Marx and Lacan: Surplus-Enjoyment, Surplus-Value, Surplus-Knowledge
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-05-24 · 1:55:33 · 15,837 words
psychoanalysisideologycapitalismhegel-dialecticssexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctnesscinema-art-culturegeopolitics-warcommunism-socialismphilosophy-general
Delivered at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), this lecture explores the structural homology between Marx's surplus value, Lacan's surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir), and what Žižek proposes as a third term, surplus knowledge in modern science. Using Hitchcock's unused North by Northwest corpse-on-assembly-line anecdote as a springboard, Žižek argues that the pleasure principle, natural exchange, and direct satisfaction are all retroactive myths, with drive, compulsion to repeat, and Lustgewinn (gain of pleasure through formal detour) as the underlying reality. The talk moves through ideology critique, analyzing political correctness, white liberal guilt, harassment discourse, and tolerance rhetoric as forms of ideologically occluded surplus enjoyment, before closing with an extended Q&A on refugees, Trump, transgenderism, the left's strategic impasse, and the paradox of post-communist China's capitalist management.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “surplus value (Mehrwert)”
Marx's concept of value generated as if from nowhere through the production process, illustrated here by the corpse that drops from a completed Ford automobile.
Žižek's third term alongside surplus value and surplus enjoyment: modern science functions through an excess of knowledge that accumulates beyond any individual's grasp, unlike traditional secret/religious knowledge.
Lacan's core invention, the object-cause of desire, not itself desired but that which sets desire in motion, unified here as the form underlying surplus value, surplus enjoyment, and surplus knowledge.
Lacan's seminar title/wordplay: those who are not duped, who cannot be tricked, err most, truth is accessible only through illusion, requiring a wrong choice first.
as “surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir)”
Lacan's concept, homologous to Marx's surplus value, designating the object-cause of desire (objet petit a) as the excess of enjoyment produced through the formal detour of drive rather than direct satisfaction.
Freud's 'gain of pleasure': the additional satisfaction produced not by attaining the goal directly but by the formal detour itself, e.g., seduction games, Brecht's pseudo-Chinese transposition, compulsion to repeat.
Marx's formulas for simple commodity exchange versus capitalist circulation: in M-C-M money becomes the telos and the process becomes endless self-perpetuation, homologous to drive.
as “goal vs. aim of drive”
Lacan's distinction within drive: the goal is the object (e.g., the breast), but the true aim is the repetitive movement of circling it, satisfaction comes from the loop, not the attainment.
as “compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang)”
Freud's term for the drive's endless self-perpetuation beyond the pleasure principle, which Žižek reads as the true content of the death drive, not extinction but immortality/undeadness.
Paradoxically reread as Freud's name for immortality: not the desire to cease but the inability to die properly, the compulsion to repeat that keeps returning like a living dead.
as “negative judgment vs. infinite judgment”
Kant's distinction: negating a predicate ('not dead' = alive) versus asserting a non-predicate ('undead'), which opens infinity, the living dead cannot die, just as drive compulsively repeats.
as “the living dead / undead”
Žižek's exemplary figure for the death drive as immortality: the undead returns again and again, unable to die properly, the Wagnerian hero's predicament, and the structure of compulsion to repeat.
as “repression of desire reverts into desire of repression”
Žižek's Hegelian-Freudian dialectical formula (via Judith Butler): obsessional defensive rituals against illicit desire themselves become the locus of perverse satisfaction.
Lacanian enjoyment as a deadly excess over pleasure, not simply satisfaction but what lies beyond the pleasure principle, the real kernel of the drives.
Hegelian figure for the moral stance that maintains its purity by lamenting the world's wrongs without acting, Žižek applies it to liberals who write about Europe's fascism instead of doing something.
as “the day after”
Žižek's name for the left's unresolved problem: the ecstatic moment of revolution is easy; what matters is translating the explosion into new rules for everyday life, the fidelity to the event.
Badiou's concept: the 'work of love' required to sustain and translate a revolutionary rupture into durable new order, what Žižek says the left consistently fails to provide after the 'day after'.
Žižek's formula for the consumerist logic of decaf ideology: Coke without sugar, beer without alcohol, sex without risk, enjoyment purged of its substance.
as “super-ego injunction to enjoy”
The Lacanian super-ego commands enjoyment, but this command itself sabotages enjoyment more efficiently than traditional prohibition does.
Žižek's analogy to primitive capital accumulation: modern science generates a surplus of knowledge that exists beyond any tradition or individual brain, always working through its own excess.
Žižek's label for one contemporary ideological pole: movements (from Polish anti-abortion drives to Boko Haram) that make the reassertion of traditional sexual hierarchy the central anti-decadence project.
Lacan's term for the fundamental anxiety of entering sexuality, being deprived of a part of oneself, which Žižek invokes here to argue that transgender anxiety ('am I that?') cannot be resolved by a third bathroom because the unease is constitutive.
Marx's residual category for social formations that do not fit his main sequence, Žižek reads it as a structural necessity: there is always a paradoxical third category (those who don't fit) that the system must posit.
Invoked (in the Q&A context of 'post-politics') as the structural placeholder that constitutes social unity without positive content, the empty frame within which post-political consensus operates.
Term Žižek cites from his Brazilian experience: zones outside legal order that paradoxically enable brutal but sometimes creative economic activity unconstrained by regulation.
Stories he reaches for 10
V for Vendetta ends with crowds storming parliament, 'The End.' Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see V for Vendetta Part 2: What Did They Do the Next Day? The left fetishizes the ecstatic rupture without addressing the day after.
“I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a movie called V for Vendetta Part 2: What Did They Do the Next Day?”
In the British film Brassed Off, a working-class man walks a woman home; she invites him up for coffee, he says he doesn't drink coffee, she replies 'No problem, I don't have any.' Nothing literally happens, yet everything is communicated through the empty detour, illustrating how surplus enjoyment arises from the formal non-content of the exchange.
“She says, 'Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?' and he says, 'I would love it but I don't drink coffee,' and then she says, 'No problem, I don't have any.'”
An authoritarian father tells his child to visit grandmother regardless of feeling, oppressive but workable (child can rebel). The permissive father says 'I'm not telling you to go unless you want to', but this hides a deeper command: not only must you go, you must want to go. The permissive command colonizes desire itself.
“You know how much your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless I'm not telling you to visit her unless you want to visit her. The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her.”
Researchers found Bakhtin's private notes while writing his book on Rabelais celebrating Carnival, and discovered his secret model was not public festivities but the Stalinist purges and Gulag: total reversibility ('today secretary, tomorrow English spy in Gulag'). Žižek uses this to argue that Carnival has a totalitarian rather than emancipatory logic.
“The secret model for Carnival for him was not some public festivity but KGB, Stalinist purges, Gulag. This is Carnival at its purest.”
Wang Hui told Žižek that Deng Xiaoping, when asked on his deathbed what his greatest act was, said it was resisting the temptation of full Western democracy, which he believed would have meant chaos. Žižek uses this to support the paradox that the Communist Party enabled China's capitalist success.
“Deng Xiaoping said that when things open, I wasn't tempted... almost the majority of the party was tempted by going to the end, full Western democracy. He said it would have meant chaos.”
Hitchcock wanted a scene in North by Northwest where Cary Grant and a factory worker watch a car assembled piece by piece, then open the door, and a corpse falls out. Žižek reads the corpse as the perfect image of surplus value: the surplus object that appears from nowhere through the production process.
“They open the door of the car and out drops a corpse. This corpse is the surplus object at its purest, the objective counterpoint to the subject.”
A right-wing New York beef advertisement showing a barbecue and country singing with the slogan 'Beef: real food for real people' functions as populist protest against over-regulated hedonism, an unconscious reaction to the hyper-disciplined consumerism that officially commands enjoyment.
“'Beef: real food for real people.' The subtle message was: 'Do we really have to go through this over-regulated hedonism?'”
Žižek met likely ethnic cleansers in a Belgrade restaurant and tried to sell them the 'escape from freedom' / modernity-anxiety explanation. They laughed and corrected him: for them, Western liberal society is over-regulated and frustrating; going to Bosnia to engage in ethnic cleansing means 'I'm free again.'
“They said, 'I cannot even beat my wife, I cannot rape her... For us, becoming a nationalist means: I go to Bosnia, engage in ethnic cleansing, I'm free again.'”
In the film Project X, a stupid teenage party spirals into a ten-thousand-person riot burning the house. At a certain point the film shows this chaos acquiring a sacred dimension, a rediscovery of old orgies, not merely secular amusement. The father's grudging approval at the end illustrates how traditional authority secretly endorses the transgression.
“At a certain point in the film it's clearly that it acquires a sacred dimension. This is really a movie about a rediscovery of the sacred—old sacred orgies in our societies.”
Žižek reads a two-page essay in United's in-flight magazine celebrating sex entirely through the lens of health benefits, muscles staying firm, saliva not dripping, which he finds the most depressive text he has read, as the injunction to enjoy via health instrumentalization ruins the enjoyment completely.
“It was the most depressive text that I've read. All of it is argumentation how good sex is for your body. 'Do a lot of deep French kissing; your muscles will remain more firm.' It really ruins everything.”
Works invoked 18
Capital book
Marx's analysis of commodities, surplus value, and C-M-C vs. M-C-M is the central theoretical scaffold for the Marx-Lacan homology argument.
V for Vendetta film
Used negatively as an example of what the left produces, a film that ends with the revolutionary moment and nothing about the day after; Žižek says the missing sequel would be the real test.
Brassed Off film
Called 'a moderately left British melodrama'; the coffee/no-coffee scene between Ewan McGregor and a woman is Žižek's canonical example of surplus enjoyment through the formal empty detour.
Roots tv
Alex Haley's TV series called 'disgusting'; used as example of how Hollywood and white racists alike love Black people to 'search for their roots', which keeps them there and preserves white universalism.
North by Northwest film
Hitchcock's unused corpse-in-Ford scene (from the Truffaut conversations) launches the entire lecture as the opening illustration of surplus value / objet petit a.
Malcolm X (film) film
Spike Lee's biopic referenced only as a chronological marker to identify which earlier Lee film Žižek praises for its 'we love them, but...' dynamic.
Judith Butler's 'best book' according to Žižek, praised for its Freudian chapter isolating the dialectical reversal of repression of desire into desire of repression.
Der fliegende Holländer opera
First major Wagnerian opera cited as archetype of the death drive as immortality: the Dutchman is condemned to eternal life and desires only to die properly.
Kolyma Tales book
Varlam Shalamov's Gulag memoirs; recommended over Solzhenitsyn as the authentic source on Gulag life.
Project X film
Called 'cheap, stupid' but 'very fascinating', a film about the rediscovery of the sacred through orgiastic excess; used to illustrate the super-ego underside of permissive society and the logic of the carnivalesque.
Nixon (film) film
Oliver Stone's biopic with Anthony Hopkins; Žižek 'doesn't like Stone much' but appreciates this film for pointing to Nixon's genuine political ambiguity rather than just attacking him.
