Lubitsch: Cynicism, Humour and Commitment
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-05-07 · 1:30:23 · 9,424 words
ideologypsychoanalysisreligion-theologysexuality-gendercapitalismcommunism-socialismliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populismcinema-art-cultureecology-climateeveryday-lifehegel-dialecticsphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture in Spain arguing that contemporary ideology operates through three new 'opiums of the people': drugs, populist appeals to 'the People', and antifascism as political fetish. He then examines how ideology's power lies in its internal inconsistency, explicit norms supplemented by implicit counter-instructions, before moving through feminism and the MeToo debate, video games and an 'obscene immortality', surplus enjoyment in sexuality and pornography, and Thomas Aquinas's paradox about Heaven and Hell, concluding with a provocation that communism should be imagined as 'a better Hell' of genuine enjoyment. The Q&A covers ecology and capitalism, black humor and political correctness, and the criminalisation of offensive speech.
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The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Marx's formula is extended by Žižek to cover not just religion but also literal drugs, populist invocations of 'the People', and antifascism as a political fetish that obscures underlying social antagonism.
Drugs perform a double function: killing collective political excitement while generating artificial private excitement, effectively killing public passion by chemical substitution.
as “lépeno-trotskyste”
A term coined by Žižek's French ex-friends to stigmatize left critics of Macron as objectively aiding Le Pen, illustrating the Stalinist logic of antifascism as political fetish.
as “ideological inconsistency”
Every operative ideology requires explicit norms to be supplemented by implicit counter-norms (e.g., 'smoking is prohibited but here are your ashtrays') that tell subjects how actually to behave.
Žižek's reformulation of the feminist critique of objectification: the true achievement of sexual liberation is women's right not to be objectified by men but to objectify themselves, to be the active agents of their own objectivization.
Žižek's label for tech-industry leaders (Gates, Cook, Zuckerberg) who function as ideological spokespeople for progressive-capitalist values, co-opting LGBT+ causes while advancing capital.
George Orwell's concept of a shared network of customs grounding social life, invoked by Žižek as what liberal permissivism dissolves and then tries to replace with an explosion of explicit legal and moral rules.
A specifically modern form of undead persistence, not noble spiritual survival but the inability to properly die or fail, illustrated by video games, cartoons (Tom and Jerry), and hardcore pornography.
The condition of subjects in modern mass culture (video games, Sade's novels, cartoons) who cannot be definitively annihilated and always return to the start, embodying an obscene rather than noble immortality.
Used here in a 'weird' Hegelian sense to describe the comic situation where failure goes so far that even disintegration or death cannot be achieved properly, one cannot even fall properly.
as “Ersatz working class”
The traditional left's repeated search for a substitute revolutionary subject (immigrants, the pure proletarian) because actual workers refuse to identify solely with their chains.
For Žižek, genuine art does not produce irrational impressions but performs thinking: it violently dismembers reality to bring out essences, illustrated by Picasso's 'Woman Throwing a Stone'.
Žižek's self-description: he believes in ideas not as eternal Forms but as Deleuzian hidden potentialities immanent in things, revealed when art cuts through surface reality.
as “big Other”
Implicitly at work in the analysis of the virtual gaze: the symbolic order whose observing presence structures enjoyment, as in the Aztec reliefs and pornographic camera address.
as “forceful oppressive subjectivization”
A worse form of domination than mere objectification: being compelled to perform as a willing, enjoying subject, having your very subjectivity imposed on you (illustrated by pornography and marital coercion).
as “surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir)”
Lacan's concept (elaborated via Marx's surplus value) names the marginal supplement, a remark, a gaze, a vulgar detail, that provides the excess of pleasure beyond mere satisfaction of a drive.
Žižek's concluding provocation: communism should not be imagined as Heaven on Earth but as a Hell full of enjoyment, genuine pleasures without the moral alibi of paradise.
as “fetishist disavowal (je sais bien, mais quand même)”
The structure 'I know very well, but nonetheless…' by which subjects acknowledge an objective truth (ecological collapse, ideology) without integrating it into their lived convictions.
Stories he reaches for 8
A clip from the British film Brassed Off (featuring Ewan McGregor) shows a flirtatious exchange: 'Do you want to come up for coffee?' / 'I don't drink coffee.' / 'I haven't got any.' The indirect invitation eroticizes the situation in a way that a direct proposition would destroy.
“'Do you want to come up for coffee?' 'I don't drink coffee.' 'I haven't got any.'”
In cartoons like Tom and Jerry, characters are destroyed (run over, cut up) in one scene only to reappear intact in the next, an illustration of the 'obscene immortality' characteristic of modernity.
“in one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces, okay, catastrophe, but hop in next scene it is here”
In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas wrestles with whether the blessed in Paradise can see the damned suffering in Hell. He says yes, but distinguishes enjoying their suffering directly (bad) from enjoying the majesty of divine justice (permitted). Žižek calls this a cheap scholastic trick and re-reads it Lacanically.
“He said if you look as a good Christian at that suffering, you are impressed by the majesty of divine justice. And that's what you really enjoy. It's a trick, it doesn't work.”
In consecutive military classes, Žižek is taught (1) that international law prohibits shooting paratroopers in the air, and (2) how to shoot paratroopers in the air. When he points out the inconsistency, the officer replies that only an intellectual could be so stupid as not to understand this.
“'Aren't you some kind of intellectual? How can you be so stupid then not to understand that?'”
A magazine article celebrates Greenland's warming as allowing vegetables to be grown there for the first time in centuries, and notes melting Arctic ice will make China-to-US shipping cheaper, framing a mega-catastrophe as an economic opportunity.
“the title was 'The Greening of Greenland'. It's wonderful... soon transport will be much cheaper”
Ancient Roman viaducts have small statues and reliefs at the top, invisible to any human gaze, further evidence that humans naturally produce for an imagined, virtual observer.
“ancient Roman viaducts. They have small statues and reliefs also on the top, invisible to human gaze.”
In Sade's novels, victims like Juliette are tortured in every possible way but reappear in the next scene as beautiful as ever, Lacan's example of modern undeadness predating video games.
“Juliette is tortured in all possible ways, but magically in the next scene he is already there, again there as beautiful as ever.”
Žižek uses this Picasso painting, which violently dismembers a woman's figure into abstract fragments, as a model of 'thinking in art': disfiguration brings out the essence, fury, fragility, more directly than realist reproduction.
“It's a monstrosity, but somehow the essence of a woman throwing a stone is here in, more directly than a realist painting.”
Works invoked 8
Brassed Off film
English working-class melodrama: the coffee/no-coffee flirtation scene is used to illustrate how sexuality operates through innuendo and would be destroyed by direct proposition.
The Name of the Rose book
Žižek violently disagrees with Eco's thesis that humor is inherently subversive; cited as the position to be refuted.
Summa Theologica book
Aquinas's solution to the Paradise/Hell gaze problem is called a cheap scholastic trick; re-read Lacanically as really about surplus enjoyment and the structure of Heaven as boring.
Juliette book
De Sade's novel cited via Lacan as an early example of modern undeadness: the heroine is perpetually tortured but restored perfectly for the next scene.
Žižek says he doesn't like it, but uses Miranda's episode (talking dirty, finger-in-ass remark) to illustrate the locus of surplus enjoyment as a marginal, unexpected detail.
Heaven Can Wait film
Lubitsch's title is quoted in the closing provocation: 'Let's create... Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment.'
Lubitsch's pre-Code Hollywood film: Chevalier's ra-ta-ta-ta song is cited as more obscenely pleasurable than direct pornography, a key illustration of surplus enjoyment.
Woman Throwing a Stone artwork
Picasso painting Žižek finds fascinating despite not generally liking Picasso; used as model of 'thinking in art', violent abstraction revealing essence more than realism.
People invoked 33
Germaine Greer positive
First-wave feminist whose thesis, women should assume active sexuality without victimhood, Žižek partially defends against today's feminist critics, while acknowledging it needs updating.
Marquis de Sade positive
His fictional universe (Juliette) is used as Lacan's example of modern undeadness, victims perpetually restored to perfection after torture.
Umberto Eco negative
Žižek violently disagrees with Eco's thesis in The Name of the Rose that humor is inherently subversive; every totalitarian regime has its own brutal humor.
Marine Le Pen negative
Cited as an example of the populist right and a real threat, but whose rise is explained as a reaction to the establishment represented by Macron.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia.
Damir Arsenijević positive
Linguist with a Stanford scholarship who collects jokes from Srebrenica survivors, cited as source for the Mujo and Fata joke and the argument that vulgar humor is genuine trauma processing.
Described as a white supremacist racist, but cited with dark irony because he alone dared to advocate raising taxes on the rich and public works, positions the liberal left no longer dares espouse.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: invoked for the concept of plus-de-jouir/surplus enjoyment, the undeadness in de Sade, and a Lacanian re-reading of Aquinas on Heaven and Hell.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Listed among pedophilia petition signatories; also invoked positively for his concept of 'Deleuzian essence' (hidden potentialities) in the discussion of art and materialism.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia.
Named alongside Le Pen and Orbán as targets of antifascist demonization; Bannon's split with Trump over tax policy is cited; accusations of hypocrisy against Trump are dismissed as missing how ideology functions.
Tim Cook negative
Named as a 'corporate organic intellectual' alongside Gates and Zuckerberg.
Emmanuel Macron negative
The antifascist 'center' candidate whose financial-establishment credentials gave birth to Le Pen; criticism of Macron was stigmatized as objective collaboration with fascism.
Laurent de Sutter positive
Young French philosopher cited for demonstrating that chemistry and drugs are becoming part of daily life management.
George Orwell positive
Invoked for the concept of 'common decency' as the shared network of customs that liberal permissivism erodes.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Named as a 'corporate organic intellectual' alongside Gates and Cook.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for his work on control and classification, invoked to criticize how many leftists who know Foucault now mobilize the very forms of classification and control he analyzed.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Director of The Smiling Lieutenant (cited for the ra-ta-ta-ta song illustrating surplus enjoyment) and Heaven Can Wait (title cited in the closing communism/Hell conclusion).
Bill Gates negative
Named as a 'corporate organic intellectual' who immediately supported LGBT+ causes, illustrating how capital co-opts progressive politics.
Pablo Picasso positive
Žižek says he doesn't generally like Picasso but is fascinated by 'Woman Throwing a Stone', which he uses as a model of art as thinking, violent abstraction that reveals essence.
Viktor Orbán negative
Listed as an example of the new populist right demonized as fascist by liberal progressive politics.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Briefly mentioned as a thinker who noted that Paradise must be boring, supporting the Heaven/Hell reversal.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia.
Hero of May '68, used as 'comic victim' of the shift in sexual politics: his naïve 1970s interview about kindergarten 'games' nearly cost him his European Parliament seat.
Arthur Koestler positive
Described as 'the big anti-communist'; his formulation 'persecution corrupts the victims' is quoted approvingly to support Žižek's argument about how patriarchy corrupts women.
Karl Marx positive
Marx's formula of religion as opium of the people is the starting point Žižek extends to new opiums; surplus value (Mehrwert) is the template for Lacan's plus-de-jouir.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked for the claim that repression is strongest in perversion, undercutting the pervert's claim to have abolished all prohibitions.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the 'negation of negation' (applied to comic undeadness), the portrait-resembles-more-than-reality thesis, and the power of abstraction to reveal essence.
Listed among signatories of the 1970s French petitions to decriminalize pedophilia, cited as evidence of how radically the cultural climate has shifted.
Thomas Aquinas negative
His distinction in the Summa Theologica between enjoying Hell's suffering directly (bad) vs. enjoying divine justice (permitted) is dismissed by Žižek as a cheap scholastic trick.
What it argues
new opiums of the people: drugs, the People, antifascismideological inconsistency: explicit norms subverted by implicit counter-normssurplus enjoyment and the marginal supplement that makes sex/desire possibleobscene immortality in video games, cartoons, and pornographyfeminism, objectification, and the MeToo movementfetishist disavowal and paradoxes of beliefcommunism as better Hell vs. bourgeois Heaven
Dialectical moves 10
“The opium of the people is the people itself.”
The populist fantasy of 'the People' functions as the very fetish that dissolves antagonism, making the people their own narcotic.
“Far from being subversive, antifascism is already its own form of ideological closure—a new spectre haunting progressive politics that obfuscates basic social antagonism.”
