Lubitsch in Times of Political Correctness
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-01-27 · 1:50:16 · 12,707 words
cinema-art-cultureideologysexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctnesscommunism-socialismhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisfascism-populismeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a lecture at a Lubitsch symposium in Berlin, arguing that Ernst Lubitsch's cinematic indirectness offers a model for a renewed left politics capable of countering both right-wing populism and liberal political correctness. He develops the claim that perversion is the hidden obverse of power and every law needs its transgression, reading Hollywood's Hays Code ideology through this lens. The talk moves through analyses of Me Too and sexual contracts, Stalinist 'objective humor', hardcore pornography's gaze, and drug culture, before proposing Lubitsch, in the spirit of Lenin's semi-humorous Central Control Commission, as the ideal ironist for a radical left today. The Q&A extends into ideology, totalitarian belief, Yugoslavian humor, and the nature of laughter under power.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's term for the pressure exerted on the left to suspend its critique of liberal mainstream in order to unite against a common fascist threat ('now is not the time'), which he regards as a trap.
Žižek coins 'axis of evil' to name the bloc of new Eastern European nationalist states (Baltic countries, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia) threatening to engulf all of Europe.
as “sexual contract”
Žižek uses 'sexual contract' to name the emerging legal-consensual framework for sex (specifying acts, consent at each stage), which he argues reproduces conservative assumptions and privileges casual sex while generating new forms of violence.
Žižek invokes the Lacanian motif 'Kant with Sade' to argue that contractual sexual consent taken to its extreme (consented sado-masochism, slave trade) realizes the paradox where market freedom of contract negates itself.
Following Hegel, Žižek uses 'objective humor' or 'objective comedy' to denote the mad inversions inscribed in social reality itself (Stalinism, precarious 'freedom'), distinct from subjective joke-telling.
as “perversion as hidden obverse of power”
Žižek's claim that every power structure requires perversion as its inherent transgression, the illicit supplement that sustains the official law rather than subverting it.
as “big Other”
Implicitly operative in Žižek's analysis of Hollywood ideology: the Hays Code addresses spectators as if they were observed by a moral agency (the big Other) for whom the explicit level is what happened, while the implicit level satisfies the spectator.
as “jouissance / excessive enjoyment”
Žižek draws on the Lacanian concept of jouissance to explain the basic formations of elementary excessive enjoyment that must remain unspoken in sexuality.
as “samtoms (symptoms)”
Žižek invokes Lacan's term (sinthome/symptom) for the basic formations of elementary excessive enjoyment that must remain unspoken, the constitutive details that organize sexuality and cannot be made explicit without destroying the erotic.
Žižek articulates a Lubitschian/Freudian principle: the truly repressed is not hidden behind the mask but is inscribed in the very form of the concealment, what you reveal in trying to hide something.
as “constitutive alienation”
For Žižek, Lubitsch's universe embodies a 'constitutive alienation' whereby a couple in sexual or romantic interplay is never alone, love is necessarily mediated through the gaze of a third party.
as “Lubitsch touch”
Žižek uses 'Lubitsch touch' to name the mode of comic indirectness, eroticizing the form of concealment itself rather than hinting at what lies behind it, which he proposes as a political-aesthetic model for the left.
Žižek argues that hardcore pornography does not objectify women but imposes a 'false and forced subjectivization', compelling women to perform and display enjoyment for a male witness-gaze, which is more humiliating than simple objectification.
Žižek uses this phrase to name how drugs supplement the decline of collective political excitement by providing private artificial stimulation, effectively killing public life while artificially exciting the intimate sphere.
Žižek quotes Lenin's phrase for the mode of operation of an ideal oversight body, cunning, ironic, using humor to expose what is ridiculous or harmful in the ruling apparatus, which Žižek links to the Lubitsch spirit.
Stories he reaches for 6
In the working-class comedy Brassed Off, a man walks a woman home; she invites him up for coffee; he says he doesn't drink coffee; she says she hasn't got any. Žižek reads this exchange as a perfect Lubitsch-style eroticization of the form of dialogue itself, the nonsense IS the erotic invitation.
“"Do you want to come up for a coffee?" "I don't drink coffee." "I haven't got any." That's it.”
In Casablanca, when Bergman visits Bogart's office and they embrace, a fade-out to the airport tower follows; afterwards Bogart smokes a cigarette. Žižek (following Maltby) shows Hollywood ideology addresses the spectator at two levels simultaneously, both that they did it and that they didn't, providing a moral mask while satisfying desire.
“It is as if Hollywood addresses you, the spectator, as a normal hypocrite... 'I will tell you exactly what is happening but I will provide a mask'”
Sister Maria returns to the convent troubled by desire for Captain von Trapp; the Reverend Mother tells her the convent is no place to escape and sends her back to seduce him, then elaborates this in the song 'Climb Every Mountain', which Žižek reads as directly obscene sexual instruction.
“The beginning tells it all: 'Climb Every Mountain'. That's absolutely incredible.”
In the Yugoslav army in 1975, one class taught the Geneva Convention rule against shooting parachutists before they land; the next class by the same officer taught exactly how to shoot parachutists. A soldier who asked about the contradiction was told he was 'completely stupid'.
“next class was about a gun... the topic of that day was, of course, how to shoot a parachutist: how you measure the strength of the wind”
Žižek's hotel room in Skopje had ashtrays with a 'no-smoking' image painted on the bottom, alongside an empty ashtray on the bedside table, openly combining prohibition and permission with no sense of contradiction, which Žižek takes as the best metaphor for contemporary ideology.
“on the bottom of this ashtray, there was an image painted, the standard 'smoking is prohibited' image.”
Žižek describes a 'canonical shot' in hardcore pornography where the woman's face is visible looking directly into the camera between the man's legs as he penetrates her from behind. He reads this as forced subjectivization: the spectator identifies not with the man but as a pure witness, seeking proof of the woman's enjoyment.
“She is looking into the camera directly and playing... full pleasure... It's a false and forced subjectivization.”
Works invoked 21
Capital book
Referenced in the anecdote about the Slovenian communist General Secretary who said to read 'both books' of Capital (there are three volumes), used to illustrate ideological cynicism in Yugoslav communism.
Ninotchka film
Discussed with some ambivalence, Žižek notes it can be read as simple anti-Soviet propaganda but insists 'it's not as simple as that'; Bela Lugosi's commissar is imagined in Žižek's thought experiment.
Brassed Off film
Modest British working-class comedy cited for the 'coffee' dialogue as a perfect contemporary example of the Lubitsch touch, eroticizing the form of dialogue rather than hinting at content.
Recommended by Robert Faller as one of Žižek's earlier works that extensively develops the motifs alluded to in later texts.
Casablanca film
Used to illustrate Hollywood's double-level Hays Code ideology: the famous fade-out scene simultaneously signals that the couple had sex and that they didn't, addressing the spectator as a 'normal hypocrite.'
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin's anti-Nazi comedy mentioned alongside To Be or Not to Be as having been criticized for making comedy of Nazi horrors; Žižek defends both as appropriate responses to horror beyond tragedy.
Mein Kampf book
Žižek says he 'fought his way through this horrible book'; read it to determine whether Hitler believed what he was saying, conclusion: yes and no, simultaneously playing his cards openly and falling into his own game.
The Sound of Music film
Described as 'the greatest movie of all times, popular even in North Korea' (ironic); Žižek reads 'Climb Every Mountain' as directly obscenely sexual instruction, using it to illustrate how ideology encodes its transgression in plain sight.
To Be or Not to Be film
Lubitsch's anti-Nazi comedy cited as exemplifying 'Erhard' (the comedy of mad inversions) and as part of the broader argument about comedy and historical horror; Žižek defends it against charges of trivializing Nazism.
Trouble in Paradise film
Called Lubitsch's masterpiece (at least for Žižek); analyzed for the ambiguity between cynical wisdom (don't dream beyond small transgressions) and a genuinely radical rage in Gaston's explosion about class exploitation.
Žižek's own documentary; mentioned in connection with the planned (but legally blocked) 'Climb Every Young Boy' priest sketch parodying The Sound of Music.
The Name of the Rose book
Called 'more theoretically wrong' than any other book for its thesis that power is horrified by laughter; Žižek argues laughter is intrinsically ambiguous and every totalitarian regime has its own inner jokes.
Quoted for Hegel's principle in the Introduction: if something does not fit its measure, you must change the measure, applied by Žižek to the Lubitsch/Lenin problem.
Hašek's novel compared to Lubitsch as an apparent benevolent cynical humanism that conceals a radical underside (Hašek was a Bolshevik commissar); the Švejk episode of shouting 'Don't shoot, there are people here' read as a Leninist moment.
Žižek says he doesn't like it (Robert Faller does) but concedes one episode (Miranda's dirty-talk affair ending in the asshole disclosure) correctly illustrates the logic of the symptom, what must remain unspoken in sexuality.
Heaven Can Wait film
Žižek agrees with James Harvey that he dislikes it; reads the Devil as embodying only cynical liberal wisdom (tolerance of small sins, no fanaticism) rather than anything more radical, the most conservative reading of Lubitsch.
Mentioned in connection with the theme of constitutive alienation, anonymous correspondents who discover they know each other, and compared to the real-life Sarajevo married couple story.
The Broken Lullaby film
Called 'one of the most obscene films I can imagine'; Žižek uses it to illustrate 'constitutive alienation', love necessarily mediated through the gaze of a third party (the dead soldier's parents).
Cluny Brown film
Cited (with credit to Alenka Zupančič) for a plumbing speech with clear revolutionary political implication: 'sometimes you should just break all down', evidence that Lubitsch harbors a more radical political stance beneath his apparent cynicism.
An Hour with You film
The opening scene, two strangers in a taxi who joke about being mistaken for a bored married couple, used to illustrate how love in Lubitsch arises from misunderstanding and the other's gaze.
Žižek's own German book recommended by Robert Faller as an entry point to Žižek's thought, alongside The Sublime Object of Ideology.
People invoked 33
Catherine Deneuve negative
Žižek explicitly opposes the Deneuve position (that Me Too went too far, a middle-of-the-road defense of flirtation), arguing his position is to go much more extreme, not to defend the liberal middle ground.
Émile Durkheim positive
Cited by Robert Faller (not directly by Žižek) for the distinction between positive cults (rituals of engagement) and negative cults (rituals of avoidance), used to frame American vs. French feminist responses to Me Too.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Present at the symposium; credited with pointing out the politically subversive plumbing speech in Cluny Brown, and with providing the Bosnian sociolinguist's data on Srebrenica jokes.
Umberto Eco negative
Žižek calls The Name of the Rose 'more theoretically wrong' than any other book for its thesis that power is horrified by laughter, Žižek argues every totalitarian regime has its own inner jokes and uses humor to sustain itself.
Susan Sarandon positive
Praised as 'one of the few who is the real left' for writing a 'wonderful reply' to Me Too that criticized not its radicality but how its pseudo-radicality fails to raise the true questions.
Aaron Schuster positive
Present at the symposium; cited for analysis of To Be or Not to Be and the couple of thieves in Trouble in Paradise.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek cites Lenin's late letters praising politeness and manners as criticism of Stalin, and quotes Lenin's proposal that the Central Control Commission should use 'semi-humorous tricks', which Žižek links to the Lubitsch spirit. Acknowledges Lenin's authoritarianism but finds radical resource in his late thought.
Charlie Chaplin positive
Mentioned alongside Lubitsch as having been criticized for making comedy out of Nazi horrors (The Great Dictator); Žižek defends both against the charge of trivializing atrocity.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for his inversion of Croce's question about Hegel, asking not what Hegel means to us but what we are in Hegel's eyes, which Žižek applies structurally to Lubitsch.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the concept of samtoms/symptoms (basic formations of elementary enjoyment that must remain unspoken), and implicitly through the analysis of the gaze, perversion, and the big Other.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited (though Žižek says 'I am not a Deleuzian') for the correct insight that any politics based on unique subjective experience ('nobody can understand how I feel') is catastrophic for political organization.
Benedetto Croce negative
Mentioned only as the source of the patronizing question 'what is dead and what is alive in Hegel's philosophy' which Adorno (and Žižek) inverts.
Moderator of the event, present throughout; Žižek notes a friendly disagreement over Sex and the City (Faller likes it, Žižek doesn't), and engages with his Hell joke and his Durkheim framing of Me Too.
Judith Butler negative
Mentioned satirically: neoliberal media use Butler's language of performative self-reinvention to tell precarious workers their instability is a new freedom ('you can deconstruct, reconstruct yourself').
Donald Trump negative
Described as 'a filthy opportunist, vulgar' who will win again; also cited as an instance of the same objective humor as Stalinist politics.
Mike Pence negative
Described as 'the true danger', a true fundamentalist madman worse than Trump, at the opening of the talk.
Jaroslav Hašek positive
Author of The Good Soldier Švejk; Žižek uses his biography (Bolshevik commissar in Siberia) to suggest that the apparently benevolent cynical humanism of Švejk has a radical political underside, analogous to what Žižek hopes to find in Lubitsch.
Emmanuel Macron negative
Named as the kind of liberal figure the left is pressured to 'unite behind' through liberal blackmail, which Žižek rejects.
Laurent de Sutter positive
French theorist cited for demonstrating that chemistry/pharmacology is becoming constitutive of our emotional lives, used to develop Žižek's argument about drugs performing euthanasia of public life.
Wolf Biermann positive
German poet/dissident whom Žižek met in Berlin; recounted the anecdote of neo-Nazi ecologists defending Hitler for building highways while praising his anti-Semitism, used to illustrate ideological inversion.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Cited approvingly for pointing out that the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts for extreme sado-masochism, used to support Žižek's claim that political correctness and violence are two sides of the same coin.
Referenced as the actor who plays a Soviet commissar in Ninotchka; imagined as the ideal face for the commissar in Žižek's thought experiment about Lubitsch facing the KGB.
Mladen Dolar positive
Present at the symposium; credited with drawing Žižek's attention to the ambiguity of humor in Eco's Name of the Rose argument.
Billy Wilder positive
Mentioned alongside Lubitsch as a filmmaker who is not a cynic, 'well aware that humor as such is ambiguous.'
Ernst Lubitsch positive
The central subject of the talk; Žižek celebrates Lubitsch's comic indirectness as a philosophical and political model, proposes him as the ideal head of a Leninist Central Control Commission, and reads him as embodying a mode of eroticizing form itself rather than transgressing behind the mask.
James Harvey positive
Present at the symposium; praised for talks on Lubitsch; cited for pointing out ambiguity in Trouble in Paradise and The Shop Around the Corner, and for speaking about respect for ordinary people.
Cited by an audience member (not by Žižek directly) as a Soviet intellectual whose diary noted that pessimism and doubt were prohibited under Stalinism.
Richard Maltby positive
Cited for his analysis demonstrating that the Casablanca scene simultaneously gives signals that the couple did and did not have sex, establishing Hollywood's double ideological address.
Joseph Stalin negative
Žižek cites Stalin as the paradigmatic case of objective humor, the comical reversal of emancipatory hopes into terrorist purges, and notes Lenin's attacks on Stalin were entirely about manners and rudeness, not political line.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the consistent emphasis (shared with Lacan) that perversion is not subversive but the hidden support of power, and invoked against the Me Too elevation of feelings as ultimate criterion, which Žižek says negates Freudian psychoanalysis.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the concept of 'objective humor' (Stalinism as objective comedy), for the methodological move of asking what we are in Hegel's eyes (via Adorno), and for the principle that when something doesn't fit its measure, one must change the measure, which Žižek applies to Lenin vs. Lubitsch.
Immanuel Kant positive
Invoked via the 'Kant with Sade' motif, the idea that contractual sexual consent taken to its extreme (consented slavery) realizes Kant's categorical imperative in unexpected Sadean form.
Max Weber positive
Cited by Robert Faller for the translatability of religious positions into secular matters, used to explain Protestant vs. Latin-Catholic attitudes underlying the Me Too debate.
What it argues
the Lubitsch touch as political and erotic modelperversion as the hidden obverse of power and lawpolitical correctness and Me Too as insufficiently radicalobjective humor and comedy as response to historical horrorideology as both explicit prohibition and its codified transgressionthe left's need to reclaim irony and politeness from the rightLenin's semi-humorous tricks and the ironist as political figure
Dialectical moves 10
“The question should not be: what does Lubitsch mean to us in our postmodern times? But: how would our contemporary situation appear in the eyes of Lubitsch?”
Reversal of the standard historicizing question (what does X mean to us?) into a defamiliarizing one (what are we in X's eyes?), following Adorno's inversion of Croce on Hegel.
“The rise of political correctness and the rise of violence are two sides of the same coin.”
What appears to be the liberal-feminist corrective to sexual violence is revealed as generating its own mirror violence through the logic of the contract.
“Perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power. Every power needs perversion as its inherent transgression that sustains it.”
The apparent transgression of the law is not its outside but its inside, the secret support that makes the law function.
“In hardcore pornography, men are objectified. It's woman who has to look into the camera—not objectivization but a false and forced subjectivization.”
