend, the more you help.
“You can be a consumerist with a clear conscience. The more you spend at Starbucks, the more you do something for mother earth.”
Bill Gates became the world's richest man not by exploiting labor in the Marxist sense but by privatizing a portion of the collective general intellect, we pay him rent to communicate with each other through his software.
“Bill Gates privatized part of what Marx called general intellect... We are paying Bill Gates a rent so that through internet we can communicate with each other.”
Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked to choose between wife and lover. Lenin wants both, so he can tell each he is with the other and go somewhere quiet to study.
“I'd rather have a wife and a lover... I could go to a calm place in order to learn, learn, and learn.”
Tom and Jerry cartoons represent the betrayal, cutting, and violence of competitive life that cannot be shown with real actors, the cartoon form allows the repressed brutality of social existence to appear.
“The brutality of our competitive life which as such cannot be directly represented in a film with real actors... you can do it in cartoons.”
The text presented as the ancient quintessence of traditional India (caste system, etc.) was half-forgotten and was systematically assembled by British colonizers in the early 19th century to provide a local ideology of rule, imperialism was always multiculturalist.
“Imperialists were always multiculturalists. They even in a hypocritical way loved their authenticity.”
Gary Wills found cases where a man who was heterosexual before ordination became a pedophile through becoming a priest, suggesting clerical pedophilia is not random but structurally embedded in Church identity, explaining the systematic cover-up.
“It's in an obscene way absolutely part of some hidden church identity.”
Young independent women workers in Ciudad Juárez are kidnapped and ritually tortured and killed by local gangs as a collective reassertion of machismo, and police systematically reclassify these as family violence to render them invisible.
“It's a ritual, it's a formula, it's a collective obscene almost pseudo-sacred event done systematically.”
The iconic photo of Gates embracing a disabled Indian child exemplifies liberal humanitarian charity that sees poverty as an occasion for compassion rather than as a structural problem requiring political transformation.
“The well-known photo of Bill Gates embracing a crippled Indian child.”
Eisenstein cuts and synthetically assembles images (active torture); Tarkovsky stretches them through duration (the seven-minute shot of a tree in Sacrifice, the rack). Both are torture machines of cinema, not opposites.
“Tarkovsky would say stretch them, it's more painful it works better.”
When Kirchner used Chávez's loans to repay the IMF directly, the IMF's reaction was not relief but anxiety: 'how will we control them now?', proof that the Super-ego demand is not meant to be met but to keep the debtor permanently subject.
“Instead of being glad, oh my god we got our money back, it was absolute worry like: But how will we control them now?”
Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek said in an interview that language by its nature lies and must be tortured to say the truth, Žižek uses this to support his thesis about fundamental violence in language.
“Language by its nature is lying. We have to torture language to make it say the truth.”
In the Mexican Revolution, Villa's northern forces and Zapata's southern forces both entered Mexico City at a decisive moment, then talked for two months and left. Used to illustrate the failure to pass from spontaneous revolt to organized political power.
“They met, they talked for two months and then they left.”
Hobsbawm's Inventions of Tradition shows that the kilt as a symbol of authentic Scottish identity was invented in the late 19th century, the paradigm case that traditions presented as ancient are recent constructions.
“The idea of kilts, this male skirts — nothing like that in Middle Ages. All invented in late nineteenth century revival.”
Works invoked 14
Capital book
Jameson's short book on Capital is cited for its insistence on rethinking and expanding the notion of exploitation to include the permanently unemployed and excluded nations.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek describes it as a close reading of Hegel, including engagement with quantum physics, with a political impetus: rethinking the Marxist legacy critically from within.
Grundrisse book
Cited for the concept of general intellect and for the passage on proletarian alienation as greatest alienation but chance for liberation, which Žižek then subjects to critique via the Hölderlin paradigm.
The Laws of Manu book
Presented as a British colonial construction masquerading as ancient Indian tradition, used to demonstrate that imperialists were multiculturalists who manufactured 'authentic' local ideology to maintain control.
Citizen Kane film
Called 'immortal'; the Kane scene defending the underprivileged is cited for its 'maybe best line of dialogue' to illustrate Chávez's political logic of elite-led mobilization from above.
Malcolm X (film) film
Mentioned as the film starring Denzel Washington; used as an entry point to discuss Malcolm X's choice of the surname 'X' and his vision of constitutive lack as universal liberation.
Called 'a wonderful collective book' and invoked to support the Hegelian absolute recoil thesis: traditions presented as ancient are recent retroactive constructions.
White Zombie film
Praised as a 'wonderful early horror film' predating the Hayes Code; Bela Lugosi's zombie plantation owner directly allegorizes the labor ideal of capitalism, workers who never complain or demand unions.
Specifically the logic of reflection and the term absoluter Gegenstoß are cited to ground the talk's central philosophical argument about loss and emergence.
Lincoln (Spielberg) film
Called 'disgusting official Hollywood liberal elite film' that reduces the abolition of slavery to Capitol political intrigues, suppressing the truth about violent struggle.
Described as 'simple but wonderful'; its analysis of debt as ideological control and entrepreneurship-of-the-self is extensively summarized and endorsed.
Cited for its seven-minute opening shot as an example of slow-duration torture of the image, the Tarkovskian alternative to Eisenstein's cutting.
Deployed as a leftist corrective to Spielberg's Lincoln: its pulp genre logic restores the repressed truth that the Civil War was a real violent racial struggle, using vampires-feeding-on-Blacks as allegory.
Self-cited as developing the rent-vs-profit theory of contemporary digital capitalism.
People invoked 34
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited as having already identified the farmer-socialism problem that Stalin's forced collectivization violently failed to solve; also appears in the introductory Lenin wife-and-lover joke.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the formula 'truth has the structure of a fiction,' for the concept of transference applied to revolutionary leadership, and for the claim that language is a fundamental gap between subject and expression ('torture house of being').
Mentioned as the Argentine president who used Chávez's loans to repay Argentina's IMF debt directly, the episode illustrates the Super-ego function of debt.
Historical figure cited as example of the failure to pass from revolutionary seizure of power to organized political program: Villa and Zapata took Mexico City and then left.
Arundhati Roy positive
Cited as immediately noting the hypocrisy of media coverage of Indian gang rapes (focusing on poor perpetrators while ignoring systemic violence by the rich) and as a supporter of Naxalite Maoist rebels.
Orson Welles positive
Citizen Kane is cited for the scene where Kane explains his defense of the underprivileged, used to gloss Chávez's political strategy.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Bolivian vice president and theorist, described approvingly as 'one of us'; praised for being frank about the limits of adding indigenous movements to parliamentary democracy, including new corruption opportunities.
Alexander Lukashenka negative
Described as 'the kind of Groucho Marx character who rules Belarus', contemptuous dismissal of Chávez's alliance with him.
Antonio Negri negative
Negri's multitude/self-organized politics is taken as the main target of Žižek's argument for organizational structures and a leader-function; described as 'Deleuzian revolutionaries' whose answer he doubts.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my very good friend'; but Žižek also criticizes Badiou for a tendency to dismiss ordinary everyday life as non-eventful 'animal life,' and notes they fought together over whether to retain the term 'democracy.'
Tariq Ali negative
Criticized for claiming Europe should look to Latin America as a model, Žižek rejects this as premature.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad negative
Cited as the friendship Žižek will 'never excuse' Chávez for maintaining, implying Ahmadinejad is morally and politically unacceptable.
Fredric Jameson positive
Called 'my good friend'; cited for his book on Capital and for proposing to expand the notion of exploitation to include the permanently unemployed; but Žižek also critiques what he sees as Jameson's idea that we live in an openly cynical post-ideological era.
Eric Hobsbawm positive
Called 'the great British Marxist who just now a year ago died'; cited for The Invention of Tradition and its demonstration that national traditions (kilts, etc.) are recent constructions, supporting Žižek's Hegelian point.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Called 'a good Greek economist'; cited for the 'Minotaur' concept describing how the United States extracts one billion dollars per day from the rest of the world through Wall Street financial mechanisms.
Historical figure cited alongside Villa to illustrate the gap between spontaneous revolutionary moment and organized political force.
Malcolm X positive
His adoption of 'X' to mark the loss of African roots is read as a genius move: seeing the constitutive lack not as a wound to be healed by returning to roots but as the condition of a new universal liberation.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Austrian Nobel laureate; Žižek says he does not like her ('too dirty for me, I'm a conservative') but cites her idea that 'language by its nature is lying and must be tortured to say the truth' as a wonderful formulation supporting his argument.
Martin Heidegger negative
Cited only to be corrected: 'language is the house of being' is insufficient; a Lacanian must add 'language is a torture house of being.'
Bill Gates negative
Cited as the paradigm of digital rent extraction, his wealth comes from privatizing the collective general intellect rather than from exploiting labor; also cited (the photo with the Indian child) as emblematic of charity capitalism.
Gary Wills positive
Chicago Catholic intellectual described as 'my good friend'; cited for finding cases where ordination itself (not prior disposition) produced pedophilia in priests, supporting Žižek's argument about structural Church identity.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Mentioned as sharing a birth date with the day Chávez died, framed as a more important spiritual axis than the Stalin coincidence; implicitly presented as a positive reference point.
Stanley Cavell positive
American philosopher and cinema theorist; Žižek says he doesn't particularly like him but that he 'wrote a good book' on comedies of remarriage, which Žižek uses as an analogy for revolutionary process requiring a first failure.
Friedrich Hölderlin negative
His famous line ('where danger is greatest, salvation also grows') names what Žižek calls the 'Hölderlin paradigm', the Marxist messianic eschatology he rejects in favor of a more tragic Hegelian view.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
His montage of attraction is cited as an example of the torture of images, cutting and synthetically assembling, as one productive mode of cinematic violence with language.
Nelson Mandela positive
Admired specifically for not falling into the trap of returning to some original African roots despite pressure, cited as exemplary alongside Malcolm X for resisting nativist authenticity politics.
Hugo Chávez positive
Žižek offers a balanced assessment: criticizes Chávez's friendship with Ahmadinejad and Lukashenko, improvised economic policy, and political prisoner cases, but strongly defends his core project of mobilizing the excluded as autonomous political agents and creating a new model beyond populist paternalism.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
His film Sacrifice (seven-minute slow approach to a tree) is cited as the opposite torture machine to Eisenstein, stretching rather than cutting images, equally violent in its own way.
Joseph Stalin negative
Invoked to argue that Stalinist violence was a sign of impotence and a flaw in the basic project, not merely an excess; used as counter-example against the view that revolutionary means can be separated from ends.
Noam Chomsky positive
Cited as having criticized Chávez over political prisoners, used to establish credibility of Žižek's balanced critique: if even Chávez's friend Chomsky raised concerns, they must be taken seriously.
Karl Marx positive
Central reference throughout: commodity fetishism, general intellect, the passage from in-itself to for-itself, the critique of political economy. Žižek argues the Marxist legacy must be critically rethought in light of Stalinism and new forms of capitalism, especially on value, natural resources, and the subject of revolution.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the clinical notion of the perverse position (cynics have the most repressed unconscious) and for Super-ego as impossible demand applied to the debt mechanism.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical reference: absoluter Gegenstoß (absolute recoil), the in-itself/for-itself distinction, and the Hegelian prohibition on dreaming forward eschatologically are all deployed; Žižek also claims Hegel may have been more materialist than Marx.
Maurizio Lazzarato positive
Italian social philosopher; his book The Making of the Indebted Man is praised as 'simple but wonderful' for theorizing how debt functions as ideological control and how entrepreneurship-of-the-self operates.
What it argues
Hugo Chávez as model and limit of left politicsglobal slums and apartheid of exclusionprotest without revolutionary organizationviolence as sign of impotenceEurocentrism, colonialism and absolute recoildebt as ideological control and entrepreneurship of the selfcynicism as the deepest ideological illusion
Dialectical moves 10
“Bourgeois liberals like nothing more than these temporary revolutionary outbursts — the right-winger who says 'I was also on the barricades in '68' confirms that spectacular revolt is already its own domestication.”
The ecstatic moment of revolt is not the opposite of the system but its safety valve; the real revolutionary act is what survives the return to normalcy.
“Brutal physical violence and terror is ultimately always a sign of impotence.”
What appears as the strongest assertion of political will is actually evidence of an inability to solve the real problem, inverting the common equation of violence with power.
“Far from being the most open attitude, cynicism is the greatest illusion — those who are cynical realists are most blind for what is going on.”
The position that claims to see through ideology (cynical realism) is itself the most ideologically mystified, because it cannot perceive the material efficacy of illusions.
“Perverts are not people with the least repression, they are people with the most repression.”
The clinical inversion of the cynical/perverse position: those who seem to do everything openly in fact have the most inaccessible unconscious.
“A thing doesn't precede its loss, but a thing emerges only through its loss.”
Hegel's absolute recoil: what colonized peoples are deprived of is not their pre-colonial essence but precisely what the colonial rupture itself opened up as a possibility.
“When we think we are returning to some roots, we are effectively creating in the very return what we are returning to.”
National and indigenous 'traditions' are retroactive inventions; the return to origins produces the origin rather than recovering it.
“You have a choice: you either torture language or you torture people.”
The violence inherent in poetic and artistic form (torturing language) is the alternative to real social violence, displacing rather than denying the fundamental negativity.
“What India today wants as the goal of its fight against the residues of colonization is a dream which emerged with the very colonization.”
Anti-colonial emancipation is structurally dependent on the colonial universality it opposes, the wound and the cure share the same source.
“Your de facto slavery is sold to you as your greater freedom.”
The entrepreneurship-of-the-self ideology inverts the reality of debt bondage, presenting compelled self-management as autonomy.
“The exclusion of Congo from the global economy is always already its inclusion — there is no country more included in global capitalism than Congo.”
What appears as peripheral exclusion is actually the most intensive form of capitalist incorporation (mineral extraction for digital technology).