By demonizing the right as fascist, the left blinds itself to how right-wing populism has absorbed traditional left motifs, and makes any criticism of the liberal center impossible.
“The greatest achievement of sexual liberation is not to be freed from objectification but to win the right to objectify oneself.”
True female sexual freedom is not freedom from objectification but active self-objectification, women as the agents, not objects, of their own objectivization.
“Protest not objectivization but the worse thing: forceful oppressive subjectivization—where your very subjectivity is imposed on you.”
Being compelled to perform as an enjoying subject is a more insidious form of domination than mere objectification because it colonizes interiority itself.
“Nowhere is repression stronger than in perversion.”
Freud's counter-intuitive insight: the pervert who claims to abolish all prohibitions represses most intensely, because the real kernel of jouissance always remains on the margin as surplus.
“In hardcore pornography I do not identify with the man doing it—he is a pure instrument. I am the observer looking for proof of the woman's enjoyment.”
The apparent male-chauvinist scenario reverses: the man is the tool, the woman is violently subjectivized rather than objectified, making this a worse humiliation.
“What I am describing is a weird negation of negation: things go so wrong that you cannot even fall apart or die properly.”
The Hegelian dialectic is inverted into a comic trap where the downward movement fails, one cannot even achieve genuine failure or catastrophe, only comic persisting.
“Communism is not Heaven on Earth. Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment.”
The communist utopia should be reframed not as transcendent moral goodness but as liberated enjoyment, Hell without the guilt, Heaven without the boredom.
“Capitalism will win the ecology race not by defeating ecology but by re-appropriating ecological struggle as a new field of investment.”
What looks like capital's greatest threat becomes its newest opportunity; ecology does not break capitalism but is absorbed by it.
“Humor is not simply the subversive force—every brutal totalitarian regime has its own internal humor making fun of its victims.”
Against Umberto Eco, Žižek insists humor is structurally ambiguous: it can be the cynicism of power as much as resistance to it.
Claims 18
asserts
Today the three operative opiums of the people in the West are literal drugs, the populist fantasy of 'the People', and antifascism used as a political fetish.ideology / contemporary opiums of the people
asserts
The demonization of the new right as fascist blinds progressives to how many traditional left motifs have been appropriated by right-wing populism.antifascism as political fetish
asserts
Every operative ideology must be internally inconsistent: its explicit norms must be supplemented by implicit counter-norms telling subjects how actually to behave.the structure of ideology
asserts
The commodification of female sexuality—women's active sexuality appearing to men as permanent availability—provides a real kernel of truth to contemporary feminist critiques.MeToo and feminist critique of sexual commodification
asserts
The greatest achievement of sexual liberation is not that women are freed from objectification but that they win the right to actively objectify themselves.objectification and female sexual agency
asserts
The politically correct cultural left's intensifying moral campaigns against discrimination serve to cover its own immersion in global capitalism.liberal political correctness and capitalism
asserts
Sexuality cannot be regulated by explicit rules because it operates through innuendo, double games, and surplus enjoyment on the margin.sexuality and political correctness
asserts
In hardcore pornography the true humiliation of women is not objectification but forceful subjectivization—being compelled to perform as enjoying subject for the male gaze.pornography and gender domination
asserts
Video games are the basic state ideological apparatus today, forming a new pre-oedipal mode of subjectivity based on obscene immortality.video games and ideology
asserts
The traditional left is paralyzed because actual workers refuse to identify as pure proletarians, and the search for an Ersatz working class (now immigrants) is a desperate dead end.the left and the revolutionary subject
asserts
Capitalism will neutralize ecology by re-appropriating ecological struggle as a new field of investment rather than being destroyed by it.capitalism and ecology
asserts
Fetishist disavowal—knowing a catastrophe is real without genuinely believing it in one's guts—is the dominant structure of our relationship to ecological collapse.ecology and fetishist disavowal
reframes
Black humor is not simply subversive; power has its own brutal arrogant humor, and humor is always ambiguous—it can be cynical domination or genuine traumatic relief.humor, subversion, and political correctness
asserts
Prohibiting offensive speech and jokes pushes them underground and allows the populist alt-right to monopolize irony and innuendo.censorship and political correctness
reframes
Many forms of contemporary male violence are best understood as desperate reactions to social and economic impotence rather than as simple patriarchal assertion.male violence and feminist strategy
asserts
Persecution corrupts its victims as well as the perpetrators, so radical feminism must also address feminine manipulation and emotional brutality as products of male domination.patriarchy and its effects on victims
asserts
Communism should be conceived not as Heaven on Earth but as a better Hell—a world of genuine enjoyment without moral alibi.communism and utopia
asserts
Sexuality always involves a virtual gaze—an imagined observer—and is never simply immediate: sex is never just between two people.sexuality and the gaze
Quotes 16
“The opium of the people can also be the people itself.”Slavoj Žižek · populism as ideological fetish
“Drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitement in our private lives.”Slavoj Žižek · drugs as substitute for political engagement
“In order to be operative, every ideology has to be inconsistent. Its explicit norms have to be supplemented by implicit norms telling us how to deal with explicit norms.”Slavoj Žižek · the structure of ideology
“This is maybe the greatest achievement in sexual liberation, that women have the right not to be objectified by men but to objectify themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · active self-objectification as liberation
“I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the politically correct cultural left is getting so fanatic in advocating progress… that they are doing it to cover up their own immersion into global capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · left moralism as alibi for capitalist integration
“If power corrupts, the reverse is also true: persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”Slavoj Žižek · patriarchy corrupts its victims too (Koestler)
“In sexuality, we are never simply alone. There is always another dimension in it, either another person's gaze, we imagine a gaze observing us.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality and the virtual gaze
“Don't just protest objectivization, protest even more where you have to act as a subject, but as it were fake subject, where your very subjectivity is imposed on you.”Slavoj Žižek · forceful oppressive subjectivization
“Nowhere is repression stronger than in perversion.”Slavoj Žižek · Freud on repression and perversion
“That gaze in pornographic scene or Aztecs… is the surplus enjoyment or ra-ta-ta-ta here. What makes sex obscene is precisely this apparent metaphors, details which provide surplus enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment as the marginal obscene supplement
“A good portrait of a person resembles this person more than the person itself.”Slavoj Žižek · art reveals essence more than reality does (Hegel)
“Communism is not Heaven on Earth. Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as liberated enjoyment, not moralistic utopia
“As long as possible people will simply not react… everybody knew a big European war is in preparation. But still when the war exploded was a mega shock. People knew it but didn't really believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist disavowal and the limits of knowledge without belief
“When you say 'yes we suffer terribly in Srebrenica', I don't believe it. Because this dignified mourning means the worst is over.”Slavoj Žižek · black humor as truer witness to trauma than dignified grief
“The politically correct left got so moralized in this prohibition that the populist vulgar alt-right is almost monopolizing now all this area of innuendos irony.”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness cedes irony to the right
“Ecology is one of the big domains of this paradoxes of belief, this fetishist disavowal. Je sais bien, mais quand même.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology and fetishist disavowal
Transcript 26 turns
Slavoj Žižek
So let's begin. I would like to begin with Marx's well-known formula of religion as the opium of the people. I think we should rethink this formula today. It is true that today radical Islam, but also Christian fundamentalism, are functioning like opium of the people, a false confrontation with capitalist modernity which allows us to dwell in our ideological dream. But I hope that today in our Western world, two other versions of the opium of the people are much more actual. And you may have guessed my paradox; these two are opium and people, the people. As a young French philosopher, Laurent de Sutter, demonstrated, chemistry in its scientific version is becoming part of us, of our daily lives. Large aspects of our lives are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs, from everyday use of sleeping pills and antidepressants. And this is not marginal. I read a statistic in Estados Unidos, United States, over of all academics, professors and so on, are on something like Xanax or whatever, use drugs. So from everyday life to of course hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers. Our very emotions are outsourced to chemical stimulation. The stakes of this chemical intervention is contradictory. We use drugs first to keep external excitement, shocks, anxieties, violence under control. That is to say, to desensitize us. No, you are too shocked, too excited, you take a drug to calm you down. And then we again use drugs to generate artificial excitement, like if you are too depressed and lack desire you again take drugs. Drugs just react to two opposed threats to our daily lives: overexcitement and depression. And it's crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the couple of private and public. In the developed Western countries, our public lives more and more lack collective excitement provided by a genuine political engagement. From time to time it happens—Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders in Estados Unidos—but politics is not exciting today, while drugs provide excitement but in the private sphere. So drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitement in our private lives. Second opium: the rise of populism demonstrates that the opium of the people can also be the people itself. Why? It's clear in the case of populism; like people is like kind of a big fetish, we are all united in it, when you refer to the people somehow antagonisms disappear. But now comes the trouble, I like to provoke with theses which are not popular. I think that the latest in this series of opiums is antifascism. A new spectre is haunting liberal progressive politics in Europe: the spectre of fascism. Trump in the United States, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary. They are all demonized as the new evil towards which we should unite all our forces. Every minimal doubt and reserve are immediately proclaimed a sign of secret collaboration with fascism. Now to avoid any doubt, I think they really are a threat. What I'm saying is that often this demonizing image of a fascist threat serves as a new political fetish obfuscating the basic social antagonism. I remember when was it, half a year ago, before the presidential elections in France, when Macron was the antifascist candidate, how every even tiny criticism of Macron was dismissed as ah, I was proclaimed a objectively working for Marine Le Pen. Some of my French ex-friends even coined the term *lépeno-trotskyste*. You pretend to be a leftist Trotskyite, but by criticizing the moderate center, you objectively, in the best Stalinist way, work for Marine Le Pen. Now I respect the choice of saying in this desperate situation Marine Le Pen is the danger, so let's vote for Macron. Nothing against this, but we should nonetheless be aware all the time that Macron stands for that establishment, financial and so on, which gave birth to Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen reacted to that establishment. So again, this is why this anti-new-right antifascism is dangerous. It renders us blind for the fact of how many motives which were once motives of the left are appropriated by populist right. Look in the United States, I was told that Steve Bannon is now in Spain giving advice to right-wing parties. But you know why Steve Bannon really split with Trump? He opposed Trump's tax reform and he said, no, we should raise the taxes for the rich up to we need big public works and so on. Bannon is a white supremacist racist, but it's very sad that only he dares to advocate things that no liberal leftist even dares to mention. Now my next step. In this new condition of new opiums of the people, how does ideology work? My premise here is that in order to be operative, every ideology has to be inconsistent. Its explicit norms have to be supplemented by implicit norms telling us how to deal with explicit norms. You know, that's the mystery of ideology. Often things are explicitly prohibited, but the message between the lines is: do it but discreetly. Or vice versa. The whole Stalinism functioned like this. In the Soviet Constitution of '36, it says if a group of citizens wants to establish a new political party—'36 Soviet Union—not only you have the right to do it, but the state has to give you financial support for your newspaper and offices and so on. Now try to do it, you know. So this inconsistency was always here of ideology. But today it works in a much more radical way. How? I'm sorry if you know this story, it's so beautiful that I like to repeat it. I was about two years ago in a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia. And my wife is a heavy smoker, so we asked do you have smoking rooms? And we got a wonderful answer from the guy at the reception. He said, 'No, sorry,' he said, 'sorry, it's the law, smoking is prohibited, but it's not a problem, you have ashtrays in all the rooms.' And then we entered the room and I was so shocked, please this one, look what we found in the room. Literally! The ashtray which had as an aesthetic supplement the sign for prohibiting smoking. I think this is a very good metaphor of our ideological predicament today. I remember then, I remembered a similar experience from my military life. My god, how much I learned in the army, because the army was full of these inconsistencies. We had in the morning classes, one hour of this, one hour of that. One morning, it was like a divine coincidence. The first class was some big topic, international agreements, rules of war. And the officer explained us how in a combat, even today