The apparent objectification of women in pornography is revealed as its opposite: the man is the faceless machine, while the woman is compelled into a coerced performance of subjectivity.
“The very form of sexual contract automatically privileges casual sex—you will not sign with your permanent partner every morning a contract.”
What presents itself as a neutral legal safeguard turns out to encode a specific and partial conception of sexuality.
“Slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom—market freedom of contract negates itself.”
Taking contractual consent to its logical extreme (consented slavery, consented killing) reveals freedom consuming itself.
“If Lubitsch as head of this Control Commission would have been unacceptable for Lenin, then we need to change not Lubitsch but Lenin.”
When a radical figure cannot fit the revolutionary measure, it is the measure, not the figure, that must be revised, a Hegelian move.
“The truly repressed for Lubitsch inscribed itself into the very process of repression. In the very form of indirectness, the true secret is implied.”
The Freudian/Lubitschian inversion: what is hidden is not behind the veil but in the structure of the veiling itself.
“What was for Lubitsch still a joke is now simply enacted in real political and ideological life.”
The satirical register has collapsed into reality, the joke has migrated into the literal, making Lubitsch-style comedy both more necessary and harder to sustain.
“The ruling elite was extremely afraid of people who took the existing ideology seriously—they were already a first step towards dissidence.”
In Yugoslavia, sincere belief in official ideology was more threatening to the system than cynicism, the system depended on disavowed non-belief.
Claims 16
asserts
There can be no renewal of the left without a Lubitsch touch—the left must reclaim irony, indirectness, and humor from the right.left politics and Lubitsch's aesthetic model
asserts
Perversion is not subversive but is the hidden obverse of power—every power needs perversion as its inherent transgression that sustains it.perversion and power
asserts
The ideology of political correctness and its restriction of sexuality to contractual consent unavoidably culminates in contracts for extreme sado-masochism, making slave trade the ultimate assertion of freedom—the rise of political correctness and the rise of violence are two sides of the same coin.political correctness and sexuality
rejects
Me Too is not radical enough—it focuses on relatively privileged women, does not address structural causes, and reproduces conservative and legalistic frameworks rather than addressing millions of daily victims.the Me Too movement
asserts
Feminist sexual liberation is not puritanical withdrawal from objectification but the right of women to actively play with self-objectivization—offering themselves and withdrawing at will as agents.feminism and sexual objectification
asserts
The ideology of Hollywood under the Hays Code is not simple hypocrisy but a fully elaborated double address—providing the explicit level (nothing happened) and the implicit level (they did it) simultaneously, sustaining both for the spectator.Hollywood ideology and the Hays Code
asserts
Lubitsch's indirectness is fundamentally different from Hays Code perversion—he eroticizes the form of concealment itself (the door) rather than using it to hint at what lies behind.Lubitsch versus Hollywood ideology
asserts
Tragedy is inappropriate for victims of extreme historical atrocity (Auschwitz, Gulag) because such victims were so thoroughly deprived of dignity that only a mode of objective comedy—not one that makes you laugh—can reflect their situation.comedy, tragedy, and historical horror
rejects
The criterion of feelings ('what matters is how we feel it') as the ultimate measure in Me Too debates embeds old Cartesian anti-feminist prejudice and negates Freudian psychoanalysis.feelings as political criterion in Me Too
asserts
If Lubitsch as head of a Leninist Central Control Commission would be unacceptable, we need to change not Lubitsch but Lenin—the ironist with manners is what the left needs at its top today.radical left politics and Lubitsch
reframes
The right question about Lubitsch (as about Hegel) is not what Lubitsch means to us today but how our contemporary situation would appear in Lubitsch's eyes.the actuality of Lubitsch / Adorno's reversal of Croce
rejects
Politics based on unique subjective experience ('I am a lesbian single mother with AIDS, nobody can understand how I feel') is catastrophic for politics because it is indistinguishable from the structure of white racist victimhood.identity politics and unique experience
reframes
Male domination is not true authority but a bribe—the system bribes lower-level men by giving them someone to oppress, and men must be convinced that terrorizing women is a symptom of their own social impotence.patriarchy and male domination
reframes
In totalitarian regimes, the question 'do they really believe it?' is too simple—leaders simultaneously played their cynical cards and fell into their own game, embodying a complex neither/nor of belief and cynicism.ideology and belief in totalitarian regimes
rejects
Laughter is not inherently subversive—every totalitarian regime has its own inner jokes, and power can instrumentalize humor to pacify populations and disrupt dissent.the subversive power of laughter (contra Eco's The Name of the Rose)
reframes
In hardcore pornography, women are not objectified but subjected to a false and forced subjectivization—compelled to display enjoyment for a witness-gaze—which is more humiliating than objectification.pornography, gender, and the gaze
Quotes 14
“There is no renewal of the left without a Lubitsch touch.”Slavoj Žižek · Lubitsch touch as political necessity for the left
“The rise of political correctness and the rise of violence are two sides of the same coin.”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness and violence as co-produced
“Slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · contractual consent self-negating into slavery
“"Do you want to come up for a coffee?" "I don't drink coffee." "I haven't got any." That's it.”Slavoj Žižek · Lubitsch touch / eroticization of form
“Perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power. Every power needs perversion as its inherent transgression that sustains it.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion sustains rather than subverts power
“What is even the best anti-Stalinist joke compared to the joke that is Stalinist politics itself?”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist politics as objective humor (paraphrase of Brecht)
“I cannot imagine a more anti-feminist prejudice. You know what's the implication of this line of argumentation? It's the old Cartesian anti-feminism.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of 'what matters is how we feel it' in Me Too
“It's not objectivization but a false and forced subjectivization. Which is why it's totally wrong to claim that as a spectator of hardcore pornography, you identify with the man.”Slavoj Žižek · pornography as forced subjectivization not objectification
“Drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitation of private life.”Slavoj Žižek · drugs as killing public political life while stimulating private experience
“If Lubitsch as head of this Control Commission would have been unacceptable for Lenin, then we need to change not Lubitsch but Lenin.”Slavoj Žižek · ironist as the true revolutionary measure
“The ruling elite was extremely afraid of people who took the existing ideology seriously. They were already for them a first step towards dissidence.”Slavoj Žižek · sincere ideological belief as dissident threat in Yugoslavia
“The truly repressed for Lubitsch inscribed itself into the very process of repression. In the very form of indirectness the true secret is implied there.”Slavoj Žižek · repression inscribed in the form of repression itself
“Today Lubitsch, can you imagine with this ironic Leninist way, semi-humorous tricks, how Lubitsch would have discarded, ruined, false liberals, conservatives, and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · Lubitsch as the weapon the left needs today
“Any politics based on unique like, 'No, I am a lesbian single mother with AIDS, nobody can even understand how I feel,' this is catastrophe for me.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of identity politics based on unique experience
Transcript 67 turns
Slavoj Žižek
About this stupid liberal left politics and Trump will win again, or even worse, somebody like Mike Pence, who is the true danger. He is a true fundamentalist madman. Trump is a filthy opportunist, vulgar, and so on. He will win. So, I think the situation is extremely serious, and everything depends on our—the left's—ability not to be just fascinated by this new fascist spectrum, but to question also the liberal mainstream to which this new fascism is a reply. If we don’t do this, if we succumb to the liberal blackmail—"now is not the time for this, let’s all unite behind Macron" and I don’t know whom and so on and so on—we are finished. I mean, all Europe will become like this new—I call it—axis of evil from Baltic countries through Poland, Czech, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and so on. All these new nationalist countries and so on and so on, with the—with many on the left helping them. But this was just an introduction. Robert, come up,
About this stupid liberal left politics and Trump will win again, or even worse, somebody like Mike Pence, who is the true danger. He is a true fundamentalist madman. Trump is a filthy opportunist, vulgar, and so on. He will win. So, I think the situation is extremely serious, and everything depends on our—the left's—ability not to be just fascinated by this new fascist spectrum, but to question also the liberal mainstream to which this new fascism is a reply. If we don’t do this, if we succumb to the liberal blackmail—"now is not the time for this, let’s all unite behind Macron" and I don’t know whom and so on and so on—we are finished. I mean, all Europe will become like this new—I call it—axis of evil from Baltic countries through Poland, Czech, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and so on. All these new nationalist countries and so on and so on, with the—with many on the left helping them. But this was just an introduction. Robert, come up,
unknown
introduce me. Enough. Hello, good evening. My name is Robert Faller. Welcome. I think it would be good if we wait like five more minutes because I've seen that there is a lot of people still queuing up outside and maybe we can grant them a few minutes to—to get in if that's okay with you? Or—
introduce me. Enough. Hello, good evening. My name is Robert Faller. Welcome. I think it would be good if we wait like five more minutes because I've seen that there is a lot of people still queuing up outside and maybe we can grant them a few minutes to—to get in if that's okay with you? Or—
Slavoj Žižek
I think it’s—okay, let it be, you are the boss. But I like to begin when people are still coming because I am at war with you. And if people are still coming, they feel guilty as if they are late, and in this way I gain a point, you know. Okay, yes.
I think it’s—okay, let it be, you are the boss. But I like to begin when people are still coming because I am at war with you. And if people are still coming, they feel guilty as if they are late, and in this way I gain a point, you know. Okay, yes.
unknown
So let's pretend as if we had already started and— No, no, it's not
So let's pretend as if we had already started and— No, no, it's not
Slavoj Žižek
a problem. But then, you know, don't catch me if I am one or two minutes longer, you know. Okay, no problem. You know what I was—okay, to fill this minute. You know, that—I think James Harvey, our dear colleague, mentioned this, that joke about: did you—the astronaut: did you meet God? Yes. But she is black and so on.
a problem. But then, you know, don't catch me if I am one or two minutes longer, you know. Okay, no problem. You know what I was—okay, to fill this minute. You know, that—I think James Harvey, our dear colleague, mentioned this, that joke about: did you—the astronaut: did you meet God? Yes. But she is black and so on.
unknown
I am tempted to say
I am tempted to say
Slavoj Žižek
that at some level, the only way to effectively fight racism is to counter-attack with this kind of jokes which may even appear racist but really undermine it from within. That the—one of the saddest things today is that in United States at least, the alt-right took over irony, obscenity and so on, and the left is caught in this crazy puritanism. And my position here is not the Catherine Deneuve position. I totally oppose her. Are you the Stasi agent who is bringing poison or what? No. Catherine de
that at some level, the only way to effectively fight racism is to counter-attack with this kind of jokes which may even appear racist but really undermine it from within. That the—one of the saddest things today is that in United States at least, the alt-right took over irony, obscenity and so on, and the left is caught in this crazy puritanism. And my position here is not the Catherine Deneuve position. I totally oppose her. Are you the Stasi agent who is bringing poison or what? No. Catherine de
unknown
Meuve. You know, if you want
Meuve. You know, if you want
Slavoj Žižek
an excellent analysis, I'm proud to—I haven't met her, but to have her on my side, you know that in Guardian and probably somewhere in the United States, the actress Susan Sarandon, who is one of the few who is the real left here, wrote a wonderful reply to Me Too game. Not criticizing it for being too radical and so on, but precisely how in their pseudo-radicality they don't raise the true questions, they are not really radical and so on. Just think about—okay, are they in? Are they in? Okay, they're still coming up. I will give you one way how to analyze it. Now, I totally agree, all these problems about women, how to fight this historical problem—I'm totally for it—how to fight violence, sexual oppression, domination and so on. But the first thing to do in all the proposals that are emerging now, what we have to do is to answer, is to confront the question: are these the real answers? Do they not contain seeds of new forms of violence? I’ll give you an example. Now, what is becoming popular in United Kingdom, Scandinavian countries, and United States are so-called sexual contracts. You know, I flirt with somebody and we are already getting more and more legal. It’s not just "we, our names, agree freely to have sex." You already have categories, you know, like first you claim your religion, your age, your name, do you have AIDS or whatever—I agree with this—then it gets already more complex, like: condom, yes or no? Anal intercourse, yes or no? The use of dirty language, yes or no? It gets very complex. You know, the end, of course, I fully agree with it, it's emphasized that both partners in even intense sexual interplay at any moment have the right to withdraw. "Sorry, I’m stepping out." Now, when I read this—to avoid a misunderstanding, I totally support it—but be aware what forms of violence this implies. For example, can there be—and I know friends of both sexes of mine to whom this happened, not to me, I’m not my own friend and so on—but namely imagine that you are a lady, and in the middle of intense sexual interplay the guy says, "Oh sorry, I want to withdraw," with a clear implication that "now that I see you naked you are simply not attractive enough" and so on. Imagine the opposite act: that just before penetration the woman looks at you with irony, implying, "Oh yours is small and crooked, sorry, I'm off." Don't tell me this is rare. This, from what friends are telling me, happens. Another thing: did you notice how the very idea of sexual contract automatically privileges a certain kind of sex, which is casual sex, one-night stands? Because you know, you will not sign with your permanent partner every morning a contract or whatever. So you know all this implication, the result is—is clear for me: that the very form of contract, it may be of some use, but it’s not the solution. There is something wrong in this approach. Now I think we should begin. Okay. This was what we call in rock concerts and in erotics a foreplay, you know. Now. Yeah, so in the spirit of comedy, I say good evening again. You know, comedy is composed of repetitions. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I suppose almost everybody of you will have read texts by Slavoj Žižek, but maybe if some of you want to start with this, that would be my introduction and my advice. I think this is a bit like with the jazz of John Coltrane. If you listen to the late John Coltrane, you will not so easily get access because he often alludes to certain pre-established motifs in a very elusive way. So if you hear that, you might not grasp it immediately. But if you start with earlier John Coltrane, you will find access to the late John Coltrane. And I think this is exactly the case with Žižek as well. In the later texts, many motifs are just nicely and tenderly touched. In the earlier texts, they are a bit more extensively developed. And so in this sense, I would recommend early writings, like the German book *Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst* or *The Sublime Object
an excellent analysis, I'm proud to—I haven't met her, but to have her on my side, you know that in Guardian and probably somewhere in the United States, the actress Susan Sarandon, who is one of the few who is the real left here, wrote a wonderful reply to Me Too game. Not criticizing it for being too radical and so on, but precisely how in their pseudo-radicality they don't raise the true questions, they are not really radical and so on. Just think about—okay, are they in? Are they in? Okay, they're still coming up. I will give you one way how to analyze it. Now, I totally agree, all these problems about women, how to fight this historical problem—I'm totally for it—how to fight violence, sexual oppression, domination and so on. But the first thing to do in all the proposals that are emerging now, what we have to do is to answer, is to confront the question: are these the real answers? Do they not contain seeds of new forms of violence? I’ll give you an example. Now, what is becoming popular in United Kingdom, Scandinavian countries, and United States are so-called sexual contracts. You know, I flirt with somebody and we are already getting more and more legal. It’s not just "we, our names, agree freely to have sex." You already have categories, you know, like first you claim your religion, your age, your name, do you have AIDS or whatever—I agree with this—then it gets already more complex, like: condom, yes or no? Anal intercourse, yes or no? The use of dirty language, yes or no? It gets very complex. You know, the end, of course, I fully agree with it, it's emphasized that both partners in even intense sexual interplay at any moment have the right to withdraw. "Sorry, I’m stepping out." Now, when I read this—to avoid a misunderstanding, I totally support it—but be aware what forms of violence this implies. For example, can there be—and I know friends of both sexes of mine to whom this happened, not to me, I’m not my own friend and so on—but namely imagine that you are a lady, and in the middle of intense sexual interplay the guy says, "Oh sorry, I want to withdraw," with a clear implication that "now that I see you naked you are simply not attractive enough" and so on. Imagine the opposite act: that just before penetration the woman looks at you with irony, implying, "Oh yours is small and crooked, sorry, I'm off." Don't tell me this is rare. This, from what friends are telling me, happens. Another thing: did you notice how the very idea of sexual contract automatically privileges a certain kind of sex, which is casual sex, one-night stands? Because you know, you will not sign with your permanent partner every morning a contract or whatever. So you know all this implication, the result is—is clear for me: that the very form of contract, it may be of some use, but it’s not the solution. There is something wrong in this approach. Now I think we should begin. Okay. This was what we call in rock concerts and in erotics a foreplay, you know. Now. Yeah, so in the spirit of comedy, I say good evening again. You know, comedy is composed of repetitions. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I suppose almost everybody of you will have read texts by Slavoj Žižek, but maybe if some of you want to start with this, that would be my introduction and my advice. I think this is a bit like with the jazz of John Coltrane. If you listen to the late John Coltrane, you will not so easily get access because he often alludes to certain pre-established motifs in a very elusive way. So if you hear that, you might not grasp it immediately. But if you start with earlier John Coltrane, you will find access to the late John Coltrane. And I think this is exactly the case with Žižek as well. In the later texts, many motifs are just nicely and tenderly touched. In the earlier texts, they are a bit more extensively developed. And so in this sense, I would recommend early writings, like the German book *Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst* or *The Sublime Object