Claims 21
asserts
The explosive growth of global slums is the crucial geopolitical event of our time, producing a new form of apartheid more rigid than classical class society.global capitalism and exclusion
asserts
Chávez's greatest achievement was not just protecting the poor in a populist style but mobilizing the excluded as autonomous political agents.Hugo Chávez's political legacy
asserts
Contemporary protest movements (Tahrir Square, European unrest) fail to pass from spontaneous rebellion to organized revolutionary force with a program.contemporary left politics
rejects
The celebration of leaderless horizontal multitude politics is insufficient because large efficient structures are required to create even the space for local participation.Negri/Deleuzian multitude politics
asserts
Every authentic revolutionary process requires a leader-function analogous to psychoanalytic transference — someone who appears to know what the people want.political leadership and revolutionary organization
asserts
Political violence (Stalinist terror, Cultural Revolution) is always ultimately a sign of impotence — a symptom of a flaw in the project itself, not an instrument of its success.violence and the left
asserts
Femicide in Ciudad Juárez and ritual rape of indigenous women in Canada are not individual pathologies but institutionalized collective obscene rituals that authorities systematically erase.gender violence and institutional cover-up
asserts
Modernization and the colonial rupture are conditions of possibility for the very emancipatory ideals that anti-colonial movements invoke against them.Eurocentrism and anti-colonial politics
rejects
The call to return to pre-modern indigenous or national roots is illusory because those 'roots' are themselves inventions produced through the very modernity being rejected.nativist and indigenous-authenticity politics
asserts
Language by its nature involves a fundamental violence — a torture — that must be embraced rather than avoided, and poetry/cinema are torture machines of language.language, subjectivity and art
asserts
Cynicism is not clear-eyed realism but the deepest ideological illusion because it renders invisible the material power of illusions in constituting social reality.cynicism and critique of ideology
asserts
The 2008 financial crisis was caused not by welfare-state idealism but by the most cynical banking managers, proving that cynical 'no bullshit' thinking is the most dangerous illusion.financial crisis and ideology
reframes
Commodity fetishism in Marx does not mean superstructural illusion overlaying real life but illusions built into the very heart of real commodity exchange.Marxist theory of ideology
asserts
Debt under contemporary capitalism functions not to be repaid but as a permanent mechanism of ideological control — the Super-ego demand is designed to be unfulfillable.debt and neoliberal ideology
asserts
The entrepreneurship-of-the-self ideology reframes debt slavery as small-capitalist investment, using the universalization of capitalism to make de facto unfreedom appear as greater freedom.neoliberal ideology and debt
asserts
Contemporary digital wealth (e.g. Bill Gates) is better explained by rent — privatization of the collective general intellect — than by exploitation of labor in the classical Marxist sense.Marxist theory of value and digital capitalism
asserts
Hegel may have been more materialist than Marx in his openness to historical contingency and his prohibition on dreaming forward toward a guaranteed eschatological reversal.Hegel vs. Marx on historical materialism
asserts
Parliamentary multi-party democracy as currently constituted is simply not strong or efficient enough to deal with ecological and other global crises.democracy and global crisis
rejects
Formal freedoms, even if bourgeois and empty, must be defended rather than dismissed as false, because they provide the measure from which actual unfreedom can be perceived.Stalinist dismissal of formal freedom
asserts
Neoliberalism is an ideology deployed to discipline the Global South while developed capitalist states (US, East Asian tigers) in practice maintain strong state regulation and intervention.neoliberalism and the state
asserts
The true measure of a revolution is not the ecstatic collective moment but what changes in ordinary daily life when things return to normal.revolution and political transformation
Quotes 15
“Brutal physical violence and terror is ultimately always a sign of impotence.”Slavoj Žižek · violence as political impotence
“The measure of the revolution is what really changes precisely afterwards when things return to normal.”Slavoj Žižek · the morning after as test of revolution
“Cynicism is not that you brutally are able to accept reality the way it is. Cynicism is the greatest illusion.”Slavoj Žižek · cynicism as ideology
“Language by its nature is lying. We have to torture language to make it say the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · language, violence and truth
“You have a choice here. You either torture language or you torture people.”Slavoj Žižek · formal violence of language as alternative to social violence
“A thing doesn't precede its loss, but a thing emerges only through its loss.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's absolute recoil
“When we think we are returning to some roots, we are effectively creating in the very return what we are returning to.”Slavoj Žižek · tradition as retroactive construction
“Language is a torture house of being.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian reworking of Heidegger on language
“This is what commodity fetishism is for Marx: illusions which are in the very heart of our real life.”Slavoj Žižek · commodity fetishism as constitutive of reality
“Your de facto slavery is sold to you as your greater freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · debt and entrepreneurship-of-the-self ideology
“The point is not for you to repay the debt. The point is precisely as a means of control to keep you permanently in debt.”Slavoj Žižek · debt as Super-ego control mechanism
“This is the liberation I don't want. I want us to enjoy our wounds.”Slavoj Žižek · constitutive lack / wound not to be healed
“Imperialists were always multiculturalists. They even in a hypocritical way loved the authenticity of the colonized.”Slavoj Žižek · imperialism and multiculturalism
“If I don't defend the interests of the underprivileged, then someone else will. Maybe even they themselves will start to defend their underprivileged, and we certainly don't want that.”Slavoj Žižek · Citizen Kane on elite self-preservation through advocacy for the poor
“We need critique of ideology more than ever. Precisely insofar as we live in an era which claims to be brutally cynical post-ideological.”Slavoj Žižek · necessity of ideology critique in post-ideological age
Transcript 19 turns
unknown
Now a brief introduction of Zizek,
Now a brief introduction of Zizek,
unknown
maybe it’s not the second or the third conference that you’re watching. He was born in in the city of Ljubljana, Slovenia, philosopher, psychoanalyst and one of the main theoreticians of today, having a great work through many areas of knowledge. Under the strong influence of Karl Marx, Hegel and Lacan, he implemented an innovative cultural criticism of modernity and postmodernity. He’s a professor at the University of Ljubljana, he presides the society for theoretical psychoanalysis in Ljubljana and he’s the international director of humanities in the university of Birkbeck in London. Polemic, provocative and good-humored, he has an admirable disposition traveling all throughout the world, participating in conferences and debates and political interventions such as the one tonight. Therefore he’s one of the main references in reflecting about the limits and contradictions of capitalism in contemporaneity, promoting a courageous and innovative renewal of the idea of communism. But maybe the most adequate way of introducing him is through one of his jokes. In the Soviet Union, when young people asked Lenin what they should do, the leader used to counsel them: learn, learn, and learn. What leads us to this ancient Soviet joke. Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked if they would rather have a lover or a wife. As it’s expected, Marx, that was very traditional in his private life, answers: a wife. Engels, a true bon vivant, chooses a lover. To the surprise of everyone, Lenin says: I’d rather have a wife and a lover. Why? Is there any kind of hidden perversion behind the image of the austere revolutionary? No, Lenin explains. Thus I could tell my wife that I’m going to meet my lover, tell my lover that I’m going to meet my wife, and then I could go to a calm place in order to learn, learn, and learn. Differently from many Marxists, Zizek doesn’t believe that we know what’s happening in the world and that it would be enough for us to focus in making the people conscious and assume the power. He believes we don’t know what’s happening and we have a lot to study. I believe this has a lot to do with Zizek’s work and the fact that we’re all here tonight. I’d like to give the floor to Zizek.
maybe it’s not the second or the third conference that you’re watching. He was born in in the city of Ljubljana, Slovenia, philosopher, psychoanalyst and one of the main theoreticians of today, having a great work through many areas of knowledge. Under the strong influence of Karl Marx, Hegel and Lacan, he implemented an innovative cultural criticism of modernity and postmodernity. He’s a professor at the University of Ljubljana, he presides the society for theoretical psychoanalysis in Ljubljana and he’s the international director of humanities in the university of Birkbeck in London. Polemic, provocative and good-humored, he has an admirable disposition traveling all throughout the world, participating in conferences and debates and political interventions such as the one tonight. Therefore he’s one of the main references in reflecting about the limits and contradictions of capitalism in contemporaneity, promoting a courageous and innovative renewal of the idea of communism. But maybe the most adequate way of introducing him is through one of his jokes. In the Soviet Union, when young people asked Lenin what they should do, the leader used to counsel them: learn, learn, and learn. What leads us to this ancient Soviet joke. Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked if they would rather have a lover or a wife. As it’s expected, Marx, that was very traditional in his private life, answers: a wife. Engels, a true bon vivant, chooses a lover. To the surprise of everyone, Lenin says: I’d rather have a wife and a lover. Why? Is there any kind of hidden perversion behind the image of the austere revolutionary? No, Lenin explains. Thus I could tell my wife that I’m going to meet my lover, tell my lover that I’m going to meet my wife, and then I could go to a calm place in order to learn, learn, and learn. Differently from many Marxists, Zizek doesn’t believe that we know what’s happening in the world and that it would be enough for us to focus in making the people conscious and assume the power. He believes we don’t know what’s happening and we have a lot to study. I believe this has a lot to do with Zizek’s work and the fact that we’re all here tonight. I’d like to give the floor to Zizek.
Slavoj Žižek
I am sorry that I have now to change to the universal language of imperialism, that's life. I must say I enjoyed very much this beginning of my talk and it gave me the idea of maybe what would have been the most interesting conference, a kind of postmodern joke. Just eight, nine, ten introductions and then maybe if there is time I give a short concluding remark, you know. First, I am glad not only to be in Brazil but to be here in Sao Paulo because as I like to emphasize for me it's not the north of Brazil, they are lazy, they dance too much, all that samba, carnival. I like Sao Paulo, nervous, stressful and so on. So I think even if Ivana is my very, very good friend, she comes from Belém I think, she will need when we take over a little bit of re-education camp to make her more tough. And second thing, I would nonetheless like to begin, he deserves it, with a short note on Hugo Chavez. All reactionaries immediately noted as if this has some deep spiritual meaning that Chavez died on the very day on which Joseph Stalin died. But I would put an accent to another thing, since we also had here a representative of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. You know that this is also the day when Rosa Luxemburg was born and this axis is maybe more important. So let me begin. I must confess that more often than not, I am not here to flatter Chavez, more often than not, I did not like what Chavez was doing, especially in the last years of his reign. I don't mean the ridiculous accusations about his totalitarian dictatorship. To people who claim this, I would advise a year or two in a real Stalinist dictatorship. But yes, he did many crazy things in foreign policy. I will never excuse him for his friendship with Ahmadinejad and especially Lukashenko, the kind of Groucho Marx character who rules Belarus. In economic policy, I think that a series of badly improvised measures he practiced, enacted, which instead of really solving problems, rather consisted in throwing money at the problems to cover them up. Then there are maybe, I don't know, some cases of mistreating political prisoners for which he was criticized even by his friend Noam Chomsky, up to last and also least, some ridiculous cultural measures like, so I heard, prohibiting The Simpsons on TV. But all this, let's be serious, pales into insignificance compared with his basic project, what he was engaged in. We all know that today in our global capitalism with its spectacular and deeply uneven development, there are more and more people who are systematically excluded from active participation in social and political life. The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the third world megalopolises from favelas here, in Rio, in Mexico City, through Africa, Lagos, Chad, India, China, Philippines, Indonesia. This is, I think, probably the crucial geopolitical event of our time. Since sometime very soon, maybe it already happened, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural agricultural population and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon here. These large groups are of course, nobody denies their existence, but here problems begin. These large groups are of course the favored objects of humanitarian care and charity of liberal elites. Recall the emblematic images like the well-known photo of Bill Gates embracing a crippled Indian child. I think rich people today love to see this poverty and have these speeches like, oh my god, we live in our false affluence, but there are children there who die for unnecessary reasons and we should do something about this. Even our capitalism is becoming charity capitalism. As I often repeat in my books apropos the example of Starbucks, you know charity is becoming a way of life. Like you go to Starbucks and they don't want to make you feel guilty for being a consumerist, no? So they tell you, our cappuccino is a little bit more expensive but one percent goes for Guatemala children, one percent for rainforest. So you know, you can be a consumerist with a clear conscience. The more you spend at Starbucks, the more you do something for mother earth, whatever. Chavez saw clearly that this is not enough. He saw the contours of a new apartheid on the horizon. And I really mean it, I think what is now slowly emerging is an apartheid much stronger than any class society. Like I read now some ominous analysis of how, do you know that in United States and so on, the rich, this is a clear tendency, are slowly emerging literally as a new biological race. They take care of their children before they are born through this all genetic manipulations to make them more healthy, more intelligent. So again, we saw what once were class struggles re-emerging in the guise of new and even stronger divisions. And this is what is obfuscated today. Which is why to detect this, don't be afraid, don't be afraid please, to look at popular culture. Often things we find in popular culture are, I think, quite interesting. Maybe even much more interesting than what we find in serious culture. Let me give you a simple example if you like cinema, of surprising, potentially at least, progressive content in the lowest popular culture. Did you see this disgusting official Hollywood liberal elite film, the last Spielberg Lincoln? This is the official story. Struggle for black liberation, for the end of slavery becomes a matter of high political intrigues on the Capitol and so on. But I think, don't laugh, I mean it seriously, there was a leftist answer to that film. Did you see the other one, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer, the vampire killer? It is of course, it's a totally crazy fiction. You know what's the story, that Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy made a deal with American vampires, that vampires will help them on the battlefield if they provide to vampires a regular number of blacks for blood for food. And then the ridiculous solution is that Lincoln learns this and quickly makes out of silver reserves of United States silver bullets which as you probably know kill vampires, and so the battle of Gettysburg was won. Now you can laugh at this, it is ridiculous. But isn't it as if all that is repressed from the original serious narrative, the fact that the fight to finish slavery was not just some Washington intrigues but real violent struggle, re-emerges in this ridiculous film? And then I went further and in my analysis and came to a strange result that there is a class struggle in horror films, I am not kidding. It's between vampires and zombies. Did you notice how vampires are upper class? They are usually educated, refined, rich, they live among us, while zombies are terrifying, inert, attacking from outside, poor. And to confirm this, I discovered, you can get it from BitTorrents for free whenever you want, a wonderful early horror film from before Hayes Code rules were imposed because in such a film would not be possible, called White Zombie where Bela Lugosi, the actor who a