this is the international Geneva Convention law, when paratroopers attack you, you are not allowed to shoot at them while they are in the air. No, you must wait that they touch ground. Okay. Then in a divine coincidence, next hour was one in the series of how you use your gun. The topic of the day, I'm not kidding, was how to hit a paratrooper in the air. You know, you have to judge the velocity of the wind, the direction and so on. And then I, I said, I was stupid, I said to the officer, 'But comrade, isn't there a slight inconsistency between what you are telling us now and what you were telling us half an hour ago?' And he answered me correctly. He said, 'Aren't you some kind of intellectual? How can you be so stupid then not to understand that?' And it's very similar, is pretty similar, I claim today. Things like that happen all the time. For example, if you are to ask an American intelligence officer, 'Do you torture?' he would say, 'Of course not, it's prohibited by the law, but here you have a book about waterboarding, how you do it.' It's more or less exactly, exactly the same. So let's go on. I want nonetheless to focus on today's problems. How does this new ideological constellation reflect itself in a particular domain of struggle for emancipation, in feminism? I remember, first we should become aware, because now we also celebrate these days literally half a century of May '68. You can learn a lot about our predicament by simply comparing today's emancipatory struggles and the struggle of '68. In the aftermath of '68, the French progressive press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of pedophilia, claiming that the artificial and oppressive cultural frontier that separates the sexual life of small children from adults should be abolished and the right to freely dispose with one's body should be extended also to children. And they explicitly meant children from four, five, six years, from this early sexualization, and their parents. The motto was: prohibiting incest is, sorry, is the last barrier of reactionary Catholic forces and so on and so on. Now, now you think okay, I'm exaggerating, this was some marginal petition of lunatics. Maybe, but let me give you a list of the lunatics who signed this petition: Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Lyotard and so on and so on. Today however, pedophilia is perceived as one of the worst crimes and instead of fighting for it in the name of anti-Catholic progress, it is rather associated with the dark side of the Catholic Church. I remember the comic victim of this change was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of '68, you find everywhere in any history of May '68 his photos around Sorbonne on the barricades. A couple of years ago I remember he gave an interview where naively he described how in his young years he worked in a kindergarten and he said that he regularly played masturbatory games with young girls there. To his surprise he faced a brutal backlash, they even some people wanted him to be removed from European Parliament and so on and so on. Now why this change? I'm not an old '68 guy, I was always pretty critical towards the legacy of '68, but we should try to understand why this shift. This shift can be nicely identified in a recent polemical exchange between Germaine Greer, the hero of that first generation feminists from the sixties, and some this second generation today's feminist. Germaine Greer made some critical remarks about \#MeToo movement and today's critics reacted very critically and rejected Greer's main thesis: women should sexually liberate themselves from male domination and assume active sexual life without playing the game of victimhood. They, today's critics, claimed that this point was valid in the sexual liberation movement of the sixties, but today the situation is different. What happened in between is the sexual emancipation of women, their assuming social life as active sexual beings with full freedom of initiative, was commodified. True, women are no longer perceived as passive objects of male desire, but their active sexuality now appears in the male eyes as their permanent availability, readiness to engage in sexual interaction at any point. I think there is a moment of truth in it. Why? Let me go on. This here is my principle position. In the West we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should bear in mind also the no less massive fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction, with the clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract male gaze, when they, if you want, objectify themselves to seduce them, they don't do it offering themselves as passive objects. They are the active agents of their own objectivization, manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including the full right of course to step out of the game at any moment. This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists. From Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit because on TV they claim this resembles masturbating a man, it should be prohibited, from our own ordinary male chauvinists who explode in violence against a woman who first provokes them and then reject their advances. But what I want to say here is that this term—I reject it often—this term often used by feminists: 'male gaze objectifies me, I don't want to be objectified.' Well, I am for objectivization, mutual. Sorry, but objectivization simply means I want to be sexually attractive, I offer myself. And the rule should not be in this way you somehow humiliate yourself, no. This is maybe the greatest achievement in sexual liberation, that women have the right not to be objectified by men but to objectify themselves. The problem is only that they should control the game. Furthermore, at a more general level, I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the politically correct cultural left is getting so fanatic in advocating progress, in fighting new and new battles against cultural and sexist apartheid, that they are doing it to cover up their own immersion into global capitalism. You know when my bells started to ring? When there was the first moment of LGBT+ transgender movement and so on, did you notice how it was immediately supported by all the big names of popular digital industry, these new I call them corporate organic intellectuals: Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and so on. How did we come to this? As many conservatives noticed, and they are right here, our time is marked by the progressive disintegration of a shared network of customs, which ground what George Orwell referred to as 'common decency'. Such standards are dismissed as a yoke that subordinates individual freedom to some proto-fascist organic social form. In such a situation, liberal permissivity reverts to an explosion of legal and moral rules, into an endless process of legalization and moralization called the fight against all forms of discrimination. I'm quite shocked here how many of the leftists who knew very well Michel Foucault's work on control, classification and so on, all that, now they mobilize extreme forms of control classification, like names for gender identities, this form of harassment, that form of harassment. I agree with all this. What I don't agree with is that you can in this way, by imposing explicit rules, that you can control sexuality in this way. Let's do it now, I would prefer, go to please, the short one yes. But before you do it, you know which dimension is missed here? Sexuality works always through innuendos, double games, you say something expecting something else. I will show you now a scene, a very short clip, seconds, but I love it, from an English working class melodrama *Brassed Off*, where two people—one of them you will notice is Ewan McGregor, the great star—flirt. He accompanies the girl home, and then when they are in front of her building, they have this short dialogue. Very short. Please do that one. Is this? Yes. Just wait. No, no, skip this one. It's too... Although it would be wonderful to have that one... Okay, yeah, yeah. [Audio from film *Brassed Off* plays: 'Do you want to come up for coffee?' 'I don't drink coffee.' 'I haven't got any.'] Stop. This is sexuality. It's not just that it's obvious as to the content that basically she's telling him: come up and f--k me. But you know what's so beautiful? That if she were to say this directly, there would have been nothing liberating in it. Not just that in this way she is more polite, but this very form of making a gesture which is, this very form eroticizes the situation. Again, if she were to say 'I need sex, you want to come up, yes, fine let's go out,' everything would have been lost. This is sexuality. This is what you cannot regulate. My last more pessimistic point here. One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles, also its victims. I would like to quote here Arthur Koestler, the big anti-communist. He says, 'If power corrupts, the reverse is also true: persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.' End of quote. Consequently, one should also talk about feminine manipulation and emotional brutality, ultimately a desperate reply to male domination of course. Women fight back and they should, anyway they can. And one should admit that in many parts of our society, in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure. So the proper strategy would be—that's what I would have done if I were to be a feminist, which I am but a woman feminist—to make it clear how, and this does not in any way legitimize male domination and violence, but how many forms of today's male violence are a desperate reaction basically of impotence. I mean social, economic and so on impotence. The clearest case here is, is I think South Africa. Friends there told me South Africa is now, breaks all the world record in, records in rape. Rape happens there statistically every four, five seconds. They even have a special subspecies of rapes, every day around two of them happen, they even have—I forgot it—a term for them, where man is killing a woman while raping her, strangling her, cutting her with a knife or whatever. But I think you cannot understand this without the desperate situation in South Africa, the disappointment of the black majority, poverty is now practically the same as under apartheid but there is much more crime, insecurity and so on and so on. I would aim at this if I were to be a radical feminist. Next point that we should understand, I'm returning now to my basic line, what is happening today in our ideology, that it functioned in this strange way. We should not be afraid to look at popular culture. I think even people who deal with popular culture like me and many others, we still underestimate the extreme importance and ideological
So let's begin. I would like to begin with Marx's well-known formula of religion as the opium of the people. I think we should rethink this formula today. It is true that today radical Islam, but also Christian fundamentalism, are functioning like opium of the people, a false confrontation with capitalist modernity which allows us to dwell in our ideological dream. But I hope that today in our Western world, two other versions of the opium of the people are much more actual. And you may have guessed my paradox; these two are opium and people, the people. As a young French philosopher, Laurent de Sutter, demonstrated, chemistry in its scientific version is becoming part of us, of our daily lives. Large aspects of our lives are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs, from everyday use of sleeping pills and antidepressants. And this is not marginal. I read a statistic in Estados Unidos, United States, over of all academics, professors and so on, are on something like Xanax or whatever, use drugs. So from everyday life to of course hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers. Our very emotions are outsourced to chemical stimulation. The stakes of this chemical intervention is contradictory. We use drugs first to keep external excitement, shocks, anxieties, violence under control. That is to say, to desensitize us. No, you are too shocked, too excited, you take a drug to calm you down. And then we again use drugs to generate artificial excitement, like if you are too depressed and lack desire you again take drugs. Drugs just react to two opposed threats to our daily lives: overexcitement and depression. And it's crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the couple of private and public. In the developed Western countries, our public lives more and more lack collective excitement provided by a genuine political engagement. From time to time it happens—Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders in Estados Unidos—but politics is not exciting today, while drugs provide excitement but in the private sphere. So drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitement in our private lives. Second opium: the rise of populism demonstrates that the opium of the people can also be the people itself. Why? It's clear in the case of populism; like people is like kind of a big fetish, we are all united in it, when you refer to the people somehow antagonisms disappear. But now comes the trouble, I like to provoke with theses which are not popular. I think that the latest in this series of opiums is antifascism. A new spectre is haunting liberal progressive politics in Europe: the spectre of fascism. Trump in the United States, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary. They are all demonized as the new evil towards which we should unite all our forces. Every minimal doubt and reserve are immediately proclaimed a sign of secret collaboration with fascism. Now to avoid any doubt, I think they really are a threat. What I'm saying is that often this demonizing image of a fascist threat serves as a new political fetish obfuscating the basic social antagonism. I remember when was it, half a year ago, before the presidential elections in France, when Macron was the antifascist candidate, how every even tiny criticism of Macron was dismissed as ah, I was proclaimed a objectively working for Marine Le Pen. Some of my French ex-friends even coined the term *lépeno-trotskyste*. You pretend to be a leftist Trotskyite, but by criticizing the moderate center, you objectively, in the best Stalinist way, work for Marine Le Pen. Now I respect the choice of saying in this desperate situation Marine Le Pen is the danger, so let's vote for Macron. Nothing against this, but we should nonetheless be aware all the time that Macron stands for that establishment, financial and so on, which gave birth to Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen reacted to that establishment. So again, this is why this anti-new-right antifascism is dangerous. It renders us blind for the fact of how many motives which were once motives of the left are appropriated by populist right. Look in the United States, I was told that Steve Bannon is now in Spain giving advice to right-wing parties. But you know why Steve Bannon really split with Trump? He opposed Trump's tax reform and he said, no, we should raise the taxes for the rich up to we need big public works and so on. Bannon is a white supremacist racist, but it's very sad that only he dares to advocate things that no liberal leftist even dares to mention. Now my next step. In this new condition of new opiums of the people, how does ideology work? My premise here is that in order to be operative, every ideology has to be inconsistent. Its explicit norms have to be supplemented by implicit norms telling us how to deal with explicit norms. You know, that's