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of Ideology*. I think— The working class has noticed your falsification of the title. Okay. You said *The Sublime Subject of Ideology*. I didn't hear this. Sorry. Freudian slip? Okay, but maybe I— Yeah, but you know, these are Freudian slips like when in front of Stalin somebody says instead of "long live Stalin," "long live Trotsky," you know, like— So you're just aware what type of slips you're making. Absolutely. Yes, yes. Sorry. So, fred the—the guilty object leaves the stage. Slavoj, thank you very much. Later there will be time—please join me to moderate the debate. Okay. Again, very quickly, I'm sorry for my—this stupid face, I cannot help it. And point two, don't be too disappointed. You will get—you got and you will get tomorrow excellent detailed analysis of Lubitsch's films. For example, the first, the let's call it "brunch session" tomorrow, Alenka and Mladen will do the real thing, which is *Berlin Lubitsch*, the two early films. I will just follow my title and do what? I would like to begin with Adorno, who said that one has to turn around Benedetto Croce's patronizing question
of Ideology*. I think— The working class has noticed your falsification of the title. Okay. You said *The Sublime Subject of Ideology*. I didn't hear this. Sorry. Freudian slip? Okay, but maybe I— Yeah, but you know, these are Freudian slips like when in front of Stalin somebody says instead of "long live Stalin," "long live Trotsky," you know, like— So you're just aware what type of slips you're making. Absolutely. Yes, yes. Sorry. So, fred the—the guilty object leaves the stage. Slavoj, thank you very much. Later there will be time—please join me to moderate the debate. Okay. Again, very quickly, I'm sorry for my—this stupid face, I cannot help it. And point two, don't be too disappointed. You will get—you got and you will get tomorrow excellent detailed analysis of Lubitsch's films. For example, the first, the let's call it "brunch session" tomorrow, Alenka and Mladen will do the real thing, which is *Berlin Lubitsch*, the two early films. I will just follow my title and do what? I would like to begin with Adorno, who said that one has to turn around Benedetto Croce's patronizing question
Slavoj Žižek
about what is dead and what is alive in Hegel's philosophy. Adorno claims: if Hegel is still a living thinker for us, then the question to be
about what is dead and what is alive in Hegel's philosophy. Adorno claims: if Hegel is still a living thinker for us, then the question to be
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raised today is the opposite one. Not what does Hegel mean to us in our eyes today, but the opposite question:
raised today is the opposite one. Not what does Hegel mean to us in our eyes today, but the opposite question:
Slavoj Žižek
what are we in the eyes of Hegel? And I think exactly the same holds for Lubitsch. The question should not be: in our postmodern cynical times, is there still something that speaks to us in Lubitsch’s films? But: how would our contemporary situation appear in the eyes of Lubitsch? And this is, I think, the actuality
what are we in the eyes of Hegel? And I think exactly the same holds for Lubitsch. The question should not be: in our postmodern cynical times, is there still something that speaks to us in Lubitsch’s films? But: how would our contemporary situation appear in the eyes of Lubitsch? And this is, I think, the actuality
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of Lubitsch. While, of course, rejecting with disgust populist neo-racism, Lubitsch would have immediately
of Lubitsch. While, of course, rejecting with disgust populist neo-racism, Lubitsch would have immediately
Slavoj Žižek
perceived also the falsity of its main opponent, the politically correct moralism, clearly seeing
perceived also the falsity of its main opponent, the politically correct moralism, clearly seeing
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their hidden
their hidden
Slavoj Žižek
complicity. Lubitsch would have been appalled to notice how the perverse pleasures of— Can't stay here, you can't stay here. Sorry. Please take our seats. Ah, sorry, yeah, yeah. How obscenities, irony even, have moved to the right, while the left is more and more caught in pathetic, ascetic, puritan moralism. What this means is simply that there is no renewal of the left without a Lubitsch touch. I will try to develop this. Where are we today? In the West at least, we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should bear in mind also that women often and on purpose use this provocative term, when they objectify themselves to seduce men. 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 to step out of the game at any moment. Even if—even if to the male gaze this appears in contradiction with their previous signals. This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists, from Muslims, who recently prohibited in some countries women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit which resemble penis, to our own male chauvinists who explode in violence against a woman who first provokes them and then rejects—his, the one whom she provoked, advances. Feminism—feminism, feminist sexual liberation is not a puritan withdrawal from being objectified as sexual object for men, but the right to actively play with self-objectivization, offering yourself and withdrawing at will. Will it be still possible to proclaim this fact? Again, this is my first central thesis. I want to claim: to objectify yourself, to dress seductively, provoke men sexually, but in all freedom that you are the agent, that you can withdraw at any moment—this is the big result. All conservatives like these puritan women: "No, I don't want to become an object," and so on and so on. Why not? But with all freedom to dominate the game, to manipulate men, whatever you want and so on and so on. So yes, sex is traversed by power games, violent obscenities and so on. But the difficult thing is to admit that it's immanent to sex. Some perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relationship that fully meets the politically correct criteria would have been a contract drawn between two sado-masochist partners. The rise of political correctness and the rise of violence are two sides of the same coin. Insofar as the basic premise of political correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual consent, Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which stipulate even extreme forms of sado-masochism, treating a person like a dog on a—on a collar, slave trading, torture up to consented killing. In such—in such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of contract negates itself. Slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if the motif of Kant with Sade becomes reality in an unexpected—in an unexpected way. So how would Lubitsch counteract this tendency? Of course, the answer is through what you people usually refer to as comic indirectness. So how does this work? After the extent of the Nazi atrocities became known to the broad public—we already talked about this here—Lubitsch's *To Be or Not to Be* as well as Charlie Chaplin's *The Great Dictator* were both criticized for downplaying the horrors of Nazism by way of making comedy out of it. Chaplin even said that if he were to know of the horrors of concentration camps, he would never have shot his film. However, the situation is, I think, much more complex and ambiguous. Isn't it that in a tragedy, victims retain a minimum of dignity? Which is why when horror exceeds a certain limit, to portray it as a tragedy is a blasphemous downplaying of its extent. In Auschwitz or in Gulag, victims were to such an extent deprived of their human dignity that they can no longer be perceived as tragic heroes. Instead of it, a certain mode of comedy enters. Not comedy where you laugh, but objective comedy, comedy which reflects the mad inversions of social reality itself. Incidentally, just I return for a brief moment to political correctness, a critical analysis of the usual complaint. You name them: as some people said, "But okay, Harvey Weinstein's horrible, what he did, but Louis C.K., who just masturbated in front of a couple of women who were his admirers, you cannot put them at the same level." Some feminists brutally answer that: "Who are the men to tell us when we feel hurt? For some of us, somebody masturbating in front of us can be as traumatic as being raped, blackmailed and so on and so on. What matters is how we feel it." And that’s the word that I all too often hear in these Me Too debates: it matters how we feel it. I cannot imagine a more anti-feminist prejudice. You know what's the implication of this line of argumentation? It’s the old Cartesian anti-feminism. The Cartesian theory of sexual difference in his minor text is that while men can elevate themselves above their emotions, feelings, to reason, women remain hooked to, cannot rise above their feelings. So, I find it very tragicomic to hear now this feeling as the ultimate criterion and so on and so on. It doesn't matter how it is, what matters is if I feel threatened and so on and so on. Not to mention that such an elevation of feeling into ultimate criterion totally negates Freudian psychoanalysis. But I’m sorry for this detour. Back to my main idea. Things are similar in Stalinism—I’m sorry—is a—can one imagine a more terrifying case of what Hegel called "objective humor" than that of Stalinism? Or the comical reversal of great emancipatory hopes in the Soviet Union into a self-destructive terrorist violence of Stalinist purges. Was in this sense Stalin not the big jokester of the 20th century? And is in our time individual freedom, freedom of choice, also not a joke where truth is the desperate situation of a precarious worker? I find this extremely comical in the saddest sense: how you’re a precarious worker, you’re never sure will you be—will you have health insurance, whatever, and then media are telling you, "But that’s your new freedom, isn’t it wonderful? You can recreate yourself"—neoliberals here talk, use the language of Judith Butler—"you can deconstruct, reconstruct yourself, performative, every couple of months" and so on and so on. In view of the fact that the greatest cultural products of the Stalinist era were political jokes, I'm tempted to paraphrase, again paraphrase Brecht: what is even the best anti-Stalinist joke compared to the joke that is Stalinist politics itself? And of course, the same goes for Trump and so on and so on. Should we be then really surprised at one of the jokes—here I try to provoke you, but Alenka Zupančič, who is here, gave me the data of some Bosnian sociolinguist who is studying this. One of the jokes from popular among the survivors of Srebrenica massacre—you remember it in the '90s where the whole city of Bosnians was slaughtered—the joke goes like this: to understand this joke, you have to remember that decades ago when in ex-Yugoslavia, when one went to the butcher to buy beef, for example, the butcher automatically asked you, "With or without bones?" because if you wanted to use meat for soup, you usually added some bones. So the joke goes like this: after the war, a survivor returns from Germany to Srebrenica to buy a piece of land, to build a house there, he earned some money in Germany. So he asks a friend about the price of land, and the friend answers—referring, of course, to the bones there of the—of those who were killed—"It depends, do you want land with bones or without bones?" Be careful: this is not a joke of others about Srebrenica. This is a joke of survivors themselves. And I think it has a deep message. The message is: "Sorry, but it’s still too horrible for us to play the tragic, the role of a tragic victim and confront it seriously. Such terrifying jokes are the only way for us to deal with it." Along similar lines, I remember years ago here in Berlin I met Wolf Biermann, who told me one experience of him, and it’s really an obscene reversal worthy of concentration camp Erhard from *To Be or Not to Be*. You all remember this disgusting defense of Hitler which was popular in some circles after World War II: true, Hitler did some horrible things like killing the Jews, but he also did some good things like building highways, made—making trains run of time, on time, and so on and so on. Now Biermann told me that after the *Wende*, he was in some part of East Germany debating with some Green ecologists, and there was also a small group of neo-Nazi ecologists. And he—they exist, sorry—in the same way that you noticed there are pro-Trump, alt-right LGBTQ people. They claim "we are alt-right because only in our Western civilization LGBTQ orientation can be fully acknowledged" and so on. Okay, so he told me, Biermann, that when he approached them—"But what do you mean? You are for Hitler, neo-Nazis?"—you know the answer he got? It’s Erhard at its purest. The answer was, "No, we are deeply critical of Hitler. True, he did some good things like getting rid of the Jews, but he also did many horrible things to nature like building highways." You know, this is how, in a Lubitsch comedy about Nazism shot today, this is how it would work. So but again, does this fact also not point to the limit of the Lubitsch approach for us today? We more and more experience how what was for Lubitsch still a joke is now simply enacted in real political and ideological life. So many examples were already given yesterday and today. So maybe Lubitsch-type of jokes only work when we still have the liberal hypocrisy to mock. But what about our era when power exerts itself brutally, dropping the liberal, humanitarian, democratic mask? One is almost tempted to say: bring us—bring us back this hypocritical mask so that, hypocritical as it is, we at least have some positive standards. However, I think Lubitsch would have been well aware that such a direct dropping the masks is always a fake. I want to make now a short reference to 1960s. Remember that this year we will be celebrating years of '68. In the '60s, it was fashionable to assert perversion against the compromise of hysteria. This was incidentally the secret male chauvinist dominance in '68. The idea was hysterics, usually women, just provoke the master, they don’t want really to destroy the master; when a hysterical subject criticizes a master, it’s always ambiguously also a call for a new master, while perversion openly does it, overthrows the master, everything is permitted and so on and so on. So a pervert openly does what a hysteric only brings about. In other words, the pervert effectively moved beyond the master and his law, while the hysteric merely provoked the master. Against this view, Freud and Lacan consistently emphasized that perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power. Every power needs perversion as its inherent transgression that sustains it. What do I mean by this? Ah, my first example, and it will shock you, it’s not even a clip, it’s a photo. Two photos from a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia. And I love this hotel, where I was a couple of months ago with my wife, and I am a strong chainsmoker, so we asked, "Is—are there smoking rooms?" And the answer we got from the receptionist was, "Oh my God, we have law, of course it’s prohibited to smoke by the law, but you have ashtrays in the room so this is not a problem." And this was not the end to our surprises. When we entered the room, there was effectively a glass ashtray, a couple of them, near the bed, on the table, and on the bottom of this ashtray, there was an image painted, the standard "smoking is prohibited" image. If you don't believe it—people claim, "Oh you invented this to be paradoxical"—look. And to make this even clearer... let's go on, sorry I hope this works... sorry... I'm so sorry... okay... I ask, I ask... I'm so sorry... I will immediately go on... with this one works... sorry... I'm getting... sorry... ah we are here. And even to add insult to injury, this is what we got then near the bedside... sorry... an empty ashtray. I think this is the best metaphor for our situation today. It's no longer, that's what surprised me, it's no longer as it was a couple of years ago in countries open towards smokers, you know, like they told you, "You cannot smoke but," they whisper to you, "if you do it discreetly, open a window a little bit, and stand there and smoke there, it’s okay." No, it's like openly admitted, treated as a no contradiction. And I claim that in our political life we are getting more and more of the same. Like, you remember the debate on torture? Wouldn't you get from CIA or FBI the same answer: "We don't torture and here you have the—the manual for waterboarding" or whatever, you know? Or I remember when I was serving the Yugoslav army in '75, a wonderful—I’m sorry getting lost in this but it’s ideology at its purest, how ideology effectively works. We had like in the morning classes, one hour this, one hour that, and the first class one morning was not social theory but legal system rules and we were taught these elementary rules of war, like I don’t know if you know this but according to Geneva Convention, it’s prohibited to shoot at a parachutist before he touches land. Okay, we learn this. But then, it was a wonderful divinely preordained coincidence, next class was about a gun, our handgun, I mean how to do things with it, and the topic of that day was, of course, how to shoot a parachutist: how you measure the strength of the wind, the direction of the fall and so on and so on. And the wonderful thing that happened was that there was one idiot—not me, but it could have been me—asked the officer, who was the same officer, "But sorry, is there not a slight contradiction between what you were teaching us now and what you were teaching us the previous hour?" And he got a wonderful answer. It was: "You seem to be an intellectual but are you completely stupid? Don’t you understand anything?" and so on and so on. So again, I—I think that this—this is how, this is again for me, the—the way perversion works, you know. This is the law and perversion. Every law needs a perversion behind it. So back to Lubitsch. We may claim: was—now I want to of course defend Lubitsch because the first suspicion would be here that with all his innuendos and so on, double entendre, secret transgressions, that Lubitsch was basically doing the same thing. No wonder that he didn't have any great problems with Hays Code. That Lubitsch simply just accepted the system but hinted at or staged its perverse background. My point is no, my point is that of course the Hollywood Hays Code was an extremely perverted system. It wasn't just the explicit ideology. It was the explicit ideology and its perverse background both together in a very elaborate codified way. Permit me to repeat two of my old not jokes but you will see the clips because I wanted really to show you two clips I've written a lot of times about this in my books to make you feel ideology in classical Hollywood. The first one is the scene two-thirds into *Casablanca*. You remember when in the night Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick’s Cafe to his office upstairs to get those famous Portuguese visas or whatever, exit visas, so that they can take the flight to Lisbon from Casablanca. And then... the clip is a classical one, it’s very short. They talk, they have this typical noir conversation like she pulls a gun at him and he says, "Kill me, you’re doing me a favor" whatever, and then they embrace, and then you have three minutes and a half of passive fade-out to the tower of Casablanca airport and then back to the two of them. Okay, let’s hope that I will be more lucky this time... okay... okay, now comes the first clip... let's play it. Okay, now of course for all normal Christian people the question: did they do it? Or the same conversation goes on. And I refer here to a guy who wrote a very good book on Hollywood called Richard Maltby, who with a—on a long pages analysis demonstrated how the scene is not simply ambiguous, but it gives two levels of clear signals. On the one hand, there are clear signals in Hollywood Hays Code ways that they did it. First, when a couple embraces kissing and you have a fade-out, it means sex follows. Second thing: after, did you notice, when you return to the conversation, Humphrey Bogart smokes a cigarette? Another trick: before you drink, after, a cigarette. Another rule. Not to mention the vulgar association, the tower, phallus, whatever you want. Then you have a whole series of indications that they didn’t do it. The same conversation seems to go on, they’re fully dressed, and so on and so on. So Maltby’s interpretation is that there is nothing subversive in this implication they did it. Hollywood ideology is both levels at the same time. It is as if Hollywood addresses you, the spectator, as a normal hypocrite. It’s as if you are under a control of some moral agency for whom you should not be doing it. And it tells you: "I will tell you exactly what is happening but I will provide a mask so that if some moral agency addresses you—how can you dream about them doing it?