Les non-dupes errent other
Lacan's 1973-74 seminar; the eleventh session quoted directly where Lacan asks what he himself really invented and answers: objet petit a.
Samo Tomšič's book (Verso); Žižek recommends it while noting his customary critical disagreements, praising especially its demonstration that C-M-C exchange is a retroactive myth.
Gandhi (film) film
Called 'shitty' (by implication, as a 'big' hagiographic movie); Indian friends share Žižek's distaste for its idealization and blame-displacement regarding Partition.
The Planet of Slums book
Mike Davis's book on favelas and slums; recommended for its analysis of zones outside legal order and the paradoxical freedoms/brutalities they enable.
L'Ordine Nuovo (journal) journal
Gramsci's journal; Žižek loves that Gramsci used 'New Order' as a positive left term before fascism captured it, illustrating the task of translating revolution into new everyday order.
Brecht's pseudo-Chinese retelling of European revolutionary history; used as a prime example of Lustgewinn, the pleasure of back-translating the fictional names.
Žižek's own book published in Europe; cited as 'obvious' and noted it 'would be prohibited here', deployed to argue that tolerance is ideologically suspect as a category.
People invoked 39
Paul Mason positive
Called a 'cheap popularizer' but Žižek 'basically agrees' with his analysis that current capitalist developments point beyond market economy.
Primo Levi positive
Recommended as exemplary witness: Auschwitz memoirs reveal the carnivalesque structure of the camp ('Arbeit macht frei' as carnivalesque inversion).
Cited (via Jameson) as effectively the most leftist US president by today's measures, health care spending, opening China, used to show how far right the political center has moved.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Gandhi's hands were 'definitely not clean' in the 1947-48 Partition, cited in the Q&A when a Pakistani questioner raises it; the Gandhi film is also called 'shitty' by implication.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
French theorist of catastrophes and friend; Žižek cites Dupuy's firsthand account that the Japanese government nearly had to evacuate all of Tokyo after Fukushima, kept secret for a day.
Blaise Pascal positive
The Pascalian wager invoked to describe Merkel's refugee decision: acting on a bet whose justification can only appear retroactively.
Richard Wagner positive
Žižek loves Wagner; argues Freud should be read against Wagner's background, as the Wagnerian hero's predicament (wanting to die, condemned to eternal repetition) is the archetype of the death drive.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
His late-1930s text on the structure of fascist propaganda, showing that beneath rhetoric of renunciation, fascism secretly offers obscene carnivalesque pleasure, is cited as the crucial lesson for analyzing ideology.
Deng Xiaoping positive
His deathbed remark about resisting full Western democracy is cited approvingly as explanation of why China succeeded where chaos would otherwise have reigned.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical reference throughout; Žižek elaborates Lacan's objet petit a, plus-de-jouir, non-dupes errent, goal/aim distinction, symbolic castration, super-ego injunction, and the seminar Les non-dupes errent (1973-74).
Oliver Stone positive
Žižek doesn't like Stone much but appreciates his Nixon film for pointing to Nixon's deep political ambiguity rather than just attacking him.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek argues against leftist celebration of Carnival (Bakhtin's theory) by revealing that Bakhtin's private notes show his secret model was Stalinist purges, Carnival has a totalitarian logic.
Mike Davis positive
Planet of Slums recommended for its analysis of favelas and the zones not fully covered by legal order, context for Žižek's discussion of those 'outside' global capitalism.
Ted Cruz negative
Called 'Lucifer in flesh' (citing Boehner) and presented as more dangerous than Trump precisely because he says the same things in a superficially more civilized, media-acceptable way.
Judith Butler positive
Usually in polemics with her, but here recommends The Psychic Life of Power as her best book, praising the chapter on Freudian reflexivity and the dialectical reversal of desire into desire of repression.
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens negative
Cited as exemplifying the neoliberal ideological trick of presenting precarious labor as 'new freedom' (you can reinvent yourself every two years).
Varlam Shalamov positive
Recommended over Solzhenitsyn as the 'authentic' Gulag writer, Kolyma Tales cited as the real source for understanding the Gulag.
Called 'disgust embodied' and a 'filthy populist opportunist,' but also analyzed as actually making more ambiguous and sometimes more reasonable positions than ideological rivals (Palestinian peace, Putin, minimum wage).
Antonio Negri negative
Cited as an example of leftists who celebrate Carnival, Žižek is 'deeply critical' of this position given Carnival's totalitarian logic.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek's close friend and personal hero; praises his concrete commitment to immigrants (adopted a Black son, teaches sans papiers); invokes Badiou's concept of 'fidelity to the event' and the 'work of love' approvingly.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn negative
Žižek tells the audience to 'ignore Solzhenitsyn' on Gulag and read Shalamov instead.
Fredric Jameson negative
Friend who told Žižek that Richard Nixon is effectively a radical leftist; also cited as exemplifying the tragic leftist position of pushing social democracy knowing it will fail, Žižek asks him 'what do you want?' and he starts to sweat.
Wang Hui positive
Described as a great Chinese social philosopher and friend who shared the anecdote about Deng Xiaoping's deathbed remark on resisting full Western democracy.
Bernie Sanders positive
Admired for doing what the politically correct cultural left failed to do for decades: finding contact with ordinary people (the Bible Belt social base of populist right-wingers).
Yanis Varoufakis negative
Called a 'good friend' but Žižek disagrees with him on democratizing Europe: Varoufakis's call for democratic transparency would have been bad for Greece and refugees given current majority sentiment.
Jeremy Rifkin positive
Grouped with Mason as a cheap popularizer whose basic diagnosis that capitalism is reaching structural limits Žižek nonetheless endorses.
Spike Lee positive
Met in a cafeteria; praised for a film (before Malcolm X) that brilliantly deploys the 'we love them, but...' liberal racist dynamic, and the class/racial reality of the harassment concept.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Described as his 'original teacher, the nephew of Lacan'; but Žižek opposes Miller's thesis that the 21st century will be the century of the Real without Oedipus, arguing this misses the continued function of prohibition.
Referenced only as the interlocutor in the Hitchcock conversations that yield the Ford corpse anecdote.
Angela Merkel positive
Her 'Kommt' gesture admitting over a million refugees against majority opinion is defended as authentic democratic leadership, a Pascalian wager, not a betrayal of democracy.
Viktor Orbán negative
Named as exemplifying the true threat to Europe, those who present themselves as Europe's defenders while actually destroying it.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited approvingly: the task today is not to ride the train of history toward progress but to pull the emergency brake, Žižek says he is much closer to Benjamin than to orthodox Marxist progressivism.
Samo Tomšič positive
Younger Slovenian colleague; Žižek recommends his book The Capitalist Unconscious (Verso) for demonstrating that C-M-C exchange never existed, while noting he is 'as always, critical' of it.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
The unused corpse-in-Ford scene from his conversations with Truffaut launches the entire theoretical argument; Žižek praises Hitchcock's instinct not to include it as too direct.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited to show that his speeches barely use the word 'tolerance', he would have found it obscene, demonstrating that tolerance is a liberal ideological displacement of structural racial problems.
Antonio Gramsci positive
Praised for still using the term 'New Order' in the 1920s-30s in a positive left sense (journal L'Ordine Nuovo), before it was captured by fascism, illustrating the task of translating revolution into new everyday order.
Karl Marx positive
Surplus value, C-M-C vs. M-C-M formula, commodity analysis, and Asiatic mode of production all deployed as central theoretical tools in structural homology with Lacan.
Sigmund Freud positive
Lustgewinn, Lustprinzip, Wiederholungszwang, death drive, and compulsion to repeat all closely read and reinterpreted throughout the lecture.
Immanuel Kant positive
The distinction between negative judgment and infinite/indefinite judgment (not dead vs. undead) is cited as crucial for understanding the death drive as immortality.
What it argues
structural homology between surplus value, surplus enjoyment, and surplus knowledgeLustgewinn: pleasure gained through formal detour rather than direct satisfactionideology as obscured surplus enjoyment (from Ku Klux Klan to political correctness)the myth of the pleasure principle and natural exchangedeath drive as immortality / the logic of the undeadtransgenderism and Lacanian symbolic castrationthe left's strategic impasse and 'the day after' the revolution
Dialectical moves 12
“The death drive is paradoxically Freud's name for immortality—the undead cannot die, it returns again and again; what looks like the drive toward extinction is actually the compulsion to repeat.”
Reversal of the common reading: the death drive is not about wanting to stop but about being unable to stop, the horror of undeadness, not the peace of extinction.
“Those who are not duped, who refuse to be tricked, err most—truth is accessible only through illusion; you have to begin with a wrong choice to make the right choice.”
Lacan's non-dupes errent: the cynical 'I see through all illusions' stance is the most mistaken, since the subject can only reach truth by passing through the necessary illusion.
“Surplus enjoyment is a nonsensical tautology because for Lacan, enjoyment is already in itself a surplus—there is no zero-level enjoyment which is then supplemented.”
Enjoyment cannot be completed or topped up; it is structurally excessive from the start, making 'surplus enjoyment' both redundant and the only true name for enjoyment.
“Repression of desire always reverts into desire of repression—the obsessional's defensive rituals themselves become the site of perverse enjoyment.”
The mechanism meant to eliminate illicit satisfaction secretly generates and sustains that satisfaction in displaced form.
“Even mother herself isn't the mother—not only does no woman fully satisfy the desire for the mother, but even the mother lacks the quality 'mother.'”
Negativity is not just about the gap between desire and object but is internal to the object itself; even the 'original' possessor of the quality lacks it.
“The best way to miss something is to go directly at it—art's basic paradox is that staging a fantasy too directly makes the effect vulgar.”
Formal detour (Lustgewinn) applies to aesthetic experience too: the most powerful representations work through indirection, not direct statement.
“Far from being the permissive authority that liberates desire, modern 'permissive' parental authority is far more oppressive—it commands not only what to do but what to want to do.”
The postmodern permissive father's 'free choice' hides a deeper injunction: you must not only visit grandmother but must want to visit her.
“White liberal self-humiliation is an inverted version of the white man's burden—by insisting they are always guilty, liberals retain the position of the only active universal agent.”
The apparent self-negation of white guilt secretly preserves the subject's centrality: we are the big guilty one, therefore still the one that matters.
“C-M-C natural exchange never existed—it is a retroactive myth that capitalism itself generates to ideologically normalize the M-C-M circuit it actually runs on.”
The supposedly pre-capitalist innocent exchange is produced by capitalism as its own ideological legitimation, not a real historical precursor.
“Richard Nixon is a radical leftist by today's standards—the center itself has moved so far right that its old positions now appear as the radical left.”
The political spectrum is not stable; what counts as left or right is determined retroactively by the current center, making historical comparison vertiginous.
“Communist China thrives precisely because only a Communist Party could have managed its capitalist transformation—the exception proves the rule that the party form enables what liberal democracy cannot.”
The apparent paradox, Communist party as best capitalist manager, is not a contradiction but the revelation of a hidden structural necessity.