the mystery of ideology. Often things are explicitly prohibited, but the message between the lines is: do it but discreetly. Or vice versa. The whole Stalinism functioned like this. In the Soviet Constitution of '36, it says if a group of citizens wants to establish a new political party—'36 Soviet Union—not only you have the right to do it, but the state has to give you financial support for your newspaper and offices and so on. Now try to do it, you know. So this inconsistency was always here of ideology. But today it works in a much more radical way. How? I'm sorry if you know this story, it's so beautiful that I like to repeat it. I was about two years ago in a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia. And my wife is a heavy smoker, so we asked do you have smoking rooms? And we got a wonderful answer from the guy at the reception. He said, 'No, sorry,' he said, 'sorry, it's the law, smoking is prohibited, but it's not a problem, you have ashtrays in all the rooms.' And then we entered the room and I was so shocked, please this one, look what we found in the room. Literally! The ashtray which had as an aesthetic supplement the sign for prohibiting smoking. I think this is a very good metaphor of our ideological predicament today. I remember then, I remembered a similar experience from my military life. My god, how much I learned in the army, because the army was full of these inconsistencies. We had in the morning classes, one hour of this, one hour of that. One morning, it was like a divine coincidence. The first class was some big topic, international agreements, rules of war. And the officer explained us how in a combat, even today this is the international Geneva Convention law, when paratroopers attack you, you are not allowed to shoot at them while they are in the air. No, you must wait that they touch ground. Okay. Then in a divine coincidence, next hour was one in the series of how you use your gun. The topic of the day, I'm not kidding, was how to hit a paratrooper in the air. You know, you have to judge the velocity of the wind, the direction and so on. And then I, I said, I was stupid, I said to the officer, 'But comrade, isn't there a slight inconsistency between what you are telling us now and what you were telling us half an hour ago?' And he answered me correctly. He said, 'Aren't you some kind of intellectual? How can you be so stupid then not to understand that?' And it's very similar, is pretty similar, I claim today. Things like that happen all the time. For example, if you are to ask an American intelligence officer, 'Do you torture?' he would say, 'Of course not, it's prohibited by the law, but here you have a book about waterboarding, how you do it.' It's more or less exactly, exactly the same. So let's go on. I want nonetheless to focus on today's problems. How does this new ideological constellation reflect itself in a particular domain of struggle for emancipation, in feminism? I remember, first we should become aware, because now we also celebrate these days literally half a century of May '68. You can learn a lot about our predicament by simply comparing today's emancipatory struggles and the struggle of '68. In the aftermath of '68, the French progressive press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of pedophilia, claiming that the artificial and oppressive cultural frontier that separates the sexual life of small children from adults should be abolished and the right to freely dispose with one's body should be extended also to children. And they explicitly meant children from four, five, six years, from this early sexualization, and their parents. The motto was: prohibiting incest is, sorry, is the last barrier of reactionary Catholic forces and so on and so on. Now, now you think okay, I'm exaggerating, this was some marginal petition of lunatics. Maybe, but let me give you a list of the lunatics who signed this petition: Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Lyotard and so on and so on. Today however, pedophilia is perceived as one of the worst crimes and instead of fighting for it in the name of anti-Catholic progress, it is rather associated with the dark side of the Catholic Church. I remember the comic victim of this change was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of '68, you find everywhere in any history of May '68 his photos around Sorbonne on the barricades. A couple of years ago I remember he gave an interview where naively he described how in his young years he worked in a kindergarten and he said that he regularly played masturbatory games with young girls there. To his surprise he faced a brutal backlash, they even some people wanted him to be removed from European Parliament and so on and so on. Now why this change? I'm not an old '68 guy, I was always pretty critical towards the legacy of '68, but we should try to understand why this shift. This shift can be nicely identified in a recent polemical exchange between Germaine Greer, the hero of that first generation feminists from the sixties, and some this second generation today's feminist. Germaine Greer made some critical remarks about \#MeToo movement and today's critics reacted very critically and rejected Greer's main thesis: women should sexually liberate themselves from male domination and assume active sexual life without playing the game of victimhood. They, today's critics, claimed that this point was valid in the sexual liberation movement of the sixties, but today the situation is different. What happened in between is the sexual emancipation of women, their assuming social life as active sexual beings with full freedom of initiative, was commodified. True, women are no longer perceived as passive objects of male desire, but their active sexuality now appears in the male eyes as their permanent availability, readiness to engage in sexual interaction at any point. I think there is a moment of truth in it. Why? Let me go on. This here is my principle position. In the West we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should bear in mind also the no less massive fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction, with the clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract male gaze, when they, if you want, objectify themselves to seduce them, they don't do it offering themselves as passive objects. They are the active agents of their own objectivization, manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including the full right of course to step out of the game at any moment. This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists. From Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit because on TV they claim this resembles masturbating a man, it should be prohibited, from our own ordinary male chauvinists who explode in violence against a woman who first provokes them and then reject their advances. But what I want to say here is that this term—I reject it often—this term often used by feminists: 'male gaze objectifies me, I don't want to be objectified.' Well, I am for objectivization, mutual. Sorry, but objectivization simply means I want to be sexually attractive, I offer myself. And the rule should not be in this way you somehow humiliate yourself, no. This is maybe the greatest achievement in sexual liberation, that women have the right not to be objectified by men but to objectify themselves. The problem is only that they should control the game. Furthermore, at a more general level, I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the politically correct cultural left is getting so fanatic in advocating progress, in fighting new and new battles against cultural and sexist apartheid, that they are doing it to cover up their own immersion into global capitalism. You know when my bells started to ring? When there was the first moment of LGBT+ transgender movement and so on, did you notice how it was immediately supported by all the big names of popular digital industry, these new I call them corporate organic intellectuals: Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and so on. How did we come to this? As many conservatives noticed, and they are right here, our time is marked by the progressive disintegration of a shared network of customs, which ground what George Orwell referred to as 'common decency'. Such standards are dismissed as a yoke that subordinates individual freedom to some proto-fascist organic social form. In such a situation, liberal permissivity reverts to an explosion of legal and moral rules, into an endless process of legalization and moralization called the fight against all forms of discrimination. I'm quite shocked here how many of the leftists who knew very well Michel Foucault's work on control, classification and so on, all that, now they mobilize extreme forms of control classification, like names for gender identities, this form of harassment, that form of harassment. I agree with all this. What I don't agree with is that you can in this way, by imposing explicit rules, that you can control sexuality in this way. Let's do it now, I would prefer, go to please, the short one yes. But before you do it, you know which dimension is missed here? Sexuality works always through innuendos, double games, you say something expecting something else. I will show you now a scene, a very short clip, seconds, but I love it, from an English working class melodrama *Brassed Off*, where two people—one of them you will notice is Ewan McGregor, the great star—flirt. He accompanies the girl home, and then when they are in front of her building, they have this short dialogue. Very short. Please do that one. Is this? Yes. Just wait. No, no, skip this one. It's too... Although it would be wonderful to have that one... Okay, yeah, yeah. [Audio from film *Brassed Off* plays: 'Do you want to come up for coffee?' 'I don't drink coffee.' 'I haven't got any.'] Stop. This is sexuality. It's not just that it's obvious as to the content that basically she's telling him: come up and f--k me. But you know what's so beautiful? That if she were to say this directly, there would have been nothing liberating in it. Not just that in this way she is more polite, but this very form of making a gesture which is, this very form eroticizes the situation. Again, if she were to say 'I need sex, you want to come up, yes, fine let's go out,' everything would have been lost. This is sexuality. This is what you cannot regulate. My last more pessimistic point here. One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles, also its victims. I would like to quote here Arthur Koestler, the big anti-communist. He says, 'If power corrupts, the reverse is also true: persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.' End of quote. Consequently, one should also talk about feminine manipulation and emotional brutality, ultimately a desperate reply to male domination of course. Women fight back and they should, anyway they can. And one should admit that in many parts of our society, in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure. So the proper strategy would be—that's what I would have done if I were to be a feminist, which I am but a woman feminist—to make it clear how, and this does not in any way legitimize male domination and violence, but how many forms of today's male violence are a desperate reaction basically of impotence. I mean social, economic and so on impotence. The clearest case here is, is I think South Africa. Friends there told me South Africa is now, breaks all the world record in, records in rape. Rape happens there statistically every four, five seconds. They even have a special subspecies of rapes, every day around two of them happen, they even have—I forgot it—a term for them, where man is killing a woman while raping her, strangling her, cutting her with a knife or whatever. But I think you cannot understand this without the desperate situation in South Africa, the disappointment of the black majority, poverty is now practically the same as under apartheid but there is much more crime, insecurity and so on and so on. I would aim at this if I were to be a radical feminist. Next point that we should understand, I'm returning now to my basic line, what is happening today in our ideology, that it functioned in this strange way. We should not be afraid to look at popular culture. I think even people who deal with popular culture like me and many others, we still underestimate the extreme importance and ideological
unknown
power of the universe of video games. Are you aware that more money
power of the universe of video games. Are you aware that more money
Slavoj Žižek
is for already for a couple of years turned around with video games than with cinema and TV series together? It's almost, to use the old-fashioned Marxist terms, the basic state ideological apparatus today. Now what I find interesting in video games is how a new mode of subjectivity is emerging there. How the subjectivity which is in some sense pre-oedipal, you are not fixed to your finitude, you are freely floating in a kind of a perverse multiplicity state. That is to say what video games impose on you is a kind of an undeadness, precisely in the sense of Stephen King and horror stories, an obscene immortality. When you are immersed into a game, you dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive, since after every destruction you can return to the beginning and start the game again. We should notice how this is not something new, but it appeared already with modernity itself. As Jacques Lacan noted, in the de Sade universe of Marquis de Sade, you have in victims, Juliette for example, this same undeadness. Juliette is tortured in all possible ways, but magically in the next scene he is already there, again there as beautiful as ever. Another domain of this undeadness is the universe of cartoons, Tom and Jerry and so on. You know it has this same undeadness; in one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces, okay, catastrophe, but hop in next scene it is here and so on. And as some theorist of hardcore pornography noticed, you have the same logic in hardcore pornography. You see ejaculation, but then—and I'm not advising you to see, they are extremely boring. The only use of hardcore pornography for me is if somebody is obsessed with sex, show him a very bad vulgar hardcore pornography, he will be cured. But even I noticed is how you see ejaculation and then they don't even need Kleenexes to wipe it off. Simply the game goes on and they can do it again and again and again. What happens here? Now comes my pessimism. I think what emerged in modernity is, and this is what is mobilized in video games, is a new form of immortality which is not the noble immortality of: I may die physically but in some world spirit or memory of others I will survive, but an obscene immortality. I can put it like this in Hegelian, Hegel terms: that it is a weird negation of negation. We have some high goal, then we have a downward movement, things go wrong, but then the situation goes so stupid that you cannot even fall apart or disintegrate or die properly. For example, the examples here would have been many good comical novels play on this. You are desperate, and you kill yourself, try to, but then something always fails. I read one marvelous short story where the guy takes pills to kill himself, by mistake he takes a laxative, he ends up just in the toilet, you know this logic. Or with happiness. You say my life is hell, I will try to be as unhappy as possible, but then you find some small masochist pleasure even in that, you cannot even go down, go down properly. Now comes the really evil part. Isn't something of this at work for today's political left? The left, the traditional left, not your Podemos, Podemos is more intelligent, are looking for the true working class, you know. From the twenties, radical left has this problem: we have a good plan for the revolution, where is the subject, working class. And then they are looking for Ersatz working class. It's as if precisely proletarians don't want to be pure proletarians like oh you see I have only my chains to lose, no. You don't have only your chains to lose. You have a credit, you have a car, you worry about always something that prevents you to be radically a proletarian. And this is—it's a very evil, I warn you, remark—what I find in some of my leftist friends who celebrate immigrants in a wrong way. They secretly hope that okay we are here corrupted, we all have small pleasures, not so bad, maybe immigrants with nothing to lose will be finally the true proletarians, you know. It's a pretty desperate situation, it doesn't work. Okay. Now comes the really evil part. No okay, first I just want to conclude this part by emphasizing how what I am describing here in this false immortality in cartoons and so on, video games, it's not just fantasy. I read some investigation of our erotic lives where they say that more and more people act, for example, in real erotic interaction as if it's a, as if it's a video game. I start with that lady or man, it doesn't work, no problem, I withdraw, I start again, as if we are freely floating in some virtual space. This liberation—and I'm not saying this is bad, this is just ideology, that we should accept our mortality and so on and so on—I think we should use this new logic of virtual space. We should use it also in order to see how we shouldn't be constrained by reality. We should relate to reality, to our real life—and this is what art is about—as one of the possible virtual worlds, and play with it to change it and so on. And now we come to your great guy, I don't even generally like him but this painting that I will show always fascinated me, Picasso's, Pablo Picasso's, what's the title? The 'A Woman Throwing a Stone', you can put it on... 