—you can always say, 'Sorry, nothing happened, look there' and so on and so on." But you see my point: both levels at the same time are it. That’s my first point. Then, of course—but I will try to prove Lubitsch is not doing this. He is not playing this boring game. Although later, in the '60s for example, when Hays Code ended, there was another apparently more perverted way of indicating things, which I claim is, if anything, is even more disgusting. Namely, a scene that I also often mention, I cannot resist playing it here for you, a scene from... my God, the greatest movie of all times, popular even in North Korea, played there all the time, *The Sound of Music*. When I was in Yugoslavia still, we had a censor who was an absolute genius. The whole film was shown the way it was, just one small song was cut out. And the censor did right, I think. It’s... you remember Sister Maria escapes being in love with the Count, escapes Trap from Trap, escapes to a monastery back but is still bothered by sexual desires, and visits her nun superior to complain, to be more punished, like, "Oh mother, tell me what to do, I still dream about him, it’s horrible, punish me more, punish me more." And then the absolute obscenity, I was shocked, I... I—sister tells her: monastery is not a place to escape, you must confront your desires, see for what you are made. So, in not so nice words she tells her: "Go back and seduce and screw the guy and you did it." And then she, the sister, elaborates this in a song which is so directly obscene that I am even now embarrassed to listen to it. The beginning tells it all: "Climb Every Mountain". That’s absolutely incredible. Let’s play it... I think that this is too obscene for us. But just to tell you to amuse—I think I wanted to do the right thing, but the producers of the second one of my two movies, *Pervert's Guide... No to Ideology*, yes. The idea was: you can see me there dressed up as a priest. And we had it already elaborated: me then singing in a—of course, I cannot sing, in a dubbed voice. But it was a genius idea with all the pedophile scandals in Catholic church, I’m a priest and a young priest there comes to me and says, "Listen, I escape to monastery but still I want to fuck young boys, what should I do?" And I tell him, "These walls are not made to escape," and so on, Trap. And then comes—we already recorded it, not with my voice—then I start to sing, "Climb every young boy" and so on. There were legal problems because the—the—the producers nonetheless contacted... 20th Century, I don't know which one did it, and they were shocked that—they didn’t allow it and so on. But what I want to tell you is this, that—I’m not kidding here, this is—the censor was right. The true lesson of an intelligent theologian knows this from Gilbert Keith Chesterton to Paul Claudel. The true core of Catholicism at least is not to prohibit sex, but to allow you to play this double game, you know. It’s prohibited but in a certain way you—it’s tolerated if you follow certain external rules and so on and so on. It was breathtaking. But so is it again, what I wanted to tell you is that ideology is not just the explicit system of prohibitions which you then secretly violate. The very core of ideology are these violations which are also strictly codified and so on. But again, Lubitsch is not doing this. Why not? I will not explain it with an example of Lubitsch but from another piece here. Lubitsch was, you know, she was obsessed by the doors. One of the stupid actresses—maybe you, James, know, I don't even know which one—did she complain that Lubitsch directs doors instead of actors? People thought... but Lubitsch is here much more refined. It’s not—he is not using the doors to indicate to remain focused on what happens behind the door. He, as it were, eroticizes the door itself. If you tear down the door, you lose everything. You lose the tension itself. Let me give you here another example from a contemporary film relatively, years back. Again, I’ve written a lot about it but maybe you will like it, which I like, namely it's a modest working-class comedy, *Brassed Off*, where a girl and a guy—you know the—the story—flirt, the guy accompanies her home and then in front of her apartment building, she invites him to come up. But how? It’s a very short clip. Let’s do it. Did we? My God... Ah okay, yeah... Very short. "Do you want to come up for a coffee?" "I don't drink coffee." "I haven't got any." That's it. I mean, it’s so simple, so vulgar even, but it is, I think, the Lubitsch style. Why? Because, first,
complicity. Lubitsch would have been appalled to notice how the perverse pleasures of— Can't stay here, you can't stay here. Sorry. Please take our seats. Ah, sorry, yeah, yeah. How obscenities, irony even, have moved to the right, while the left is more and more caught in pathetic, ascetic, puritan moralism. What this means is simply that there is no renewal of the left without a Lubitsch touch. I will try to develop this. Where are we today? In the West at least, we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should bear in mind also that women often and on purpose use this provocative term, when they objectify themselves to seduce men. 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 to step out of the game at any moment. Even if—even if to the male gaze this appears in contradiction with their previous signals. This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists, from Muslims, who recently prohibited in some countries women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit which resemble penis, to our own male chauvinists who explode in violence against a woman who first provokes them and then rejects—his, the one whom she provoked, advances. Feminism—feminism, feminist sexual liberation is not a puritan withdrawal from being objectified as sexual object for men, but the right to actively play with self-objectivization, offering yourself and withdrawing at will. Will it be still possible to proclaim this fact? Again, this is my first central thesis. I want to claim: to objectify yourself, to dress seductively, provoke men sexually, but in all freedom that you are the agent, that you can withdraw at any moment—this is the big result. All conservatives like these puritan women: "No, I don't want to become an object," and so on and so on. Why not? But with all freedom to dominate the game, to manipulate men, whatever you want and so on and so on. So yes, sex is traversed by power games, violent obscenities and so on. But the difficult thing is to admit that it's immanent to sex. Some perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relationship that fully meets the politically correct criteria would have been a contract drawn between two sado-masochist partners. The rise of political correctness and the rise of violence are two sides of the same coin. Insofar as the basic premise of political correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual consent, Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which stipulate even extreme forms of sado-masochism, treating a person like a dog on a—on a collar, slave trading, torture up to consented killing. In such—in such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of contract negates itself. Slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if the motif of Kant with Sade becomes reality in an unexpected—in an unexpected way. So how would Lubitsch counteract this tendency? Of course, the answer is through what you people usually refer to as comic indirectness. So how does this work? After the extent of the Nazi atrocities became known to the broad public—we already talked about this here—Lubitsch's *To Be or Not to Be* as well as Charlie Chaplin's *The Great Dictator* were both criticized for downplaying the horrors of Nazism by way of making comedy out of it. Chaplin even said that if he were to know of the horrors of concentration camps, he would never have shot his film. However, the situation is, I think, much more complex and ambiguous. Isn't it that in a tragedy, victims retain a minimum of dignity? Which is why when horror exceeds a certain limit, to portray it as a tragedy is a blasphemous downplaying of its extent. In Auschwitz or in Gulag, victims were to such an extent deprived of their human dignity that they can no longer be perceived as tragic heroes. Instead of it, a certain mode of comedy enters. Not comedy where you laugh, but objective comedy, comedy which reflects the mad inversions of social reality itself. Incidentally, just I return for a brief moment to political correctness, a critical analysis of the usual complaint. You name them: as some people said, "But okay, Harvey Weinstein's horrible, what he did, but Louis C.K., who just masturbated in front of a couple of women who were his admirers, you cannot put them at the same level." Some feminists brutally answer that: "Who are the men to tell us when we feel hurt? For some of us, somebody masturbating in front of us can be as traumatic as being raped, blackmailed and so on and so on. What matters is how we feel it." And that’s the word that I all too often hear in these Me Too debates: it matters how we feel it. I cannot imagine a more anti-feminist prejudice. You know what's the implication of this line of argumentation? It’s the old Cartesian anti-feminism. The Cartesian theory of sexual difference in his minor text is that while men can elevate themselves above their emotions, feelings, to reason, women remain hooked to, cannot rise above their feelings. So, I find it very tragicomic to hear now this feeling as the ultimate criterion and so on and so on. It doesn't matter how it is, what matters is if I feel threatened and so on and so on. Not to mention that such an elevation of feeling into ultimate criterion totally negates Freudian psychoanalysis. But I’m sorry for this detour. Back to my main idea. Things are similar in Stalinism—I’m sorry—is a—can one imagine a more terrifying case of what Hegel called "objective humor" than that of Stalinism? Or the comical reversal of great emancipatory hopes in the Soviet Union into a self-destructive terrorist violence of Stalinist purges. Was in this sense Stalin not the big jokester of the 20th century? And is in our time individual freedom, freedom of choice, also not a joke where truth is the desperate situation of a precarious worker? I find this extremely comical in the saddest sense: how you’re a precarious worker, you’re never sure will you be—will you have health insurance, whatever, and then media are telling you, "But that’s your new freedom, isn’t it wonderful? You can recreate yourself"—neoliberals here talk, use the language of Judith Butler—"you can deconstruct, reconstruct yourself, performative, every couple of months" and so on and so on. In view of the fact that the greatest cultural products of the Stalinist era were political jokes, I'm tempted to paraphrase, again paraphrase Brecht: what is even the best anti-Stalinist joke compared to the joke that is Stalinist politics itself? And of course, the same goes for Trump and so on and so on. Should we be then really surprised at one of the jokes—here I try to provoke you, but Alenka Zupančič, who is here, gave me the data of some Bosnian sociolinguist who is studying this. One of the jokes from popular among the survivors of Srebrenica massacre—you remember it in the '90s where the whole city of Bosnians was slaughtered—the joke goes like this: to understand this joke, you have to remember that decades ago when in ex-Yugoslavia, when one went to the butcher to buy beef, for example, the butcher automatically asked you, "With or without bones?" because if you wanted to use meat for soup, you usually added some bones. So the joke goes like this: after the war, a survivor returns from Germany to Srebrenica to buy a piece of land, to build a house there, he earned some money in Germany. So he asks a friend about the price of land, and the friend answers—referring, of course, to the bones there of the—of those who were killed—"It depends, do you want land with bones or without bones?" Be careful: this is not a joke of others about Srebrenica. This is a joke of survivors themselves. And I think it has a deep message. The message is: "Sorry, but it’s still too horrible for us to play the tragic, the role of a tragic victim and confront it seriously. Such terrifying jokes are the only way for us to deal with it." Along similar lines, I remember years ago here in Berlin I met Wolf Biermann, who told me one experience of him, and it’s really an obscene reversal worthy of concentration camp Erhard from *To Be or Not to Be*. You all remember this disgusting defense of Hitler which was popular in some circles after World War II: true, Hitler did some horrible things like killing the Jews, but he also did some good things like building highways, made—making trains run of time, on time, and so on and so on. Now Biermann told me that after the *Wende*, he was in some part of East Germany debating with some Green ecologists, and there was also a small group of neo-Nazi ecologists. And he—they exist, sorry—in the same way that you noticed there are pro-Trump, alt-right LGBTQ people. They claim "we are alt-right because only in our Western civilization LGBTQ orientation can be fully acknowledged" and so on. Okay, so he told me, Biermann, that when he approached them—"But what do you mean? You are for Hitler, neo-Nazis?"—you know the answer he got? It’s Erhard at its purest. The answer was, "No, we are deeply critical of Hitler. True, he did some good things like getting rid of the Jews, but he also did many horrible things to nature like building highways." You know, this is how, in a Lubitsch comedy about Nazism shot today, this is how it would work. So but again, does this fact also not point to the limit of the Lubitsch approach for us today? We more and more experience how what was for Lubitsch still a joke is now simply enacted in real political and ideological life. So many examples were already given yesterday and today. So maybe Lubitsch-type of jokes only work when we still have the liberal hypocrisy to mock. But what about our era when power exerts itself brutally, dropping the liberal, humanitarian, democratic mask? One is almost tempted to say: bring us—bring us back this hypocritical mask so that, hypocritical as it is, we at least have some positive standards. However, I think Lubitsch would have been well aware that such a direct dropping the masks is always a fake. I want to make now a short reference to 1960s. Remember that this year we will be celebrating years of '68. In the '60s, it was fashionable to assert perversion against the compromise of hysteria. This was incidentally the secret male chauvinist dominance in '68. The idea was hysterics, usually women, just provoke the master, they don’t want really to destroy the master; when a hysterical subject criticizes a master, it’s always ambiguously also a call for a new master, while perversion openly does it, overthrows the master, everything is permitted and so on and so on. So a pervert openly does what a hysteric only brings about. In other words, the pervert effectively moved beyond the master and his law, while the hysteric merely provoked the master. Against this view, Freud and Lacan consistently emphasized that perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power. Every power needs perversion as its inherent transgression that sustains it. What do I mean by this? Ah, my first example, and it will shock you, it’s not even a clip, it’s a photo. Two photos from a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia. And I love this hotel, where I was a couple of months ago with my wife, and I am a strong chainsmoker, so we asked, "Is—are there smoking rooms?" And the answer we got from the receptionist was, "Oh my God, we have law, of course it’s prohibited to smoke by the law, but you have ashtrays in the room so this is not a problem." And this was not the end to our surprises. When we entered the room, there was effectively a glass ashtray, a couple of them, near the bed, on the table, and on the bottom of this ashtray, there was an image painted, the standard "smoking is prohibited" image. If you don't believe it—people claim, "Oh you invented this to be paradoxical"—look. And to make this even clearer... let's go on, sorry I hope this works... sorry... I'm so sorry... okay... I ask, I ask... I'm so sorry... I will immediately go on... with this one works... sorry... I'm getting... sorry... ah we are here. And even to add insult to injury, this is what we got then near the bedside... sorry... an empty ashtray. I think this is the best metaphor for our situation today. It's no longer, that's what surprised me, it's no longer as it was a couple of years ago in countries open towards smokers, you know, like they told you, "You cannot smoke but," they whisper to you, "if you do it discreetly, open a window a little bit, and stand there and smoke there, it’s okay." No, it's like openly admitted, treated as a no contradiction. And I claim that in our political life we are getting more and more of the same. Like, you remember the debate on torture? Wouldn't you get from CIA or FBI the same answer: "We don't torture and here you have the—the manual for waterboarding" or whatever, you know? Or I remember when I was serving the Yugoslav army in '75, a wonderful—I’m sorry getting lost in this but it’s ideology at its purest, how ideology effectively works. We had like in the morning classes, one hour this, one hour that, and the first class one morning was not social theory but legal system rules and we were taught these elementary rules of war, like I don’t know if you know this but according to Geneva Convention, it’s prohibited to shoot at a parachutist before he touches land. Okay, we learn this. But then, it was a wonderful divinely preordained coincidence, next class was about a gun, our handgun, I mean how to do things with it, and the topic of that day was, of course, how to shoot a parachutist: how you measure the strength of the wind, the direction of the fall and so on and so on. And the wonderful thing that happened was that there was one idiot—not me, but it could have been me—asked the officer, who was the same officer, "But sorry, is there not a slight contradiction between what you were teaching us now and what you were teaching us the previous hour?" And he got a wonderful answer. It was: "You seem to be an intellectual but are you completely stupid? Don’t you understand anything?" and so on and so on. So again, I—I think that this—this is how, this is again for me, the—the way perversion works, you know. This is the law and perversion. Every law needs a perversion behind it. So back to Lubitsch. We may claim: was—now I want to of course defend Lubitsch because the first suspicion would be here that with all his innuendos and so on, double entendre, secret transgressions, that Lubitsch was basically doing the same thing. No wonder that he didn't have any great problems with Hays Code. That Lubitsch simply just accepted the system but hinted at or staged its perverse background. My point is no, my point is that of course the Hollywood Hays Code was an extremely perverted system. It wasn't just the explicit ideology. It was the explicit ideology and its perverse background both together in a very elaborate codified way. Permit me to repeat two of my old not jokes but you will see the clips because I wanted really to show you two clips I've written a lot of times about this in my books to make you feel ideology in classical Hollywood. The first one is the scene two-thirds into *Casablanca*. You remember when in the night Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick’s Cafe to his office upstairs to get those famous Portuguese visas or whatever, exit visas, so that they can take the flight to Lisbon from Casablanca. And then... the clip is a classical one, it’s very short. They talk, they have this typical noir conversation like she pulls a gun at him and he says, "Kill me, you’re doing me a favor" whatever, and then they embrace, and then you have three minutes and a half of passive fade-out to the tower of Casablanca airport and then back to the two of them. Okay, let’s hope that I will be more lucky this time... okay... okay, now comes the first clip... let's play it. Okay, now of course for all normal Christian people the question: did they do it? Or the same conversation goes on. And I refer here to a guy who wrote a very good book on Hollywood called Richard Maltby, who with a—on a long pages analysis demonstrated how the scene is not simply ambiguous, but it gives two levels of clear signals. On the one hand, there are clear signals in Hollywood Hays Code ways that they did it. First, when a couple embraces kissing and you have a fade-out, it means sex follows. Second thing: after, did you notice, when you return to the conversation, Humphrey Bogart smokes a cigarette? Another trick: before you drink, after, a cigarette. Another rule. Not to mention the vulgar association, the tower, phallus, whatever you want. Then you have a whole series of indications that they didn’t do it. The same conversation seems to go on, they’re fully dressed, and so on and so on. So Maltby’s interpretation is that there is nothing subversive in this implication they did it. Hollywood ideology is both levels at the same time. It is as if Hollywood addresses you, the spectator, as a normal hypocrite. It’s as if you are under a control of some moral agency for whom you should not be doing it. And it tells you: "I will tell you exactly what is happening but I will provide a mask so that if some moral agency addresses you—how can you dream about them doing it?