year before became famous for his role of Dracula, vampire, plays a plantation owner in Haiti. When the film opens, he receives some guests and shows them his factory where they are transforming sugar canes into sugar. And then you see all his workers are zombies. And he explains to guests, this is wonderful, zombies just work all the time, they don't complain about hours of work, they don't want trade unions or whatever and so on. So you see, this is a little bit of what Jacques Lacan meant by his maybe strange idea that the truth has the structure of a fiction sometimes. What you cannot say in real serious narrative re-emerges in a very ridiculous form but nonetheless it returns where in horror films, maybe even in cartoons. That's why I like cartoons. Imagine a typical Tom and Jerry cartoon. Are you and try to imagine what happens there in a film with real actors? They lie to each other, they betray each other, they cut each other, they it's can you even it is as if the brutality of our competitive life which as such cannot be directly represented in a film with real actors, ah you can do it in cartoons. So okay, back to my point about Chavez and class divisions. Chavez did something great here. He was, I claim, the first who not only protected the poor, took care of the poor in the old populist Peronist style. He did not just speak for them, for the poor. He seriously, whatever his mistakes were, put all his energy into awakening the poor, effectively mobilizing them as active and autonomous political agents. He saw clearly that without the inclusion of all those excluded in favelas and so on, our societies will gradually approach a state of permanent civil war. And since I like films, I recalled apropos Chavez the immortal, maybe best line of a dialogue from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. You remember a scene one third into the film when Kane starts to publish his, whatever is the title, populist newspaper defending the underprivileged, and a rich banker comes to him and says, are you crazy? You are a man of wealth and property and full of money, why do you speak against your class for all those poor? And you know what Citizen Kane answers, I quote it: If I don't defend the interests of the underprivileged, then someone else will. Maybe somebody without any money or property, maybe even they themselves will start to defend their privileges, their underprivileged, and we certainly don't want that, you know. This is what Chavez clearly saw. So while we hear all the prattle about Chavez's ambiguous legacy, about how he divided his nation, when we expose him to maybe sometimes even deserved criticism, let's not forget what it all was about. It was simply, as they say but they don't practice it in American constitution, about the people, about the government of the people, for the people, by the people. Yes, he created a lot of mess, but with all his theatrical rhetorics, he was sincere, he really meant it, and when he failed, these are our failures, we don't have answers. So allow me to conclude in this part in a slightly pathetic way, but I mean it very seriously, although it will sound sentimental. It really came to me that you know one of my friends told me that their father recently died and he, their father, had a very strange disease. It exists, although it's rare, that your heart grows too large. And since it grows too large, the veins are too wide, so simply the heart breaks down, not sentimentally, but it cannot do all the work, you know. Simply too much blood because of how wide it is and because it's too big a heart it cannot do it. Well my dream is maybe Chavez did not die of cancer but really of having too big a heart in this sense. So my god, you know, again I am not saying let's celebrate him, let's brutally criticize him if necessary, but as one of us. So what would be the legacy of Chavez? Can he serve as a model also outside Latin America? Here the situation is getting critical, especially now in Europe. Well I think this is for me a kind of a symbol of what Left can and cannot do, especially in so-called developed countries. The situation in parts of Europe now is that we have great unrest, demonstrations, even permanent demonstrations, almost civil war, great dissatisfaction and so on, like in Greece, Spain and so on. But strangely this objectively almost revolutionary situation cannot be transformed into an organized movement with at least minimally clear vision about what to do. Something is happening for which we already have models in the past. Like recently I read, maybe I am wrong but that's how it was presented to me, recently I read a book about Mexican Revolution. And I simplify it a little bit but that's what basically happened on a crucial date, in November If you know Mexican history you know what happened. From the north troops of Pancho Villa, from the south Emiliano Zapata, closed on and liberated, occupied, okay entered Mexico City, and basically took power. But now comes for me one of the saddest lessons. What happened then? They met, they talked for two months and then they left. One to the north, the other to the south. So why is it then, about this I would like to talk more today, it's what in Hegel's old terms, in traditional Marxism was called the passage from in-itself, an sich, to for-itself, from chaotic protest to an organized program and political force to realize it. Why doesn't this happen? Now probably if you are fans of Tony Negri and other let's call them Deleuzian revolutionaries, you will say: but that's what is great about today's protest movements, that precisely they are, you know the jargon, self-organized multitude, molecular, no longer hierarchic structures with an authoritarian leader and so on and so on. I doubt this easy answer. First, the model of this celebration of multitudes is the idea, of course, of local so-called local democracy and active participation of citizens. The idea is we don't need high centralized organization, we don't need people who know and about what people ordinary people do or need and tell them, we don't need leaders, we don't need centralized power, we need active citizens meeting, debating, learning through mistakes what they really want, what to do. Okay, of course there are situations when and these are magical moments when this happens. But let me tell you something and I'm here telling you this to provoke you, it will be problematic probably for you. If I look deeply into my heart and I think that the great majority of people, I don't despise them for this because I am with them here, would agree with this. I'm sorry to tell you but I wouldn't like to live in a society in this permanent state of mobilization, you know, where all the time I had to go to meetings, active participation and so on and so on. I want somebody, state or collective organism, whatever we call it, to do invisibly its work, to create a kind of a network which allows me just to do the creative or less creative things that I want to do. That's my first problem. My second problem about leaders. No, people don't want sorry people don't know what they want. It's not that we intellectuals know, we probably know even less today. But I claim that there is in every authentic revolutionary process something very similar to what in psychoanalysis we call transference at work. You don't know what you want, but to learn what you want, you need somebody and I'm not ashamed to call him the leader who appears falsely but nonetheless as the one who somehow knows what you want. And isn't it think about it, isn't this what a really great leader does? You listen to a really great leader and the magic effect of his thoughts is: oh my god, now I understand what I really want. And I'm sorry to tell you, I don't see anything proto-fascist or whatever in this. So again, I don't think that this eternal hidden dream of the Left, abolish all higher hierarchic structures, we need active citizenship and so on participation, of course that this is the answer. We should never forget that precisely to create a space for this active local participation we need large efficient structures. Humanity needs them more than ever today. Just think about what we will have to do to properly approach ecological crisis. And let me be very clear, my message here is not resignation. Oh we didn't succeed so let's be realists, let's just accept the bourgeois state. No, my demands are here much higher. I claim that to be again very honest and brutal, of course when we have this collective, sorry to use this dirty word, multiple political orgasm situation, like Tahrir Square, you know one million people there insisting, persisting together, you almost cry like it's beautiful. But I'm sorry to tell you I'm obsessed by what in English they call the morning after, meaning the morning after the night of drinking, you know. For me the true measure of a revolution or just revolt of transformative process are not these ecstatic collective moments. They come cheap. What is the most horrible for me is that then the result is the same as with French '68. You know, people gather in a cafeteria ten years later, have a coffee and talk: Oh my god, wasn't it so beautiful when we were young and on the streets there. And then somebody's cell phone rings: Sorry, I have to run to my bank for my job whatever. The measure of the revolution is what really changes precisely afterwards when things return to normal. I claim that bourgeois liberals like nothing more than these temporary revolutionary outbursts. Everybody knows that in France it's a matter of honor today for every right-wing politician to say: You know, I was also on the barricades in '68. It's almost kind of a you know if you were not, you cannot really be a good right-winger today. It's like a kind of a child disease in the making, necessary disease in the making of a proper right-winger. So again, the really and even in my very good friend's work, Alain Badiou's work, I find a little bit of this dismissal for dismissal of ordinary everyday life as just animal life, non-eventful. No, the really difficult thing is to change the daily life when things return to normal. I am not here criticizing Chavez, maybe he failed, but I claim and that's the first thing to learn from him. From what I know, and I have friends almost a small private spy service in Venezuela, people who inform me, he saw this, he was well aware of this. He tried desperately to do something at this level, organizing different forms of ownership, whatever, cooperation, participation. Second thing that the work of Chavez allows us to approach again is, I claim, the problem of violence. First, we should demystify violence, not in this cheap pseudo-leftist sense: Oh, it depends which violence and so on. No, what I want to say is that when we criticize the twentieth century Left for its excessive violence as it is usually done by critics of Stalinism. The usual mistake is to focus on violence, like: Oh, Stalin was wrong killing millions. Of course he was wrong, but it's extremely stupid, I claim, to say Stalin was otherwise okay just he made a mistake here. No, something must have been wrong in his basic project that in order to impose it, he had to have recourse to violence. In this sense for me, brutal physical violence and terror is ultimately always a sign of impotence. Let's take one of the high points of Stalinist violence, the forced collectivization of farms at the end of the 1920s, beginning of 30s. Isn't this extremely brutal violence, which then led to, as you probably know, big famine in Ukraine and so on. Isn't this a sign of an extreme impotence, inability to actually solve the problem which already Lenin knew is the big problem in Russia, of how to really bring farmers into socialism. Even in Chinese great cultural revolution, all those scenes that I remember from when I was young, about you know thousands of Red Guards destroying old, destroying old monasteries, historical buildings. Wasn't this basically a brutal acting out, or rather sorry let me be precise clinically, passage l'acte, which betrayed a deep inability of really breaking with the past. So again, the real problem is usually not violence but the flaw in the very concept, project that we try to realize which pushed us towards violence. To give you here another example, and I think it's decent to not to talk only about Chavez, but my god there are women in this world and today is their day, no? Let's at least remember this. Violence against women. How hypocritical are we often here. For example, you remember probably it was reported also in your media, the those terrible gang rapes in India. Eh, but they are the way it is reported in our media is deeply symptomatic. My friend the Indian novelist, who is very much to the left supporting Naxalite Maoist rebels, and this is another thing you don't learn in our media. You know what's happening now in India? There are almost one million armed Maoist rebels fighting for local tribal people who are the big victims of the ongoing modernization of India. What I want to say is that how all our media were full of these stories but as Arundhati Roy immediately noted, why? Because it's so simple, because those rapists were poor ordinary people. You have all the time in India much worse horror stories. For example, everybody who knows, okay I don't know them but I read about them, prostitution houses in Mumbai knows that there is a big systematic business of rich people sending their emissaries to poor villages in Nepal where they buy girls from four or five years old and bring them either for bordellos or often simply at home as slaves, starting to exploit them sexually immediately. Everybody knows this, it's done systematically, I would like to read also about that. Or another two examples of precisely violence as a sign of impotence and that's crucial. Of course there are individual private cases of violence, but we should be very specific here. Individual cases are often simply pathological, what can you do maybe. But okay, let's concede this point. What worries me recently is a rise of and maybe you know some cases of violence especially against women which is not simply you know here is a madman, there madman, but which has clear collective almost ritualized status. It's a collective ritual reassertion of masculinity in moments of panic. Of course probably you know it, the big example here is Ciudad Juarez on the border with United States south of El Paso. You know so-called femicide there. It's very interesting what happens there. Ciudad Juarez is a new industrial city with this non-creative just putting things together, I don't know how you call it, it's a name for this industry, and there are thousands of young independent women there. Of course, earning their jobs with poorly paid stupid work, but nonetheless at least living independent life out of family control and so on. And this obviously is a kind of a provocation to traditional machismo. So what emerged there, every year I think over one hundred are killed, is a typical scenario. Local gangs kidnap one of these lone working girls and then, I mean I may be a cynic but it's sad even for me to think about it, the poor girl is not only gang raped but then gradually killed in a well very brutal and ritualized form. For example, first so that it hurts with scissors they cut off her nipples and so on and so on. But what I want to emphasize and here comes the horror, is that this is not just you know crazy people here, crazy people there. It's a ritual, it's a formula, it's a collective obscene almost pseudo-sacred event done systematically. And the saddest thing as you can expect is that what police does if you report this, because these gangs are often connected with the police, is that they call social workers who systematically try to reinterpret these cases as cases of local family violence. That girl was killed probably her father was a drunk and so on, you know, systematically obliterating this collectively ritual case. Now you will tell me okay I'm a white Western racist, I'm again picking of Mexicans. Ah-ah, let's go to the other side of United States, Canada, which boasts itself to be like part of Europe in United States, more enlightened, tolerant than United States. Exactly the same phenomenon, much less reported because it's easier to attack primitive Mexicans there. I have a friend in Vancouver, west of Canada, which boasts to be the most liberal progressive American city. Close to Vancouver is a big reservation of natives, whatever we call them, I don't like the term natives because like we are cultural, they are poor natives part of nature or what, but whatever. And this natives in a reservation after a long time were allowed to have their own police force. So then a ritual again be attentive, a ritual not just individual cases emerged, almost eighty around usually women arrived is that a group of white people, a gang for Saturday evening or Friday drunken, go to reservation, kidnap a lone native girl, and the same story, brutally gang rape her, kill her and now comes the trick, dump her body just within the reservation. And then if local native police calls Canadian police, they claim, oh it's in your reservation this is not our job. Again the same story, it's probably some local family violence, probably father raped the daughter and so on. Again systematically they try to obliterate to render invisible the how should I call it, almost I would say institutional ritualistic function of this violence. This is not there are madmen and rapists, no, this is an obscene social ritual. And I think that the biggest element in this series are, I don't know how it is with you but in Europe, pedophilia in Catholic Church. It's absolutely not true as church representatives claim in Europe that: Okay, what do you want? We are not perfect, there are pedophiles everywhere, no wonder they are also in the church. No, my good friend Gary Wills from Chicago, a Catholic but a very progressive one, even found some cases where a guy who became a priest, before he became a priest was like straight heterosexual, it's literally his being a priest which redirected him into pedophilia. So you see it's again, it's not just: Oh there is everywhere pedophilia we have it also. No, it's in an obscene way absolutely part of some in a way hidden church identity, which also explains how self-defensive