'A Woman Throwing a Stone'. Why do I like it? Hegel said somewhere that a good portrait of a person resembles this person more than the person itself. A good painting of a woman does not reproduce her reality, first it must be a violent painting. In the, violent in the sense that you have the object, the woman, you cut it into pieces, you do the work of abstraction. Hegel knew this that the greatness of human mind is not that precisely it's not holistic. You have a holistic image and you say let's pick this out, let's pick that out, and let's do a new weird monstrosity. This is what, this is for me again a model painting. It's a monstrosity, but somehow—sorry for using this Platonic term—somehow the essence of a woman throwing a stone is here in, more directly than a realist painting. I'm very naively Platonic here. I believe in ideas, of course not in eternal sky ideas, but ideas in the sense of every person has an essence, not Platonic essence but essence in the sense of Deleuzian essence more, of all the hidden potentialities and so on and so on, that go far beyond the immediate reality. And this is what art is doing at its most elementary. Precisely cut into reality in a very brutal way to bring out—I see in this all the potentials of the woman, the fury, the fragility and so on and so on and so on. This is for me a nice example of, a nice example of what I would call thinking in art. This painting is thinking. It's not an irrational impression of a woman, forget about feelings. He is doing the thinking. Thinking means: you have an image but you try to understand it, you cut it into parts, you violently dismember it and through this disfiguration, the domain of thoughts, ideas, essences appear. In this sense I'm a materialist Platonist. So again in this way we came to another topic: the mixture of virtuality and reality, which I think is crucial about sexual matters. Sexuality, in sexuality, we are never simply alone in the sense of okay I am with my partner. There is always another dimension in it, either another person's gaze, we imagine a gaze observing us. I think you cannot understand sexuality without referring to that mythic past. You remember there are two big examples. You remember they found I think in Mexico, I don't know where, some paintings on the flat ground by I think Aztecs, but you know what's the mystery? You cannot see them from the ground. You must be very high up to see them. So for whom were the Aztecs doing this, drawing these lines? Or the same, everybody knows this, ancient Roman viaducts. They have small statues and reliefs also on the top, invisible to human gaze. Now wait a minute, this is not for me a proof of God, you know, I'm a materialist. I'm just saying that it's our natural predisposition to imagine being observed by a virtual gaze. Now comes the obscene part, I'm sorry if some of you, I'm sorry if some of you will be offended by it, but I will draw—don't be afraid also again a feminist lesson from it. I debated with friends, a very obscene debate: what would have been the fundamental archetype of hardcore pornography? And I think okay, I don't have vast knowledge there, they had better knowledge, but they convinced me that the archetypal scene would be this one of for male chauvinist hardcore pornography: a woman on the bed—I'm sorry for this but you will see the important lesson—with her legs up, a man penetrating her, and you see clearly in front the penetration. But now comes the crucial feature. Man is purely instrumentalized. In many of the short films that I've seen, you don't even see the man's face. His duty is just bam bam, to do it. But now—and they must suffer very much while they do this—between the woman's legs and the man penetrating her, there is some space, always this happens, where you see the woman's face looking at you at the camera and making some u-u whatever, I cannot do these sounds and so on. You see it's not immediacy. The way they stage sex is: your gaze is included into it. And I claim at some basic level this happens always. Now what is the feminist lesson? It's not simply that woman is nonetheless not doing so bad because she is minimally subjectivized. I think it's much more sad and brutal for woman than for man. Man is just an instrument, who cares about him? They are usually—this always depresses me—some anonymous sailors with cheap tattoos and so on, I don't know how they get them. But the woman has to address directly the camera, which you are not allowed to do it in usual fiction films, and has to play the game of asserting her pleasure, all the moaning and so on sounds and so on. So I claim it's totally wrong to claim that I, if as a male chauvinist, I watch a hardcore movie of this type, that I identify with the perpetrator. I imagine myself to be at the place of the guy who is doing it. No, he is pure instrument. I am a pure observer who is looking for a proof of woman's enjoyment. And I think this is a much worse humiliation for the woman. Much worse than being just an object of instrument is to be, how should I call this, forcefully oppressively subjectivized. Everybody knows this is for me male chauvinism at its worst. We when we are at our worst, we don't just exploit women. We want them to praise us, to enjoy it and so on and so on. So again, don't just protest objectivization, protest even more where you have to act as the woman as a subject, but as it were fake subject, where your very subjectivity is imposed on you. And I know cases, a psychiatrist told me, where a man, her partner, got furious because he was having sex with for example his wife, but the wife say okay okay it's my marital duty, but didn't participate enough in it. And that made the man furious, often a man beats a woman like this, you have even to play the game of being a free subject and enjoying it. Back to that idea of imaginary virtual gaze, like in imagine when we make love we are like those Aztec statues or on the top of viaduct, you know. We always imagine a gaze. That's the first thing, sex is never immediate. The second thing, maybe even more important, is that it's not enough to play the game of getting rid of repression and being a pure perverse subject of showing it all and so on and so on. In sexuality, what is Freud said something ingenious. He said—you know that the usual cliché, here they were very male chauvinist in '68—when I was young the idea was: women are hysterics, they provoke the master but they really want a master, a better master, while we men can be perverts. We go to the end, we get rid of all prohibitions, we really do what hysterics only dream. Ah, Freud says something ingenious. He says that the, that in perversion nowhere is repression, *Verdrängung*, stronger than in perversion. Why? Because what is repressed is not the thing itself in the sense of you have an artistic depiction of sex but then the real thing is just the act itself. As that example of hardcore porn of gaze shows, something must be added to it on the edge. For example, I saw my wife was looking at it—no I like a bad commercial TV series but I don't like *Sex and the City*. But nonetheless, one of them had an interesting turn where Miranda, the ugly one but my favorite, I hate all other three, makes love with a guy and then the guy tells her, 'Why are you so cold? I would like you to talk while I'm making love to you. All the dirty things that come to your mind.' Okay, she gets into it slowly with some effort and does tells all the dirty thoughts. But then at some point she says something that shouldn't have been mentioned, you know. She says, 'I notice how satisfied you are when in the middle of lovemaking I stick my finger into your ass,' you know. And then the guy totally collapses, loses... You know, I think with every abolition of prohibitions is like this. Yes we do whatever we want, but there is something which is not even very radical, some remark, some gesture, that is the true place of what Lacan called *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment. And this is not there in the depth. It's something on the margin, like here a small remark or whatever. This is why I don't trust people who play perverts. I don't have any obstacles, I do whatever I want. My answer would be, okay, but what is your version of sticking a finger up your ass, you know. That's your stick. And maybe we should nonetheless do it, it's so amusing. Lubitsch in his movie *The Smiling Lieutenant* did something like this. It's a Hollywood movie although just before Hayes Code was imposed from '31. I will not go into the story, we don't have time, just Maurice Chevalier when he was young plays a great seducer, officer of Austrian army, and he sings a song which if you ask me is embarrassing to listen. Not anything, not anything directly pornographic. He, the whole song is a comparison between making love, penetrating the woman and shooting *ra-ta-ta-ta* in the army. And it's all this very vulgar comparison: we soldiers are always on our duty and so on. But although it's just a vulgar metaphor, no pornography, if you ask me to watch this is for me worse than to watch a simple hardcore pornography. Do it now, it's just a very short song. [Audio from film *The Smiling Lieutenant* plays: 'A soldier's work is never done, Although we never use a gun. We're on active service, Though we're through with fighting. For when a lady takes the field, and knows the guards will always yield, and every man deserves a medal every night. To arms! To arms! We're used to night alarms, We're always facing powder, The girls give in, We weaken but we win, and march home feeling prouder. We're on parade each evening in the park, We're not afraid to skirmish in the dark. We're famous near and far, for our ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Toujours l'amour in the army, We give the girls a...'] Stop it. Okay, but I think that this is in some sense this *ra-ta-ta-ta* and so on is just a vulgar formula. We know to what it refers, but in a way it's much more condensed pleasure, vulgar, than let's call it real sex itself. And I even know, I will tell you a private secret, not from my life but from a friend. He wanted to have a—and I'm not my best friend I'm not telling you my own—he wanted to make love with his girlfriend and they watched this movie days before and she told him, 'Okay, what about some *ra-ta-ta-ta*?' and it was over. He was not able to do it, you know. You see this is what Lacan called *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment, very important, a notion Lacan elaborated with direct reference to Marx, *Mehrwert*, surplus value. That gaze in pornographic scene or Aztecs and so on drawings is the surplus enjoyment or *ra-ta-ta-ta* here. What makes sex obscene is precisely this apparent metaphors, details which provide surplus enjoyment. And not to lose time, I want to conclude just with a brief exercise into theology. We have a wonderful—and I'm proud to do this in Spain which is Catholic country like my own—in Thomas Aquinas *Summa Theologica*. He there gets caught in these paradoxes, because he's bothered by this problem: do people who are in Paradise, are they allowed to see, to take a look at the people who suffer in Hell? The answer should be yes, because by definition for his theology people in, in Paradise can know everything about reality, so it shouldn't be prohibited. But there is a problem, because in Paradise there is no suffering just enjoyment, pleasure, so isn't this a perversion? How can you enjoy seeing other people suffering, burning there? And he avoids in a very cheap scholastic way this conclusion. He distinguishes between two types of enjoyment. He said it would be bad to enjoy directly when you see them burning whatever in Hell, their suffering. But he said if you look as a good Christian at that suffering, you are impressed by the