—you can always say, 'Sorry, nothing happened, look there' and so on and so on." But you see my point: both levels at the same time are it. That’s my first point. Then, of course—but I will try to prove Lubitsch is not doing this. He is not playing this boring game. Although later, in the '60s for example, when Hays Code ended, there was another apparently more perverted way of indicating things, which I claim is, if anything, is even more disgusting. Namely, a scene that I also often mention, I cannot resist playing it here for you, a scene from... my God, the greatest movie of all times, popular even in North Korea, played there all the time, *The Sound of Music*. When I was in Yugoslavia still, we had a censor who was an absolute genius. The whole film was shown the way it was, just one small song was cut out. And the censor did right, I think. It’s... you remember Sister Maria escapes being in love with the Count, escapes Trap from Trap, escapes to a monastery back but is still bothered by sexual desires, and visits her nun superior to complain, to be more punished, like, "Oh mother, tell me what to do, I still dream about him, it’s horrible, punish me more, punish me more." And then the absolute obscenity, I was shocked, I... I—sister tells her: monastery is not a place to escape, you must confront your desires, see for what you are made. So, in not so nice words she tells her: "Go back and seduce and screw the guy and you did it." And then she, the sister, elaborates this in a song which is so directly obscene that I am even now embarrassed to listen to it. The beginning tells it all: "Climb Every Mountain". That’s absolutely incredible. Let’s play it... I think that this is too obscene for us. But just to tell you to amuse—I think I wanted to do the right thing, but the producers of the second one of my two movies, *Pervert's Guide... No to Ideology*, yes. The idea was: you can see me there dressed up as a priest. And we had it already elaborated: me then singing in a—of course, I cannot sing, in a dubbed voice. But it was a genius idea with all the pedophile scandals in Catholic church, I’m a priest and a young priest there comes to me and says, "Listen, I escape to monastery but still I want to fuck young boys, what should I do?" And I tell him, "These walls are not made to escape," and so on, Trap. And then comes—we already recorded it, not with my voice—then I start to sing, "Climb every young boy" and so on. There were legal problems because the—the—the producers nonetheless contacted... 20th Century, I don't know which one did it, and they were shocked that—they didn’t allow it and so on. But what I want to tell you is this, that—I’m not kidding here, this is—the censor was right. The true lesson of an intelligent theologian knows this from Gilbert Keith Chesterton to Paul Claudel. The true core of Catholicism at least is not to prohibit sex, but to allow you to play this double game, you know. It’s prohibited but in a certain way you—it’s tolerated if you follow certain external rules and so on and so on. It was breathtaking. But so is it again, what I wanted to tell you is that ideology is not just the explicit system of prohibitions which you then secretly violate. The very core of ideology are these violations which are also strictly codified and so on. But again, Lubitsch is not doing this. Why not? I will not explain it with an example of Lubitsch but from another piece here. Lubitsch was, you know, she was obsessed by the doors. One of the stupid actresses—maybe you, James, know, I don't even know which one—did she complain that Lubitsch directs doors instead of actors? People thought... but Lubitsch is here much more refined. It’s not—he is not using the doors to indicate to remain focused on what happens behind the door. He, as it were, eroticizes the door itself. If you tear down the door, you lose everything. You lose the tension itself. Let me give you here another example from a contemporary film relatively, years back. Again, I’ve written a lot about it but maybe you will like it, which I like, namely it's a modest working-class comedy, *Brassed Off*, where a girl and a guy—you know the—the story—flirt, the guy accompanies her home and then in front of her apartment building, she invites him to come up. But how? It’s a very short clip. Let’s do it. Did we? My God... Ah okay, yeah... Very short. "Do you want to come up for a coffee?" "I don't drink coffee." "I haven't got any." That's it. I mean, it’s so simple, so vulgar even, but it is, I think, the Lubitsch style. Why? Because, first,
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can you imagine the vulgarity, non-erotic, if they would have spoken openly, like she telling him, "Why don’t you come up and fuck the brain out of me," and "Yeah, yeah, I'm your your" whatever? The point is just not—it's not even hint at the sexual invitation. The very form of dialogue, this wonderful nonsense: you make an offer and then you deny it, like "cup for a coffee," "by the way I
can you imagine the vulgarity, non-erotic, if they would have spoken openly, like she telling him, "Why don’t you come up and fuck the brain out of me," and "Yeah, yeah, I'm your your" whatever? The point is just not—it's not even hint at the sexual invitation. The very form of dialogue, this wonderful nonsense: you make an offer and then you deny it, like "cup for a coffee," "by the way I
Slavoj Žižek
have no coffee" or whatever. This form is itself eroticized. And this is what Lubitsch knew how—it was doing, how—how to do. How? Let me give you another example from a series here. I have a great disagreement with my friend Robert Faller, who likes *Sex and the City*. And I don't. But I admit as a concession to him that in one episode, there are some details which are absolutely correct. Miranda, the relatively ugly girl, has a—an affair with a guy, and the guy likes to talk dirty all the time and even solicits her to talk dirty, know, sexual obscenities and so on. Like you can tell everything you want. First she is too restrained, and then finally she accepts the game. But in a wonderful detail, she then says something which she shouldn't have mentioned. It's not even a very dirty detail. She tells him, "Do you—I noticed how you liked during when you asked me during the act how you enjoyed if I put my finger into your asshole" and so on. This was too much to embarrassing for him. It’s over. And I think, you know, so these are the true details that matter. And here perversion lies. I cannot prove it now clinically but I tested it with my friends: all the perverts who have this, "fuck your mother, fuck two dogs at the same time,"
have no coffee" or whatever. This form is itself eroticized. And this is what Lubitsch knew how—it was doing, how—how to do. How? Let me give you another example from a series here. I have a great disagreement with my friend Robert Faller, who likes *Sex and the City*. And I don't. But I admit as a concession to him that in one episode, there are some details which are absolutely correct. Miranda, the relatively ugly girl, has a—an affair with a guy, and the guy likes to talk dirty all the time and even solicits her to talk dirty, know, sexual obscenities and so on. Like you can tell everything you want. First she is too restrained, and then finally she accepts the game. But in a wonderful detail, she then says something which she shouldn't have mentioned. It's not even a very dirty detail. She tells him, "Do you—I noticed how you liked during when you asked me during the act how you enjoyed if I put my finger into your asshole" and so on. This was too much to embarrassing for him. It’s over. And I think, you know, so these are the true details that matter. And here perversion lies. I cannot prove it now clinically but I tested it with my friends: all the perverts who have this, "fuck your mother, fuck two dogs at the same time,"
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whatever, I don't know, "open," it's
whatever, I don't know, "open," it's
Slavoj Žižek
always some, you know, you always have to look for: but just don't do this. Something is prohibited. And this is how sexuality works. Some things of course shouldn't be done. Some things shouldn't be talked about and not done. Some things you should say. But the crucial details, things, you should just do them but not talk about them. And they are not the mega secret or whatever. They are just what Lacan calls *samtoms*, symptoms, basic formations of elementary excessive enjoyment which should remain—which should remain unspoken. So the next—so again, I'm sorry. I claim that's why Lubitsch resisted this pornography, "let’s totally open ourselves" and so on and so on. Because he knew that the only way to hint at these embarrassing details is by not showing it, by not showing it all there, the detail of the form itself. For example, it may be well possible that in that scene from *Brassed Off*, the guy would have been shocked at her answer, "but I don't have any coffee." That would have been too much for him in its very non-sexual innocence and so on and so on. But
always some, you know, you always have to look for: but just don't do this. Something is prohibited. And this is how sexuality works. Some things of course shouldn't be done. Some things shouldn't be talked about and not done. Some things you should say. But the crucial details, things, you should just do them but not talk about them. And they are not the mega secret or whatever. They are just what Lacan calls *samtoms*, symptoms, basic formations of elementary excessive enjoyment which should remain—which should remain unspoken. So the next—so again, I'm sorry. I claim that's why Lubitsch resisted this pornography, "let’s totally open ourselves" and so on and so on. Because he knew that the only way to hint at these embarrassing details is by not showing it, by not showing it all there, the detail of the form itself. For example, it may be well possible that in that scene from *Brassed Off*, the guy would have been shocked at her answer, "but I don't have any coffee." That would have been too much for him in its very non-sexual innocence and so on and so on. But
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let's
let's
Slavoj Žižek
go a step further. Lubitsch was also aware, that's another point of this Lubitsch indirectness: paradoxically, you know Lubitsch took the basic lesson of Freud. The repressed is not simply what is deep there masked. The really repressed for Lubitsch inscribed itself into the very process of repression. Like when you try to hide things, not to say them directly, in the very form of indirectness the true secret is implied there. Another thing that Lubitsch was aware is what I call the constitutive alienation, and it was already mentioned by you Robert and others, how for Lubitsch a couple in sexual game is never alone. Robert mentioned this afternoon this game of how you fall in love by falling into the trap of—of falling into how others perceive—others perceive you as already in love. In this sense, love can arise out of a pure misunderstanding. Classical is here the beginning of *An Hour with You*, when a couple finds themselves accidentally in a taxi. They are both married but not to each other. And one
go a step further. Lubitsch was also aware, that's another point of this Lubitsch indirectness: paradoxically, you know Lubitsch took the basic lesson of Freud. The repressed is not simply what is deep there masked. The really repressed for Lubitsch inscribed itself into the very process of repression. Like when you try to hide things, not to say them directly, in the very form of indirectness the true secret is implied there. Another thing that Lubitsch was aware is what I call the constitutive alienation, and it was already mentioned by you Robert and others, how for Lubitsch a couple in sexual game is never alone. Robert mentioned this afternoon this game of how you fall in love by falling into the trap of—of falling into how others perceive—others perceive you as already in love. In this sense, love can arise out of a pure misunderstanding. Classical is here the beginning of *An Hour with You*, when a couple finds themselves accidentally in a taxi. They are both married but not to each other. And one
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tells to the other, "My God, somebody may mistake us as if we are a bored married couple ignoring each other." From that point you know they are doomed. I mean, they're doomed, they will be together. And I think that this element—you see it—this is one of the elements of Lubitsch universe. You see it in all its brutality in one early movie which is very ambiguous but wonderful for me nonetheless, *The Broken Lullaby*. It’s one of
tells to the other, "My God, somebody may mistake us as if we are a bored married couple ignoring each other." From that point you know they are doomed. I mean, they're doomed, they will be together. And I think that this element—you see it—this is one of the elements of Lubitsch universe. You see it in all its brutality in one early movie which is very ambiguous but wonderful for me nonetheless, *The Broken Lullaby*. It’s one of
Slavoj Žižek
the most obscene films that I can imagine. The hero of the film is a French soldier haunted by the memory of a guy he shot on the front on the last day of war. And this German guy he killed is Walter Hölderlin—very strange name. Then what happens is that he finds a letter there of the dead German soldier and after the war is obsessed by him, visits in a small German town his family, finds father, mother, and the fiancée, a girl, and the two of them fall in love. Then at the end, he finally tells her, because before he was lying, "But listen, I cannot stay here, I—I killed your fiancée, your boyfriend." And now you will see the two very short clips: something extremely perverse happens. She, the girl, tells him, "But the boy’s, the killed soldier’s parents love you so much, you are for them like the return of their son, that for their sake we have to remain together and live together and husband and wife for them." It’s direct idea that
the most obscene films that I can imagine. The hero of the film is a French soldier haunted by the memory of a guy he shot on the front on the last day of war. And this German guy he killed is Walter Hölderlin—very strange name. Then what happens is that he finds a letter there of the dead German soldier and after the war is obsessed by him, visits in a small German town his family, finds father, mother, and the fiancée, a girl, and the two of them fall in love. Then at the end, he finally tells her, because before he was lying, "But listen, I cannot stay here, I—I killed your fiancée, your boyfriend." And now you will see the two very short clips: something extremely perverse happens. She, the girl, tells him, "But the boy’s, the killed soldier’s parents love you so much, you are for them like the return of their son, that for their sake we have to remain together and live together and husband and wife for them." It’s direct idea that
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it doesn't matter how we feel, although obviously they do have love for each other, but it has to be mediated by the others'
it doesn't matter how we feel, although obviously they do have love for each other, but it has to be mediated by the others'
Slavoj Žižek
gaze. So then you will see after this conversation the final scene—just a minute—where he, the French guy, is playing the dead soldier’s violin for her and for the parents who watch—and watch them with tears and so on. Is this total... okay let's do it. This is the last clip, then I just finish. [Movie clip plays]. Exactly. And the last clip and then just the finale. This is the last scene. [Movie clip plays]. Okay, let’s go... it’s okay. What I wanted to emphasize here is that here we have an element of the Lubitsch universe, but it’s not yet part of the Lubitsch touch of the comedy. But it’s crucial to see how he needs comedy, Lubitsch, because otherwise you would have to confront this horror. This is horror what happens here. But then, now I want to go on into these forms of indirectness. Here we have again indirectness because it’s very ambiguous, of course. Does the couple really want to live together and they just need the parents as an excuse, "Oh we are doing for their gaze" and so on, or not? I claim it doesn't matter, love is necessarily mediated in this way. And also, it was already mentioned here, James in his yesterday’s first talk, *The Shop Around the Corner*. Do you know that—coming from ex-Yugoslavia, I cannot restrain myself from telling you this—that exactly a similar situation happened immediately after the war was over, the Siege of Sarajevo, in mid-1990s? It really happened, it was in newspapers in Sarajevo. A married couple was bored by each other. And each of them privately engaged with anonymously in a—how do you call it?—internet affair, just talking anonymously with a partner and understood him and her, with a partner very well, all their emotional life was there, they ignored each other. Finally each of them decided to meet the partner. They did the standard thing: "Okay, in that cafeteria I will have that hat on, you will have that book," whatever. And you can guess what they discovered: they were the same husband and wife. Now, how would Lubitsch read this? I think he would be horrified. It wouldn't work. The solution is not, "Oh but we are the dreamy partner of each other." No, a certain gap would have been closed, it would have been a catastrophe. Now comes a truly problematic part. Now in the spirit of political correctness, I would have to
gaze. So then you will see after this conversation the final scene—just a minute—where he, the French guy, is playing the dead soldier’s violin for her and for the parents who watch—and watch them with tears and so on. Is this total... okay let's do it. This is the last clip, then I just finish. [Movie clip plays]. Exactly. And the last clip and then just the finale. This is the last scene. [Movie clip plays]. Okay, let’s go... it’s okay. What I wanted to emphasize here is that here we have an element of the Lubitsch universe, but it’s not yet part of the Lubitsch touch of the comedy. But it’s crucial to see how he needs comedy, Lubitsch, because otherwise you would have to confront this horror. This is horror what happens here. But then, now I want to go on into these forms of indirectness. Here we have again indirectness because it’s very ambiguous, of course. Does the couple really want to live together and they just need the parents as an excuse, "Oh we are doing for their gaze" and so on, or not? I claim it doesn't matter, love is necessarily mediated in this way. And also, it was already mentioned here, James in his yesterday’s first talk, *The Shop Around the Corner*. Do you know that—coming from ex-Yugoslavia, I cannot restrain myself from telling you this—that exactly a similar situation happened immediately after the war was over, the Siege of Sarajevo, in mid-1990s? It really happened, it was in newspapers in Sarajevo. A married couple was bored by each other. And each of them privately engaged with anonymously in a—how do you call it?—internet affair, just talking anonymously with a partner and understood him and her, with a partner very well, all their emotional life was there, they ignored each other. Finally each of them decided to meet the partner. They did the standard thing: "Okay, in that cafeteria I will have that hat on, you will have that book," whatever. And you can guess what they discovered: they were the same husband and wife. Now, how would Lubitsch read this? I think he would be horrified. It wouldn't work. The solution is not, "Oh but we are the dreamy partner of each other." No, a certain gap would have been closed, it would have been a catastrophe. Now comes a truly problematic part. Now in the spirit of political correctness, I would have to
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add a trigger warning. My friends drew my attention
add a trigger warning. My friends drew my attention
Slavoj Žižek