church here is, you know, not informing the police as far as possible and so on and so on. So much about violence. Okay let's go on to the next point which I associate with Chavez. Eurocentrism. Should we be Eurocentrists or not? What I liked about Chavez is that of course he was for indigenous rights and so on and so on, but that he nonetheless as far as I know resisted the temptation of claiming of condemning modernization as such and claiming the solution is to return in a modern form of course but nonetheless to some I don't know Incan-Mayan tradition and so on, some more authentic collective being and so on and so on. I am deeply skeptical about it. I think that not only is with global capitalism, global modernization here there is no way out, no way back, even worse in what sense worse? Let me return briefly to India, what happened to me there when I was visiting India about a year and a half ago I think. In a debate there some Indian cultural theorists attacked me for Eurocentrism, of course, I'm used to it. But what they told me it's interesting, they told me: Don't you see that the very fact that we, defending our Indian culture against colonization, have to speak the language of the colonizers, English. Don't you see in what disadvantage we find ourselves here? Like we cannot even speak our own language, we have to formulate our very dreams of liberation of new India in the very language which caused our humiliation and colonization. Sorry to tell you I exploded. I first exploded apropos one detail which I hope you were intelligent enough to immediately notice it, and because of this detail I immediately accused them of racism. Namely, I'm sorry to tell you but as you know English is not my language. You know they immediately their reason was: Oh, I'm coming from small shitty European nation for them it's natural to speak English, but we big India no-no that's different. But more fundamentally, what I developed and you know who agreed with me? I met them. The untouchables, the true lower classes. Namely that how should I put it, it is true that there was some pre-modern India and then British colonizers brutally imposed a foreign culture, a new universal language and so on. But, and this is what Marx was saying all the time, but what India today wants, a new open modern democratic post-colonial India, it is what they want as the goal of their fight against the residues of colonization is a dream which emerged with the very colonization. And now we come nonetheless to Hegel. Hegel saw this very clearly. This paradox of how let's say you are colonized, a universality is brutally imposed on you, and you experience this as a traumatic loss: My god we are deprived of our true being, we have to speak foreign language. But what you are really deprived of, this is crucial, is not what you really lost, pre-modern India. No, it's something the space of which was opened through this very brutal modernization. You should never forget this. Let me give you another proof. There is a text which is the best condensation resume of traditional India. It's called The Laws of Manu, a detailed description of caste system, all it blah blah. Ah, you know what's the irony, as I learned from my friends there? This book, The Laws of Manu, was half forgotten in traditional India and so on. It was definitely put together as an ancient pre-modern Indian classic by British colonizers in the early nineteenth century when they said to themselves: We need some local ideology to keep Indians under our rule. Contrary to what people think imperialists were always multiculturalists. They definitely didn't want the majority of the colonized to become like them. No-no, they even in a hypocritical way they loved their authenticity. Like my basic experience here is when I read forty years ago, a friend brought me from South Africa a defense of the apartheid regime of apartheid. It wasn't: No, blacks are less stupid. No, the defense was: Oh my god, what a beautiful naive but authentic world those Bushmen and Hottentot have. If we simply abolish apartheid, they will all be lost in our vulgar Western technocratic society. We need them in their difference to remind us of our own alienation, of how a much more authentic relationship to nature is possible blah blah all that. That's why, in spite of all his compromises, I admire Mandela, that he never fell into this trap of returning to some original roots. You know that even one another of my heroes, the black fighter in America, if you saw the movie with Denzel Washington, Malcolm X knew this. You know X means he has chosen Malcolm X to stand for the loss of roots. We don't have father's name, we miss these traditional roots. But his point was not oh now we must return to some African roots. No, the genius of Malcolm X was that he saw this X, we lack roots in tradition, as a chance of a new universal liberation. Okay, maybe we cannot agree with him I don't, he found this in Islam, no, as a universal religion where it doesn't matter if you are if you are black or not. And the last point, let me go nonetheless a little bit into philosophy here. What Hegel saw clearly here and I admire him for this, is again how I quote here from Hegel's Logic in logic of reflection. He introduces a wonderful term, he calls it absoluter Gegenstoß, absolute recoil or counter-punch if you want. The idea being that a thing doesn't precede its loss, but a thing emerges only through its loss. And okay, to return back to this English language and in India. I claim that the illusion of putting the blame on English language, like English language prevents us from really spontaneously expressing in our own way our dreams, is that here I am a Lacanian and also Hegelian. I claim and this is the big lesson of psychoanalysis, but every language is like this. Every language, if there is a lesson of Lacan, is that there is a fundamental gap between human subject and language. As we should put it, it's not enough to say like Heidegger: language is the house of being. A Lacanian should add: language is a torture house of being. Which means what? That and here I quote in this big fat book, the Austrian writer who got a Nobel Prize, Elfriede Jelinek. I don't like her very much, she's too dirty for me, I'm a conservative. But she had a wonderful idea. In one interview she said: Language by its nature is lying. We have to torture language to make it say the truth. Now when I said this at one talk, somebody attacked me with this humanist stupidity saying something like: But when you start to torture language you end up torturing people. No point, it's it's exactly the opposite. You have a choice here. You either torture language or you torture people. Now you will say I'm crazy. What do I mean by this? I tell you look at all poetry. Isn't poetry the greatest torture machine you can imagine? Just imagine to write a sonnet. What you have to do? Cut words short, squeeze them and so on. Poetry is a torture machine of language. Even in cinema, I develop this in my book. Take Eisenstein. What he does with images. The whole language of his montage of attraction is a language of cutting, torturing, synthetically artificially bringing it together. Now you will say yeah but that's Eisenstein. What about the other line, Rossellini, Tarkovsky, which is more passive organic, not active participation but passively just let it be. No it's I claim it's another form of torture. Tarkovsky. Did you see his last film, Sacrifice? The first shot, camera for seven minutes slowly approaching a tree. We have a name, I think it's I forgot what, it's bloody no, it's the name how do you call the torturing machine which you are on it and then it stretches you? You know what I mean, no? Yeah, yeah, the yeah, yeah. So I think that then the debate between Tarkovsky and Eisenstein would be which way it's better to torture images, no? Eisenstein would say cut him, no-no Tarkovsky would say stretch them, it's more painful it works better. What I mean quite seriously is that again there is a fundamental violence in language here. So to conclude slowly, I would like to apply this Hegelian idea of what he calls absolute recoil, how something emerges through its very loss. Or to put it in another way as Hegel put it, when we think we are returning to some roots, we are effectively creating in the very return what we are returning to. And I can tell you that my country Slovenia is a great example of it. We returned to our roots through national constitution in late nineteenth century. Of course, it was all invented at that point. And it's quite incredible, Eric Hobsbawm, the great British Marxist who just now a year ago or when even less died, he I hope it's translated here. If not, then Ivana you have an order to publish it. A wonderful collective book called Inventions of Tradition, no, where he wonderfully shows how even such well-known like Scotland. You know the idea of kilts, this male skirts, no? Nothing like that in Middle Ages. This was the way we know them now all invented in late nineteenth century revival and so on. Why am I saying this? Now the concluding part back to today's politics. Because this holds especially for beliefs. I think that we, but not only we, it was all the time, people never I claim authentically believed. We always believe through this recoil. You believe into something by maintaining a distance towards it, even by making cynically fun of it. Which is why for me, that's my last central point, cynicism is not that you brutally are able to accept reality the way it is. Cynicism is the greatest illusion. Those who are cynical realists are most blind for what is going on. What do I mean by this? Some of my friends, even Frederic Jameson, have this idea which I think it's profoundly wrong. That today we live in an openly cynical era where those in power no longer take seriously their own ideology. Like when Americans say we bring democracy, it's clear even to them that they are making fun, it's really only power interests whatever, economic colonization. So today, it's the idea that today we don't we do not need any longer some exquisite ide- some exquisite critique of ideology with this symptomatic reading, what is unsaid in what is said, absence, lacuna in No, it's simply direct bluff not taken seriously so we don't need critique of ideology. The big lesson of Marx here, to which we should return, is no, that precisely such brutally realist thinking, like no bullshit, forget about ideas, we all know it's only about money, money, power, sex, whatever you want. It's the greatest illusion. Let me give you an example which I think at least should convince you. Remember the financial crisis of I'm sorry to tell you but it was not done by, if we are looking for those guilty, it was not some welfare state idealists living in their illusions. It was done precisely by most cynical banking manager speculation who thought fuck all ideals, it's just about money and so on and so on. That's the point that and Freud also knew this. When he said clearly insofar as cynicism clinically means perverse position that far from being the most open attitude, like hysterics only half dream about it but perverts go to the end, they do everything openly. No, Freud says that the unconscious is most inaccessible, most difficult to penetrate in perverts. Perverts are not people with the least of repression, they are people with most of oppression. So what is it then that cynics do not see? Precisely among other things the power, the material power of illusions themselves. And this is for me again the deepest insight of Marx of his commodity fetishism theory. That illusions are not just ideological illusions. This is not Marxist notion of ideology. We have some real life and then some crazy illusions. No, what Marx called commodity fetishism are illusions which are in the very heart of our real life. The place of commodity fetishism is real commodity, the most brutal real commodity exchange. And here, what this means is that precisely insofar as we live in an era which claims to be brutally cynical post-ideological, we need, we need critique of ideology more than ever. So to conclude another just five minutes, five minutes in a dialectical sense like let me give you a nice example. Is it translated here with you? If not, you should translate it. A book by an interesting Italian social philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, is it? No, it's a wonderful book, simple but wonderful. This book claims how in today's global capitalism, the status of being indebted changed. And changed how? So that what we are witnessing today, and this is ideology at its purest. It's that the fact that if we poorer people want to be consumerists, all have to be you described me how they do it in Brazil here, all have to be indebted. This is in spontaneous ideology conceptualized as the term is entrepreneurship of the self. Like the idea is, big or small, we are all capitalists. In what sense? Like I'm a poor guy and I have to decide: will I go on drinking or will I with great pain put some money aside and invest it into my education? They claim, ah, you are entrepreneur of yourself, this is your decision to invest into yourself in this way and so on and so on. So that the idea is that the debt functions like capitalist investment. Let us say I want my children to be educated, so it's really as if a small capitalist enterprise I get indebted in order to invest in them. So you see the ideological beauty of this operation. All of a sudden it doesn't really matter, okay, someone somebody has a big factory or whatever, I have nothing, but this is just a matter of where the decimal comma is. Basically we are all capitalists investing. The other thing that Lazzarato shows very nicely is how this logic of being indebted and investment serves as a wonderful way of ideological control. No longer do we need old ideological oppressive machines and so on. The moment you are in debt, you have to control yourself to take care that you repay your debts and so on and so on. Then Lazzarato shows in a wonderful way how this works not only at the level of individuals, but even companies or states and so on and so on. For example, I remember some seven-eight years, correct me if I'm wrong, ago, when Argentina through some when Nestor Kirchner was still president, through some I think financial help or loans precisely from Chavez decided to pay back directly its debt to IMF. And I remember the reaction of IMF. Instead of being glad, oh my god we got our money back, it was absolute worry like: But how will we control them now? They will be just doing whatever they want. In other words, I think, and here we can perfectly apply the Freudian notion of Super-ego. When you are bombarded by an impossible demand, but the whole point of the authority which terrorizes you is that precisely you are not supposed to meet this demand, to do it. And I think this is how debt functions. The point is not for you to repay the debt. The point is precisely as a means of control to keep you to keep you to keep you permanently in debt. So this is I claim where we are today. And I think without this universalization of capitalism where we are all of a sudden all capitalists. Even if you are poor guy again who gets indebted to educate your children, ah you are a small capitalist investing and so on and so on. This is a very simple but elementary example of how ideology works. This is also a wonderful way to to dismantle whatever remains of the welfare state. You know, instead of state providing for your school they claim: No-no you are an autonomous small capitalist. You should decide, you should take care. You want security, you should invest in it. It's a wonderful example of how your de facto slavery is sold to you as your greater freedom. Instead of saying I must be in a panic how will will I have enough money to pay the debt for my sons' children's, sorry for the male chauvinist twist, I automatically assume that children who go to school are sons, no? I apologize for this. But how you know you are treated as a free small capitalist investor to mask this debt. So again what I am saying here is that this is a nice proof of how precisely this allegedly brutal modern financial world is the world of illusions, the world of dreaming as there never was one. But, conclude, allow me to conclude, maybe some of you already heard it, with an extremely brutal and tasteless joke. As a matter of fact not so tasteless, I in a way like it. Never forget the basic lesson of Marx. In order to go further to criticize capitalism one has to go through capitalism. You know even concerning so-called formal freedoms. Marx was not a Stalinist who claimed freedom is just a formal freedom. No, Marx knew very well that only a formal freedom which is empty allows you to build a measure from which you can then see how effectively not free you are. This is why we should be very attentive and reject the Stalinist reasoning: Oh bourgeois freedom are only false freedoms, and then they take away from you those freedoms. Yeah, but the problem is if you are taken away your formal freedom, you lose even a chance to see where maybe your actual freedom. So again, all temptation to move back this vision of some pre-modern paradise and then comes the wound of capitalist modernization should be rejected. Why? The promised dirty story. It's in my nature I cannot resist it. When I was in Palestine, West Bank, in Ramallah last summer, I met a Christian Palestinian. You know we tend to forget this, our media do not report enough that of Palestinians are Christians. It's not just some Islam plot or whatever. And this guy they are wonderfully liberated, emancipated many Palestinians, told me a wonderful obscene joke about Jesus Christ. Which is the best metaphor of what I am tried to tell you with this reference to Hegel. The joke is that just when Christ was not dying but you know the last night when Christ was praying there in Gethsemane garden, I don't know where and he knew of course being God that next day he will be arrested, crucified. His apostles around his tent there worried. One of them said, my God, our Lord sacrificed all his life for our welfare, he didn't have any fun in his life, shouldn't he experience some fun at least before he will die, no? So let's help him. So they call Mary Magdalene, no, knowing who she is and said, why wouldn't you go in