is for already for a couple of years turned around with video games than with cinema and TV series together? It's almost, to use the old-fashioned Marxist terms, the basic state ideological apparatus today. Now what I find interesting in video games is how a new mode of subjectivity is emerging there. How the subjectivity which is in some sense pre-oedipal, you are not fixed to your finitude, you are freely floating in a kind of a perverse multiplicity state. That is to say what video games impose on you is a kind of an undeadness, precisely in the sense of Stephen King and horror stories, an obscene immortality. When you are immersed into a game, you dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive, since after every destruction you can return to the beginning and start the game again. We should notice how this is not something new, but it appeared already with modernity itself. As Jacques Lacan noted, in the de Sade universe of Marquis de Sade, you have in victims, Juliette for example, this same undeadness. Juliette is tortured in all possible ways, but magically in the next scene he is already there, again there as beautiful as ever. Another domain of this undeadness is the universe of cartoons, Tom and Jerry and so on. You know it has this same undeadness; in one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces, okay, catastrophe, but hop in next scene it is here and so on. And as some theorist of hardcore pornography noticed, you have the same logic in hardcore pornography. You see ejaculation, but then—and I'm not advising you to see, they are extremely boring. The only use of hardcore pornography for me is if somebody is obsessed with sex, show him a very bad vulgar hardcore pornography, he will be cured. But even I noticed is how you see ejaculation and then they don't even need Kleenexes to wipe it off. Simply the game goes on and they can do it again and again and again. What happens here? Now comes my pessimism. I think what emerged in modernity is, and this is what is mobilized in video games, is a new form of immortality which is not the noble immortality of: I may die physically but in some world spirit or memory of others I will survive, but an obscene immortality. I can put it like this in Hegelian, Hegel terms: that it is a weird negation of negation. We have some high goal, then we have a downward movement, things go wrong, but then the situation goes so stupid that you cannot even fall apart or disintegrate or die properly. For example, the examples here would have been many good comical novels play on this. You are desperate, and you kill yourself, try to, but then something always fails. I read one marvelous short story where the guy takes pills to kill himself, by mistake he takes a laxative, he ends up just in the toilet, you know this logic. Or with happiness. You say my life is hell, I will try to be as unhappy as possible, but then you find some small masochist pleasure even in that, you cannot even go down, go down properly. Now comes the really evil part. Isn't something of this at work for today's political left? The left, the traditional left, not your Podemos, Podemos is more intelligent, are looking for the true working class, you know. From the twenties, radical left has this problem: we have a good plan for the revolution, where is the subject, working class. And then they are looking for Ersatz working class. It's as if precisely proletarians don't want to be pure proletarians like oh you see I have only my chains to lose, no. You don't have only your chains to lose. You have a credit, you have a car, you worry about always something that prevents you to be radically a proletarian. And this is—it's a very evil, I warn you, remark—what I find in some of my leftist friends who celebrate immigrants in a wrong way. They secretly hope that okay we are here corrupted, we all have small pleasures, not so bad, maybe immigrants with nothing to lose will be finally the true proletarians, you know. It's a pretty desperate situation, it doesn't work. Okay. Now comes the really evil part. No okay, first I just want to conclude this part by emphasizing how what I am describing here in this false immortality in cartoons and so on, video games, it's not just fantasy. I read some investigation of our erotic lives where they say that more and more people act, for example, in real erotic interaction as if it's a, as if it's a video game. I start with that lady or man, it doesn't work, no problem, I withdraw, I start again, as if we are freely floating in some virtual space. This liberation—and I'm not saying this is bad, this is just ideology, that we should accept our mortality and so on and so on—I think we should use this new logic of virtual space. We should use it also in order to see how we shouldn't be constrained by reality. We should relate to reality, to our real life—and this is what art is about—as one of the possible virtual worlds, and play with it to change it and so on. And now we come to your great guy, I don't even generally like him but this painting that I will show always fascinated me, Picasso's, Pablo Picasso's, what's the title? The 'A Woman Throwing a Stone', you can put it on... 'A Woman Throwing a Stone'. Why do I like it? Hegel said somewhere that a good portrait of a person resembles this person more than the person itself. A good painting of a woman does not reproduce her reality, first it must be a violent painting. In the, violent in the sense that you have the object, the woman, you cut it into pieces, you do the work of abstraction. Hegel knew this that the greatness of human mind is not that precisely it's not holistic. You have a holistic image and you say let's pick this out, let's pick that out, and let's do a new weird monstrosity. This is what, this is for me again a model painting. It's a monstrosity, but somehow—sorry for using this Platonic term—somehow the essence of a woman throwing a stone is here in, more directly than a realist painting. I'm very naively Platonic here. I believe in ideas, of course not in eternal sky ideas, but ideas in the sense of every person has an essence, not Platonic essence but essence in the sense of Deleuzian essence more, of all the hidden potentialities and so on and so on, that go far beyond the immediate reality. And this is what art is doing at its most elementary. Precisely cut into reality in a very brutal way to bring out—I see in this all the potentials of the woman, the fury, the fragility and so on and so on and so on. This is for me a nice example of, a nice example of what I would call thinking in art. This painting is thinking. It's not an irrational impression of a woman, forget about feelings. He is doing the thinking. Thinking means: you have an image but you try to understand it, you cut it into parts, you violently dismember it and through this disfiguration, the domain of thoughts, ideas, essences appear. In this sense I'm a materialist Platonist. So again in this way we came to another topic: the mixture of virtuality and reality, which I think is crucial about sexual matters. Sexuality, in sexuality, we are never simply alone in the sense of okay I am with my partner. There is always another dimension in it, either another person's gaze, we imagine a gaze observing us. I think you cannot understand sexuality without referring to that mythic past. You remember there are two big examples. You remember they found I think in Mexico, I don't know where, some paintings on the flat ground by I think Aztecs, but you know what's the mystery? You cannot see them from the ground. You must be very high up to see them. So for whom were the Aztecs doing this, drawing these lines? Or the same, everybody knows this, ancient Roman viaducts. They have small statues and reliefs also on the top, invisible to human gaze. Now wait a minute, this is not for me a proof of God, you know, I'm a materialist. I'm just saying that it's our natural predisposition to imagine being observed by a virtual gaze. Now comes the obscene part, I'm sorry if some of you, I'm sorry if some of you will be offended by it, but I will draw—don't be afraid also again a feminist lesson from it. I debated with friends, a very obscene debate: what would have been the fundamental archetype of hardcore pornography? And I think okay, I don't have vast knowledge there, they had better knowledge, but they convinced me that the archetypal scene would be this one of for male chauvinist hardcore pornography: a woman on the bed—I'm sorry for this but you will see the important lesson—with her legs up, a man penetrating her, and you see clearly in front the penetration. But now comes the crucial feature. Man is purely instrumentalized. In many of the short films that I've seen, you don't even see the man's face. His duty is just bam bam, to do it. But now—and they must suffer very much while they do this—between the woman's legs and the man penetrating her, there is some space, always this happens, where you see the woman's face looking at you at the camera and making some u-u whatever, I cannot do these sounds and so on. You see it's not immediacy. The way they stage sex is: your gaze is included into it. And I claim at some basic level this happens always. Now what is the feminist lesson? It's not simply that woman is nonetheless not doing so bad because she is minimally subjectivized. I think it's much more sad and brutal for woman than for man. Man is just an instrument, who cares about him? They are usually—this always depresses me—some anonymous sailors with cheap tattoos and so on, I don't know how they get them. But the woman has to address directly the camera, which you are not allowed to do it in usual fiction films, and has to play the game of asserting her pleasure, all the moaning and so on sounds and so on. So I claim it's totally wrong to claim that I, if as a male chauvinist, I watch a hardcore movie of this type, that I identify with the perpetrator. I imagine myself to be at the place of the guy who is doing it. No, he is pure instrument. I am a pure observer who is looking for a proof of woman's enjoyment. And I think this is a much worse humiliation for the woman. Much worse than being just an object of instrument is to be, how should I call this, forcefully oppressively subjectivized. Everybody knows this is for me male chauvinism at its worst. We when we are at our worst, we don't just exploit women. We want them to praise us, to enjoy it and so on and so on. So again, don't just protest objectivization, protest even more where you have to act as the woman as a subject, but as it were fake subject, where your very subjectivity is imposed on you. And I know cases, a psychiatrist told me, where a man, her partner, got furious because he was having sex with for example his wife, but the wife say okay okay it's my marital duty, but didn't participate enough in it. And that made the man furious, often a man beats a woman like this, you have even to play the game of being a free subject and enjoying it. Back to that idea of imaginary virtual gaze, like in imagine when we make love we are like those Aztec statues or on the top of viaduct, you know. We always imagine a gaze. That's the first thing, sex is never immediate. The second thing, maybe even more important, is that it's not enough to play the game of getting rid of repression and being a pure perverse subject of showing it all and so on and so on. In sexuality, what is Freud said something ingenious. He said—you know that the usual cliché, here they were very male chauvinist in '68—when I was young the idea was: women are hysterics, they provoke the master but they really want a master, a better master, while we men can be perverts. We go to the end, we get rid of all prohibitions, we really do what hysterics only dream. Ah, Freud says something ingenious. He says that the, that in perversion nowhere is repression, *Verdrängung*, stronger than in perversion. Why? Because what is repressed is not the thing itself in the sense of you have an artistic depiction of sex but then the real thing is just the act itself. As that example of hardcore porn of gaze shows, something must be added to it on the edge. For example, I saw my wife was looking at it—no I like a bad commercial TV series but I don't like *Sex and the City*. But nonetheless, one of them had an interesting turn where Miranda, the ugly one but my favorite, I hate all other three, makes love with a guy and then the guy tells her, 'Why are you so cold? I would like you to talk while I'm making love to you. All the dirty things that come to your mind.' Okay, she gets into it slowly with some effort and does tells all the dirty thoughts. But then at some point she says something that shouldn't have been mentioned, you know. She says, 'I notice how satisfied you are when in the middle of lovemaking I stick my finger into your ass,' you know. And then the guy totally collapses, loses... You know, I think with every abolition of prohibitions is like this. Yes we do whatever we want, but there is something which is not even very radical, some remark, some gesture, that is the true place of what Lacan called *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment. And this is not there in the depth. It's something on the margin, like here a small remark or whatever. This is why I don't trust people who play perverts. I don't have any obstacles, I do whatever I want. My answer would be, okay, but what is your version of sticking a finger up your ass, you know. That's your stick. And maybe we should nonetheless do it, it's so amusing. Lubitsch in his movie *The Smiling Lieutenant* did something like this. It's a Hollywood movie although just before Hayes Code was imposed from '31. I will not go into the story, we don't have time, just Maurice Chevalier when he was young plays a great seducer, officer of Austrian army, and he sings a song which if you ask me is embarrassing to listen. Not anything, not anything directly pornographic. He, the whole song is a comparison between making love, penetrating the woman and shooting *ra-ta-ta-ta* in the army. And it's all this very vulgar comparison: we soldiers are always on our duty and so on. But although it's just a vulgar metaphor, no pornography, if you ask me to watch this is for me worse than to watch a simple hardcore pornography. Do it now, it's just a very short song. [Audio from film *The Smiling Lieutenant* plays: 'A soldier's work is never done, Although we never use a gun. We're on active service, Though we're through with fighting. For when a lady takes the field, and knows the guards will always yield, and every man deserves a medal every night. To arms! To arms! We're used to night alarms, We're always facing powder, The girls give in, We weaken but we win, and march home feeling prouder. We're on parade each evening in the park, We're not afraid to skirmish in the dark. We're famous near and far, for our ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Toujours l'amour in the army, We give the girls a...'] Stop it. Okay, but I think that this is in some sense this *ra-ta-ta-ta* and so on is just a vulgar formula. We know to what it refers, but in a way it's much more condensed pleasure, vulgar, than let's call it real sex itself. And I even know, I will tell you a private secret, not from my life but from a friend. He wanted to have a—and I'm not my best friend I'm not telling you my own—he wanted to make love with his girlfriend and they watched this movie days before and she told him, 'Okay, what about some *ra-ta-ta-ta*?' and it was over. He was not able to do it, you know. You see this is what Lacan called *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment, very important, a notion Lacan elaborated with direct reference to Marx, *Mehrwert*, surplus value. That gaze in pornographic scene or Aztecs and so on drawings is the surplus enjoyment or *ra-ta-ta-ta* here. What makes sex obscene is precisely this apparent metaphors, details which provide surplus enjoyment. And not to lose time, I want to conclude just with a brief exercise into theology. We have a wonderful—and I'm proud to do this in Spain which is Catholic country like my own—in Thomas Aquinas *Summa Theologica*. He there gets caught in these paradoxes, because he's bothered by this problem: do people who are in Paradise, are they allowed to see, to take a look at the people who suffer in Hell? The answer should be yes, because by definition for his theology people in, in Paradise can know everything about reality, so it shouldn't be prohibited. But there is a problem, because in Paradise there is no suffering just enjoyment, pleasure, so isn't this a perversion? How can you enjoy seeing other people suffering, burning there? And he avoids in a very cheap scholastic way this conclusion. He distinguishes between two types of enjoyment. He said it would be bad to enjoy directly when you see them burning whatever in Hell, their suffering. But he said if you look as a good Christian at that suffering, you are impressed by the
unknown
majesty of divine justice. And that's what you really enjoy. It's a trick, it doesn't work. But if we read this problem in a Lacanian way, ah, it
majesty of divine justice. And that's what you really enjoy. It's a trick, it doesn't work. But if we read this problem in a Lacanian way, ah, it
Slavoj Žižek
appears in a totally new light.
appears in a totally new light.