“True democracy does not mean following the crowd—Angela Merkel was right to act against the majority, making a Pascalian wager that the decision will retroactively justify itself.”
Democratic legitimacy is not reducible to majority preference; authentic political leadership requires acting against the majority when necessary and hoping the act creates its own retroactive justification.
Claims 22
asserts
The pure pleasure principle (Lustprinzip) does not exist—it is as much a myth as Marx's natural C-M-C exchange; from the outset, pleasure is always already corrupted by compulsion to repeat.Freudian pleasure principle / drive theory
asserts
Surplus value, surplus enjoyment, and surplus knowledge are all forms of appearance of objet petit a—the surplus object that mysteriously emerges from a process.structural homology of Marx and Lacan
asserts
Objet petit a is Lacan's single core invention, the nucleus of his entire return to Freud—not the unconscious structured like a language, not the big Other, not the formulas of sexuation.Lacan's theoretical contribution
reframes
The death drive is paradoxically Freud's name for immortality, not extinction—it is the compulsion to repeat, the undeadness that cannot stop, not the wish to cease.Freudian death drive
asserts
Repression of desire always reverts into desire of repression—obsessional rituals designed to suppress illicit satisfaction become themselves the source of perverse enjoyment.obsessional neurosis / Freudian reflexivity
reframes
Full enjoyment is not only something we can never fully attain but also something we can never fully get rid of—it insists and haunts even as we try to erase it.Lacanian enjoyment / jouissance
asserts
White liberal guilt and political correctness are themselves ideological forms of surplus enjoyment: by positioning themselves as uniquely guilty, liberals secretly retain the status of the only true universal subject.political correctness / white liberal guilt as ideology
asserts
Without surplus enjoyment, ideology cannot function—fascism, the KKK, and political correctness all require an obscene carnivalesque underside of illicit pleasure to sustain themselves.ideology and surplus enjoyment
reframes
Contemporary consumerism is not genuinely hedonistic but hyper-regulated: the injunction to enjoy is so hedged with conditions (diet, safe sex, body training) that it ruins enjoyment.consumerism and enjoyment
asserts
The super-ego injunction to enjoy sabotages enjoyment more efficiently than traditional prohibition—permissive authority is more oppressive than authoritarian command.permissive vs. authoritarian authority
rejects
Carnival is not inherently emancipatory—Bakhtin's secret model for carnival was the Stalinist purges, and carnival logic structures both Gulag and Auschwitz ('Arbeit macht frei').leftist celebration of carnival (Bakhtin, Negri)
asserts
The left's fundamental unresolved problem is 'the day after': translating ecstatic revolutionary rupture into new rules for everyday life, which requires Badiou's fidelity to the event.the left's strategic impasse
asserts
Transgender anxiety ('am I that?') cannot be resolved by a third bathroom category because the unease about sexual identity is constitutive of subjectivity itself, not a contingent social imposition.transgenderism and Lacanian subjectivity
rejects
Tolerance is a suspicious ideological category because it culturalizes structural economic and legal problems of racism, converting them into questions of psychological openness.tolerance as anti-racism discourse
reframes
Trump is a filthy populist opportunist, but on several concrete issues (Palestinian peace process, engaging Putin, minimum wage) he was more ambiguous and reasonable than ideological rivals like Ted Cruz.Trump versus other Republican candidates
asserts
The European refugee crisis was handled catastrophically and possibly intentionally to provoke right-wing backlash; the solution is organized processing centers and airlifts, not open-borders chaos.European refugee crisis management
asserts
Angela Merkel was right to admit refugees against majority opinion—authentic democracy does not mean following the crowd but making a risky wager that retroactively justifies itself.democracy and leadership vs. populism
asserts
Only the Chinese Communist Party could have managed China's capitalist transformation—this is precisely what liberals cannot accept about Chinese development.Chinese development model
asserts
Intellectual property is the death knell of capitalism—new forms of exchange are emerging that point beyond the market economy, but the left has no organized model for them.capitalism's structural limits
asserts
C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity) natural exchange never existed—it is a retroactive myth that capitalist ideology generates to re-normalize the M-C-M circuit.Marxist political economy / Samo Tomšič's reading
reframes
The harassment concept, as effectively deployed in the US, has a strong class dimension: it mostly targets lower-class or 'vulgar' behavior rather than genuine sexual violence.sexual harassment discourse
asserts
Poverty is not noble—idealizing refugees in Frank Capra style is the worst ideology because poverty can itself be ethically destructive.refugee politics and idealization of the poor
Quotes 18
“Truth is accessible only through illusion. You have to begin with a wrong choice to make the right choice.”Slavoj Žižek · non-dupes errent / illusion and truth
“Surplus enjoyment is a nonsensical tautology because for Lacan, we do not have a zero-level enjoyment which is then supplemented by some surplus—enjoyment is in itself a surplus.”Slavoj Žižek · enjoyment as constitutively surplus
“Full enjoyment is not just something we cannot ever fully get hold of, that forever evades. Much more tragically, it's also something we cannot ever get rid of.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance as inescapable
“The death drive is paradoxically Freud's name for immortality on the contrary. What's death drive? The living dead. You kill him, it returns again and again and again.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as undeadness
“Without this Lustgewinn, without this surplus pleasure, an ideology doesn't function.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment as condition of ideology
“Repression of desire always reverts into desire of repression.”Slavoj Žižek · obsessional dialectic of desire
“The best way to miss something is to go directly at it.”Slavoj Žižek · formal detour / Lustgewinn in aesthetics
“The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. It orders you not what to do but even what to desire to do.”Slavoj Žižek · permissive authority colonizes desire
“Who are today true consumers? Drug addicts, smokers, and maybe alcoholics. That's why we are so obsessed with them—they are the only true consumers left.”Slavoj Žižek · consumerism and its real subjects
“The true aim of drive is the very repetitive movement of satisfying it. What really brings satisfaction is just sucking the breast—the repetitive action as such.”Slavoj Žižek · drive's aim vs. goal
“I don't want to open our heart, the problem is to open our doors to get them in to live. I hate this moralistic pressure which serves just to retain our beautiful soul.”Slavoj Žižek · beautiful soul vs. real political action on refugees
“The true scandal is not that some people are now openly for torture. The true horror is that torture became a topic of public debate at all—normalization of torture.”Slavoj Žižek · normalization as the real scandal
“Berlin Wall fell down, but new walls are emerging everywhere.”Slavoj Žižek · global division in/out replaces Cold War barriers
“I'm much closer to Walter Benjamin here, who said the task today is not to ride the train of history towards progress but to pull the emergency brake.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjamin against progressivist Marxism
“When leftists say that the situation is very complex, it means they are in deep shit always.”Slavoj Žižek · left's strategic paralysis
“The corpse is the surplus object at its purest, the objective counterpoint to the subject, the surplus product of the subject's activity.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus object / objet petit a
“Poverty is not a noble thing. Poverty can ruin you ethically also. Poverty makes you brutal, survivalist.”Slavoj Žižek · against idealization of the poor
“Intellectual property is the death knell of capitalism. It's clear that in the long term it will not work.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's structural limits
Transcript 26 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I’m very grateful for your kind invitation. I always like to drop in for my good friend Alain Badiou. And I must tell you from my private experience, because I know of at least five, six people who began to hate him because he had to cancel in the last minute. It’s not that he is not—played the role of a big academic who can afford this, but a) he has health problems, he has private family problems. No, I can say this, nothing dirty, intimate, but for example he—he is really for me a heroic person, you know. For him, helping immigrants and so on, it’s not this big liberal phrase. It’s—he adopted years ago a black guy, son of a single mother who died because of AIDS. He and his wife adopted him and he spent hours, and there were some often—this son has some psychological problems, there were even tragic things. Once I visited him, I saw police in front of his apartment block and the guy, he had some psychotic crisis, the son, full of [unintelligible] and so on, shouting around and Badiou trying to calm him. I mean he is simply my hero at this level, you know. For him, again, helping the immigrants and so on, it’s not this big politically correct stuff and then you go home. It’s—he spent weekends in France with these *sans papiers*, without paper, teaching them, patiently explaining to them how to—how to use what you can use of the state. Because he discovered something which is very interesting, that one strong factor in the exclusion of those *sans papiers* and others, it’s—it’s very tragic how many of them simply do not know what are their rights. They don’t even use the opportunities that they have. And of course, I’m not—he, we are not blaming them. The point is that the system is made—functions de facto in such a convoluted way that, you know, you give people certain rights, but then you set in motion or establish a complex machinery making it sure that most of these rights concrete individual people will not be able to use them. And we come here—I’m so sad we don’t have time to do this—to talk what you were kind enough to mention. I’m proud to say we are both neighbors—I mean Slovenia and Hungary—and also we are two proud members of this new tribe, these almost neo-fascist new European countries. I don’t know, I will not speak to you but for you, but I’m more and more ashamed of coming where I come from, you know. Sorry, so second point, but more about politics and all that stuff, we will connect this to cinema in the evening. Yes, I propose nonetheless not to disappoint you—I hope this will not disappoint you—if I treat you a little bit more seriously and go at least into something that will be like three quarters of a theory. About, again, this parallel between what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, with all the wonderful French ambiguities, you know, because *plus-de-jouir* means "more of," but if you know French it also can mean "none of it, let’s stop it," you know, "no more of that." But that’s—this ambiguity, you will see immediately in what sense is the point. Then the surplus value, *Mehrwert* in Marx, and I would like to add as Lacan does—and it’s strange how this topic is almost totally neglected—the topic of surplus knowledge, a knowledge in excess, and how the status of this surplus knowledge changes with science. So let’s see where we will come. I will talk at a certain point, you will be my male domina—that is to say, leather dress and whip—and you stop me. Okay, and then... now please don’t be disappointed, there will be theory. I would like to begin, since nonetheless we are at TIFF cinema, with a well-known reference to Alfred Hitchcock. In his conversations with Truffaut, Hitchcock recalls a scene he wanted to insert into *North by Northwest*. The scene was never shot, and I think Hitchcock was right not to include it because it renders all too directly the basic matrix of his work. You know, that’s one of the arts of cinema for me, that like if you say something too directly, if you stage a fantasy too brutally, too directly, the effect can be vulgar. You know, that’s the basic paradox of Hitchcock. But I think of art as such, the best way to miss something is to go directly at it. But nonetheless, it’s a—I was surprised to discover already years ago as a kid when I read the book that it’s a very Marxist example in a way. Quote—I quote Hitchcock: "I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant"—you know, who played, plays Roger Thornhill in *North by Northwest*—"Cary Grant and one of the factory workers at a Ford automobile plant. As they walk along the assembly line, behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece. Finally, the car that they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete with gas and oil and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' Then they open the door of the car and out drops a corpse." End of quote. What we would have seen in this long shot is precisely the elementary unity of the production process. And isn't it clear that the corpse that mysteriously drops out from nowhere, that it’s a perfect standing for the surplus value that is generated out of nowhere through the production process? This corpse is the surplus object at its purest, the objective counterpoint to the subject, the surplus product of