and seduce Jesus? Let him have some fun. Of course she being Mary Magdalene, huh-huh, with pleasure she does it, no? Then apostles listen. Five minutes afterwards Mary Magdalene comes out running totally pale and terrified. And they ask her: What happened? No, it's not what you think, it's not that Jesus was a secret pervert or whatever. It's simply she said, it started well, I started to dance in front of him and our Lord looked at me kindly. Then I slowly went further, I raised my skirt, I spread my legs and to excite him I put my sex organ close to his face, and then it happened. Jesus looked at my spread vagina and said: Oh what a horrible wound! And put his palm on it and made it full, you know. This is the liberation I don't want. I want us to enjoy our wounds. Thank you very much. Now you will do I think he is my good friend Kim because he knows how to organize debates in a Stalinist way, which means you are all free to ask questions but then unfortunately there is not enough time so you must put written questions and he does his censorship, no. He is my friend, that's how we do it. You see, it's very nice. Probably as a good Stalinist he wrote himself most of these. Ah, you mean for translation. Okay, okay so that you don't have to say twice no. Okay. Definitely. In Less Than Nothing you bring the image, not of a Marx reader of Hegel but of a Hegel reader of Marx. I’d like to suggest Zizek to speak about it. Yeah, but you know like my god read the book which I find this joke wonderful, it’s called Less Than Nothing, well it certainly doesn’t weigh less than nothing, no. It is a close reading of Hegel, even some new stuff like quantum physics, I try to throw a new light on all these epistemological problems of quantum physics through Hegel, but the basic impetus is a political one. I claim that let’s face it, precisely if we want to be Marxists today, we have to admit that although Marx was of course not guilty for Stalinism, but the very fact that something like Stalinism emerged, or the very fact that today the main role of existing old style communists is to be as in China obviously the best managers of today’s capitalism, this does show that maybe we have to rethink critically the Marxist legacy. Not to go behind, but to repeat Marx, to do it again, like I agree that what Marx did in his critique of political economy it's breathtaking. It's I would say not only the best, but simply the only serious description of the totality of capitalist reproduction. But there are so many questions to be asked. For example, who is the agent of potential revolutionary change today? Is it still the old working class? I doubt. Today, for example in Western Europe, to be in the classical proletarian position, to have a permanent wage job where you are exploited but at least you are permanently exploited no, it's almost a privileged position. More and more the model becomes halftime unemployed, precarious jobs and so on, all that. And there are as I already said favelas, people who are excluded and so on. So the other problem that I rise in a very naive way, and again we are back to Chavez, the role of natural resources in exploitation. Marx was here maybe really too much marked by his time when he clearly, unambiguously claimed that natural resources are not a source of value. And the irony is that you know what he uses as an example: oil. So are we aware if we apply this in a direct mechanic way what this means? This means that insofar as now because of fracking I think Americans no longer need I don't know Venezuelan oil, but when Chavez was selling oil to United States, basically if we apply and I don't agree with this, what I'm saying if we mechanically apply Marxist position here, it would mean that Chavez was exploiting United States because he was selling for hard money something which has no value in the Marxist sense of value. I don't agree with this. I'm just saying that all this and the problem raised by Tony Negri. I’m well aware of all the monetary mechanisms how United States de facto functions today as what a good Greek economist called Varoufakis I think calls Minotaur. Like do you know that for the last forty years from Nixon era United States need to function one billion dollars per day from other countries and it's precisely through this money then being invested on Wall Street through all that stuff that they succeed in doing this without repaying the debts and so on and so on. So I have I have no illusions here. What I'm only saying is that and I follow here my good friend Fredric Jameson in his short book on Capital, did Boitempo also publish it or will? Not yet. Okay, where Fredric Jameson says the same thing, where he emphasizes how it is absolutely crucial today to rethink, change and expand the notion of exploitation. For example Jameson even proposes a crazy move of including permanently unemployed into exploited. In the sense that he claims unemployment is no longer today the old unemployment about which Marx was talking, this reserve army manipulated and so on and so on. More and more the whole strata, the whole groups are getting permanently unemployed. Unemployment has today an incredibly stronger structural role. Whole countries are in a symbolic sense unemployed in the sense that they are proclaimed rogue countries and simply excluded. Of course as I already said this exclusion is always inclusion. For example Congo is
I am sorry that I have now to change to the universal language of imperialism, that's life. I must say I enjoyed very much this beginning of my talk and it gave me the idea of maybe what would have been the most interesting conference, a kind of postmodern joke. Just eight, nine, ten introductions and then maybe if there is time I give a short concluding remark, you know. First, I am glad not only to be in Brazil but to be here in Sao Paulo because as I like to emphasize for me it's not the north of Brazil, they are lazy, they dance too much, all that samba, carnival. I like Sao Paulo, nervous, stressful and so on. So I think even if Ivana is my very, very good friend, she comes from Belém I think, she will need when we take over a little bit of re-education camp to make her more tough. And second thing, I would nonetheless like to begin, he deserves it, with a short note on Hugo Chavez. All reactionaries immediately noted as if this has some deep spiritual meaning that Chavez died on the very day on which Joseph Stalin died. But I would put an accent to another thing, since we also had here a representative of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. You know that this is also the day when Rosa Luxemburg was born and this axis is maybe more important. So let me begin. I must confess that more often than not, I am not here to flatter Chavez, more often than not, I did not like what Chavez was doing, especially in the last years of his reign. I don't mean the ridiculous accusations about his totalitarian dictatorship. To people who claim this, I would advise a year or two in a real Stalinist dictatorship. But yes, he did many crazy things in foreign policy. I will never excuse him for his friendship with Ahmadinejad and especially Lukashenko, the kind of Groucho Marx character who rules Belarus. In economic policy, I think that a series of badly improvised measures he practiced, enacted, which instead of really solving problems, rather consisted in throwing money at the problems to cover them up. Then there are maybe, I don't know, some cases of mistreating political prisoners for which he was criticized even by his friend Noam Chomsky, up to last and also least, some ridiculous cultural measures like, so I heard, prohibiting The Simpsons on TV. But all this, let's be serious, pales into insignificance compared with his basic project, what he was engaged in. We all know that today in our global capitalism with its spectacular and deeply uneven development, there are more and more people who are systematically excluded from active participation in social and political life. The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the third world megalopolises from favelas here, in Rio, in Mexico City, through Africa, Lagos, Chad, India, China, Philippines, Indonesia. This is, I think, probably the crucial geopolitical event of our time. Since sometime very soon, maybe it already happened, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural agricultural population and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon here. These large groups are of course, nobody denies their existence, but here problems begin. These large groups are of course the favored objects of humanitarian care and charity of liberal elites. Recall the emblematic images like the well-known photo of Bill Gates embracing a crippled Indian child. I think rich people today love to see this poverty and have these speeches like, oh my god, we live in our false affluence, but there are children there who die for unnecessary reasons and we should do something about this. Even our capitalism is becoming charity capitalism. As I often repeat in my books apropos the example of Starbucks, you know charity is becoming a way of life. Like you go to Starbucks and they don't want to make you feel guilty for being a consumerist, no? So they tell you, our cappuccino is a little bit more expensive but one percent goes for Guatemala children, one percent for rainforest. So you know, you can be a consumerist with a clear conscience. The more you spend at Starbucks, the more you do something for mother earth, whatever. Chavez saw clearly that this is not enough. He saw the contours of a new apartheid on the horizon. And I really mean it, I think what is now slowly emerging is an apartheid much stronger than any class society. Like I read now some ominous analysis of how, do you know that in United States and so on, the rich, this is a clear tendency, are slowly emerging literally as a new biological race. They take care of their children before they are born through this all genetic manipulations to make them more healthy, more intelligent. So again, we saw what once were class struggles re-emerging in the guise of new and even stronger divisions. And this is what is obfuscated today. Which is why to detect this, don't be afraid, don't be afraid please, to look at popular culture. Often things we find in popular culture are, I think, quite interesting. Maybe even much more interesting than what we find in serious culture. Let me give you a simple example if you like cinema, of surprising, potentially at least, progressive content in the lowest popular culture. Did you see this disgusting official Hollywood liberal elite film, the last Spielberg Lincoln? This is the official story. Struggle for black liberation, for the end of slavery becomes a matter of high political intrigues on the Capitol and so on. But I think, don't laugh, I mean it seriously, there was a leftist answer to that film. Did you see the other one, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer, the vampire killer? It is of course, it's a totally crazy fiction. You know what's the story, that Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy made a deal with American vampires, that vampires will help them on the battlefield if they provide to vampires a regular number of blacks for blood for food. And then the ridiculous solution is that Lincoln learns this and quickly makes out of silver reserves of United States silver bullets which as you probably know kill vampires, and so the battle of Gettysburg was won. Now you can laugh at this, it is ridiculous. But isn't it as if all that is repressed from the original serious narrative, the fact that the fight to finish slavery was not just some Washington intrigues but real violent struggle, re-emerges in this ridiculous film? And then I went further and in my analysis and came to a strange result that there is a class struggle in horror films, I am not kidding. It's between vampires and zombies. Did you notice how vampires are upper class? They are usually educated, refined, rich, they live among us, while zombies are terrifying, inert, attacking from outside, poor. And to confirm this, I discovered, you can get it from BitTorrents for free whenever you want, a wonderful early horror film from before Hayes Code rules were imposed because in such a film would not be possible, called White Zombie where Bela Lugosi, the actor who a year before became famous for his role of Dracula, vampire, plays a plantation owner in Haiti. When the film opens, he receives some guests and shows them his factory where they are transforming sugar canes into sugar. And then you see all his workers are zombies. And he explains to guests, this is wonderful, zombies just work all the time, they don't complain about hours of work, they don't want trade unions or whatever and so on. So you see, this is a little bit of what Jacques Lacan meant by his maybe strange idea that the truth has the structure of a fiction sometimes. What you cannot say in real serious narrative re-emerges in a very ridiculous form but nonetheless it returns where in horror films, maybe even in cartoons. That's why I like cartoons. Imagine a typical Tom and Jerry cartoon. Are you and try to imagine what happens there in a film with real actors? They lie to each other, they betray each other, they cut each other, they it's can you even it is as if the brutality of our competitive life which as such cannot be directly represented in a film with real actors, ah you can do it in cartoons. So okay, back to my point about Chavez and class divisions. Chavez did something great here. He was, I claim, the first who not only protected the poor, took care of the poor in the old populist Peronist style. He did not just speak for them, for the poor. He seriously, whatever his mistakes were, put all his energy into awakening the poor, effectively mobilizing them as active and autonomous political agents. He saw clearly that without the inclusion of all those excluded in favelas and so on, our societies will gradually approach a state of permanent civil war. And since I like films, I recalled apropos Chavez the immortal, maybe best line of a dialogue from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. You remember a scene one third into the film when Kane starts to publish his, whatever is the title, populist newspaper defending the underprivileged, and a rich banker comes to him and says, are you crazy? You are a man of wealth and property and full of money, why do you speak against your class for all those poor? And you know what Citizen Kane answers, I quote it: If I don't defend the interests of the underprivileged, then someone else will. Maybe somebody without any money or property, maybe even they themselves will start to defend their privileges, their underprivileged, and we certainly don't want that, you know. This is what Chavez clearly saw. So while we hear all the prattle about Chavez's ambiguous legacy, about how he divided his nation, when we expose him to maybe sometimes even deserved criticism, let's not forget what it all was about. It was simply, as they say but they don't practice it in American constitution, about the people, about the government of the people, for the people, by the people. Yes, he created a lot of mess, but with all his theatrical rhetorics, he was sincere, he really meant it, and when he failed, these are our failures, we don't have answers. So allow me to conclude in this part in a slightly pathetic way, but I mean it very seriously, although it will sound sentimental. It really came to me that you know one of my friends told me that their father recently died and he, their father, had a very strange disease. It exists, although it's rare, that your heart grows too large. And since it grows too large, the veins are too wide, so simply the heart breaks down, not sentimentally, but it cannot do all the work, you know. Simply too much blood because of how wide it is and because it's too big a heart it cannot do it. Well my dream is maybe Chavez did not die of cancer but really of having too big a heart in this sense. So my god, you know, again I am not saying let's celebrate him, let's brutally criticize him if necessary, but as one of us. So what would be the legacy of Chavez? Can he serve as a model also outside Latin America? Here the situation is getting critical, especially now in Europe. Well I think this is for me a kind of a symbol of what Left can and cannot do, especially in so-called developed countries. The situation in parts of Europe now is that we have great unrest, demonstrations, even permanent demonstrations, almost civil war, great dissatisfaction and so on, like in Greece, Spain and so on. But strangely this objectively almost revolutionary situation cannot be transformed into an organized movement with at least minimally clear vision about what to do. Something is happening for which we already have models in the past. Like recently I read, maybe I am wrong but that's how it was presented to me, recently I read a book about Mexican Revolution. And I simplify it a little bit but that's what basically happened on a crucial date, in November If you know Mexican history you know what happened. From the north troops of Pancho Villa, from the south Emiliano Zapata, closed on and liberated, occupied, okay entered Mexico City, and basically took power. But now comes for me one of the saddest lessons. What happened then? They met, they talked for two months and then they left. One to the north, the other to the south. So why is it then, about this I would like to talk more today, it's what in Hegel's old terms, in traditional Marxism was called the passage from in-itself, an sich, to for-itself, from chaotic protest to an organized program and political force to realize it. Why doesn't this happen? Now probably if you are fans of Tony Negri and other let's call them Deleuzian revolutionaries, you will say: but that's what is great about today's protest movements, that precisely they are, you know the jargon, self-organized multitude, molecular, no longer hierarchic structures with an authoritarian leader and so on and so on. I doubt this easy answer. First, the model of this celebration of multitudes is the idea, of course, of local so-called local democracy and active participation of citizens. The idea is we don't need high centralized organization, we don't need people who