unknown
What if—and every good Christian knows this, even Kierkegaard mentioned this—the way
What if—and every good Christian knows this, even Kierkegaard mentioned this—the way
unknown
it's
it's
Slavoj Žižek
usually described
usually described
unknown
Paradise must be an extremely boring place, you know. And people always have a suspicion that life in Hell has to be much more interesting, you know. Orgies, you drink, okay there is fire, barbecue,
Paradise must be an extremely boring place, you know. And people always have a suspicion that life in Hell has to be much more interesting, you know. Orgies, you drink, okay there is fire, barbecue,
Slavoj Žižek
you dance, whatever. So in Paradise the situation is this one: people get bored, okay permanent happiness but where is life, where is passion? So from time to time some angel tells them, 'Ah you are bored here. Ah take a look at the Hell and then you will prefer to stay here,' you know. It's a little bit like in our societies which are still doing relatively well, this view into Hell is provided by TV news where it's very perverse, we secretly enjoy it. You know on TV news they usually—I don't know how is it in Spain but in English language they usually say—'now we will show you some pictures of suffering in Somalia, warning to sensitive viewers' blah blah, which means here you get the pleasure, look at it, you know. It's exactly like this. But then I have another dream with which I will conclude. I can imagine this would be the Hell I like. I imagine Hell where they have orgies all the time, they drink, they roast barbecue, the oil fire is there really for good food and so on. Just once a week some Hell administrator comes to them and says, 'Listen guys we have a good time, but now for minutes we will be observed from Heaven, so please play the game as if you suffer and so on.' Otherwise they may abolish Paradise. So they 'oh it's on okay oh oh oh' and then 'okay back to the orgy' and so on. Maybe this should be the ideal world we should strive for, to quote the Ernst Lubitsch title, *Heaven Can Wait*. Let's create... Communism is not Heaven on Earth. Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment. Thank you very much. Muchísimas, muchísimas gracias Slavoj. Yo creo que se ha puesto en marcha muchas de las características que mencionaba el presidente de esta institución cuando le otorgaba la medalla de oro. Ha puesto bueno, ha puesto en funcionamiento, ¿no?, el papel vigente que aún tiene la ideología. Ha hablado de Hegel, lo ha usado a Hegel, a Marx y a Lacan para analizar de manera crítica nuestro presente, también con agudeza y de un modo provocador. Y también se ha visto a lo largo de su intervención algo que no se ha mencionado pero que es muy conocido y sigue siendo eficaz, que es su gran sentido del humor. Tenemos algo de tiempo para unas preguntas si les parece bien. Si levantan la mano y me miran a mí o a la persona que tiene el micrófono, así se las podemos dar. I hope—it's my standard joke that I like it—I hope you and the director did it in a proper Stalinist way. No freedom of speech, you distributed the questions, no good, I want it organized. You know an old communist told me this. He told, I reproached him in the last years of communism like 'but you communists cannot tolerate free debate.' He told me, 'We love free debate, just free debate has to be especially well organized to avoid enemy provocations,' you know. Let's do it, please. Hi. So I was going to ask in English if that's... Yeah, perfect, thank you. So what you were saying about immortality and sort of this idea of sort of something just respawning. I was thinking sort of of plastics and sort of pollution in the environment. How oh well we can use a million plastic bags and we just assume that they will just keep coming. And the idea that, you know, the collapse of the environment is sort of an inevitability, I think we're all pretty much aware that climate collapse is a huge problem that we have to confront at some point. But I also think that it's sort of an inevitability that global capital will at some point collapse. And I was wondering what your thoughts on were, what your thoughts were on sort of if it was a race between the two so to say, between global capital collapsing and the environment collapsing, and which you think would win if it was two a race between the two. And what you think we should focus on or if you think there's one or the other together, what your thoughts on that
you dance, whatever. So in Paradise the situation is this one: people get bored, okay permanent happiness but where is life, where is passion? So from time to time some angel tells them, 'Ah you are bored here. Ah take a look at the Hell and then you will prefer to stay here,' you know. It's a little bit like in our societies which are still doing relatively well, this view into Hell is provided by TV news where it's very perverse, we secretly enjoy it. You know on TV news they usually—I don't know how is it in Spain but in English language they usually say—'now we will show you some pictures of suffering in Somalia, warning to sensitive viewers' blah blah, which means here you get the pleasure, look at it, you know. It's exactly like this. But then I have another dream with which I will conclude. I can imagine this would be the Hell I like. I imagine Hell where they have orgies all the time, they drink, they roast barbecue, the oil fire is there really for good food and so on. Just once a week some Hell administrator comes to them and says, 'Listen guys we have a good time, but now for minutes we will be observed from Heaven, so please play the game as if you suffer and so on.' Otherwise they may abolish Paradise. So they 'oh it's on okay oh oh oh' and then 'okay back to the orgy' and so on. Maybe this should be the ideal world we should strive for, to quote the Ernst Lubitsch title, *Heaven Can Wait*. Let's create... Communism is not Heaven on Earth. Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment. Thank you very much. Muchísimas, muchísimas gracias Slavoj. Yo creo que se ha puesto en marcha muchas de las características que mencionaba el presidente de esta institución cuando le otorgaba la medalla de oro. Ha puesto bueno, ha puesto en funcionamiento, ¿no?, el papel vigente que aún tiene la ideología. Ha hablado de Hegel, lo ha usado a Hegel, a Marx y a Lacan para analizar de manera crítica nuestro presente, también con agudeza y de un modo provocador. Y también se ha visto a lo largo de su intervención algo que no se ha mencionado pero que es muy conocido y sigue siendo eficaz, que es su gran sentido del humor. Tenemos algo de tiempo para unas preguntas si les parece bien. Si levantan la mano y me miran a mí o a la persona que tiene el micrófono, así se las podemos dar. I hope—it's my standard joke that I like it—I hope you and the director did it in a proper Stalinist way. No freedom of speech, you distributed the questions, no good, I want it organized. You know an old communist told me this. He told, I reproached him in the last years of communism like 'but you communists cannot tolerate free debate.' He told me, 'We love free debate, just free debate has to be especially well organized to avoid enemy provocations,' you know. Let's do it, please. Hi. So I was going to ask in English if that's... Yeah, perfect, thank you. So what you were saying about immortality and sort of this idea of sort of something just respawning. I was thinking sort of of plastics and sort of pollution in the environment. How oh well we can use a million plastic bags and we just assume that they will just keep coming. And the idea that, you know, the collapse of the environment is sort of an inevitability, I think we're all pretty much aware that climate collapse is a huge problem that we have to confront at some point. But I also think that it's sort of an inevitability that global capital will at some point collapse. And I was wondering what your thoughts on were, what your thoughts were on sort of if it was a race between the two so to say, between global capital collapsing and the environment collapsing, and which you think would win if it was two a race between the two. And what you think we should focus on or if you think there's one or the other together, what your thoughts on that
unknown
were. Very good question. I am afraid that the global capitalism will win by—and it's already doing pretty successfully—by appropriating the very ecological things. I read recently in a big media—was it even *Newsweek*, I don't know where—a very good text which explodes critically against, you know, these fashionable new houses, self-sustained with solar energy. And it proves that the production building of such
were. Very good question. I am afraid that the global capitalism will win by—and it's already doing pretty successfully—by appropriating the very ecological things. I read recently in a big media—was it even *Newsweek*, I don't know where—a very good text which explodes critically against, you know, these fashionable new houses, self-sustained with solar energy. And it proves that the production building of such
Slavoj Žižek
houses does so much, hurt so much environment and so on that is the worst thing. I think the only intelligent thing is to follow Japan here. You know what Japan did? They concentrated all the population in of their land, the Osaka region, the
houses does so much, hurt so much environment and so on that is the worst thing. I think the only intelligent thing is to follow Japan here. You know what Japan did? They concentrated all the population in of their land, the Osaka region, the
unknown
Tokyo region, and they keep out, just some farmers can live there and so on but... and this is why a German ecologist told me this, it's a wonderful vision. The best solution for ecology that we can do now is, you know ecologists say 'why are you so crowded in cities', that's our solution. Pack as many people as you want in big cities where pollution is, they basically pollute each other, you know I mean. And it's much better for nature to keep them majority out than to disperse them. So again, my fear is that in these tricky ways capitalism will re-appropriate ecology struggle as simply a new field of investment. Because that's what capitalism always knows how to do it. You think this is a catastrophe, no
Tokyo region, and they keep out, just some farmers can live there and so on but... and this is why a German ecologist told me this, it's a wonderful vision. The best solution for ecology that we can do now is, you know ecologists say 'why are you so crowded in cities', that's our solution. Pack as many people as you want in big cities where pollution is, they basically pollute each other, you know I mean. And it's much better for nature to keep them majority out than to disperse them. So again, my fear is that in these tricky ways capitalism will re-appropriate ecology struggle as simply a new field of investment. Because that's what capitalism always knows how to do it. You think this is a catastrophe, no
Slavoj Žižek
it turns it just into another field of investment. Because as you maybe also know, I've written about it, ecology is one of the big domains of this paradoxes of belief, this fetishist disavowal. *Je sais bien, mais quand même.* I know very well, but. Yes what you mentioned we have all the data, we know, but we don't really believe in our guts, in our daily life we don't really accept it. And I don't want to be a direct pessimist,
it turns it just into another field of investment. Because as you maybe also know, I've written about it, ecology is one of the big domains of this paradoxes of belief, this fetishist disavowal. *Je sais bien, mais quand même.* I know very well, but. Yes what you mentioned we have all the data, we know, but we don't really believe in our guts, in our daily life we don't really accept it. And I don't want to be a direct pessimist,
unknown
but—this
but—this
Slavoj Žižek
is horrible to say because it's not in my nature in my tendency of my thinking—but maybe we would need some kind of a, at least let's hope controllable catastrophes to awaken us a little bit. Because I think that as long as possible people will simply not react. Is the same as, it's very interesting to read history of Europe the years before World War One. Everybody knew a big European war is in preparation. And they everybody was talking about it. But still when the war exploded was a mega shock. People knew it but didn't really believe in it. And I will not repeat my old lines here, just that this paradoxes of belief—how you can believe something without really believing in it and all that—are absolutely crucial for how things function today. We have today beliefs which are operative even if people explicitly do not believe in it. Like a Jewish friend of mine—and don't take this in any way in an anti-Semitic way I mean, he was making fun of himself as my friend—told me that—and I like this about Israel—you know that Israel is or Jews in Israel are probably the most atheist nation in the world. According to some statistics around even more percent of Jews in Israel don't believe. But as that friend told me, 'I don't believe there is... we Jews here don't believe in God but we nonetheless believe that God gave us the land of Israel,' you know and so on. You have all these paradoxes which are the stuff of ideology today. That's why when people accuse Trump of being a hypocrite and so on, that's not the point, that's how it functions today ideology. Sorry I don't have more time but I would love to go into it because it's again ecology is the big field of how capital can neutralize it. Or even for example, maybe I even mentioned it a year ago here. I was shocked two years ago I read I don't know in which magazine a report on Greenland and the title was 'The Greening of Greenland'. It's wonderful, it's so hot they can now first time in hundreds of years grow vegetables there and so on. And now with the melting of the North Pole, soon transport will be much cheaper, ships will bring all the bullshit mass produced directly from China to United States. You see it's a mega catastrophe, but you know they treat it like this. No, never underestimate the capacity of people not to take seriously, not to believe what they know in some sense that it's true. Do you think that my answer was so serious that now you don't dare to ask another frivolous question? No, frivolity is the only, is one of the important things. What is absolutely fake is to take things seriously—sorry, can I provide a little bit—in a wrong way. I recently, trigger warning as they say in politically correct times, another vulgarity from me but it's so important to get this lesson. You remember, if you are old enough, years ago, a little bit more, the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia. I met recently now a linguist who is now has a scholarship in Stanford, Damir Arsenijević, who is collecting jokes from Srebrenica. They are incredibly vulgar, but they told me it's not disrespect. It's that people are so still traumatized there, that the only way to survive is to make fun of it. Which again is not disrespect but is kind of a desperate admission it's still too traumatic to look it into the eye in a serious way. And the jokes are undescribably vulgar, that's why I cannot resist the temptation to tell you one. It's about a Bosnian couple, they are legendary stuff of jokes, Mujo and Fata. Mujo husband, Fata his wife. And they discover a grave in Srebrenica, many disfigured men's bodies. Because the parts which are not disfigured are only penises. So they collect just the penises and since they suspect that Mujo was also killed, they call Fata his wife to see if she recognizes Mujo's penis. Vulgarity, I know. But that's how real people deal with traumas. And then she takes one penis, 'No, this is not Mujo. No, this is not Mujo.' Then with another penis, 'This one is not even from Srebrenica,' you know. That's how my god this is how you deal with real traumas. The moment you say 'yes we suffer terribly in Srebrenica', I don't believe it. Because when you—you know it's like with small children. When I had a son I discovered this when he was small. If the child has a traumatic experience or falls down is hurt, the moment the child starts to cry means it's over. It's okay. Real trauma is you can just, you cannot even cry; crying is already a relief. In the same sense this dignified mourning means the worst is over. I even now answered the