the subject’s activity. This surplus, as already mentioned, has three forms: surplus value, surplus enjoyment, and surplus knowledge. They are all forms of appearance of what Lacan calls *l'objet petit a*, the object small a, the object cause of desire. Lacan begins the eleventh week of his seminar *Les non-dupes errent* from '73-'74—you know this wonderful play with words, *Les non-dupes errent*, it’s a basic theoretical insight of Lacan, very Hegelian, I claim, means precisely those who are not duped, tricked, they err, they are most in the wrong. And I think this is a very deep insight, that the definition of idiot, of a complete idiot, is not the one who falls into every trap, but the one who cannot be tricked. Truth is accessible only through illusion. You have to, or to put it in the terms of choice, you have to begin with a wrong choice to make the right choice. And when he asks himself in this eleventh session of his seminar, he asks himself—Lacan, sorry—a question in his usually arrogant way addressing himself. Here is a quote from Lacan: "What was it that Lacan, who is here present, really invented?" He meant himself. And then he answers the question, he says, "Like that, to get things going: *objet a*, the object small a." So Lacan considers this his—the core of his return to Freud. So again, it’s not desire if the desire of the other, is not the unconscious is structured like a language, it’s not even there is no sexual relationship or some other of these big Lacanian mantras. And Lacan emphasizes that this object small a is not just one among his contribution. He thinks everything that he really invented is focused on this notion. *L'objet a*, object small a, has a long history in Lacan's teaching. It precedes for decades Lacan's systematic reference to the analysis of commodities in Marx's *Capital*. And, okay, we don't have time to do this, but it would be very interesting to see how it—it means gradually exactly the opposite of what it meant. At the beginning, it was in his first seminars early '50s, for Lacan object A was simply the imaginary object, the image with which I identify and so on. Then it is closer, gets closer to the lack in the symbolic order and so on and so on. And only, again, I would say in late '60s does he develop his, let’s call it mature theory of object small a. And here reference to Marx, especially to Marx's notion of surplus value, is crucial. It enabled Lacan to articulate his notion of object small a as surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*. The predominant motive which penetrates all Lacan's references to Marx's analysis of commodities is the structural homology between surplus value of Marx and what Lacan calls surplus enjoyment. The key, if we are looking for the roots to surplus enjoyment in Freud, then I think the crucial notion is the one, the phenomenon called by Freud *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure. This does not designate a simple acceleration of pleasure, like you can have sex this way but take that drug and you will get even more pleasure or whatever. No, it—it means additional pleasure provided by the very formal detour in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. For example, an example from literature which always fascinated me. Do you know Brecht's *Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen* (Book of Changes)? Where basically, what does Brecht do there? He is retelling the history of revolutionary movements in Europe, but he transposes this history into an imaginary China. For example, he speaks about a wise Chinese leader called To-tsi, which is of course Trotsky, and so on and so on. So our re-translation of these pseudo-Chinese names back into their European original—"Aha," we say, "To-tsi is Trotsky"—now I guessed it, makes the text much more pleasurable. This would be a nice case of *Lustgewinn*. Just imagine, it could have been done easily. Just imagine rewriting Brecht's book without this Chinese bullshit, just replacing Chinese names with real, as it were, European names. You get something very vulgar, common. Brecht's insights are even from today’s perspective at least very suspicious sometimes, like... this is not a popular to say today when many people still celebrate Brecht, but till the end—it means till '55-'56, no—he was bothered with it, he wrote a couple of texts which are very difficult to locate, because people try to hide them, defending Stalinist monstrous show trials. He does it in a very objective way, he says, "Okay, maybe there is something problematic about them, but can we nonetheless imagine in what conditions this might be true? What could have pushed Trotsky towards becoming a traitor?" and so on and so on. Or, the most elementary example, how much a process of seduction gains with its intricate innuendos, false denials and so on and so on. It’s—you know, it’s not just that because of cultural obstacles we do this game, like—sorry for being male chauvinist direct—I want to sleep with a lady, but and what I really want is just to tear her clothes off and do it, but unfortunately because of the social oppression and so on, I have to play all these games. No, it’s not like that. I claim that if you take away these games, you maybe get some purely biological satisfaction, but you don't get pleasure. Let me—here we could lose time, but I will not lose it too much by giving you wonderful example, for example an example that I often use. Did you see a—I relatively liked it because it’s kind of a moderately left British melodrama from some years ago, *Brassed Off*, with Ewan McGregor playing a working-class hero. This is Ewan McGregor, the old one, before he became Jedi and all big things, no? And it’s—I always say it, you know it, I always refer to it because it’s a wonderful example. It’s—there is erotic tension between him who plays a worker to be fired, and a slightly more upper-class girl who is an accountant for the managers there. And okay, they flirt and he accompanies her to her home. And in front of her house, she says, "Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?" and he says, "I would love it but I don't drink coffee," and then she says, "No problem, I don't have any." I cannot, can you imagine, it happens apparently, it happens, nothing happens, you know. Just an offer is rejected. "Do you want coffee?" "No." "Okay, I don't have it." So you would say, "Heh-heh, so what?" It’s total—I mean if you take it literally, it’s total stupidity. Basically, the conversation really is about, "Do you want to come up and fuck me?" "Yes." But my god, by the very vulgarity of what I said now, you see how much you gain by doing an empty detour. Now let’s complicate this a little bit more. In the same way that in libidinal economy there is no pure pleasure principle undisturbed by the perversities of compulsion to repeat, perversities which cannot be accounted for in the terms of pleasure principle. In the sphere of the exchange of commodities, there is no direct closed circle of exchanging commodities, this what Marx calls C-M-C, Commodity-Money-Commodity. I sell a commodity which is mine to gain money to buy with it another commodity which satisfies some of my needs. And here one has to be very careful. The point of Marx is not that this is—this is still natural, this is non-alienated production because production serves human needs. You know, like, you know, at and then in capitalism madness explodes. As Marx put it, C-M-C, Commodity-Money-Commodity: I sell something to buy something else which satisfies my needs. Here we can say production still serves concrete needs of concrete people. Capitalist formula as Marx shows is M-C-M: Money invested into commodity generating more money. What happens here is not just a reversal, but as Marx put it very nicely, the—the whole process becomes eternal. Because in C-M-C exchange is just a detour, so that I get at the end what I really need. But in M-C-M, the moment money becomes predominant, the process becomes endless. Because, you know, it never stops. You—you get money to get more money to get more money and so on and so on. But what is crucial here—I don't have time to develop it—I would like to refer you here to a book which was now published by Verso, it's doing quite well, of a one of the younger colleagues of mine in Slovenia, Samo Tomšič. It's called *The Capitalist Unconscious*, where I have of course, as always, that's my business as a grumpy old man, I am critical of that book, but I think he does this basic job very well in that book. Especially he shows that for Marx, C-M-C, this basic zero-level of not yet perverted exchange where exchange still serves concrete human needs, that it never existed. That it’s a myth. It’s a retroactive myth to justify capitalism. Because you know what’s true capitalism? Capitalist ideology is its re-normalization. Capitalist ideology is not, "Oh, it's only money, money engendering more money." No, capitalist ideology is, "It's really about people," you know. Even the most crazy speculative dance, it all serves satisfaction of the needs of concrete people and so on and so on. So the point is that—that for Freud—it’s—I hope you will get the point because here now things will start to get complicated—it's the same with a simple direct pleasure without a detour. Exactly in the same way as for Marx, there is no immediate satisfaction in exchange, but there is always a gap where exchange becomes its own goal. It’s exactly the same movement as again in what Freud calls compulsion to repeat, and the compulsion to repeat is of course the basic movement of what Freud calls drive. Lacan in reading closely Freud distinguishes in the notion of drive between its goal and its aim. The goal is, for example, oral drive, the most elementary example. The goal, direct goal of the oral drive is, okay, like child sucking breast, getting fed, satisfying your need. But for Lacan, the true aim of drive is the very repetitive movement of satisfying it. What really brings satisfaction is just sucking the breast, the repetitive action as such. Here we have *Lustgewinn*. *Lustgewinn* precisely also in the sense of *plus-de-jouir*, no more enjoyment. Because you get *Lustgewinn*, you get more of pleasure precisely by endlessly postponing the final satisfaction, because it's not really about that and so on. So again, the idea is that in our libidinal economy, that to put it bluntly in Freudian terms, *Lustprinzip*, the pure pleasure principle, doesn't exist. It's a myth. The same myth as some direct natural exchange for Marx. From the very beginning, *Lustprinzip*, that is to say the principle of psychic activity where the goal is direct pleasure, is corrupted, eternalized, subverted through what Freud calls compulsion to repeat, *Wiederholungszwang*. Here there is so much work to be done in—in going further from Marx, sorry, from even from Lacan in reading Freud exactly. Just a couple of motives to amuse you maybe or to allow you to see in new light the most standard concepts, for example: death drive. It’s usually dismissed as some Freudian stupidity, like oh, it's a kind of a quasi-biological term or some kind of a Nirvana principle, "Oh, I want to disappear" and so on. But read Freud closely and I think it can be demonstrated that death drive is paradoxically Freud's name for immortality on the contrary. You know what's death drive? Here, I'm sorry this an old line of thought of mine, but I'm telling it because I think it works well. Okay, maybe this is my *Lustgewinn* to repeat it to you, to get additional pleasure, no? Or compulsion to repeat. Think about a living dead. This is a wonderful concept, very Lacanian one I think, the living dead. And here, sorry to make this short philosophical exercise, in Immanuel Kant you find an absolutely crucial philosophical distinction. The distinction between a negative or and infinite or indefinite judgments. A negative judgment negates a predicate. What Lacan—sorry what Kant calls infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Now you will tell me, "But fuck it, it's the same shit." No, it’s not. And let me give you precisely the Stephen King example of undead. Let’s say you say about someone like you, let’s—you are alive. So let’s first negate a predicate: "You aren't dead." What does this mean? Means you are alive, no? It's logical. But now bear in mind, recall all your legacy of guilty pleasures of zombie horror stories, no? If I say, "He is undead." If you are normal, you will run the hell out of this room. Because you know it means he is—he is still alive while already dead. He is undead, he cannot die. You see how you get here precisely this infinitization. You kill him, it returns again and again and again. And this is what Freud calls *Wiederholungszwang*, the compulsion to repeat, this undeadness. This is why I claim Freud should be read already against the background of Richard Wagner. Because that's the basic predicament—I love Wagner, I'm sorry—of Richard Wagner's operas. The typical Wagnerian hero, his problem is not "Oh, I want to live, I don't want to die." No, the typical Wagnerian hero wants to die. The only way to find peace is to die. And the tragedy is how to die properly. From the first opera, first big Wagnerian opera, *Flying Dutchman*, he wants to die properly. He is condemned to live in eternity and so on and so on. So again, not to get lost, this denaturalization, let’s call it, of desire in drive, where the point is not satisfaction but this endless postpone—like here we have *Lustgewinn*, profit-gaining pleasure at its purest, when the very endless postponement of satisfaction brings, generates the additional pleasure. And although I'm often in polemics with her, but here I would advise you to read—she's not stupid—Judith Butler, in her best book I claim—it may surprise you—*The Psychic Life of Power*. She has a very good chapter on Freud's reflexivity and so on, where in a wonderful way she isolates