know and about what people ordinary people do or need and tell them, we don't need leaders, we don't need centralized power, we need active citizens meeting, debating, learning through mistakes what they really want, what to do. Okay, of course there are situations when and these are magical moments when this happens. But let me tell you something and I'm here telling you this to provoke you, it will be problematic probably for you. If I look deeply into my heart and I think that the great majority of people, I don't despise them for this because I am with them here, would agree with this. I'm sorry to tell you but I wouldn't like to live in a society in this permanent state of mobilization, you know, where all the time I had to go to meetings, active participation and so on and so on. I want somebody, state or collective organism, whatever we call it, to do invisibly its work, to create a kind of a network which allows me just to do the creative or less creative things that I want to do. That's my first problem. My second problem about leaders. No, people don't want sorry people don't know what they want. It's not that we intellectuals know, we probably know even less today. But I claim that there is in every authentic revolutionary process something very similar to what in psychoanalysis we call transference at work. You don't know what you want, but to learn what you want, you need somebody and I'm not ashamed to call him the leader who appears falsely but nonetheless as the one who somehow knows what you want. And isn't it think about it, isn't this what a really great leader does? You listen to a really great leader and the magic effect of his thoughts is: oh my god, now I understand what I really want. And I'm sorry to tell you, I don't see anything proto-fascist or whatever in this. So again, I don't think that this eternal hidden dream of the Left, abolish all higher hierarchic structures, we need active citizenship and so on participation, of course that this is the answer. We should never forget that precisely to create a space for this active local participation we need large efficient structures. Humanity needs them more than ever today. Just think about what we will have to do to properly approach ecological crisis. And let me be very clear, my message here is not resignation. Oh we didn't succeed so let's be realists, let's just accept the bourgeois state. No, my demands are here much higher. I claim that to be again very honest and brutal, of course when we have this collective, sorry to use this dirty word, multiple political orgasm situation, like Tahrir Square, you know one million people there insisting, persisting together, you almost cry like it's beautiful. But I'm sorry to tell you I'm obsessed by what in English they call the morning after, meaning the morning after the night of drinking, you know. For me the true measure of a revolution or just revolt of transformative process are not these ecstatic collective moments. They come cheap. What is the most horrible for me is that then the result is the same as with French '68. You know, people gather in a cafeteria ten years later, have a coffee and talk: Oh my god, wasn't it so beautiful when we were young and on the streets there. And then somebody's cell phone rings: Sorry, I have to run to my bank for my job whatever. The measure of the revolution is what really changes precisely afterwards when things return to normal. I claim that bourgeois liberals like nothing more than these temporary revolutionary outbursts. Everybody knows that in France it's a matter of honor today for every right-wing politician to say: You know, I was also on the barricades in '68. It's almost kind of a you know if you were not, you cannot really be a good right-winger today. It's like a kind of a child disease in the making, necessary disease in the making of a proper right-winger. So again, the really and even in my very good friend's work, Alain Badiou's work, I find a little bit of this dismissal for dismissal of ordinary everyday life as just animal life, non-eventful. No, the really difficult thing is to change the daily life when things return to normal. I am not here criticizing Chavez, maybe he failed, but I claim and that's the first thing to learn from him. From what I know, and I have friends almost a small private spy service in Venezuela, people who inform me, he saw this, he was well aware of this. He tried desperately to do something at this level, organizing different forms of ownership, whatever, cooperation, participation. Second thing that the work of Chavez allows us to approach again is, I claim, the problem of violence. First, we should demystify violence, not in this cheap pseudo-leftist sense: Oh, it depends which violence and so on. No, what I want to say is that when we criticize the twentieth century Left for its excessive violence as it is usually done by critics of Stalinism. The usual mistake is to focus on violence, like: Oh, Stalin was wrong killing millions. Of course he was wrong, but it's extremely stupid, I claim, to say Stalin was otherwise okay just he made a mistake here. No, something must have been wrong in his basic project that in order to impose it, he had to have recourse to violence. In this sense for me, brutal physical violence and terror is ultimately always a sign of impotence. Let's take one of the high points of Stalinist violence, the forced collectivization of farms at the end of the 1920s, beginning of 30s. Isn't this extremely brutal violence, which then led to, as you probably know, big famine in Ukraine and so on. Isn't this a sign of an extreme impotence, inability to actually solve the problem which already Lenin knew is the big problem in Russia, of how to really bring farmers into socialism. Even in Chinese great cultural revolution, all those scenes that I remember from when I was young, about you know thousands of Red Guards destroying old, destroying old monasteries, historical buildings. Wasn't this basically a brutal acting out, or rather sorry let me be precise clinically, passage l'acte, which betrayed a deep inability of really breaking with the past. So again, the real problem is usually not violence but the flaw in the very concept, project that we try to realize which pushed us towards violence. To give you here another example, and I think it's decent to not to talk only about Chavez, but my god there are women in this world and today is their day, no? Let's at least remember this. Violence against women. How hypocritical are we often here. For example, you remember probably it was reported also in your media, the those terrible gang rapes in India. Eh, but they are the way it is reported in our media is deeply symptomatic. My friend the Indian novelist, who is very much to the left supporting Naxalite Maoist rebels, and this is another thing you don't learn in our media. You know what's happening now in India? There are almost one million armed Maoist rebels fighting for local tribal people who are the big victims of the ongoing modernization of India. What I want to say is that how all our media were full of these stories but as Arundhati Roy immediately noted, why? Because it's so simple, because those rapists were poor ordinary people. You have all the time in India much worse horror stories. For example, everybody who knows, okay I don't know them but I read about them, prostitution houses in Mumbai knows that there is a big systematic business of rich people sending their emissaries to poor villages in Nepal where they buy girls from four or five years old and bring them either for bordellos or often simply at home as slaves, starting to exploit them sexually immediately. Everybody knows this, it's done systematically, I would like to read also about that. Or another two examples of precisely violence as a sign of impotence and that's crucial. Of course there are individual private cases of violence, but we should be very specific here. Individual cases are often simply pathological, what can you do maybe. But okay, let's concede this point. What worries me recently is a rise of and maybe you know some cases of violence especially against women which is not simply you know here is a madman, there madman, but which has clear collective almost ritualized status. It's a collective ritual reassertion of masculinity in moments of panic. Of course probably you know it, the big example here is Ciudad Juarez on the border with United States south of El Paso. You know so-called femicide there. It's very interesting what happens there. Ciudad Juarez is a new industrial city with this non-creative just putting things together, I don't know how you call it, it's a name for this industry, and there are thousands of young independent women there. Of course, earning their jobs with poorly paid stupid work, but nonetheless at least living independent life out of family control and so on. And this obviously is a kind of a provocation to traditional machismo. So what emerged there, every year I think over one hundred are killed, is a typical scenario. Local gangs kidnap one of these lone working girls and then, I mean I may be a cynic but it's sad even for me to think about it, the poor girl is not only gang raped but then gradually killed in a well very brutal and ritualized form. For example, first so that it hurts with scissors they cut off her nipples and so on and so on. But what I want to emphasize and here comes the horror, is that this is not just you know crazy people here, crazy people there. It's a ritual, it's a formula, it's a collective obscene almost pseudo-sacred event done systematically. And the saddest thing as you can expect is that what police does if you report this, because these gangs are often connected with the police, is that they call social workers who systematically try to reinterpret these cases as cases of local family violence. That girl was killed probably her father was a drunk and so on, you know, systematically obliterating this collectively ritual case. Now you will tell me okay I'm a white Western racist, I'm again picking of Mexicans. Ah-ah, let's go to the other side of United States, Canada, which boasts itself to be like part of Europe in United States, more enlightened, tolerant than United States. Exactly the same phenomenon, much less reported because it's easier to attack primitive Mexicans there. I have a friend in Vancouver, west of Canada, which boasts to be the most liberal progressive American city. Close to Vancouver is a big reservation of natives, whatever we call them, I don't like the term natives because like we are cultural, they are poor natives part of nature or what, but whatever. And this natives in a reservation after a long time were allowed to have their own police force. So then a ritual again be attentive, a ritual not just individual cases emerged, almost eighty around usually women arrived is that a group of white people, a gang for Saturday evening or Friday drunken, go to reservation, kidnap a lone native girl, and the same story, brutally gang rape her, kill her and now comes the trick, dump her body just within the reservation. And then if local native police calls Canadian police, they claim, oh it's in your reservation this is not our job. Again the same story, it's probably some local family violence, probably father raped the daughter and so on. Again systematically they try to obliterate to render invisible the how should I call it, almost I would say institutional ritualistic function of this violence. This is not there are madmen and rapists, no, this is an obscene social ritual. And I think that the biggest element in this series are, I don't know how it is with you but in Europe, pedophilia in Catholic Church. It's absolutely not true as church representatives claim in Europe that: Okay, what do you want? We are not perfect, there are pedophiles everywhere, no wonder they are also in the church. No, my good friend Gary Wills from Chicago, a Catholic but a very progressive one, even found some cases where a guy who became a priest, before he became a priest was like straight heterosexual, it's literally his being a priest which redirected him into pedophilia. So you see it's again, it's not just: Oh there is everywhere pedophilia we have it also. No, it's in an obscene way absolutely part of some in a way hidden church identity, which also explains how self-defensive church here is, you know, not informing the police as far as possible and so on and so on. So much about violence. Okay let's go on to the next point which I associate with Chavez. Eurocentrism. Should we be Eurocentrists or not? What I liked about Chavez is that of course he was for indigenous rights and so on and so on, but that he nonetheless as far as I know resisted the temptation of claiming of condemning modernization as such and claiming the solution is to return in a modern form of course but nonetheless to some I don't know Incan-Mayan tradition and so on, some more authentic collective being and so on and so on. I am deeply skeptical about it. I think that not only is with global capitalism, global modernization here there is no way out, no way back, even worse in what sense worse? Let me return briefly to India, what happened to me there when I was visiting India about a year and a half ago I think. In a debate there some Indian cultural theorists attacked me for Eurocentrism, of course, I'm used to it. But what they told me it's interesting, they told me: Don't you see that the very fact that we, defending our Indian culture against colonization, have to speak the language of the colonizers, English. Don't you see in what disadvantage we find ourselves here? Like we cannot even speak our own language, we have to formulate our very dreams of liberation of new India in the very language which caused our humiliation and colonization. Sorry to tell you I exploded. I first exploded apropos one detail which I hope you were intelligent enough to immediately notice it, and because of this detail I immediately accused them of racism. Namely, I'm sorry to tell you but as you know English is not my language. You know they immediately their reason was: Oh, I'm coming from small shitty European nation for them it's natural to speak English, but we big India no-no that's different. But more fundamentally, what I developed and you know who agreed with me? I met them. The untouchables, the true lower classes. Namely that how should I put it, it is true that there was some pre-modern India and then British colonizers brutally imposed a foreign culture, a new universal language and so on. But, and this is what Marx was saying all the time, but what India today wants, a new open modern democratic post-colonial India, it is what they want as the goal of their fight against the residues of colonization is a dream which emerged with the very colonization. And now we come nonetheless to Hegel. Hegel saw this very clearly. This paradox of how let's say you are colonized, a universality is brutally imposed on you, and you experience this as a traumatic loss: My god we are deprived of our true being, we have to speak foreign language. But what you are really deprived of, this is crucial, is not what you really lost, pre-modern India. No, it's something the space of which was opened through this very brutal modernization. You should never forget this. Let me give you another proof. There is a text which is the best condensation resume of traditional India. It's called The Laws of Manu, a detailed description of caste system, all it blah blah. Ah, you know what's the irony, as I learned from my friends there? This book, The Laws of Manu, was half forgotten in traditional India and so on. It was definitely put together as an ancient pre-modern Indian classic by British colonizers in the early nineteenth century when they said to themselves: We need some local ideology to keep Indians under our rule. Contrary to what people think imperialists were always multiculturalists. They definitely didn't want the majority of the colonized to become like them. No-no, they even in a hypocritical way they loved their authenticity. Like my basic experience here is when I read forty years ago, a friend brought me from South Africa a defense of the apartheid regime of apartheid. It wasn't: No, blacks are less stupid. No, the defense was: Oh my god, what a beautiful naive but authentic world those Bushmen and Hottentot have. If we simply abolish apartheid, they will all be lost in our vulgar Western technocratic society. We need them in their difference to remind us of our own alienation, of how a much more authentic relationship to nature is possible blah blah all that. That's why, in spite of all his compromises, I admire Mandela, that he never fell into this trap of returning to some original roots. You know that even one another of my heroes, the black fighter in America, if you saw the movie with Denzel Washington, Malcolm X knew this. You know X means he has chosen Malcolm X to stand for the loss of roots. We don't have father's name, we miss these traditional roots. But his point was not oh now we must return to some African roots. No, the genius of Malcolm X was that he saw this X, we lack roots in tradition, as a chance of a new universal liberation. Okay, maybe we cannot agree with him I don't, he found this in Islam, no, as a universal religion where it doesn't matter if you are if you are black or not. And the last point, let me go nonetheless a little bit into philosophy here. What Hegel saw clearly here and I admire him for this, is again how I quote here from Hegel's Logic in logic of reflection. He introduces a wonderful term, he calls it absoluter Gegenstoß, absolute recoil or counter-punch if you want. The idea being that a thing doesn't precede its loss, but a thing emerges only through its loss. And okay, to return back to this English language and in India. I claim that the illusion of putting the blame on English language, like English language prevents us from really spontaneously expressing in our own way our dreams, is that here I am a Lacanian and also Hegelian. I claim and this is the big lesson of psychoanalysis, but every language is like this. Every language, if there is a lesson of Lacan, is that there is a fundamental gap between human subject and language. As we should put it, it's not enough to say like Heidegger: language is the house of