is horrible to say because it's not in my nature in my tendency of my thinking—but maybe we would need some kind of a, at least let's hope controllable catastrophes to awaken us a little bit. Because I think that as long as possible people will simply not react. Is the same as, it's very interesting to read history of Europe the years before World War One. Everybody knew a big European war is in preparation. And they everybody was talking about it. But still when the war exploded was a mega shock. People knew it but didn't really believe in it. And I will not repeat my old lines here, just that this paradoxes of belief—how you can believe something without really believing in it and all that—are absolutely crucial for how things function today. We have today beliefs which are operative even if people explicitly do not believe in it. Like a Jewish friend of mine—and don't take this in any way in an anti-Semitic way I mean, he was making fun of himself as my friend—told me that—and I like this about Israel—you know that Israel is or Jews in Israel are probably the most atheist nation in the world. According to some statistics around even more percent of Jews in Israel don't believe. But as that friend told me, 'I don't believe there is... we Jews here don't believe in God but we nonetheless believe that God gave us the land of Israel,' you know and so on. You have all these paradoxes which are the stuff of ideology today. That's why when people accuse Trump of being a hypocrite and so on, that's not the point, that's how it functions today ideology. Sorry I don't have more time but I would love to go into it because it's again ecology is the big field of how capital can neutralize it. Or even for example, maybe I even mentioned it a year ago here. I was shocked two years ago I read I don't know in which magazine a report on Greenland and the title was 'The Greening of Greenland'. It's wonderful, it's so hot they can now first time in hundreds of years grow vegetables there and so on. And now with the melting of the North Pole, soon transport will be much cheaper, ships will bring all the bullshit mass produced directly from China to United States. You see it's a mega catastrophe, but you know they treat it like this. No, never underestimate the capacity of people not to take seriously, not to believe what they know in some sense that it's true. Do you think that my answer was so serious that now you don't dare to ask another frivolous question? No, frivolity is the only, is one of the important things. What is absolutely fake is to take things seriously—sorry, can I provide a little bit—in a wrong way. I recently, trigger warning as they say in politically correct times, another vulgarity from me but it's so important to get this lesson. You remember, if you are old enough, years ago, a little bit more, the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia. I met recently now a linguist who is now has a scholarship in Stanford, Damir Arsenijević, who is collecting jokes from Srebrenica. They are incredibly vulgar, but they told me it's not disrespect. It's that people are so still traumatized there, that the only way to survive is to make fun of it. Which again is not disrespect but is kind of a desperate admission it's still too traumatic to look it into the eye in a serious way. And the jokes are undescribably vulgar, that's why I cannot resist the temptation to tell you one. It's about a Bosnian couple, they are legendary stuff of jokes, Mujo and Fata. Mujo husband, Fata his wife. And they discover a grave in Srebrenica, many disfigured men's bodies. Because the parts which are not disfigured are only penises. So they collect just the penises and since they suspect that Mujo was also killed, they call Fata his wife to see if she recognizes Mujo's penis. Vulgarity, I know. But that's how real people deal with traumas. And then she takes one penis, 'No, this is not Mujo. No, this is not Mujo.' Then with another penis, 'This one is not even from Srebrenica,' you know. That's how my god this is how you deal with real traumas. The moment you say 'yes we suffer terribly in Srebrenica', I don't believe it. Because when you—you know it's like with small children. When I had a son I discovered this when he was small. If the child has a traumatic experience or falls down is hurt, the moment the child starts to cry means it's over. It's okay. Real trauma is you can just, you cannot even cry; crying is already a relief. In the same sense this dignified mourning means the worst is over. I even now answered the
unknown
question which I wasn't asked so... Please. Hi. Um,
question which I wasn't asked so... Please. Hi. Um,
Slavoj Žižek
you mentioned before
you mentioned before
unknown
how black humor brought relief
how black humor brought relief
Slavoj Žižek
to real trauma, like the provision of humor could, um, well that brought to mind the fact that in this country right now there's like a great controversy because they're criminalizing those forms of expression, um, like black humor on Twitter about tragedy or terrorism or fascism in Spain. And how do you think criminalizing black humor and those forms of relief affects the way our relationship with tragedy and terrorism and... It's a very good question and let me avoid a misunderstanding. I don't simply say let's just make fun of it all, Holocaust and... No, no, no. I would—my first gesture would have been—that we have humor and humor. I'm well aware that there, okay I'll put it like this. I violently disagree with the thesis of Umberto Eco's *Name of the Rose*, that humor is the subversive force and so on. Every brutal totalitarian regime has its own internal humor making fun of the poor or its victims. That's the cynicism of power. We have this type of humor. And for example I read forgot where but a wonderful analysis of the change of humor in Soviet Union in late twenties. Bolsheviks have a certain type of humor. Then with Stalinism, humor totally changed. There still were jokes, but they were extremely brutal arrogant jokes even publicly. Privately they mostly made fun of those who took their own ideology seriously, making... and so on and so on. So it's not just that I am against dignity, for example one of my traumatic experiences in the last years under socialism, when things were opening and so on, was that one of the strategies of those in power was to try to ruin dissident meetings—because they could not prohibit them any longer—through vulgar humor. I remember it was very traumatic one meeting when somebody, an old lady, was reporting on her experience in jail, in a very dignified way and so on. And there was obviously a police provocateur there and he didn't do it at the level of fact like 'ooh you are criticizing our social...', no. He was doing like 'boom boom are you not satisfied that they didn't rape you enough there' and so on, you know total and say this vulgar total vulgarity and so on. So they're absolutely humor is ambiguous. So that's why I disagree again with Umberto Eco, no you also have absolutely crucial the arrogant humor of those in power to be confronted by other types of humor. But the problem with—again the problem with political correctness is what. Let's say you prohibit certain political or racial sexual jokes. Okay there should be limits, I am a feminist and so on. I'm just saying that prohibiting it, I wonder how it really works. Maybe it pushes it underground. For me this politically correct attitude of eternally feeling guilt, you know, my god I use that expression, wasn't I already racist or sexist there and so on and so on. My ideal society would be the one in which you can use all the dirty words, dirty jokes, even apparently racist jokes, but they simply on the basis of friendship and respect wouldn't function in a racist way. Like that's how I deal with my friends. And the most wonderful experience that I had was: my son had a black friend when he was young in elementary school, a black boy, and I was very proud of this was his best friend. His mother came, I don't know why, from Cuba to Slovenia and and we were really friends. And I always make towards him, even now because I met him now at the graduation ceremony, he told me he remembers this extremely bad taste remarks, you know like once in the first second year, you know this elementary mathematics where, you know, you take two apples, you cut them each into six pieces, then you take three pieces back, double the amount you add, how much you get at the end. And he had some trouble this black boy. I couldn't resist extremely bad taste humor and I said, 'Maybe you are using bad example for this guy. Give him rather the example of one eight is playing with one banana which is cut into two.' And he loved this so much that now comes the beauty, sorry I'm not lost. Once I was... he came to play with my son and I was just in a very bad mood. So I encountered him, I went to open the door, and very friendly I just greeted him in a friendly way. He looked at me worried and went. And then two minutes later my son came to me and said 'What's wrong, why didn't you insult my friend? Are you mad at him? He is very worried about you,' and so on, you know. That's friendship is always—not always, there are people and I respect this, it's not just we all start insulting each other—but there is a certain type of very authentic friendship which precisely as a confirmation of this friendship includes obscenities and so on. And the logic is very beautiful. The underlying logic is a kind of implicit negation. It's 'we are such good friends that we can afford even this and we know that it will not hurt us.' But nonetheless again, I think we
to real trauma, like the provision of humor could, um, well that brought to mind the fact that in this country right now there's like a great controversy because they're criminalizing those forms of expression, um, like black humor on Twitter about tragedy or terrorism or fascism in Spain. And how do you think criminalizing black humor and those forms of relief affects the way our relationship with tragedy and terrorism and... It's a very good question and let me avoid a misunderstanding. I don't simply say let's just make fun of it all, Holocaust and... No, no, no. I would—my first gesture would have been—that we have humor and humor. I'm well aware that there, okay I'll put it like this. I violently disagree with the thesis of Umberto Eco's *Name of the Rose*, that humor is the subversive force and so on. Every brutal totalitarian regime has its own internal humor making fun of the poor or its victims. That's the cynicism of power. We have this type of humor. And for example I read forgot where but a wonderful analysis of the change of humor in Soviet Union in late twenties. Bolsheviks have a certain type of humor. Then with Stalinism, humor totally changed. There still were jokes, but they were extremely brutal arrogant jokes even publicly. Privately they mostly made fun of those who took their own ideology seriously, making... and so on and so on. So it's not just that I am against dignity, for example one of my traumatic experiences in the last years under socialism, when things were opening and so on, was that one of the strategies of those in power was to try to ruin dissident meetings—because they could not prohibit them any longer—through vulgar humor. I remember it was very traumatic one meeting when somebody, an old lady, was reporting on her experience in jail, in a very dignified way and so on. And there was obviously a police provocateur there and he didn't do it at the level of fact like 'ooh you are criticizing our social...', no. He was doing like 'boom boom are you not satisfied that they didn't rape you enough there' and so on, you know total and say this vulgar total vulgarity and so on. So they're absolutely humor is ambiguous. So that's why I disagree again with Umberto Eco, no you also have absolutely crucial the arrogant humor of those in power to be confronted by other types of humor. But the problem with—again the problem with political correctness is what. Let's say you prohibit certain political or racial sexual jokes. Okay there should be limits, I am a feminist and so on. I'm just saying that prohibiting it, I wonder how it really works. Maybe it pushes it underground. For me this politically correct attitude of eternally feeling guilt, you know, my god I use that expression, wasn't I already racist or sexist there and so on and so on. My ideal society would be the one in which you can use all the dirty words, dirty jokes, even apparently racist jokes, but they simply on the basis of friendship and respect wouldn't function in a racist way. Like that's how I deal with my friends. And the most wonderful experience that I had was: my son had a black friend when he was young in elementary school, a black boy, and I was very proud of this was his best friend. His mother came, I don't know why, from Cuba to Slovenia and and we were really friends. And I always make towards him, even now because I met him now at the graduation ceremony, he told me he remembers this extremely bad taste remarks, you know like once in the first second year, you know this elementary mathematics where, you know, you take two apples, you cut them each into six pieces, then you take three pieces back, double the amount you add, how much you get at the end. And he had some trouble this black boy. I couldn't resist extremely bad taste humor and I said, 'Maybe you are using bad example for this guy. Give him rather the example of one eight is playing with one banana which is cut into two.' And he loved this so much that now comes the beauty, sorry I'm not lost. Once I was... he came to play with my son and I was just in a very bad mood. So I encountered him, I went to open the door, and very friendly I just greeted him in a friendly way. He looked at me worried and went. And then two minutes later my son came to me and said 'What's wrong, why didn't you insult my friend? Are you mad at him? He is very worried about you,' and so on, you know. That's friendship is always—not always, there are people and I respect this, it's not just we all start insulting each other—but there is a certain type of very authentic friendship which precisely as a confirmation of this friendship includes obscenities and so on. And the logic is very beautiful. The underlying logic is a kind of implicit negation. It's 'we are such good friends that we can afford even this and we know that it will not hurt us.' But nonetheless again, I think we
unknown
should be pragmatic here, I'm not
should be pragmatic here, I'm not
Slavoj Žižek
naive.
naive.
unknown
I'm not saying let's just allow everything because you know racism can get very brutal here and that's the problem. The problem is that although in a concrete situation you can always see very
I'm not saying let's just allow everything because you know racism can get very brutal here and that's the problem. The problem is that although in a concrete situation you can always see very
Slavoj Žižek
well: is this humor brutal racism or is just a much more gentle irony and so on? But it's very difficult to formalize it. This is allowed, this is not allowed and so on and so on. No it's, we have to be pragmatic here. I don't just believe in the efficiency of simple prohibitions because you know what's the problem? In the United States you can see this. The politically correct left got so moralized in this prohibition that the populist vulgar alt-right is almost monopolizing now all this area of innuendos irony and so on and so on. It's a very complex situation. You see *muy complejo*. Bueno lo tenemos que dejar aquí. Muchísimas gracias a todos por venir. Sí quería pedir un aplauso para Slavoj por su generosidad. Thank you very much, thank you. I am really glad to be here for very racist reasons for you. When first as a child I heard about Spain I thought—now this will be a very strange remark from you—I thought, oh, a Latin country, dirty and so on. And then at least in Madrid and Barcelona I was surprised how you really seem to join the best of both worlds, at least the Latin liveliness but at the same time cities are efficient, clear, much more efficient and clear than some middle and north European cities I can tell you. And you know we all, we want to cheat, we want to have a cake and eat it. We want a city which is lively and so on but at the same time clean, efficient. And you are not doing so bad here. I'm
well: is this humor brutal racism or is just a much more gentle irony and so on? But it's very difficult to formalize it. This is allowed, this is not allowed and so on and so on. No it's, we have to be pragmatic here. I don't just believe in the efficiency of simple prohibitions because you know what's the problem? In the United States you can see this. The politically correct left got so moralized in this prohibition that the populist vulgar alt-right is almost monopolizing now all this area of innuendos irony and so on and so on. It's a very complex situation. You see *muy complejo*. Bueno lo tenemos que dejar aquí. Muchísimas gracias a todos por venir. Sí quería pedir un aplauso para Slavoj por su generosidad. Thank you very much, thank you. I am really glad to be here for very racist reasons for you. When first as a child I heard about Spain I thought—now this will be a very strange remark from you—I thought, oh, a Latin country, dirty and so on. And then at least in Madrid and Barcelona I was surprised how you really seem to join the best of both worlds, at least the Latin liveliness but at the same time cities are efficient, clear, much more efficient and clear than some middle and north European cities I can tell you. And you know we all, we want to cheat, we want to have a cake and eat it. We want a city which is lively and so on but at the same time clean, efficient. And you are not doing so bad here. I'm
unknown
glad.
glad.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you.
Thank you.