to it and I openly admit that I checked it myself: that in hardcore pornography, when they depict a sexual act, there is something that you may call—Lubitsch would never have done it, but something I’m sure Lubitsch would have noticed if he were to be forced to watch them. There is some, let’s call it, "elementary shot" which is—I cannot show it to you, I am too embarrassed—the following one: woman lying on her back with her legs up, spread apart, and the man in front of her, you see just his back, penetrating her. But now comes the crucial detail. Her legs, my God, it must be so difficult to stay this... her legs are spread apart in such a way that between her legs, while you see the guy penetrating her, her back, from his back only, you see her face. And she is looking into the camera directly and playing—okay I will not show it—full pleasure and so on. You see, the third one we have to be there. And this scene teaches us a lot. First, it’s absolutely not true that women are objectified in hardcore. In the standard hardcore, men are objectified. Man, you don’t even see his face in this film that I’ve seen. He’s just a machine, he comes bum-bum-bum, nobody cares. He never looks into the camera. Woman has to look into the camera and it’s something I think much more horrible than objectivization. It’s a false and forced subjectivization. Which is why it’s totally wrong to claim that as a spectator of hardcore pornography, you look at—you look at it identifying with the man who is doing it to a woman. No, you identify yourself through your gaze as a pure witness. What you are looking for is a proof that—of woman’s enjoyment. What arouses you is not your enjoyment, but the woman should demonstrate it that she enjoys it. And I think again this is a much more humiliating strategy of humiliating women than direct objectivization. And it effectively... if you just—it doesn't work without this gaze, which incidentally violates the basic rule, like, you know, if it’s not a subjective shot, the actor is not allowed to look into the camera. Here you have it’s allowed and you, spectator, are directly included. But included as a pure observer. And I think that this is literally a constitutive of sexuality as such. That’s why, if you allow me just a couple of concluding remarks, that’s why I think one thing is sure: Lubitsch would have been horrified by our drug culture. For theoretical reasons, as a French theorist Laurent de Sutter demonstrated, chemistry in its scientific version is becoming part of us. Large aspects of our lives are characterized—are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs, from everyday use of sleeping pills and antidepressants to hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers; our very emotions are outsourced to chemical stimulation. The stakes of these chemical interventions are double and contradictory. We use drugs to keep external excitement, shocks, anxieties, and so on under control—that is to say, to desensitize us for them—and and to generate artificial excitement if we are depressed and lack desire and so on. Drugs thus react to the two opposite threats to our daily lives: overexcitement and depression. And it’s crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the coupling of private and public. In the developed Western countries, our public lives are more and more—they more and more lack collective excitement, exemplarily provided by genuine political engagement, while drugs supplement this lack with private, or rather intimate, forms of excitement. Drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitation of private life. Now, not to lose too much of your time, I would like just to point out that here nonetheless we may be in encounter—so Lubitsch's answer to this is not drugs, because in drugs you precisely lose this indirectness which is inscribed into sexuality. But how does this indirectness work? I claim—I cannot develop it, I don't want to go for too long—that there is a fundamental ambiguity here in Lubitsch. Let’s take what is for me at least, maybe and for Lubitsch himself his masterpiece, *Trouble in Paradise*. On the one hand, the message of his films can be seen as a kind of a cynical wisdom: don’t—don’t take the ruling ideology too seriously, enjoy small transgressions, and so on and so on. And this is what I find problematic. You find this, for example, I see in it the ultimate lesson of *Heaven Can Wait*. Basically, you know the situation—I don't want to bore you—Devil is presented as a good, wise God. Devil is the one who knows we need small sins and so on, so Devil sends the hero who was living—who was a very good person but living a promiscuous life and so on, says, "Sorry, we don't have time for people like you here," like this basic tolerance, "don't be too fanatical," and so on and so on. I—I don't like this reading of Lubitsch as honest, benevolent, liberal, horrified at excesses and so on. Because already in *To Be or Not to Be*—and I’m here referring very briefly to to Aaron Schuster and to James Harvey, who were here—they pointed out the ambiguity of this situation, *The More the Merrier* of the couple of thieves, Lily and Gaston, and then the other couple, Gaston and Madame Colet. The para—the first paradox is that in a way where is the paradise when the movie talks about *Trouble in Paradise*? Obviously paradise is the life of crime and theft and so on, that the poor couple in bed. And I like this idea that the temptation enters the game in the guise of a beautiful rich woman who wants marriage and so on and so on. But no, at the end, and this is what I don’t like, the result is—I claim—in its very apparent subversiveness, a very pretty conservative one: it’s "don’t dream about that, be a good conservative thief, live your small transgressions" and so on and so on. It’s wisdom. And I—can all of Lubitsch be reduced to this? Now, if you just—allow me to—to go a step further, now really to conclude... *Ninotchka*, I'm a little bit troubled by that film because it can be read in that way: that okay, it’s not even so critical totally of Soviet but nonetheless Soviet Union a land of fanaticism and so on and so on, and the heroine slowly discovers these everyday pleasures of
to it and I openly admit that I checked it myself: that in hardcore pornography, when they depict a sexual act, there is something that you may call—Lubitsch would never have done it, but something I’m sure Lubitsch would have noticed if he were to be forced to watch them. There is some, let’s call it, "elementary shot" which is—I cannot show it to you, I am too embarrassed—the following one: woman lying on her back with her legs up, spread apart, and the man in front of her, you see just his back, penetrating her. But now comes the crucial detail. Her legs, my God, it must be so difficult to stay this... her legs are spread apart in such a way that between her legs, while you see the guy penetrating her, her back, from his back only, you see her face. And she is looking into the camera directly and playing—okay I will not show it—full pleasure and so on. You see, the third one we have to be there. And this scene teaches us a lot. First, it’s absolutely not true that women are objectified in hardcore. In the standard hardcore, men are objectified. Man, you don’t even see his face in this film that I’ve seen. He’s just a machine, he comes bum-bum-bum, nobody cares. He never looks into the camera. Woman has to look into the camera and it’s something I think much more horrible than objectivization. It’s a false and forced subjectivization. Which is why it’s totally wrong to claim that as a spectator of hardcore pornography, you look at—you look at it identifying with the man who is doing it to a woman. No, you identify yourself through your gaze as a pure witness. What you are looking for is a proof that—of woman’s enjoyment. What arouses you is not your enjoyment, but the woman should demonstrate it that she enjoys it. And I think again this is a much more humiliating strategy of humiliating women than direct objectivization. And it effectively... if you just—it doesn't work without this gaze, which incidentally violates the basic rule, like, you know, if it’s not a subjective shot, the actor is not allowed to look into the camera. Here you have it’s allowed and you, spectator, are directly included. But included as a pure observer. And I think that this is literally a constitutive of sexuality as such. That’s why, if you allow me just a couple of concluding remarks, that’s why I think one thing is sure: Lubitsch would have been horrified by our drug culture. For theoretical reasons, as a French theorist Laurent de Sutter demonstrated, chemistry in its scientific version is becoming part of us. Large aspects of our lives are characterized—are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs, from everyday use of sleeping pills and antidepressants to hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers; our very emotions are outsourced to chemical stimulation. The stakes of these chemical interventions are double and contradictory. We use drugs to keep external excitement, shocks, anxieties, and so on under control—that is to say, to desensitize us for them—and and to generate artificial excitement if we are depressed and lack desire and so on. Drugs thus react to the two opposite threats to our daily lives: overexcitement and depression. And it’s crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the coupling of private and public. In the developed Western countries, our public lives are more and more—they more and more lack collective excitement, exemplarily provided by genuine political engagement, while drugs supplement this lack with private, or rather intimate, forms of excitement. Drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitation of private life. Now, not to lose too much of your time, I would like just to point out that here nonetheless we may be in encounter—so Lubitsch's answer to this is not drugs, because in drugs you precisely lose this indirectness which is inscribed into sexuality. But how does this indirectness work? I claim—I cannot develop it, I don't want to go for too long—that there is a fundamental ambiguity here in Lubitsch. Let’s take what is for me at least, maybe and for Lubitsch himself his masterpiece, *Trouble in Paradise*. On the one hand, the message of his films can be seen as a kind of a cynical wisdom: don’t—don’t take the ruling ideology too seriously, enjoy small transgressions, and so on and so on. And this is what I find problematic. You find this, for example, I see in it the ultimate lesson of *Heaven Can Wait*. Basically, you know the situation—I don't want to bore you—Devil is presented as a good, wise God. Devil is the one who knows we need small sins and so on, so Devil sends the hero who was living—who was a very good person but living a promiscuous life and so on, says, "Sorry, we don't have time for people like you here," like this basic tolerance, "don't be too fanatical," and so on and so on. I—I don't like this reading of Lubitsch as honest, benevolent, liberal, horrified at excesses and so on. Because already in *To Be or Not to Be*—and I’m here referring very briefly to to Aaron Schuster and to James Harvey, who were here—they pointed out the ambiguity of this situation, *The More the Merrier* of the couple of thieves, Lily and Gaston, and then the other couple, Gaston and Madame Colet. The para—the first paradox is that in a way where is the paradise when the movie talks about *Trouble in Paradise*? Obviously paradise is the life of crime and theft and so on, that the poor couple in bed. And I like this idea that the temptation enters the game in the guise of a beautiful rich woman who wants marriage and so on and so on. But no, at the end, and this is what I don’t like, the result is—I claim—in its very apparent subversiveness, a very pretty conservative one: it’s "don’t dream about that, be a good conservative thief, live your small transgressions" and so on and so on. It’s wisdom. And I—can all of Lubitsch be reduced to this? Now, if you just—allow me to—to go a step further, now really to conclude... *Ninotchka*, I'm a little bit troubled by that film because it can be read in that way: that okay, it’s not even so critical totally of Soviet but nonetheless Soviet Union a land of fanaticism and so on and so on, and the heroine slowly discovers these everyday pleasures of
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the decadent West, fashion and so on and so on. It’s not as simple as that, but my
the decadent West, fashion and so on and so on. It’s not as simple as that, but my
Slavoj Žižek
problem is what with this one? In at least in some
problem is what with this one? In at least in some
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Lubitsch films, you have nonetheless wonderful hints at a more radical, potentially even a more radical political stance. For example, the key shot—I didn’t want to bore you with too many
Lubitsch films, you have nonetheless wonderful hints at a more radical, potentially even a more radical political stance. For example, the key shot—I didn’t want to bore you with too many
Slavoj Žižek
clips—the key moment of *Trouble in Paradise* is that conflict between Gaston and Madame Colet, where Gaston explodes in rage about like, "You know, you denounce me to the police
clips—the key moment of *Trouble in Paradise* is that conflict between Gaston and Madame Colet, where Gaston explodes in rage about like, "You know, you denounce me to the police
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but
but
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not your—your—your bank manager" or whatever "who is a big thief
not your—your—your bank manager" or whatever "who is a big thief
Slavoj Žižek
and so on." And this is not cynical wisdom—I want just to focus on this—this genuine rage. It’s an explosion of rage. At another level, even in *Cluny Brown*—and I’m
and so on." And this is not cynical wisdom—I want just to focus on this—this genuine rage. It’s an explosion of rage. At another level, even in *Cluny Brown*—and I’m
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grateful to Alenka Zupančič who pointed out this—at some moment and these are all these wonderful innuendos when
grateful to Alenka Zupančič who pointed out this—at some moment and these are all these wonderful innuendos when
Slavoj Žižek
Cluny talks about how you fix—when—a plumbing doesn't work, he makes a statement with clear political revolutionary implication. She says, "Yes, sometimes you can just do it a little bit, but sometimes you can just—you should just break all down" or whatever, something like that. Why? This does not exclude Lubitsch's apparent benevolent cynicism. I want here to draw a comparison between Lubitsch and one of the big central European writers, Jaroslav Hašek, you know who wrote *The Good Soldier Švejk*. Usually Švejk is read as a model of this
Cluny talks about how you fix—when—a plumbing doesn't work, he makes a statement with clear political revolutionary implication. She says, "Yes, sometimes you can just do it a little bit, but sometimes you can just—you should just break all down" or whatever, something like that. Why? This does not exclude Lubitsch's apparent benevolent cynicism. I want here to draw a comparison between Lubitsch and one of the big central European writers, Jaroslav Hašek, you know who wrote *The Good Soldier Švejk*. Usually Švejk is read as a model of this
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benevolence, you know, "don’t take
benevolence, you know, "don’t take
Slavoj Žižek
it seriously, make fun" and so on and so on. But in a very Lubitschian way, I can imagine a Lubitsch hero doing this. You know there is one episode in *Švejk* which is wonderful. When Švejk goes to the front, Austrian soldiers here, Russians on the other side, Russians start to shoot at them. And you know what Švejk does? He stands up, starts to wave and says, "Don't shoot, there are people here, don't shoot" and so on. This is the Leninist moment. This is enacting when Lenin said we should promote fraternizing on the front and so on. But now I am coming to my point. Isn’t it strange that the very writer who is perceived as this benevolent, humanity, "don’t go too far," "have—be open for human weaknesses" and so on? You know what—missing in this picture, and I read a biography of Hašek: okay, in '22 or when—I don’t know—he returned to Prague and wrote all this. You know where did he be a couple of years earlier? In Russia, fighting for the Bolsheviks as a polit-commissar of an entire division in Siberia. That’s—that’s the crux of it. And maybe my hope is not to turn Lubitsch—I'm not so naive—into a Bolshevik, but
it seriously, make fun" and so on and so on. But in a very Lubitschian way, I can imagine a Lubitsch hero doing this. You know there is one episode in *Švejk* which is wonderful. When Švejk goes to the front, Austrian soldiers here, Russians on the other side, Russians start to shoot at them. And you know what Švejk does? He stands up, starts to wave and says, "Don't shoot, there are people here, don't shoot" and so on. This is the Leninist moment. This is enacting when Lenin said we should promote fraternizing on the front and so on. But now I am coming to my point. Isn’t it strange that the very writer who is perceived as this benevolent, humanity, "don’t go too far," "have—be open for human weaknesses" and so on? You know what—missing in this picture, and I read a biography of Hašek: okay, in '22 or when—I don’t know—he returned to Prague and wrote all this. You know where did he be a couple of years earlier? In Russia, fighting for the Bolsheviks as a polit-commissar of an entire division in Siberia. That’s—that’s the crux of it. And maybe my hope is not to turn Lubitsch—I'm not so naive—into a Bolshevik, but
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nonetheless, since I am a
nonetheless, since I am a
Slavoj Žižek
radical leftist, I hope I will convince you to find a place for him even in a radical left. And now I’m doing like in Hollywood Hays Code, radical left read communist universe. You know, let's do an experiment: imagine the final scene of *Heaven Can Wait* where—you know—the Devil and—and the hero of the film comes to the Devil, tries to convince—basically he admits it: "Sorry, I belong to hell, I am—I lived a sinful life," and Devil says, "No, sorry, hell is not a place for you, maybe go up to the other place, you will find there maybe how do you say a small room in the backlot" or whatever. I—let's imagine a similar scene: Lubitsch in Soviet Union arrested of course by KGB and confronting a commissar who decides "Gulag or not." Let's imagine that this commissar is played by Bela Lugosi as in *Ninotchka*. And Lubitsch knowing about his sin says, "You know what, I admit I deserve Gulag. Look, I like bourgeois pleasures, jokes, sex, and so on, irony." And in the same way as the Devil does it—that's my dream—does it, the commissar says, "A-a-a, I was just reading Lenin, and sorry, you don't belong to Gulag. There is a place for you on the very top of our edifice." How would he read it? You know that Lenin in the last years of his life—and I'm not blaming big many things unacceptable for us to do, I am not trying to simply redeem him—but it's very interesting that in the last two years of his life, Lenin became aware of how dangerous the situation is. He focuses his war on Stalin, but in what way? Nikola Lubitsch said in an interview that his father, Ernst, if she hated something, found the lowest ethically, it was a lack of *Höflichkeit* (politeness, gentleness). This is a permanent motif in last Lenin's letters. You remember the famous attack on Stalin in Lenin’s so-called "testimony". All Lenin's criticism of Stalin—I will not read it not to lose time—criticism of Stalin is about manners. It’s not Stalin has the wrong political line or whatever, it's "Comrade Stalin is too rude, he doesn't have manners, how to treat comrades" and so on. Even more: it’s not just this general point. Now comes the true—now comes the true wonder. At the end of his life, Lenin had a crazy idea. He saw where things are going, he still what an authoritarian he wanted all the power to the Bolshevik party, but he saw the need to somebody to control the party itself. And Lenin came to this crazy idea that it's unworkable but it's beautiful, that for a Central Control Commission, elected freely at the party congress without any control from Central Committee, which would be allowed to control with real power all the ruling structures—politburo, central committee, government. And the way Lenin describes the working of this body is nuts. He says—I quote Lenin here—he says, "This body should resort"—quote from Lenin—"to some semi-humorous tricks, cunning devices, pieces of trickery or something of that sort." Semi-humorous tricks to express—to expose something ridiculous, something harmful and so on. So again, it's not the KGB terror; it's that even the top of the party should have a body above—okay, let's now you see my point—should have a—a some kind of a mega-ironist, who makes jokes, fun, in a polite way and so on and so on. And you got my point: maybe in my, I'm sorry, communist dream, Lubitsch should be on the top of that Central Control Committee. Now you will say, "But it's naive, Bolsheviks would never allow this, even for Lenin this would have been too much." Ah, here I'm a Hegelian. You know, Hegel says in the introduction to his *Phänomenologie des Geistes* that if some—something does not fit its measure, then you have to change the measure itself. So my point would have been: if Lubitsch as head of this Control Commission would have been unacceptable for Lenin, then we need to change not Lubitsch but Lenin. Because only somebody with this manners and so on can save us today. Now you will say I’m crazy. I mean, we have serious problems and so on, who talks about manners? No, we live in times today when what the right-wing is doing, reopened racism and so on, where again we are on the opposite side from '68 when, you know, revolutionary students liked to be rough, like using dirty words and so on and so on. Now the right-wingers are doing it. And now we, the left, need to rehabilitate politeness and what you—James were talking about in religious terms, this respect for ordinary people and so on and so on. The left should shamelessly say, "Sorry guys, we not you are the moral majority," not the fundamentalist one, but the Lubitsch moral majority. Today Lubitsch, can you imagine with this ironic Leninist way, semi-humorous tricks, how Lubitsch would have discarded, ruined, false liberals, conservatives, and so on and so on. As Lenin knew how serious this was, for Lenin, my God, this was a matter for survival. That’s why politically we need a Lubitsch today. Thank you very much. Well, Slavoj, maybe to start our discussion, since you seemed not satisfied with Lubitsch's Devil in *Heaven Can Wait*... Yeah. I would—to manipulate—I agree here with James Harvey, who also told me that he hated *Heaven Can Wait*. So I would like to ask you, would you like the following Devil? You know, it's a little story, Mr. Müller, average German guy, is sent to hell. He rings the doorbell, the door opens, and a very polite young man shows up and says, "Mr. Müller, welcome. You know, I am the Devil here. I am the host. Please come in, I hope you will feel fine here. Here is our wellness area, and there are the tennis courts, and we have excellent sports facilities, and we have a library with all the books that are forbidden but also allowed ones, and we have wonderful