being. A Lacanian should add: language is a torture house of being. Which means what? That and here I quote in this big fat book, the Austrian writer who got a Nobel Prize, Elfriede Jelinek. I don't like her very much, she's too dirty for me, I'm a conservative. But she had a wonderful idea. In one interview she said: Language by its nature is lying. We have to torture language to make it say the truth. Now when I said this at one talk, somebody attacked me with this humanist stupidity saying something like: But when you start to torture language you end up torturing people. No point, it's it's exactly the opposite. You have a choice here. You either torture language or you torture people. Now you will say I'm crazy. What do I mean by this? I tell you look at all poetry. Isn't poetry the greatest torture machine you can imagine? Just imagine to write a sonnet. What you have to do? Cut words short, squeeze them and so on. Poetry is a torture machine of language. Even in cinema, I develop this in my book. Take Eisenstein. What he does with images. The whole language of his montage of attraction is a language of cutting, torturing, synthetically artificially bringing it together. Now you will say yeah but that's Eisenstein. What about the other line, Rossellini, Tarkovsky, which is more passive organic, not active participation but passively just let it be. No it's I claim it's another form of torture. Tarkovsky. Did you see his last film, Sacrifice? The first shot, camera for seven minutes slowly approaching a tree. We have a name, I think it's I forgot what, it's bloody no, it's the name how do you call the torturing machine which you are on it and then it stretches you? You know what I mean, no? Yeah, yeah, the yeah, yeah. So I think that then the debate between Tarkovsky and Eisenstein would be which way it's better to torture images, no? Eisenstein would say cut him, no-no Tarkovsky would say stretch them, it's more painful it works better. What I mean quite seriously is that again there is a fundamental violence in language here. So to conclude slowly, I would like to apply this Hegelian idea of what he calls absolute recoil, how something emerges through its very loss. Or to put it in another way as Hegel put it, when we think we are returning to some roots, we are effectively creating in the very return what we are returning to. And I can tell you that my country Slovenia is a great example of it. We returned to our roots through national constitution in late nineteenth century. Of course, it was all invented at that point. And it's quite incredible, Eric Hobsbawm, the great British Marxist who just now a year ago or when even less died, he I hope it's translated here. If not, then Ivana you have an order to publish it. A wonderful collective book called Inventions of Tradition, no, where he wonderfully shows how even such well-known like Scotland. You know the idea of kilts, this male skirts, no? Nothing like that in Middle Ages. This was the way we know them now all invented in late nineteenth century revival and so on. Why am I saying this? Now the concluding part back to today's politics. Because this holds especially for beliefs. I think that we, but not only we, it was all the time, people never I claim authentically believed. We always believe through this recoil. You believe into something by maintaining a distance towards it, even by making cynically fun of it. Which is why for me, that's my last central point, cynicism is not that you brutally are able to accept reality the way it is. Cynicism is the greatest illusion. Those who are cynical realists are most blind for what is going on. What do I mean by this? Some of my friends, even Frederic Jameson, have this idea which I think it's profoundly wrong. That today we live in an openly cynical era where those in power no longer take seriously their own ideology. Like when Americans say we bring democracy, it's clear even to them that they are making fun, it's really only power interests whatever, economic colonization. So today, it's the idea that today we don't we do not need any longer some exquisite ide- some exquisite critique of ideology with this symptomatic reading, what is unsaid in what is said, absence, lacuna in No, it's simply direct bluff not taken seriously so we don't need critique of ideology. The big lesson of Marx here, to which we should return, is no, that precisely such brutally realist thinking, like no bullshit, forget about ideas, we all know it's only about money, money, power, sex, whatever you want. It's the greatest illusion. Let me give you an example which I think at least should convince you. Remember the financial crisis of I'm sorry to tell you but it was not done by, if we are looking for those guilty, it was not some welfare state idealists living in their illusions. It was done precisely by most cynical banking manager speculation who thought fuck all ideals, it's just about money and so on and so on. That's the point that and Freud also knew this. When he said clearly insofar as cynicism clinically means perverse position that far from being the most open attitude, like hysterics only half dream about it but perverts go to the end, they do everything openly. No, Freud says that the unconscious is most inaccessible, most difficult to penetrate in perverts. Perverts are not people with the least of repression, they are people with most of oppression. So what is it then that cynics do not see? Precisely among other things the power, the material power of illusions themselves. And this is for me again the deepest insight of Marx of his commodity fetishism theory. That illusions are not just ideological illusions. This is not Marxist notion of ideology. We have some real life and then some crazy illusions. No, what Marx called commodity fetishism are illusions which are in the very heart of our real life. The place of commodity fetishism is real commodity, the most brutal real commodity exchange. And here, what this means is that precisely insofar as we live in an era which claims to be brutally cynical post-ideological, we need, we need critique of ideology more than ever. So to conclude another just five minutes, five minutes in a dialectical sense like let me give you a nice example. Is it translated here with you? If not, you should translate it. A book by an interesting Italian social philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, is it? No, it's a wonderful book, simple but wonderful. This book claims how in today's global capitalism, the status of being indebted changed. And changed how? So that what we are witnessing today, and this is ideology at its purest. It's that the fact that if we poorer people want to be consumerists, all have to be you described me how they do it in Brazil here, all have to be indebted. This is in spontaneous ideology conceptualized as the term is entrepreneurship of the self. Like the idea is, big or small, we are all capitalists. In what sense? Like I'm a poor guy and I have to decide: will I go on drinking or will I with great pain put some money aside and invest it into my education? They claim, ah, you are entrepreneur of yourself, this is your decision to invest into yourself in this way and so on and so on. So that the idea is that the debt functions like capitalist investment. Let us say I want my children to be educated, so it's really as if a small capitalist enterprise I get indebted in order to invest in them. So you see the ideological beauty of this operation. All of a sudden it doesn't really matter, okay, someone somebody has a big factory or whatever, I have nothing, but this is just a matter of where the decimal comma is. Basically we are all capitalists investing. The other thing that Lazzarato shows very nicely is how this logic of being indebted and investment serves as a wonderful way of ideological control. No longer do we need old ideological oppressive machines and so on. The moment you are in debt, you have to control yourself to take care that you repay your debts and so on and so on. Then Lazzarato shows in a wonderful way how this works not only at the level of individuals, but even companies or states and so on and so on. For example, I remember some seven-eight years, correct me if I'm wrong, ago, when Argentina through some when Nestor Kirchner was still president, through some I think financial help or loans precisely from Chavez decided to pay back directly its debt to IMF. And I remember the reaction of IMF. Instead of being glad, oh my god we got our money back, it was absolute worry like: But how will we control them now? They will be just doing whatever they want. In other words, I think, and here we can perfectly apply the Freudian notion of Super-ego. When you are bombarded by an impossible demand, but the whole point of the authority which terrorizes you is that precisely you are not supposed to meet this demand, to do it. And I think this is how debt functions. The point is not for you to repay the debt. The point is precisely as a means of control to keep you to keep you to keep you permanently in debt. So this is I claim where we are today. And I think without this universalization of capitalism where we are all of a sudden all capitalists. Even if you are poor guy again who gets indebted to educate your children, ah you are a small capitalist investing and so on and so on. This is a very simple but elementary example of how ideology works. This is also a wonderful way to to dismantle whatever remains of the welfare state. You know, instead of state providing for your school they claim: No-no you are an autonomous small capitalist. You should decide, you should take care. You want security, you should invest in it. It's a wonderful example of how your de facto slavery is sold to you as your greater freedom. Instead of saying I must be in a panic how will will I have enough money to pay the debt for my sons' children's, sorry for the male chauvinist twist, I automatically assume that children who go to school are sons, no? I apologize for this. But how you know you are treated as a free small capitalist investor to mask this debt. So again what I am saying here is that this is a nice proof of how precisely this allegedly brutal modern financial world is the world of illusions, the world of dreaming as there never was one. But, conclude, allow me to conclude, maybe some of you already heard it, with an extremely brutal and tasteless joke. As a matter of fact not so tasteless, I in a way like it. Never forget the basic lesson of Marx. In order to go further to criticize capitalism one has to go through capitalism. You know even concerning so-called formal freedoms. Marx was not a Stalinist who claimed freedom is just a formal freedom. No, Marx knew very well that only a formal freedom which is empty allows you to build a measure from which you can then see how effectively not free you are. This is why we should be very attentive and reject the Stalinist reasoning: Oh bourgeois freedom are only false freedoms, and then they take away from you those freedoms. Yeah, but the problem is if you are taken away your formal freedom, you lose even a chance to see where maybe your actual freedom. So again, all temptation to move back this vision of some pre-modern paradise and then comes the wound of capitalist modernization should be rejected. Why? The promised dirty story. It's in my nature I cannot resist it. When I was in Palestine, West Bank, in Ramallah last summer, I met a Christian Palestinian. You know we tend to forget this, our media do not report enough that of Palestinians are Christians. It's not just some Islam plot or whatever. And this guy they are wonderfully liberated, emancipated many Palestinians, told me a wonderful obscene joke about Jesus Christ. Which is the best metaphor of what I am tried to tell you with this reference to Hegel. The joke is that just when Christ was not dying but you know the last night when Christ was praying there in Gethsemane garden, I don't know where and he knew of course being God that next day he will be arrested, crucified. His apostles around his tent there worried. One of them said, my God, our Lord sacrificed all his life for our welfare, he didn't have any fun in his life, shouldn't he experience some fun at least before he will die, no? So let's help him. So they call Mary Magdalene, no, knowing who she is and said, why wouldn't you go in and seduce Jesus? Let him have some fun. Of course she being Mary Magdalene, huh-huh, with pleasure she does it, no? Then apostles listen. Five minutes afterwards Mary Magdalene comes out running totally pale and terrified. And they ask her: What happened? No, it's not what you think, it's not that Jesus was a secret pervert or whatever. It's simply she said, it started well, I started to dance in front of him and our Lord looked at me kindly. Then I slowly went further, I raised my skirt, I spread my legs and to excite him I put my sex organ close to his face, and then it happened. Jesus looked at my spread vagina and said: Oh what a horrible wound! And put his palm on it and made it full, you know. This is the liberation I don't want. I want us to enjoy our wounds. Thank you very much. Now you will do I think he is my good friend Kim because he knows how to organize debates in a Stalinist way, which means you are all free to ask questions but then unfortunately there is not enough time so you must put written questions and he does his censorship, no. He is my friend, that's how we do it. You see, it's very nice. Probably as a good Stalinist he wrote himself most of these. Ah, you mean for translation. Okay, okay so that you don't have to say twice no. Okay. Definitely. In Less Than Nothing you bring the image, not of a Marx reader of Hegel but of a Hegel reader of Marx. I’d like to suggest Zizek to speak about it. Yeah, but you know like my god read the book which I find this joke wonderful, it’s called Less Than Nothing, well it certainly doesn’t weigh less than nothing, no. It is a close reading of Hegel, even some new stuff like quantum physics, I try to throw a new light on all these epistemological problems of quantum physics through Hegel, but the basic impetus is a political one. I claim that let’s face it, precisely if we want to be Marxists today, we have to admit that although Marx was of course not guilty for Stalinism, but the very fact that something like Stalinism emerged, or the very fact that today the main role of existing old style communists is to be as in China obviously the best managers of today’s capitalism, this does show that maybe we have to rethink critically the Marxist legacy. Not to go behind, but to repeat Marx, to do it again, like I agree that what Marx did in his critique of political economy it's breathtaking. It's I would say not only the best, but simply the only serious description of the totality of capitalist reproduction. But there are so many questions to be asked. For example, who is the agent of potential revolutionary change today? Is it still the old working class? I doubt. Today, for example in Western Europe, to be in the classical proletarian position, to have a permanent wage job where you are exploited but at least you are permanently exploited no, it's almost a privileged position. More and more the model becomes halftime unemployed, precarious jobs and so on, all that. And there are as I already said favelas, people who are excluded and so on. So the other problem that I rise in a very naive way, and again we are back to Chavez, the role of natural resources in exploitation. Marx was here maybe really too much marked by his time when he clearly, unambiguously claimed that natural resources are not a source of value. And the irony is that you know what he uses as an example: oil. So are we aware if we apply this in a direct mechanic way what this means? This means that insofar as now because of fracking I think Americans no longer need I don't know Venezuelan oil, but when Chavez was selling oil to United States, basically if we apply and I don't agree with this, what I'm saying if we mechanically apply Marxist position here, it would mean that Chavez was exploiting United States because he was selling for hard money something which has no value in the Marxist sense of value. I don't agree with this. I'm just saying that all this and the problem raised by Tony Negri. I’m well aware of all the monetary mechanisms how United States de facto functions today as what a good Greek economist called Varoufakis I think calls Minotaur. Like do you know that for the last forty years from Nixon era United States need to function one billion dollars per day from other countries and it's precisely through this money then being invested on Wall Street through all that stuff that they succeed in doing this without repaying the debts and so on and so on. So I have I have no illusions here. What I'm only saying is that and I follow here my good friend Fredric Jameson in his short book on Capital, did Boitempo also publish it or will? Not yet. Okay, where Fredric Jameson says the same thing, where he emphasizes how it is absolutely crucial today to rethink, change and expand the notion of exploitation. For example Jameson even proposes a crazy move of including permanently unemployed into exploited. In the sense that he claims unemployment is no longer today the old unemployment about which Marx was talking, this reserve army manipulated and so on and so on. More and more the whole strata, the whole groups are getting permanently unemployed. Unemployment has today an incredibly stronger structural role. Whole countries are in a symbolic sense unemployed in the sense that they are proclaimed rogue countries and simply excluded. Of course as I already said this exclusion is always inclusion. For example Congo is
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presented as a crazy rogue state. Yes but I don't think there is in the entire world a country more included in global capitalism than Congo with you know that the the minerals used in all our digital machines come from there and so on and so on. So I'm aware of all of this.
presented as a crazy rogue state. Yes but I don't think there is in the entire world a country more included in global capitalism than Congo with you know that the the minerals used in all our digital machines come from there and so on and so on. So I'm aware of all of this.