this fundamental Hegelian dialectical reversal. She says that fundamental mechanism described by Freud is how repression of desire always reverts into desire of repression. You know, desire is not simply... or this is for example the basic mechanism of obsessional neurosis. The problem of obsessional neurosis is what? You are, let’s say—I simplify of course—traumatized by some illicit pleasure: "I want to do that." I will not name it, I'm criticized enough for being a fascist and so on. Imagine something really dirty. You cannot assume it. So the obsessional neurotic or compulsive strategy is to invent rituals to deny, to oppress, to give—to—to keep this satisfaction at a distance. But you know what happens? You then start to enjoy perversely this—these defensive rituals themselves. And that's so important to bear this in mind because already through this simple insight, you can get rid of this all pseudo-postmodern stupidity of Lacan as a poet of non-satisfaction, lack, *jouissance*, full enjoyment is never here, it's castrated, it's on—you never get the object. Or the primitive Oedipal version, "No woman is really a mother," you know. We always—we men in so-called normal sexuality, which for Lacan is not normal and so on—we always want... No, but you know, Lacan, and this is where psychoanalysis begins in exact parallel with Marx again. Lacan's premise is not just this tragic negativity, we have to heroically confront assume the void of desire, desire is a—is a gap, no object can satisfy it and so on and so on. No, the first complication of Lacan is, "Okay, no woman is a mother, but we have to add even mother herself isn't the mother, you know." In other words, what I want to say with this is that Lacan's point is not just this negativity, but it's also the opposite one: full enjoyment, it's not just something that we cannot ever get fully hold of, that forever evades. Much more tragically, it's also something we cannot ever get rid of. It insists, it remains, it haunts you, the more you erase it—like the tragic, and believe me I know what I'm talking about, if there ever was an obsessional neurotic it's me—the more by these true rituals you want to get rid of it, the more it haunts you. And now to give you some example of this, I will give you two examples which are very problematic. I want to live through this pleasure of being a little bit politically incorrect. I find this *Lustgewinn* in its perverted way as ideological category with—in many—in some predominant politically correct discourse. Where is—because for example, I was always suspicious of this endless will to self-humiliation of white liberal politically correct people where they have a couple of dogmas. The one is whenever something horrible is happening in the third world countries, we must be somehow guilty, no? There is, you remember—you're too young many of you—20 years ago, big ethnic slaughter in Rwanda, Hutu-Tutsi. Oh, it must be an effect of post-colonialism and so on. I mean, I'm not saying this is not true. I'm saying something else. I'm saying this: how now are we Europeans masochists or what? Why are we doing this? I claim the Freudian answer is *Lustgewinn*. Where is the *Lustgewinn*? It’s so easy to detect. First in this way, by insisting that if the ethnic others, those that we consider primitives, whatever, by insisting that we are always guilty, I claim it's an inverted version of white man's burden. You know, in the old times, we white men had the historical task of taking care of other races which are more primitive and so on, you know the disgusting story. Now it's as if they want to say, "Well, if we cannot be that, at least we can be the big guilty one." Why? What's the profit of us? The profit is that we are the only active agent who know it. We—we patronize the others, because—I will develop to you this patronization at another level. Did you notice how—I don't know how you do it here in Canada—but in United States I noticed this all the time. Just ask a white politically correct liberal: how does he relate to asserting one's national identity? I noticed that you have a clear hierarchy of permitted, not permitted. The further you are from white Protestant, possibly men, the more you are allowed to assert it. If you are Native American—but I hate that term "Native American" and some of my Indian—I proudly call them then—friends hate it also. You see this is how—this is where politically correct changing names doesn't work. A—a Native American friend of mine that I met in Missoula, Montana, told me openly, "Why—I don't want to be a Native American, because the opposite of nature is culture, so we are native, you are cultured or what, my god," and so on. And he told me a wonderful argument for remaining, for sticking to the name of Indian—maybe you know my joke, but it’s wonderful. He said, "At least if we remain Indians, our name is a—an eternal reminder of the stupidity of white men who thought they were in India, you know." No, they are—I love those friends because they are so sensitive about this falsity of celebrating in an ecological whatever way the others. Like this friend of mine gave me a study he wrote—he’s a doctor—demonstrating how Native Americans burned more forests and killed more buffaloes than all white men together. Is he crazy? No. He did something ingenious. He detected very well the racist patronizing undertone in this, you know, "We white people just totally exploit nature, but natives have an organic relation to nature" and so on and so on. For them this is something... so let me go on. Okay, they can do it. Blacks, roots, search for roots, their identity, they can still do it. It’s okay, no? Hollywood loves it, Alex Haley, that disgusting, I claim, TV series *Roots*, you know. Because we white racists, if we are, in so far as we are, we love black people to search for their roots. Which means they stay there, no? They search for their roots, we white are of course the only truly universal and so on. Then with Italians, eh eh eh, you can do it but not really, no? Problems began. Germans, Swedes, so-so. But if you say, "We white Anglo-Saxons"—which I'm not—"want to assert our ethnic roots," you're a fascist, no? Or whatever. And of course there is a lot of truth in this, that usually this white assertion of our identity is racist. But I want to say something else, that this prohibition is—why is it false? Because at the same time that we apparently humiliate ourselves, there is an incredible *Lustgewinn*, gain of pleasure. Because precisely because we are not allowed our own roots, we are the only ones who really have a universal position. We are the one, the neutral ones who can allocate to all of—you know, we are exempt, the only true universal subject. That’s at least—that’s—that’s my problem with it. And it's the same, this is again what is bringing me such a—so many trouble, also in this moralist, instead of doing something in Europe, we have all these moralist protests: "Europe is losing its heart, not receiving more refugees." Incidentally, I think Europe should receive more refugees, absolutely. But in a much more organized way. For example, just I don't know if you saw the news, the latest one, I tend to agree with it, a very nice proposal from Germany that EU should reserve at least of its funds for taking care of refugees. And we are talking about enormous sums of money here. No, no, it's so—it's so popular now in Europe to—to now to claim Europe is regressing into barbarism, it’s becoming a new concentration camp and so on and so on. What's my problem here? Why I dare doing it? Because I think that—I observe with horror how those who complain, the—the moralistic satisfaction of the beautiful soul that they find in it. Liberals love to write now comments on, "My God, Europe is getting fascist," or whatever, you know, like it's—it’s their moral superiority which is asserted in this way instead of simply doing something. Doing for example what here Bernie... here down there, okay, Bernie Sanders is doing, you know. I—I mean you know why I admire Sanders? Because with all his limitations, compromises and so on, he did something that this politically correct cultural left was not doing for decades. He found contact with so-called ordinary people who are usually the social base of populist right-wingers. This is an absolute miracle for me. The—the social base which is the very base of Bible Belt, he got. And this is I think the crucial task, not this arrogance of our superiority and so on and so on. And so not to understand me: if by political correctness you mean we shouldn't humiliate other races—true, or true—I don't know, true openness, tolerance and so on, of course I am totally for it. But I'm just saying that, and that's how ideology functions, even words which may appear to be positive, progressive, can function in an ambiguous way. That's why for example I'm absolutely suspicious about words like harassment. Of course I am totally against sexual harassment. I mean I'm a madman, I'm for death penalty, no problem, kill the rapists. But—but when we talk about harassment, you know what bothers me? I noticed systematically in the United States the class dimension of harassment, although they would never have said it. But it's usually white academic liberals using this, like: who is experienced as harassing? It's mostly lower class—lower-class white people or those who are considered too vulgar, who talk in a vulgar way, are sexist in a vulgar way. So in a way, harassment, the way the term is effectively used, I claim, has an incredibly strong component of this "don't trust your neighbor," you know, "remain at a distance." When do we expe—I mean you know who knew this? I met him once in a cafeteria, he’s a wonderful guy, Spike Lee, in his which—film before his big biopic, before *Malcolm X*, I don't know where—where he deploys in a wonderful way this idea how, you know, "We—we love blacks, but..." and then "but," we feel, you know, "but do they have to play"—this was done years ago—"those big boombox system, their music is intruding, their food smells bad" and so on and so on. That's the reality of harassment. That's for me the suspicious aspect of harassment. Or another example: tolerance. I wrote a book in Europe—here it would be prohibited—*A Plea for Intolerance*. It's obvious for me. Why is it—this is not neutral fact that we almost automatically translate problems of racism into problems of tolerance. But my god this is not self-evident. Make a simple experiment: go to Google, copy big speeches by Martin Luther King and search in them for "tolerance." You practically don't find the word. He would have felt obscene if—if somebody would read him like "white people should show more tolerance for black people" or whatever. No, the problem with tolerance is I think that first it culturalizes the problem, you know. All of a sudden problems are not economic, legal, but "why are we traumatized by other races? What are the fears deep in ourselves that we are really escaping from?" and so on and so on. So you see, here things get really—here things get really complicated for me. And here again you find all different ways of obscure *Lustgewinn*. We should learn when we are dealing with racism, and even with critics of racism, we should learn the old lesson of Adorno. He saw this clearly already in the late '30s in a wonderful short text about the structure of fascist propaganda. How beneath all this rhetoric of renouncement, "Enough of decadent pleasures, sacrifice yourself for the country," all of fascism functioned in this way that officially it’s prohibition, secretly it offers you some obscene pleasure—carnivalesque pleasure usually, like "let’s beat the Jews, let’s rape women" or whatever. Even I think it's crucial, sorry if I repeat my old examples, to read in this way Ku Klux Klan. I read some good books describing everyday life in United States in let’s say when was the golden era of Ku Klux Klan in 20th century? I think the '20s, no? Yes. Officially it was Catholic Church, white race predominance, but what was the reality of Ku Klux Klan? It was the obscene *Lustgewinn*, like "It's Saturday evening, guys, if we are white let’s gather, let’s hang some black guys, let’s rape some black women" and so on and so on. This is I think absolutely crucial, without this *Lustgewinn*, without this surplus pleasure, an ideology doesn't function. That's why, incidentally, I'm deeply critical of those leftists—there is something of it even in Toni Negri—who celebrate Carnival. "Wonderful, social hierarchy is canceled, the poor are the rich, king is a beggar" and so on. Yeah, but there is also a terrifying totalitarian Carnival. And you know who is the big theorist of Carnival? Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian fellow traveler of formalists. But you know what I heard now from my Russian friends? Before World War II he survived the purges because he was happy to live in province, they put him into some small library in Kazan, and when he was writing his book on François Rabelais, which is his book apparently celebrating Carnival, he took many notes, they now found these notes and they were shocked to discover that the secret model for Carnival for him was not some, I don't know, public festivity and so on, but KGB, Stalinist purges, Gulag and so on. This is Carnival at its purest. Today you—haha—today you are maybe secretary of the central committee, tomorrow you are English spy in Gulag. You know this total reversibility and so on. And it's absolutely clear if you read the best memoirs of Gulag and of Auschwitz, for example Primo Levi. Auschwitz was a carnival at a certain level. It was—it began, the carnival began with "Arbeit macht frei," you know. This is for me a carnivalesque statement, it's immediately inverted and so on. Even Gulag, incidentally, if you want to learn about Gulag, ignore Solzhenitsyn, read the real guy, Varlam Shalamov, *Kolyma Tales*. He is the authentic one. But what I wanted—what I wanted to say is that I'm really sick and tired, and this is I think the tragedy of the left. They love these carnivalesque moments, you know, "Oh people explode, hierarchy is over." Isn't this getting boring and so on? The—the big problem that left has not resolved is what I call "the day after." I said this yesterday at the unfortunate thing at Left Forum, that I use this example that I always use. Have you seen the movie *V for Vendetta*? Yes, you know how it ends: crowds penetrate the parliament, people takes over, and then "The End." As I usually say, I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a movie called *V for Vendetta Part But what did they do then next day? For me, the true test of a revolution is not "We all cry, one million people on Tahrir Square, on Gezi Square." Fuck you, I'm not fascinated by that. What interests me is when things return back to normal, a week, a month later, how will ordinary people feel the change? How, you know, the difficult—it's relatively easy to do this big ecstatic explosion. The really difficult thing is what Badiou calls the "work of love" or "fidelity to the event." To translate this explosion into new rules, new order for everyday life. That's why I like Antonio Gramsci, who you know, from the '30s onwards if in Europe you use the word "New Order," it basically meant fascism. But Gramsci still uses the term, he even edited a journal called *L'Ordine Nuovo*. I love this, that how you know in the '20s still the term "New Order" didn't mean fascism, it meant on the contrary the crucial task of the left and so on and so on. So again, back to my main line: we have to distinguish here as you probably all know between pleasure and enjoyment. What Lacan calls enjoyment, *jouissance*, is a deadly excess over pleasure. It's beyond pleasure principle. So now comes of course the basic paradox: surplus enjoyment is a nonsensical tautology because for Lacan, we do not have a zero-level enjoyment which is then supplemented by some surplus, enjoyment is in itself a surplus. So this is why I claim, a little bit of social or sociopsychological if you want analysis, which is why I claim we do not live today really in a true society of unconstrained consummation and so on and so on. The—this is the trick of our consumerist society, that it's extremely self-controlled and regulated. Yes, we are solicited all the time "Enjoy!" and so on. But then you get a series of discriminatory measures, like—I mean this is when I meet people from some swingers or gay communities where they really dedicate their life to pleasure more or less, I'm always shocked at the price they pay for it. But then you have to do the jogging, body training, behave in an appropriate way what you eat, it's horrible. And I think that one of the reactions, populist reactions against this official hedonism is not "Oh, it’s too decadent." No, I can almost understand ordinary people. They experience this, let's call it naively, politically correct regulated official hedonism as way too disciplined. You know where I got this truth? It was a—there was some obviously right-wing publicity some years ago when I was in New York, I loved it. It was publicity for beef. It showed this classic, no: barbecue, family singing country songs, barbecuing beef. And then just short expression: "Beef: real food for real people," you know. Okay, now you can say it's a proto-fascist—of course it is, it’s disgusting. But the subtle message was like, "Do we really have to go through this over-regulated hedonism?" Permit me to repeat another of my old stories. That's why one of my formative, basic experiences was when I visited in early-mid '90s, half in legally risky Belgrade, and met them by a chance in a restaurant, some probably people strong nationalists who were probably engaged in ethnic cleansing. And I was stupid enough to engage in a debate with them. And it was wonderful what a lesson they gave me. I behaved as an arrogant European sociologist and tried to sell them the story of "escape for freedom": "Ah, probably you are afraid of modernity, in modern world your roles are not prescribed, you know, like you know all this, you know, Anthony Giddens and so on stuff, we have to reinvent ourselves, too much freedom so you cannot sustain this, you want to escape back into old certainties." And they started to laugh like mad. And they gave me a lesson. They told me, "No, sorry, it's the exact opposite. For us, modern Western liberal society is over-regulated and frustrating." Of course, they understood this, they were not theorists, in an extremely vulgar way. They said, "I cannot even beat my wife, I see a nice girl there, I—I cannot rape her, I cannot..." And for them, becoming a nationalist means precisely this: "I go to Bosnia, engage in ethnic cleansing, I'm free again." Don't under—don't underestimate this. So who are today consumerists? We are more than ever afraid of true consumers. True consumers are three more or less today, I claim: drug addicts, smokers, and maybe up to a point alcoholics. And that's why we are so obsessed—I always found suspicious ideologically the all this campaign against smoking. No, no, I'm for punishing the big companies, I don't smoke, no problem here. But just this absolute obsession, and I just had to laugh—do you also have it here?—how the very people who pretend to be usually for liberalization of drugs, no, I notice this total inconsistency, like in some politically correct way it was decided that drugs are okay, you know, the—but smoking is whatever. Although, my god, sorry to tell you but I think that nonetheless drugs are generally much more dangerous than... and this absolute educational furor which cannot be accounted for in—in medical terms. For example, was it also in Canada? I know that in the United States already half a year ago companies or big airline companies decided on prohibiting e-smoking, electronic smoking. And it was extremely interesting, I was shocked to read the justification. It was not, "Oh, we don't yet know, maybe e-smoking is also dangerous." No, they even concede this point. I was shocked. The justification was that by using e-cigarettes in public, you publicly display your moral weakness, your inability to abstain fully from smoking, and that's why this shouldn't be allowed. So I think to repeat some other of my old jokes that the way—this is the antagonism, if you want to put it in this way, this is the antagonism inscribed into our consumerism. It may appear to be unlimited consumerism—you know, this is the opposite of *Lustgewinn*. It is: you are allowed totally, but then the conditions are so... your solicitation to enjoy is so filtered through regulations and so on that it's ruined. I always have here remember a horror story, the examples that I always mention. You know the dream, our consumerist controlled consumerist dream is: "Yes, enjoy, but with a product where you enjoy without paying the price for it." Like Coke but Diet Coke. I don't know, so sweet dessert without sugar, beer without alcohol, sausage without fat and so on and so on. And even in sex, this is what people call safe sex usually. You know, so I—like we are allowed to enjoy if it's properly justified. I remember when I took a year ago already a flight, I think it was United in their *Hemispheres*, the journal that you get there. There was a two-page essay celebrating sex. And it was the most depressive text that I've read. Because all of it is one argumentation how good sex is for your body, I mean—I mean for your body in the sense of health. They say, "Do a lot of deep French kissing, why? Because in this way your muscles will remain more firm and when you will be old the saliva will not drip from your..." It's so disgusting, it really—it really—it really ruins everything. You know, and—and this is where psychoanalysis can do its job today. You know, the standard story is, "Ooh, psychoanalysis, it’s old-fashioned, Victorian, we now have no prohibition." No, already if you read properly Freud, his problem is not "We want to enjoy but a prohibition, social prohibitions that we internalize prevent us from enjoying, so the function of the psychoanalyst is to enable you to get rid of these prohibitions so that you can do it." No, as Freud knew it very well, the true problem is not a father who terrorizes you prohibiting you sexuality. Such a father is usually a good father. Why? Because you normally, you rebel against him and so on, it works. The true problem is a father—and now I will be intimate, believe me I know what I'm talking about, I had it—a father who, I remember when I was fifteen my father came to me, "Are you a true man? Are you attracted to girls? Should I show you how? Do you know how to do it?" and so on. Believe me, this caused big troubles and so on, you know. So again, the situation is here—so again, the big paradox Freud is struggling with is not this simple one, social norms prohibit enjoyment so we have to get rid of them or replacement with different norms. The big problem is why what Lacan calls the super-ego injunction to enjoy sabotages enjoyment in the most efficient way. Because I claim the classic authoritarian, moderately authoritarian society works so-so—I'm not celebrating it—but there there is always a limited space for enjoyment open to you. As Lacan puts it very nicely, "Every—in every person of every figure of authority, there always allows a space, a small niche: 'I don't see you there, I don't want to know what you are doing there, but discretely just do it there.'" Even, and I checked this with my Jewish friends—by Jewish friends I mean people who really know about the Bible—that even in—in the Bible you find this, you know, the Ten Commandments. Which is this, the first or the second? "Do not celebrate other gods," you know. But this is, check it up if it's a good translation, every good Jewish specialist in the Bible will tell you: this is not what it says there. It says, "Do not celebrate other gods in front of me." You know, it's this: "I run the public space, don't do it here. What you are doing back there, it’s your problem." And—and we often—that's the tragedy of political correctness, we don't see this. Do you remember when was it? I think two—he was still president, so it must be four years ago, the unfortunate Ahmadinejad visited United Nations and then he was invited to Columbia University. And—I'm no friend with Ahmadinejad, incidentally I was even engaged there in Iran in polemics, remember when Mousavi, who was the guy who lost elections. I wrote a text defending Mousavi, and then for two days I was told by some friends I was the main target of attack in—from Ahmadinejad press claiming that I am—I'm paid by CIA to ruin Iran. No, my reaction was to write an open letter to CIA: "Hey, where is my money? My bank account!" No, but more seriously, one thing has to be said for Ahmadinejad. I hope that—some of you know it more in detail, but two Iranian friends of mine were there. And—to avoid misunderstanding, they were—they emigrated from Iran, they were not—but they told me that, remember all big media our laughed at it, made fun how Ahmadinejad was asked, "How is it with homosexuality in Iran?" And officially the translation was that he said, "We don't have this problem because we don't have homosexuality in Iran." And everyone laughed. It was a mistranslation, I was told. He said something much more, okay I wouldn't say refined, but different. His point was, "We do it differently than you. We don't talk about it, we prohibit it in public space and what you do discretely is your problem." The message was—I'm not saying this is true, but I am saying what I even heard from a—an old friend of Michel Foucault, that my god I'm very vulgar now, he went to Iran to screw the priests there, of course, no? I mean, homosexuality is extremely expanded in—in Iran. But it's what I'm—okay let me give you another example which I like here. I mention it in one of my books. Did you see that shitty movie which is very fascinating I think, it's really a movie about a religious experience today. Did you see the movie, it's horror, cheap, stupid, *Project X*? Yeah, it's so crucial about the... it's in some small town two jerks, nerds, want to organize a big party, the—the father, family of one of them goes for a weekend to another city, and before leaving, father tells the son, "Listen, you can have your party but not more than five people, don't use the pool, don't touch the car," and so on. And then the guy puts note on the web, no? "Come!" and then... I don't know if it happens here, but this is based on a true story in Europe, in Belgium it really happened. In Belgium I think forty, fifty—you know, a girl invited "come to a party" and then fifty thousand people came. Okay, something similar happens in this movie, like five, ten thousand people come, they ruin the house, they burn the car, the—the—the—the—the—police have to intervene with helicopters, everything is wrong. What's interesting in this, this is my answer to those, I hate them, how do they call "post-secular" people who claim our societies are too secular, we need to enter the new sense of the sacred post-secular. I claim at a certain point in the film, it’s pretty nicely shown, this simple stupid amusement, it's clearly that it acquires a sacred dimension. This is really a movie about a rediscovery of the sacred, and not this Christian symbolic sacred, but old sacred orgies in our societies. So what I want to say is that then, yes, the absolutely crucial thing happens at the end. When father returns, and you would have thought father would explode. He does explode. He says to his son, "Listen, you didn't follow my orders, you will have to work hard," and then the father... and X, and this is the end of the movie. Then the father adds, "But nonetheless, I admit it: you did have a courage to do this, I didn't expect..." You know, father plays