cinemas, and if any movie is missing please put it to the wish list, and we have a couple of wonderful restaurants, so please feel welcome, and if anything should be missing please complain and we will try to fix it." And Mr. Müller is a bit surprised and then all of a sudden he sees in the background there are some barracks and there seems to be fire inside and he says, "Can we also see those facilities?" and the Devil is not very willing to show but he leads him there and then Mr. Müller of course sees what he expected: there are big bowls with soup and naked poor people are thrown into them and little devils with forks are pinching them. And Mr. Müller is a bit shocked and says, "And Mr. Devil, what is this here?" and the Devil shakes his shoulders and says, "I don't know, the Christian people wanted to have this here." And now it will... okay, let's not lose time with this because I don't have time to develop it. But I think this even fits my story that I mentioned yesterday. It must be quite boring, this stupid hell of yours. I think that maybe they really enjoy there in that fire and you know the true attraction is there. I would if I were to be Mr. Müller, I would say: one-way ticket to hell. I have no problem with that. Okay. Because you know it is as if why can you see that part? Your Devil is too good, he is manipulating. He knows that people would be bored here so you have to have this bad hell there and so on. On the other hand, you know, like my God, hell is the only way where you can thrive. I want real hell, with suffering and so on. I mean look at Dante. Who reads heaven? It’s one of the most boring things you can imagine. The second part, how do you call it? *Fegefeuer* in German. I don't know how to say that in English. Yes. Purgatory, yes. But you know that this is literally a capitalist early invention. When after the year the idea came: can we have a place in between where you work a little bit and pay for your sins so that you go out? No, I claim all interesting things happen in hell. Even all Francesca da Rimini, all those tragic lovers and so on and so on. So no, I go to the end here. I want a Christian hell, my God. Not some stupid primordial hell and so on and so on. You are—I know we have a problem here, because you are a pagan, no? Yes. Absolutely. So my punishment to you would be: not you will be in hell, you will be in the most boring part of heaven. Oh yes, that's—that's... yeah, yeah. Maybe we can connect this to a beginning point in your lecture when you referred to the Me Too debate and the discrepancy between the American and the French feminists. And here my question would be: is it not somehow telling that this discrepancy or this disagreement occurs between precisely American and French women? Because I— Is my French women whom do you mean? Catherine Deneuve. But she was attacked also in France, you know. Yes, yes, okay. But still I mean a considerable number of feminists wrote this or signed this paper. And what I observe I think can be expressed in a distinction made by Émile Durkheim, he in his sociology of religions he distinguished between positive and negative cults. And he said for example in some religions at some celebrations you have to eat abundantly and drink a lot, and in other religions you have negative rituals of avoidance where you don't have to eat and don't have to drink and so on. And I think this occurs today in many conflicts on the level of everyday life, and as Max Weber has taught religious positions also translate into matters which don't seem immediately of religious nature. So I think for example when a colleague in France wears nice shoes, you have to immediately tell him or her a compliment. That's a positive ritual. In America, if anybody at all dares to wear nice shoes in the office, you must not say anything and act as if you hadn't seen it. And is there not a kind of battle going on coming from the Protestant Northern American side that tries to convince us that negative rituals are always preferable? It's always better to act as if you hadn't seen the other or as if the other were not there. Whereas a kind of let's say pagan heritage of French or Italian culture tries to teach us it's always nicer to engage in a positive ritual to say something to be polite and—and to form a kind of positive social bond. Would you interpret the Me Too debate along these lines? No. I—my problem is only this one. This may surprise you because often I'm decried as just against political correctness. No, the goals are right for me. For me the problem with Me Too is that they are not really radical enough. They don’t address the causes and so on, or even the forms of true violence and so on. That's another... so I think that as I said at the beginning, this all this debate "are they going too far or not, Me Too" should not blind us for the fact that a big tectonic shift is happening. Really a shift of in something that was automatically assumed as our everyday value attitude towards women and so on which was going on maybe for thousands of years. Something tremendous is happening and I totally support it. It's just the way it's caught in this legal terminology, legalism, or other problems that I disagree. So the way I read this Catherine Deneuve and others' letter, it's I don't like the whole conceptualization which is they are too puritan, they go too far, we should find some middle-of-the-road... No, my position is not middle-of-the-road. My position is go much more to the extreme. You know what I mean, like Me Too just reproduces at many level certain even conservative and so on stances, which is why, it may surprise you, I spoke with some Arab friends who triumphantly support Me Too. They claimed "but that’s what we are saying, that's why women should be covered, that they are not objectified, reduced to male gaze" and so on and so on. No, I—and also again I'm deeply suspicious of this—this mixture of legalism and moralism. Here we agree. On the one hand all this obsession with contracts and so on, on the other hand this reference to some authentic experience. I mean, if we learned something—I am not a Deleuzian—but Gilles Deleuze said something years ago. He said: any politics based on unique like, "No, I am a lesbian single mother with AIDS, nobody can even understand how I feel," this is catastrophe for me. Why? Because it’s nothing else, in a quite justified way, a white racist will tell you: "But do you know how traumatic it is for me to be close to a black guy or to a Jew?" and I met some of them there among my relatives unfortunately. And I don't think you can simply say, "But they are not authentic" or whatever. It's not as simple as that. I mean, you know. So again, it should not be at the level of feelings or unique experience or whatever. Because you know the way I would have proceeded as a Me Too feminist, I would say: let’s find allies among also exploited men, in the sense that we women are castigated in a certain passive role and so on. But men are not simply enjoying their domination. The male domination is the way the system bribes them. Because you know it's always intelligent strategy to a mid-level slave to give him someone that he can then oppress and so on. And to address to—to convince men that their terrorizing women is not a true authority, it's acting out something that enables them to live with their impotence and so on, I mean social impotence
radical leftist, I hope I will convince you to find a place for him even in a radical left. And now I’m doing like in Hollywood Hays Code, radical left read communist universe. You know, let's do an experiment: imagine the final scene of *Heaven Can Wait* where—you know—the Devil and—and the hero of the film comes to the Devil, tries to convince—basically he admits it: "Sorry, I belong to hell, I am—I lived a sinful life," and Devil says, "No, sorry, hell is not a place for you, maybe go up to the other place, you will find there maybe how do you say a small room in the backlot" or whatever. I—let's imagine a similar scene: Lubitsch in Soviet Union arrested of course by KGB and confronting a commissar who decides "Gulag or not." Let's imagine that this commissar is played by Bela Lugosi as in *Ninotchka*. And Lubitsch knowing about his sin says, "You know what, I admit I deserve Gulag. Look, I like bourgeois pleasures, jokes, sex, and so on, irony." And in the same way as the Devil does it—that's my dream—does it, the commissar says, "A-a-a, I was just reading Lenin, and sorry, you don't belong to Gulag. There is a place for you on the very top of our edifice." How would he read it? You know that Lenin in the last years of his life—and I'm not blaming big many things unacceptable for us to do, I am not trying to simply redeem him—but it's very interesting that in the last two years of his life, Lenin became aware of how dangerous the situation is. He focuses his war on Stalin, but in what way? Nikola Lubitsch said in an interview that his father, Ernst, if she hated something, found the lowest ethically, it was a lack of *Höflichkeit* (politeness, gentleness). This is a permanent motif in last Lenin's letters. You remember the famous attack on Stalin in Lenin’s so-called "testimony". All Lenin's criticism of Stalin—I will not read it not to lose time—criticism of Stalin is about manners. It’s not Stalin has the wrong political line or whatever, it's "Comrade Stalin is too rude, he doesn't have manners, how to treat comrades" and so on. Even more: it’s not just this general point. Now comes the true—now comes the true wonder. At the end of his life, Lenin had a crazy idea. He saw where things are going, he still what an authoritarian he wanted all the power to the Bolshevik party, but he saw the need to somebody to control the party itself. And Lenin came to this crazy idea that it's unworkable but it's beautiful, that for a Central Control Commission, elected freely at the party congress without any control from Central Committee, which would be allowed to control with real power all the ruling structures—politburo, central committee, government. And the way Lenin describes the working of this body is nuts. He says—I quote Lenin here—he says, "This body should resort"—quote from Lenin—"to some semi-humorous tricks, cunning devices, pieces of trickery or something of that sort." Semi-humorous tricks to express—to expose something ridiculous, something harmful and so on. So again, it's not the KGB terror; it's that even the top of the party should have a body above—okay, let's now you see my point—should have a—a some kind of a mega-ironist, who makes jokes, fun, in a polite way and so on and so on. And you got my point: maybe in my, I'm sorry, communist dream, Lubitsch should be on the top of that Central Control Committee. Now you will say, "But it's naive, Bolsheviks would never allow this, even for Lenin this would have been too much." Ah, here I'm a Hegelian. You know, Hegel says in the introduction to his *Phänomenologie des Geistes* that if some—something does not fit its measure, then you have to change the measure itself. So my point would have been: if Lubitsch as head of this Control Commission would have been unacceptable for Lenin, then we need to change not Lubitsch but Lenin. Because only somebody with this manners and so on can save us today. Now you will say I’m crazy. I mean, we have serious problems and so on, who talks about manners? No, we live in times today when what the right-wing is doing, reopened racism and so on, where again we are on the opposite side from '68 when, you know, revolutionary students liked to be rough, like using dirty words and so on and so on. Now the right-wingers are doing it. And now we, the left, need to rehabilitate politeness and what you—James were talking about in religious terms, this respect for ordinary people and so on and so on. The left should shamelessly say, "Sorry guys, we not you are the moral majority," not the fundamentalist one, but the Lubitsch moral majority. Today Lubitsch, can you imagine with this ironic Leninist way, semi-humorous tricks, how Lubitsch would have discarded, ruined, false liberals, conservatives, and so on and so on. As Lenin knew how serious this was, for Lenin, my God, this was a matter for survival. That’s why politically we need a Lubitsch today. Thank you very much. Well, Slavoj, maybe to start our discussion, since you seemed not satisfied with Lubitsch's Devil in *Heaven Can Wait*... Yeah. I would—to manipulate—I agree here with James Harvey, who also told me that he hated *Heaven Can Wait*. So I would like to ask you, would you like the following Devil? You know, it's a little story, Mr. Müller, average German guy, is sent to hell. He rings the doorbell, the door opens, and a very polite young man shows up and says, "Mr. Müller, welcome. You know, I am the Devil here. I am the host. Please come in, I hope you will feel fine here. Here is our wellness area, and there are the tennis courts, and we have excellent sports facilities, and we have a library with all the books that are forbidden but also allowed ones, and we have wonderful cinemas, and if any movie is missing please put it to the wish list, and we have a couple of wonderful restaurants, so please feel welcome, and if anything should be missing please complain and we will try to fix it." And Mr. Müller is a bit surprised and then all of a sudden he sees in the background there are some barracks and there seems to be fire inside and he says, "Can we also see those facilities?" and the Devil is not very willing to show but he leads him there and then Mr. Müller of course sees what he expected: there are big bowls with soup and naked poor people are thrown into them and little devils with forks are pinching them. And Mr. Müller is a bit shocked and says, "And Mr. Devil, what is this here?" and the Devil shakes his shoulders and says, "I don't know, the Christian people wanted to have this here." And now it will... okay, let's not lose time with this because I don't have time to develop it. But I think this even fits my story that I mentioned yesterday. It must be quite boring, this stupid hell of yours. I think that maybe they really enjoy there in that fire and you know the true attraction is there. I would if I were to be Mr. Müller, I would say: one-way ticket to hell. I have no problem with that. Okay. Because you know it is as if why can you see that part? Your Devil is too good, he is manipulating. He knows that people would be bored here so you have to have this bad hell there and so on. On the other hand, you know, like my God, hell is the only way where you can thrive. I want real hell, with suffering and so on. I mean look at Dante. Who reads heaven? It’s one of the most boring things you can imagine. The second part, how do you call it? *Fegefeuer* in German. I don't know how to say that in English. Yes. Purgatory, yes. But you know that this is literally a capitalist early invention. When after the year the idea came: can we have a place in between where you work a little bit and pay for your sins so that you go out? No, I claim all interesting things happen in hell. Even all Francesca da Rimini, all those tragic lovers and so on and so on. So no, I go to the end here. I want a Christian hell, my God. Not some stupid primordial hell and so on and so on. You are—I know we have a problem here, because you are a pagan, no? Yes. Absolutely. So my punishment to you would be: not you will be in hell, you will be in the most boring part of heaven. Oh yes, that's—that's... yeah, yeah. Maybe we can connect this to a beginning point in your lecture when you referred to the Me Too debate and the discrepancy between the American and the French feminists. And here my question would be: is it not somehow telling that this discrepancy or this disagreement occurs between precisely American and French women? Because I— Is my French women whom do you mean? Catherine Deneuve. But she was attacked also in France, you know. Yes, yes, okay. But still I mean a considerable number of feminists wrote this or signed this paper. And what I observe I think can be expressed in a distinction made by Émile Durkheim, he in his sociology of religions he distinguished between positive and negative cults. And he said for example in some religions at some celebrations you have to eat abundantly and drink a lot, and in other religions you have negative rituals of avoidance where you don't have to eat and don't have to drink and so on. And I think this occurs today in many conflicts on the level of everyday life, and as Max Weber has taught religious positions also translate into matters which don't seem immediately of religious nature. So I think for example when a colleague in France wears nice shoes, you have to immediately tell him or her a compliment. That's a positive ritual. In America, if anybody at all dares to wear nice shoes in the office, you must not say anything and act as if you hadn't seen it. And is there not a kind of battle going on coming from the Protestant Northern American side that tries to convince us that negative rituals are always preferable? It's always better to act as if you hadn't seen the other or as if the other were not there. Whereas a kind of let's say pagan heritage of French or Italian culture tries to teach us it's always nicer to engage in a positive ritual to say something to be polite and—and to form a kind of positive social bond. Would you interpret the Me Too debate along these lines? No. I—my problem is only this one. This may surprise you because often I'm decried as just against political correctness. No, the goals are right for me. For me the problem with Me Too is that they are not really radical enough. They don’t address the causes and so on, or even the forms of true violence and so on. That's another... so I think that as I said at the beginning, this all this debate "are they going too far or not, Me Too" should not blind us for the fact that a big tectonic shift is happening. Really a shift of in something that was automatically assumed as our everyday value attitude towards women and so on which was going on maybe for thousands of years. Something tremendous is happening and I totally support it. It's just the way it's caught in this legal terminology, legalism, or other problems that I disagree. So the way I read this Catherine Deneuve and others' letter, it's I don't like the whole conceptualization which is they are too puritan, they go too far, we should find some middle-of-the-road... No, my position is not middle-of-the-road. My position is go much more to the extreme. You know what I mean, like Me Too just reproduces at many level certain even conservative and so on stances, which is why, it may surprise you, I spoke with some Arab friends who triumphantly support Me Too. They claimed "but that’s what we are saying, that's why women should be covered, that they are not objectified, reduced to male gaze" and so on and so on. No, I—and also again I'm deeply suspicious of this—this mixture of legalism and moralism. Here we agree. On the one hand all this obsession with contracts and so on, on the other hand this reference to some authentic experience. I mean, if we learned something—I am not a Deleuzian—but Gilles Deleuze said something years ago. He said: any politics based on unique like, "No, I am a lesbian single mother with AIDS, nobody can even understand how I feel," this is catastrophe for me. Why? Because it’s nothing else, in a quite justified way, a white racist will tell you: "But do you know how traumatic it is for me to be close to a black guy or to a Jew?" and I met some of them there among my relatives unfortunately. And I don't think you can simply say, "But they are not authentic" or whatever. It's not as simple as that. I mean, you know. So again, it should not be at the level of feelings or unique experience or whatever. Because you know the way I would have proceeded as a Me Too feminist, I would say: let’s find allies among also exploited men, in the sense that we women are castigated in a certain passive role and so on. But men are not simply enjoying their domination. The male domination is the way the system bribes them. Because you know it's always intelligent strategy to a mid-level slave to give him someone that he can then oppress and so on. And to address to—to convince men that their terrorizing women is not a true authority, it's acting out something that enables them to live with their impotence and so on, I mean social impotence
unknown
and so on. It’s absolutely
and so on. It’s absolutely
Slavoj Žižek
crucial. Also, everybody knows this: do you know for example in contemporary crisis with unemployment, precariousness and so on, the other part of subordination of women is men as a breadwinner and so on and so on. How traumatic it is for men not to be able to provide and so on. The most tragic example is in India, when guys where now many individually owned farms are bought by big companies and so on, the point being that tens of
crucial. Also, everybody knows this: do you know for example in contemporary crisis with unemployment, precariousness and so on, the other part of subordination of women is men as a breadwinner and so on and so on. How traumatic it is for men not to be able to provide and so on. The most tragic example is in India, when guys where now many individually owned farms are bought by big companies and so on, the point being that tens of
unknown
thousand of farmers out of this shame that they cannot provide for their family are making seriously
thousand of farmers out of this shame that they cannot provide for their family are making seriously
Slavoj Žižek
suicides and so on.