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All I'm saying is
All I'm saying is
Slavoj Žižek
that if you simply dogmatically insist on some working-class fundamentalism, only hard workers really create value, then it's how would then the moment you get like then it's a problem how to account for so-called third world state wanting to profit from their natural wealth. I think again my theory here is again by some economists whom I appreciate very much, I develop this again in the Year of Dreaming Dangerously book that today I like very much this theory, it's a simple one, we are in a way partially returning from profit to rent. For Marx at the beginning was rent, rent for the land and then with the development of capitalism more and more rent goes to profit. I claim that today more and more rent is the source of wealth. And the example I use is this mega-rich people the new digitally rich people. A stupid simple example, take Bill Gates. How did he become okay, a Mexican guy beat him, not the most wealthy, the second. You must be very you must use very artificial tricks to explain how he extra-exploits this that. No, I think it's a much more efficient interpretation this one: Bill Gates privatized part of what Marx called general intellect, the collective intellectual substance which should be out there for all of us to communicate with each other. We are paying Bill Gates a rent so that through internet and so on we can communicate with each other. It's the privatization of what Marx called collective substance of knowledge, it's rent in its form. That's all I'm saying. Let's remain Marxist of course but let's my god do what Marx himself would have definitely insisted and what he up to a point already saw. Back to the question nonetheless I got a little bit lost now, I think that for reasons into which I don't have time to go now I already talk too much, that maybe we should risk philosophically returning to Hegel a little bit. In the sense in the precise sense in which I claim at some precise level maybe Hegel was more materialist than Marx. Hegel was not a crazy idealist who thought oh out of my brain I can develop everything that exists. No, Hegel precisely was much more open to the contingency of historical development. That's why Hegel prohibited too much dreaming about the future. You know when he says it's not for us to look forward, I claim that this Marxist traditional let's call it by its name eschatology, or what I like to call Hölderlin paradigm, Hölderlin the German poet you know whose most famous line is endlessly quoted by Heidegger: Wo das Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch (Where the danger is the greatest, there also salvation potentially arises). This vision of history of we are now at a dangerous moment, lowest moment, but up there is a chance of a big reversal. I and Marx has this for example in Grundrisse how proletarian position is the greatest alienation but the chance for liberation. I think that our situation is much more adequately described by in Hegelian terms. We had a great attempt of liberalization in the twentieth century, communism and so on, it failed but how to avoid the conclusion: oh so we should do nothing, become cynics and so on. Hegel has a much more tragic position. Hegel's position is it has to fail the first time. The problem is precisely not to lose hope after the first failure. If you like popular cinema, then my comparison would be the I don't like him especially but here he wrote a good book, the American philosopher and cinema theorist Stanley Cavell, who wrote a wonderful book on comedies of remarriage. You know there are many of them with Katharine Hepburn or Hitchcock Miss- comedies whose story is this one: you have a couple who are first passionately in love, they marry, then of course when the first bliss is over they divorce, they meet again and you know only the second time when they really get to know each other it's the true authentic marriage. Like that you have to marry twice to the same person of course to have the real marriage. Maybe something similar sorry for the obscenity of the comparison goes for authentic revolutionary process. First it has to go wrong and then it's the true test, you know, if you go on then. But I am afraid now to go too much into it. It's in this big fat book. Zizek was talking a bit before how anguished he gets for not being able to answer too many questions and here we have about questions that are evidently difficult to be totally comprehended. I separated some issues that are repeated and so on. Speaking about your observation that the protests in Europe have the spirit of rebellion but not of revolution, many people asked about your impressions on Latin American and the Brazilian government. We can gather this with a question about how can we think about the political participation today. How can we distinguish a leader that conducts to freedom from a fascist leader? Well first about Latin America, you know I'm not here sorry to be tasteless I'm not here to kiss your asses you know. I'm not one I try not to be another disgusting European intellectual who enjoys his privileged life there and likes revolutions if they happen far away on another continent so that his life is not perturbed too much. My true friendship towards Latin America is precisely that I want to retain a critical spirit. I frankly think there were many honest, extremely important attempts to do this, that, but I'm sorry to tell you I don't think that you invented something that effectively can already serve as the model for the entire world. Some people like Tariq Ali almost claim this: Europe should look to Latin America. No, you cannot do this. I'm much more skeptical here because it will be a long process of learning. And I'm here brutally realist. I praise Chavez but I have friends in Venezuela, you know who does something very evil, but I think it should be done. Whenever it was reported in the media there that oh a cooperative took over that factory or there was a new commune organized there, he noted it in his diary and then a year later you know when the media no longer talked about it, he went there to look what happened no, and to be brutal the results are pretty sad you know. Like in most of the cases either it went bankrupt or state had to intervene or whatever. So it's a long process. I have I am open towards everyone with all my critique but I don't know enough about Brazil. What I see as important here is that not anything big that your Worker's Party government did but nonetheless you have one lesson modest but very important today for the entire world. Often the global situation is presented to us as homogeneous in the sense of there is IMF, world market, you have to obey neoliberal rules or chaos and so on. No, you showed that even within the existing global system there are many options, you can find your way. It's not as simple as we all obey the same rules. On the contrary, one of the interesting things today is that precisely states which follow in a too direct stupid way, which take neoliberalism too seriously, suffer the consequences. Look at the countries which everyone would agree are capitalism in its most violent precisely creative destructive expansion. Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, China. I'm sorry to tell you but these are not neoliberal countries. These are all of them countries with an extremely strong regulatory function of the state. You cannot imagine how important the state is in coordinating, directing the big investments and so on and so on. So we should distinguish in neoliberalism between its ideology of market liberalism and what is effectively going on today, even in the United States. What neoliberalism? If in defense and all social service whatever, not social services they are diminishing, but like regulation of social life, economic and so on. I don't think that United States as a state
that if you simply dogmatically insist on some working-class fundamentalism, only hard workers really create value, then it's how would then the moment you get like then it's a problem how to account for so-called third world state wanting to profit from their natural wealth. I think again my theory here is again by some economists whom I appreciate very much, I develop this again in the Year of Dreaming Dangerously book that today I like very much this theory, it's a simple one, we are in a way partially returning from profit to rent. For Marx at the beginning was rent, rent for the land and then with the development of capitalism more and more rent goes to profit. I claim that today more and more rent is the source of wealth. And the example I use is this mega-rich people the new digitally rich people. A stupid simple example, take Bill Gates. How did he become okay, a Mexican guy beat him, not the most wealthy, the second. You must be very you must use very artificial tricks to explain how he extra-exploits this that. No, I think it's a much more efficient interpretation this one: Bill Gates privatized part of what Marx called general intellect, the collective intellectual substance which should be out there for all of us to communicate with each other. We are paying Bill Gates a rent so that through internet and so on we can communicate with each other. It's the privatization of what Marx called collective substance of knowledge, it's rent in its form. That's all I'm saying. Let's remain Marxist of course but let's my god do what Marx himself would have definitely insisted and what he up to a point already saw. Back to the question nonetheless I got a little bit lost now, I think that for reasons into which I don't have time to go now I already talk too much, that maybe we should risk philosophically returning to Hegel a little bit. In the sense in the precise sense in which I claim at some precise level maybe Hegel was more materialist than Marx. Hegel was not a crazy idealist who thought oh out of my brain I can develop everything that exists. No, Hegel precisely was much more open to the contingency of historical development. That's why Hegel prohibited too much dreaming about the future. You know when he says it's not for us to look forward, I claim that this Marxist traditional let's call it by its name eschatology, or what I like to call Hölderlin paradigm, Hölderlin the German poet you know whose most famous line is endlessly quoted by Heidegger: Wo das Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch (Where the danger is the greatest, there also salvation potentially arises). This vision of history of we are now at a dangerous moment, lowest moment, but up there is a chance of a big reversal. I and Marx has this for example in Grundrisse how proletarian position is the greatest alienation but the chance for liberation. I think that our situation is much more adequately described by in Hegelian terms. We had a great attempt of liberalization in the twentieth century, communism and so on, it failed but how to avoid the conclusion: oh so we should do nothing, become cynics and so on. Hegel has a much more tragic position. Hegel's position is it has to fail the first time. The problem is precisely not to lose hope after the first failure. If you like popular cinema, then my comparison would be the I don't like him especially but here he wrote a good book, the American philosopher and cinema theorist Stanley Cavell, who wrote a wonderful book on comedies of remarriage. You know there are many of them with Katharine Hepburn or Hitchcock Miss- comedies whose story is this one: you have a couple who are first passionately in love, they marry, then of course when the first bliss is over they divorce, they meet again and you know only the second time when they really get to know each other it's the true authentic marriage. Like that you have to marry twice to the same person of course to have the real marriage. Maybe something similar sorry for the obscenity of the comparison goes for authentic revolutionary process. First it has to go wrong and then it's the true test, you know, if you go on then. But I am afraid now to go too much into it. It's in this big fat book. Zizek was talking a bit before how anguished he gets for not being able to answer too many questions and here we have about questions that are evidently difficult to be totally comprehended. I separated some issues that are repeated and so on. Speaking about your observation that the protests in Europe have the spirit of rebellion but not of revolution, many people asked about your impressions on Latin American and the Brazilian government. We can gather this with a question about how can we think about the political participation today. How can we distinguish a leader that conducts to freedom from a fascist leader? Well first about Latin America, you know I'm not here sorry to be tasteless I'm not here to kiss your asses you know. I'm not one I try not to be another disgusting European intellectual who enjoys his privileged life there and likes revolutions if they happen far away on another continent so that his life is not perturbed too much. My true friendship towards Latin America is precisely that I want to retain a critical spirit. I frankly think there were many honest, extremely important attempts to do this, that, but I'm sorry to tell you I don't think that you invented something that effectively can already serve as the model for the entire world. Some people like Tariq Ali almost claim this: Europe should look to Latin America. No, you cannot do this. I'm much more skeptical here because it will be a long process of learning. And I'm here brutally realist. I praise Chavez but I have friends in Venezuela, you know who does something very evil, but I think it should be done. Whenever it was reported in the media there that oh a cooperative took over that factory or there was a new commune organized there, he noted it in his diary and then a year later you know when the media no longer talked about it, he went there to look what happened no, and to be brutal the results are pretty sad you know. Like in most of the cases either it went bankrupt or state had to intervene or whatever. So it's a long process. I have I am open towards everyone with all my critique but I don't know enough about Brazil. What I see as important here is that not anything big that your Worker's Party government did but nonetheless you have one lesson modest but very important today for the entire world. Often the global situation is presented to us as homogeneous in the sense of there is IMF, world market, you have to obey neoliberal rules or chaos and so on. No, you showed that even within the existing global system there are many options, you can find your way. It's not as simple as we all obey the same rules. On the contrary, one of the interesting things today is that precisely states which follow in a too direct stupid way, which take neoliberalism too seriously, suffer the consequences. Look at the countries which everyone would agree are capitalism in its most violent precisely creative destructive expansion. Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, China. I'm sorry to tell you but these are not neoliberal countries. These are all of them countries with an extremely strong regulatory function of the state. You cannot imagine how important the state is in coordinating, directing the big investments and so on and so on. So we should distinguish in neoliberalism between its ideology of market liberalism and what is effectively going on today, even in the United States. What neoliberalism? If in defense and all social service whatever, not social services they are diminishing, but like regulation of social life, economic and so on. I don't think that United States as a state
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apparatus was ever stronger than today. No, capitalists cheat here. Neoliberalism
apparatus was ever stronger than today. No, capitalists cheat here. Neoliberalism
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in this sense, you know, state should intervene less, leave the market to decide, it's it's a stupid ideology to screw up third world countries
in this sense, you know, state should intervene less, leave the market to decide, it's it's a stupid ideology to screw up third world countries
Slavoj Žižek
and to destroy them.
and to destroy them.
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They themselves don't
They themselves don't
Slavoj Žižek
really
really
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follow this. They United States quite ruthlessly support their own industries, they break all the neoliberal Look how already Bush saved the American steel industry by breaking all the neoliberal rules and supporting them with great
follow this. They United States quite ruthlessly support their own industries, they break all the neoliberal Look how already Bush saved the American steel industry by breaking all the neoliberal rules and supporting them with great
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donations and so on and so on. So again this
donations and so on and so on. So again this
Slavoj Žižek
is I think an important lesson from you and from some other countries that there neoliberalism is not one big homogeneous system where IMF rules we have all to follow that dictate. No-no-no the situation is much more complex, inconsistent and there are things which can be done. If only the revolutionary act is able to transform reality, how can we think about the political practice settled on the democratic state? The big problem here and I don't want to go into it now is what do we mean by democracy. I mean it's not self-evident. Me and my friend Alain Badiou we were for a long time fighting with this problem. Like at some point Badiou thought democracy is a term too much overdetermined by whatever imperialist Western connotations and it's better to drop it. But then he encountered this problem with what to replace it. For some time Badiou played with the notion of justice. And he quickly came to see that it's even worse. I mean everyone is for justice. Conservative corporatists are for justice, which means to everyone his/her own place, it’s this kind of a corporate justice and so on. So I think that I am ready to keep the term democracy on condition nonetheless that we accept something which is becoming clearer and clearer. That what we today call democracy in the institutional sense of multi-party democracy is simply not strong and efficient enough to deal with ecological and other global problems that we are approaching. Now there is no easy way to find something else. For example, a year ago I visited Bolivia and had a wonderful frank talk with Linera. He is you know theoretician like me, one of us no, and he was very frank. He told me yes the idea of Bolivia new Bolivia is to to add to just this parliamentary mechanisms local indigenous movements and so on. But at the same time and this is what I admired in Linera, he had no illusions about them. He told me immediately what new opportunities of corruption and so on emerge in this way. He told me that many of these local indigenous movements simply send one of their chiefs representatives to La Paz where they get corrupted and if they do anything at all it is that they fight for their own group against the other group, like who will get the money for some project. So yes it's good but there is no easy solution here. But that's the problem. I think that
is I think an important lesson from you and from some other countries that there neoliberalism is not one big homogeneous system where IMF rules we have all to follow that dictate. No-no-no the situation is much more complex, inconsistent and there are things which can be done. If only the revolutionary act is able to transform reality, how can we think about the political practice settled on the democratic state? The big problem here and I don't want to go into it now is what do we mean by democracy. I mean it's not self-evident. Me and my friend Alain Badiou we were for a long time fighting with this problem. Like at some point Badiou thought democracy is a term too much overdetermined by whatever imperialist Western connotations and it's better to drop it. But then he encountered this problem with what to replace it. For some time Badiou played with the notion of justice. And he quickly came to see that it's even worse. I mean everyone is for justice. Conservative corporatists are for justice, which means to everyone his/her own place, it’s this kind of a corporate justice and so on. So I think that I am ready to keep the term democracy on condition nonetheless that we accept something which is becoming clearer and clearer. That what we today call democracy in the institutional sense of multi-party democracy is simply not strong and efficient enough to deal with ecological and other global problems that we are approaching. Now there is no easy way to find something else. For example, a year ago I visited Bolivia and had a wonderful frank talk with Linera. He is you know theoretician like me, one of us no, and he was very frank. He told me yes the idea of Bolivia new Bolivia is to to add to just this parliamentary mechanisms local indigenous movements and so on. But at the same time and this is what I admired in Linera, he had no illusions about them. He told me immediately what new opportunities of corruption and so on emerge in this way. He told me that many of these local indigenous movements simply send one of their chiefs representatives to La Paz where they get corrupted and if they do anything at all it is that they fight for their own group against the other group, like who will get the money for some project. So yes it's good but there is no easy solution here. But that's the problem. I think that
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it's clear that
it's clear that
Slavoj Žižek
parliamentary democracy the way we have it now will not do the job. No I I'm too tired I don't have big I don't have a big final word. The only thing I can do but it would be total bluff is you know some pseudo-Zen Buddhist wisdom like clap with one hand or whatever. Okay I can be hypocritical and say but this is a lie. I just wanted to make you start thinking. The final word should be yours. What will you do out of this when you know.
parliamentary democracy the way we have it now will not do the job. No I I'm too tired I don't have big I don't have a big final word. The only thing I can do but it would be total bluff is you know some pseudo-Zen Buddhist wisdom like clap with one hand or whatever. Okay I can be hypocritical and say but this is a lie. I just wanted to make you start thinking. The final word should be yours. What will you do out of this when you know.
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I hate
I hate
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intellectuals where when they do this cheap rhetorical tricks. So I prefer to say nothing and very sincerely
intellectuals where when they do this cheap rhetorical tricks. So I prefer to say nothing and very sincerely
Slavoj Žižek
express my big gratitude for your patience. I'm really grateful to you for coming here. Thank you very much.
express my big gratitude for your patience. I'm really grateful to you for coming here. Thank you very much.