this game of traditional authority. While modern authority, okay, let me—I will give you—I will propose you a solution for me cheating here. Just—to conclude with another story from one of my books, what's the problem with this permissive authority? How it can be even more oppressive? It's my old story, sorry if you know it. Imagine it’s, let’s say, Saturday, Sunday afternoon, you are a small boy or a girl, and your father wants you to visit some stupid old senile grandmother. And of course you don't want to go. Okay, let’s say you are a traditional authoritarian father. You say to the boy or girl, "Listen, I don't care how you feel, you just go there and treat grandmother respectfully, treat her nicely." That's okay, I claim, no problem. You feel oppressed but you rebel secretly and so on. But then comes the most monster code, the postmodern whatever you call him, permissive father who will tell you something different. I know, again, obviously I had some problems here, my father used to do this to me. His typical phrase to me would have been something like this: "You know how much your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless I'm not telling you to visit her unless you want to visit her." You can see that beneath the appearance of a free choice, there is a much stronger order. The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. It orders you not what to do but even what to desire to do. And I claim this is regular trick of our, I don't have time to go into it now, of our free choice societies. We are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice, as it were. Okay, listen, are you centralized here? Centralized in this sense, the usual thing happened because I wanted to say, to go through many other things, for example how with modern science—just to recapitulate—then I wanted to pass on to modern science where we have the same surplus paradox. Which is why very nicely Lacan speaks about primordial accumulation of—of knowledge with modern science. You know, in traditional societies, you have some basic common sense knowledge, we all have it, and then you have the surplus knowledge which is the secret knowledge: religion, sects, whatever, another type of knowledge, today what would have been New Age knowledge. But with science something else happens: science always can work only through a—it's not just a tradition passed from one to another brain, it's just—it works through its own surplus, as it were. So I wanted to go into this, to this parallel, how modern science functions then through what is, who is the subject of science. And I wanted to end with—I wanted to end with where are we today with symbolic authority. Is it true, because there is a certain image of where our societies are moving, that was to be the leftist conclusion. Where they say in modern capitalism we no longer have authorities, that Oedipus is past, it's just usually the term used is "generalized perversion." We are just thrown out like crazy, running from one object to another, hyperactive all the time, like all prohibitions are over and so on and so on. Even my original teacher, the nephew of Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, unfortunately bought this story. How the new century will be the century of the real, it's no longer Oedipus, no longer symbolic construction, is real outside the law and so on and so on. I wanted to oppose this radically, claiming that no, this idea of the crazy free circulation of capital real without law nonetheless covers up prohibition, covers up a fundamental antagonism. And you know this, to conclude with a problematic statement if you allow me. Okay, no, now I will do my dirty trick. I agree with you, I've talked too much, debate. So okay, debate. I ask myself, "Professor, what did you want to say in the remaining..." No-no, don't be afraid. I wonder if you will agree, I will conclude with how this same topic of how to deal with excess, real outside law, we encounter it—do you also have them here? how do you call this LGBTQ okay, segregated toilets problem. Let me make it clear what's my position here: of course I totally support it, in the sense of ending this last segregation and so on. Just beware that you will not get out of it what you will expect. You know why? Let me—let me say it. You know the first thing to note is that it's not simply that our societies are progressing. I mean, I read this even in a cover story of *Time* magazine, everybody knows with that. On the one hand, in our societies, call them developed whatever, Western, I don't care, more and more you have abortion, women's rights, gay marriages, whatever. But you know, as a maybe reaction, maybe not, in many of the third world or other countries, you have more and more homophobia and so on. And this is a crucial thing to understand. Now you will say this is because these countries are poor and so on. No, let me give you a fact which may be so surprising. People usually try to account for this new populism by "people feel exploited, poor, blah blah, cheated by modernity." But look at a country like Poland where I have good connections. It’s maybe the only up till now true economic miracle of post-communism. You can say with other countries that they screwed it up and so on, but Poland, in Poland really the standard of life went up, they never had it so good. And still you have now an incredible hardline reaction. Like, my god, you got at one public demonstration almost one million people demonstrating against abortion. And wait a minute, not just against abortion, it's already outlawed, they even want to close these last loopholes which are: abortion is now I think permitted in Poland if mother's life is in danger, if it was the result of rape, or if the child is, how do you call it, freak, ill, distorted so that it will probably die. Now they want even to close this loophole. So you cannot explain it in this simple economic sense. But what I'm saying is that this is one pole. And in Europe it’s very funny to observe this struggle. The one pole that I call politics of new sexual difference, which means how maintaining traditional hierarchic sexual difference is perceived as the central issue in escaping today's decadence in reconstituting a new society. So we shouldn't too much make fun of those primitives, Boko Haram whatever. Boko Haram is the in Northern Nigeria, no, this is the clearest example. It's very paradoxical: you have a big movement, they want to reconstruct all society, the basic premise Boko Haram: no Western education for women and so on. And the thing is very sad if you read their statement—I did, I even met some of them. They consider their fight as anti-colonialist fight. They claim, "From our everyday experience, the basic effect, result, the most destructive result of colonization of our countries is the disintegration of our traditional communal structures." So they claim this is where it begins. The basic—the first move in fighting anti-colonialism is to firmly re-establish sexual hierarchy. The first thing that made me suspicious is how all the big business enthusiastically supports it. You know, like Tim Cook on Apple said, "We should..." Well, it would be better maybe for him to do something for slave workers of Foxconn in China who are... But you know where I see the problem in this? I want to reconstruct something that maybe be called the primordial scene of transgenderism, and it's totally authentic experience. They always mention it, like: you come to the—okay, you have certain need, no? You come to the toilet and... anxiety. You cannot recognize yourself. Like, you may be determined socially as a man, but sorry I don't recognize, I'm not that, I'm not that. Well, for Lacan, the first note here would have been that it's always like this. Okay, not to such a degree, but sorry, maybe I am a pervert idiot here, but quite often when I go to a toilet and see "Gentlemen," I... am I that? you know, maybe... I mean, and this I'm not making just a joke here. For Lacan, sexual identity is ultimately always an escape, a desperate attempt to cover up a fundamental anxiety: "Am I that?" or whatever. This is why for Lacan subjectivity as such... Yes, sorry, no but just to go on. And so you know what would have been my solution? It's a little bit funny. You know the three, you know—okay, with other ways, not excrements—you know, I noticed in your country probably that when they try to—they try to put for different ways different, no, to recycle. You have, for example, in my country you have paper, plastics, organic waste, whatever. And then I noticed you always have another one which is "waste in general." And it’s a wonderful Hegelian paradox as if the universal dimension must appear aside as another particular. That would have been my solution, if you ask me: "Men, women, general sex, sex as such." Why? Because you know what's the problem from Lacanian theory? Okay, you can disagree with the term, but when Lacan speaks about what he calls symbolic castration, he means precisely this fundamental anxiety, unease, as if by way of entering sexuality I am deprived of a part of myself, I never can find myself in it. And I think the disappointment maybe of transgenderism is that if you neutralize it that you will get rid of it. You will not get rid of it. I claim that this type of unease about "Who am I?" is constitutive. They—they think they will—they will get too much from that—from that operation. So I—my—my solution would have been, of course we should do it, but no, my solution would have been three doors if you ask me. Because it always works like three. True antagonism is never double, it's never me and them. Antagonism always fails and then there must be a third—you know, it’s like this is the old Hegelian lesson, whenever you try to categorize something, you always have one paradoxical category which basically means all that that doesn't fit in any of the previous categories. Like isn't it clear that with Marx, my old example I'm playing with your nerves now many times, isn't it clear that with Marx what Marx called Asiatic—no Asian, that how is it called, Asiatic mode of production? It's not a concept. Marx theorized primitive tribal societies, whatever you call them, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever the shit is, if anything at all, that come afterwards. Then he noticed that there are social formations which don't fit to it. And he created a category of Asiatic mode of production. But I think the only true meaning of Asiatic mode of production is all those societies which do not fit the other one. And this is crucial symbolic operation. It's also crucial for racism because the other in racism always functions like that, but I talk too much, you should stop me. Okay, I'm... ah, sorry, no no no! No no no, this is not what you think. It's another—are you somehow connected because I really had a whole line of thought, and I feel that I cheated. So is there a master here? Are you? Now I make a racist remark: are you so bad in Canada that crazy guy from my decadent part of you that is your master? He is! Anyway that I send you the file and you address him and you know, because it seems to me nonetheless that you came here expecting to hear more of this, and I feel obliged to—so let's do it like this, so that you know he or the other guy or whoever here, you the salami guy, sorry. No, whatever, okay, we'll do it. Thank you very much. Sorry! So, unfortunately, despite Zizek's best efforts, we still have time for questions. Yeah, you know that’s my—my aim was to be able to say with all hypocrisy I’m so sorry that we no longer have time for debate, you know. Okay, so one over there. Please, sorry. Um... oh. No, no. Okay. Um... I was wondering, so you talk about um... like borders and recently there's been a lot with the Syrian refugees. And I was watching a CNN broadcast the other day, um, and there were all these protests that say "borders kill." And um, I was just wondering what your thoughts would be on that in terms of like national identity and you were talking about gender identity and how to both um... live with borders that are not malicious but also exist like as a in a nation or as a national identity or something like that. Um because it... yeah, so... Yeah, I see—I see. You know, my problem is this one, at least—I don't know about the world situation, although I'm noticing that it's not just European problem, it's happening all around the world with violent consequences which are not properly reported in our media. For example, as we know now almost half of Zimbabwe is in South Africa. But are people aware that there are many violent acts of poor South African workers who feel that, you know, they are stealing Zimbabweans from there their jobs. Not to mention China, in whole of China ten-twenty millions people... So I think this is our future for economic reasons, global warming, or even natural disasters. Let me tell you something, my good friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophes. He is member of some official organization so he was when Fukushima happened, a day after he was there. And he told me, "Do you know that it was kept secret, but for one day the Japanese government thought that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area." How? Where will they go and so on. So we will confront—and I think it's absolutely crucial to do it in an organized way. Here all these misunderstandings emerge about my role here. I think that the way it was done in Europe was totally catastrophic. First, that they allowed—I more and more, and even this is based on some of the rumors that I hear from my friend diplomats in Brussels, that it was done consciously to secretly promote the right-wing anti-immigrant agenda. You know, it was done in this chaotic way: tens of thousands every day through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and so on, as if they wanted to provoke the backlash from... I think my