suicides and so on.
unknown
And to ask all these questions not... I mean we should expand also violence against women. For example, our own forms of violence and then not just don't talk to me just about Muslims. Let's talk about, for example, I heard this from my friend there, South Africa. You know that in South Africa, it's not only the rape capital per capita in the world, they have also now a specific crime which is becoming ritualized, it's a permanent form, to kill a woman, strangle her, cut her while you rape her and so on. It's so much of this violence. You know what's the key for me how to approach this? It's clear also from studies in Mexico where there's a lot of
And to ask all these questions not... I mean we should expand also violence against women. For example, our own forms of violence and then not just don't talk to me just about Muslims. Let's talk about, for example, I heard this from my friend there, South Africa. You know that in South Africa, it's not only the rape capital per capita in the world, they have also now a specific crime which is becoming ritualized, it's a permanent form, to kill a woman, strangle her, cut her while you rape her and so on. It's so much of this violence. You know what's the key for me how to approach this? It's clear also from studies in Mexico where there's a lot of
unknown
violence against women that this—these are mainly—this is basically done by men who are horrified at the loss of their power and who fear feminine emancipation and so on. I think that it's crucial to expand the horizon in this way. And this is exactly what Me Too are not doing. I don't like this focus on nonetheless relatively privileged women, you know for example that Rose McGowan, you know, okay, she could have said to Harvey Weinstein, "Fuck off, I will find a model job somewhere
violence against women that this—these are mainly—this is basically done by men who are horrified at the loss of their power and who fear feminine emancipation and so on. I think that it's crucial to expand the horizon in this way. And this is exactly what Me Too are not doing. I don't like this focus on nonetheless relatively privileged women, you know for example that Rose McGowan, you know, okay, she could have said to Harvey Weinstein, "Fuck off, I will find a model job somewhere
Slavoj Žižek
else." Okay, it’s cynical to say this. But what’s not cynical is that what about millions of women who don’t have this chance, who are on a daily basis not you meet a boss he wants to fuck you, no, on a daily basis terrorized and so on and so on? All this at this level we should oppose I think Me Too, not for—not in this Catherine Deneuve way "oh but we like to flirt, they went too far" and so on or whatever you know? I'm sorry, I'm losing time. But maybe we should allow the people... Yes. Do we have a microphone in for the audience? I cannot see that. Or you know what I would really like to do, but we are not at this level, this would be a true I hope we agree philosophical
else." Okay, it’s cynical to say this. But what’s not cynical is that what about millions of women who don’t have this chance, who are on a daily basis not you meet a boss he wants to fuck you, no, on a daily basis terrorized and so on and so on? All this at this level we should oppose I think Me Too, not for—not in this Catherine Deneuve way "oh but we like to flirt, they went too far" and so on or whatever you know? I'm sorry, I'm losing time. But maybe we should allow the people... Yes. Do we have a microphone in for the audience? I cannot see that. Or you know what I would really like to do, but we are not at this level, this would be a true I hope we agree philosophical
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turn, that I talk and then you have to guess to
turn, that I talk and then you have to guess to
Slavoj Žižek
what question I was answering. I
what question I was answering. I
unknown
give the answer,
give the answer,
Slavoj Žižek
you ask me a question. That would be something, but you are not yet ready for that. We could try, Slavoj, you give an
you ask me a question. That would be something, but you are not yet ready for that. We could try, Slavoj, you give an
unknown
answer and we
answer and we
Slavoj Žižek
try if anybody can guess the question. Too cruel for them. Okay. Do we have a question? Yes, I see somebody on the left side, please. Okay. Yesterday you were talking about how Lubitsch was going to Moscow and was really
try if anybody can guess the question. Too cruel for them. Okay. Do we have a question? Yes, I see somebody on the left side, please. Okay. Yesterday you were talking about how Lubitsch was going to Moscow and was really
unknown
astonished about how— James Harvey was saying this I think. Oh yeah, about how he was astonished that the people were actually believing that they were creating something new. And it reminded me of an article that was published about the
astonished about how— James Harvey was saying this I think. Oh yeah, about how he was astonished that the people were actually believing that they were creating something new. And it reminded me of an article that was published about the
Slavoj Žižek
Soviet intellectual
Soviet intellectual
unknown
Mikhail Prishvin, and in one of his diary entries he observed that there was actually class struggle in Soviet Russia, but that pessimism and doubt was
Mikhail Prishvin, and in one of his diary entries he observed that there was actually class struggle in Soviet Russia, but that pessimism and doubt was
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prohibited under the law because of the delusion that they are creating something. And I would ask you if you would agree that there is analogy to political correctness that when we prohibit certain words when we talk to each other or when we prohibit to show certain images that we creating a better atmosphere that we feel better to each other and something like that. Generally I accept this analogy only I would like to talk with Lubitsch here but one cannot. You know I—I think in so-called authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, the real situation is much more ambiguous. Look, years ago I read, I fought my way through this horrible book, *Mein Kampf*. Hitler was a good speaker but not writer. And I read it with a simple question in my mind: did Hitler believe in what he was saying or not? And the answer is clear and
prohibited under the law because of the delusion that they are creating something. And I would ask you if you would agree that there is analogy to political correctness that when we prohibit certain words when we talk to each other or when we prohibit to show certain images that we creating a better atmosphere that we feel better to each other and something like that. Generally I accept this analogy only I would like to talk with Lubitsch here but one cannot. You know I—I think in so-called authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, the real situation is much more ambiguous. Look, years ago I read, I fought my way through this horrible book, *Mein Kampf*. Hitler was a good speaker but not writer. And I read it with a simple question in my mind: did Hitler believe in what he was saying or not? And the answer is clear and
Slavoj Žižek
unambiguous: yes and no. That is to say, on the one hand he plays his cards openly. He says how you should lie, how to—you know, he shows the cards of his manipulation. At the same time you can palpably see how at some point he starts—you described it like that—he falls into his own game. And I think it was the same in under Stalinism. It wasn't simply did they believe or not? Even the top nomenklatura, and this is my own experience in my own country—sorry for boring you with this—but let me tell you another almost Lubitschian experience that I had had as a young communist youth years ago or what. Slovenia is a small country so we were lucky: for us General Secretary of the country was not the one you—whom you see on the card once a year, you could even meet him on a street. So I was there forced to be at a speech of this communist leader, at that point Secretary, who gave a speech to us young communists and he concluded with the point that you should never forget Marxist theory, that a good communist should read both books of Marx’s *Capital* and follow the fourth thesis of Feuerbach: philosophers shouldn’t only interpret the world, also change it. Then, after the talk—my God I was so stupid—I approached him and said, "Comrade General Secretary, I just want to prevent embarrassment for you, but you know there are three volumes of *Capital* and it’s Thesis I got the—my—a lesson of a lifetime. He told me, "You didn't get it. I know this but that was my point, I don't care." You know how it was part of the system not to take its own ideology seriously. But again, it wasn't they were simply cynical. If you were to question them seriously, they would say, "Okay, forget about ideology but nonetheless, look, we are developing the country, we are maybe in a rough way doing something serious" and so on and so on. And I think you would have gotten something similar from a Stalinist leader. Stalin despised incredibly people who argued with seriously quoting Lenin, Marx, or whatever. What mattered to him is Russia should be developed, the party should keep power, or whatever. So it’s—it’s this typically Western enigma: do they believe it or not? It’s too simple for the complexity of so-called totalitarian regimes. I am more... and here we bring us to another point: humor. At—I didn’t have time to develop it but that’s what’s important what you James and also Folker already pointed out. Lubitsch is not a—and Billy Wilder, they are not cynics. They—it means they were well aware that humor as such is ambiguous. You know where I discovered this? And Mladen Dolar, who is also here my friend, drew attention two years ago. You remember years ago or when the big hit was Umberto Eco's *The Name of the Rose*? I don't think there is a book more theoretically wrong than that one: that the power is horrified by laughter. A-a, it depends what kind of a laughter. Absolutely every totalitarian regime has its own inner jokes. You make fun of the stupid people whom we are oppressing and so on and so on. Laughter... even this was one of my formative experiences when I was not a big dissident, but I was involved in some sub-dissident
unambiguous: yes and no. That is to say, on the one hand he plays his cards openly. He says how you should lie, how to—you know, he shows the cards of his manipulation. At the same time you can palpably see how at some point he starts—you described it like that—he falls into his own game. And I think it was the same in under Stalinism. It wasn't simply did they believe or not? Even the top nomenklatura, and this is my own experience in my own country—sorry for boring you with this—but let me tell you another almost Lubitschian experience that I had had as a young communist youth years ago or what. Slovenia is a small country so we were lucky: for us General Secretary of the country was not the one you—whom you see on the card once a year, you could even meet him on a street. So I was there forced to be at a speech of this communist leader, at that point Secretary, who gave a speech to us young communists and he concluded with the point that you should never forget Marxist theory, that a good communist should read both books of Marx’s *Capital* and follow the fourth thesis of Feuerbach: philosophers shouldn’t only interpret the world, also change it. Then, after the talk—my God I was so stupid—I approached him and said, "Comrade General Secretary, I just want to prevent embarrassment for you, but you know there are three volumes of *Capital* and it’s Thesis I got the—my—a lesson of a lifetime. He told me, "You didn't get it. I know this but that was my point, I don't care." You know how it was part of the system not to take its own ideology seriously. But again, it wasn't they were simply cynical. If you were to question them seriously, they would say, "Okay, forget about ideology but nonetheless, look, we are developing the country, we are maybe in a rough way doing something serious" and so on and so on. And I think you would have gotten something similar from a Stalinist leader. Stalin despised incredibly people who argued with seriously quoting Lenin, Marx, or whatever. What mattered to him is Russia should be developed, the party should keep power, or whatever. So it’s—it’s this typically Western enigma: do they believe it or not? It’s too simple for the complexity of so-called totalitarian regimes. I am more... and here we bring us to another point: humor. At—I didn’t have time to develop it but that’s what’s important what you James and also Folker already pointed out. Lubitsch is not a—and Billy Wilder, they are not cynics. They—it means they were well aware that humor as such is ambiguous. You know where I discovered this? And Mladen Dolar, who is also here my friend, drew attention two years ago. You remember years ago or when the big hit was Umberto Eco's *The Name of the Rose*? I don't think there is a book more theoretically wrong than that one: that the power is horrified by laughter. A-a, it depends what kind of a laughter. Absolutely every totalitarian regime has its own inner jokes. You make fun of the stupid people whom we are oppressing and so on and so on. Laughter... even this was one of my formative experiences when I was not a big dissident, but I was involved in some sub-dissident
unknown
activities
activities
Slavoj Žižek
in late '80s. We had a meeting, and how they were intelligent, those in power, how they tried to disrupt our meetings: not that a polit-commissar came and shouted at us, "Are you aware that you are destroying socialism" or whatever. No, by sending provocateurs who tried to disrupt—for example, once there was a political prisoner who came to our group and was telling what—how they questioned him, the brutalities. And somebody, who later we discovered he was a police provocateur, started [unintelligible] dirty gestures,
in late '80s. We had a meeting, and how they were intelligent, those in power, how they tried to disrupt our meetings: not that a polit-commissar came and shouted at us, "Are you aware that you are destroying socialism" or whatever. No, by sending provocateurs who tried to disrupt—for example, once there was a political prisoner who came to our group and was telling what—how they questioned him, the brutalities. And somebody, who later we discovered he was a police provocateur, started [unintelligible] dirty gestures,
unknown
"Ha-ha, did you enjoy it?" and
"Ha-ha, did you enjoy it?" and
Slavoj Žižek
so on. You know, this or "all politics is a whore, if we come to power it will be even worse" and so on and so on. So we, how dissidents were talking seriously, those
so on. You know, this or "all politics is a whore, if we come to power it will be even worse" and so on and so on. So we, how dissidents were talking seriously, those
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who spoke for power were engaged in in dirty jokes and so on. This is
who spoke for power were engaged in in dirty jokes and so on. This is
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why there was a myth which is wrong but there is a truth in it. You know that in almost every socialist country there was a myth—maybe you here, ex-GDR, you were an exception—that the myth is, it’s a beautiful myth, is that there is an ultra-secret department of Stasi or whatever was there fabricating political jokes. Not jokes against the West but against their own leaders. The idea
why there was a myth which is wrong but there is a truth in it. You know that in almost every socialist country there was a myth—maybe you here, ex-GDR, you were an exception—that the myth is, it’s a beautiful myth, is that there is an ultra-secret department of Stasi or whatever was there fabricating political jokes. Not jokes against the West but against their own leaders. The idea
Slavoj Žižek
was that in this way jokes also play a positive constructive role: it relaxes people, they laugh, they drink beer, they tell jokes and they leave you alone, you go on. The ruling elite, at least in Yugoslavia, was extremely afraid of people who took the existing ideology seriously. They were already for them a first step towards dissidence. And that's my Lubitschian view, just one story about ex-Yugoslavia. For example, I loved the '80s when it was cynicism, era of cynicism. You remember, if you are old enough, Virgin Mary appeared in Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Slovene communists who were more business oriented and so on were furious at how the hardline Bosnian communists screwed it up. You know, they—they tried to sabotage it, blah-blah-blah, the result was that since we Yugoslavs didn’t want to organize mass tourism, millions, Italians entered and earned billions of dollars. So then, in this time, a miracle happened in Slovenia, at the very right location between capital Ljubljana and the airport. Small crossing, a statue there, small of Virgin Mary, started to do what they are hated for or what they are supposed to do: move a little bit some tears of blood and so on. A-ha, we were different Slovenes. Immediately there were plans, "Wonderful, develop tourism, hotels, it's wonderful." And then a catastrophe happened. The local priest in whose part of the—this happened said, wrote in a religious weekly journal that, "No, this is not a true miracle, this is just superstition." And he—something historic happened. Then, in the weekly most official communist weekly newspaper, he was attacked for non-patriotic behavior, like, "My God, this is a miracle, it can bring billions to our country, we need it, and who is this priest to play some cheap materialism there?" and so on, you know. This is how these things work. I mean, I—I was always fascinated by these ambiguities and I learn from you here a lot, like: we believe in something. What does it mean? Who believes? Do we really believe and so on? Sorry for this improvisation.
was that in this way jokes also play a positive constructive role: it relaxes people, they laugh, they drink beer, they tell jokes and they leave you alone, you go on. The ruling elite, at least in Yugoslavia, was extremely afraid of people who took the existing ideology seriously. They were already for them a first step towards dissidence. And that's my Lubitschian view, just one story about ex-Yugoslavia. For example, I loved the '80s when it was cynicism, era of cynicism. You remember, if you are old enough, Virgin Mary appeared in Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Slovene communists who were more business oriented and so on were furious at how the hardline Bosnian communists screwed it up. You know, they—they tried to sabotage it, blah-blah-blah, the result was that since we Yugoslavs didn’t want to organize mass tourism, millions, Italians entered and earned billions of dollars. So then, in this time, a miracle happened in Slovenia, at the very right location between capital Ljubljana and the airport. Small crossing, a statue there, small of Virgin Mary, started to do what they are hated for or what they are supposed to do: move a little bit some tears of blood and so on. A-ha, we were different Slovenes. Immediately there were plans, "Wonderful, develop tourism, hotels, it's wonderful." And then a catastrophe happened. The local priest in whose part of the—this happened said, wrote in a religious weekly journal that, "No, this is not a true miracle, this is just superstition." And he—something historic happened. Then, in the weekly most official communist weekly newspaper, he was attacked for non-patriotic behavior, like, "My God, this is a miracle, it can bring billions to our country, we need it, and who is this priest to play some cheap materialism there?" and so on, you know. This is how these things work. I mean, I—I was always fascinated by these ambiguities and I learn from you here a lot, like: we believe in something. What does it mean? Who believes? Do we really believe and so on? Sorry for this improvisation.