solution would have been: absolutely even more immigrants into Europe. I always repeat this: the true threat to Europe are those who present themselves as defenders of Europe today. Like, would you like Europe where your beloved leader Viktor Orbán, or the same leader of... if such people take over in Europe, this is the end of Europe, my god. No, so this is not... what I'm saying is that, and this is the tragedy of European Union, maybe it's the end, the same thing could have been done in a minimally organized way. Which means I proposed even using the army, not to fight the refugees but establish on Libyan coasts, Syria, Turkey, big centers, process them, airlifts or whatever. It could have been done in a much more efficient simple way. The result of this chaotic way is that now—now after this experience—in every, every more or less European country, if you were to held a referendum, it would be mostly around two thirds against the refugees. And there is very difficult, there I had a conflict with my good friend Varoufakis, who said, "Oh, democratize Europe." I say, "Okay, but you must do something more." Because if you just render decisions in Europe now transparent democratic, it's very bad news for refugees. For example, I had a debate in Germany when I defended refugees, and then some right-winger in Berlin—big debate—some right-winger attacked me, said, "But you pretend to be for democratic transparency." He said, "Listen, Angela Merkel made the big gesture 'Kommt' (Come). Over one million people came. This is a big change in Germany. Where is her democratic legitimization?" She must have known very well that the majority is against. So what would be your answer here? My answer is extremely brutal but very problematic. Angela Merkel was right. Democracy, authentic democracy does not mean simply you follow the crowd. Fuck it, I'm ready to say this. Because again, it's very sad news but democracy in Europe at this moment... a true politician doesn't follow the crowd. A true politician does a very risky move, even going against the majority, hoping it's a wager, like in Pascal, that retroactively it will justify itself. That only through the result of his crazy decision it will appear retroactively that it was right that he did. So you see, I'm here—and even with helping Greece, that was my argument against Varoufakis. Is he aware that "we criticize Europe alienated bureaucracy in Brussels is screwing up Greece," fuck you, ordinary people were much more against Greece. God help us! It’s good news for Greece that the decisions in Brussels were obscure. Because I spoke with Slovenia representative in Brussels, my friend spoke with the one from Slovakia, and they all told the same story: in secret meetings we were able to do something for Greece. The moment we had to speak public, we were afraid of supporting Greece because our local populists would immediately explode, "Oh lazy Greeks," you know, "let them eat their yogurts" or whatever whatever. So you see, you see what I mean? I claim that it's—it’s—I'm—I'm not—not even only for pragmatic reasons. I know that some people sympathize with refugees like they are almost communists today because they are coming to Europe with a radical demand. Some of them say it openly, I almost like it. Their demand is, "You claim you are a society with open borders, so we have the right to go into whichever country of Europe we want—Norway, UK—and the state there has to take care of us somehow." Okay, it sounds nice, but what does this mean empirically concretely? This means, to be extremely brutal, that the only way to do this is to abolish democracy in Europe. What would be your solution here? My solution is some middle path with element of authoritarian support for refugees. Don't count on popular support. This is tragic news, the result of refugees is—you... we are now all happy, we just squeezed out that the Austrian guy was not elected—this would have been horror, because for our shitty countries, Slovenia, Hungary, it's normal if our guys took power, but you know that Frei-demokrat or what in Austria? That would have been the first case in a—the developed big Western country that a true right-winger... you remember UKIP, Farage? I met Farage, incidentally, at a round table, my friend, they did anti-immigrant there, or Marine Le Pen, France and so on. It’s a horrible thing that is going on, one shouldn't—one shouldn't joke here. That’s all I'm saying. For example, people accuse me—it was such a misinterpretation I read on a YouTube this morning—that I said there are murderers, rapists and thieves among the refugees. My point was very simple one. When one million of people come, of course there are, what did you expect? Let’s confront this openly. The worst thing—and I explicitly said that the problem is how to create space for more refugees—and the worst thing is to idealize refugees in Frank Capra style, you know. "Oh, but they are really poor people are good people." Are these guys who claim this normal? Don't they see, don't they know what is poverty? Poverty is not a noble thing, you know. This is what we learn, this is why they are worst ideology, Frank Capra movies, as if poor people are authentic, friendly. Poverty can ruin you ethically also. Poverty makes you brutal, survivalist and so on and so on. And also I hated when people approached me, "You don't want to open your heart to refugees." I said, "Of course not! I don't want to open our heart, the problem is to open our doors to get them in to live." I hate this moralistic pressure which I think serves just to retain our beautiful soul and avoid confronting real problems. Real problems: what is happening in African and Middle East countries from where refugees are coming? How are we, Europe, economically co-responsible for it? Whenever you—it's interesting how all those countries from which refugees are coming, with exception of Syria—but this is because it's caught into it—are not really simply poor countries, but are poor countries with some national resources fully included into Western capital and so on. Or... Let’s... sorry I have to interrupt you there... Okay, okay, haha! I really didn't answer your big one. Please. I moved originally from Pakistan which is much further right of Slovenia and Hungary. Yeah but sorry to interrupt then I will let you speak immediately. You know where I—I sympathize with you, even my Indian friends are telling me that you know the shitty movie *Gandhi*. *Gandhi*, you saw it, that big... it's
I’m very grateful for your kind invitation. I always like to drop in for my good friend Alain Badiou. And I must tell you from my private experience, because I know of at least five, six people who began to hate him because he had to cancel in the last minute. It’s not that he is not—played the role of a big academic who can afford this, but a) he has health problems, he has private family problems. No, I can say this, nothing dirty, intimate, but for example he—he is really for me a heroic person, you know. For him, helping immigrants and so on, it’s not this big liberal phrase. It’s—he adopted years ago a black guy, son of a single mother who died because of AIDS. He and his wife adopted him and he spent hours, and there were some often—this son has some psychological problems, there were even tragic things. Once I visited him, I saw police in front of his apartment block and the guy, he had some psychotic crisis, the son, full of [unintelligible] and so on, shouting around and Badiou trying to calm him. I mean he is simply my hero at this level, you know. For him, again, helping the immigrants and so on, it’s not this big politically correct stuff and then you go home. It’s—he spent weekends in France with these *sans papiers*, without paper, teaching them, patiently explaining to them how to—how to use what you can use of the state. Because he discovered something which is very interesting, that one strong factor in the exclusion of those *sans papiers* and others, it’s—it’s very tragic how many of them simply do not know what are their rights. They don’t even use the opportunities that they have. And of course, I’m not—he, we are not blaming them. The point is that the system is made—functions de facto in such a convoluted way that, you know, you give people certain rights, but then you set in motion or establish a complex machinery making it sure that most of these rights concrete individual people will not be able to use them. And we come here—I’m so sad we don’t have time to do this—to talk what you were kind enough to mention. I’m proud to say we are both neighbors—I mean Slovenia and Hungary—and also we are two proud members of this new tribe, these almost neo-fascist new European countries. I don’t know, I will not speak to you but for you, but I’m more and more ashamed of coming where I come from, you know. Sorry, so second point, but more about politics and all that stuff, we will connect this to cinema in the evening. Yes, I propose nonetheless not to disappoint you—I hope this will not disappoint you—if I treat you a little bit more seriously and go at least into something that will be like three quarters of a theory. About, again, this parallel between what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, with all the wonderful French ambiguities, you know, because *plus-de-jouir* means "more of," but if you know French it also can mean "none of it, let’s stop it," you know, "no more of that." But that’s—this ambiguity, you will see immediately in what sense is the point. Then the surplus value, *Mehrwert* in Marx, and I would like to add as Lacan does—and it’s strange how this topic is almost totally neglected—the topic of surplus knowledge, a knowledge in excess, and how the status of this surplus knowledge changes with science. So let’s see where we will come. I will talk at a certain point, you will be my male domina—that is to say, leather dress and whip—and you stop me. Okay, and then... now please don’t be disappointed, there will be theory. I would like to begin, since nonetheless we are at TIFF cinema, with a well-known reference to Alfred Hitchcock. In his conversations with Truffaut, Hitchcock recalls a scene he wanted to insert into *North by Northwest*. The scene was never shot, and I think Hitchcock was right not to include it because it renders all too directly the basic matrix of his work. You know, that’s one of the arts of cinema for me, that like if you say something too directly, if you stage a fantasy too brutally, too directly, the effect can be vulgar. You know, that’s the basic paradox of Hitchcock. But I think of art as such, the best way to miss something is to go directly at it. But nonetheless, it’s a—I was surprised to discover already years ago as a kid when I read the book that it’s a very Marxist example in a way. Quote—I quote Hitchcock: "I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant"—you know, who played, plays Roger Thornhill in *North by Northwest*—"Cary Grant and one of the factory workers at a Ford automobile plant. As they walk along the assembly line, behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece. Finally, the car that they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete with gas and oil and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' Then they open the door of the car and out drops a corpse." End of quote. What we would have seen in this long shot is precisely the elementary unity of the production process. And isn't it clear that the corpse that mysteriously drops out from nowhere, that it’s a perfect standing for the surplus value that is generated out of nowhere through the production process? This corpse is the surplus object at its purest, the objective counterpoint to the subject, the surplus product of the subject’s activity. This surplus, as already mentioned, has three forms: surplus value, surplus enjoyment, and surplus knowledge. They are all forms of appearance of what Lacan calls *l'objet petit a*, the object small a, the object cause of desire. Lacan begins the eleventh week of his seminar *Les non-dupes errent* from '73-'74—you know this wonderful play with words, *Les non-dupes errent*, it’s a basic theoretical insight of Lacan, very Hegelian, I claim, means precisely those who are not duped, tricked, they err, they are most in the wrong. And I think this is a very deep insight, that the definition of idiot, of a complete idiot, is not the one who falls into every trap, but the one who cannot be tricked. Truth is accessible only through illusion. You have to, or to put it in the terms of choice, you have to begin with a wrong choice to make the right choice. And when he asks himself in this eleventh session of his seminar, he asks himself—Lacan, sorry—a question in his usually arrogant way addressing himself. Here is a quote from Lacan: "What was it that Lacan, who is here present, really invented?" He meant himself. And then he answers the question, he says, "Like that, to get things going: *objet a*, the object small a." So Lacan considers this his—the core of his return to Freud. So again, it’s not desire if the desire of the other, is not the unconscious is structured like a language, it’s not even there is no sexual relationship or some other of these big Lacanian mantras. And Lacan emphasizes that this object small a is not just one among his contribution. He thinks everything that he really invented is focused on this notion. *L'objet a*, object small a, has a long history in Lacan's teaching. It precedes for decades Lacan's systematic reference to the analysis of commodities in Marx's *Capital*. And, okay, we don't have time to do this, but it would be very interesting to see how it—it means gradually exactly the opposite of what it meant. At the beginning, it was in his first seminars early '50s, for Lacan object A was simply the imaginary object, the image with which I identify and so on. Then it is closer, gets closer to the lack in the symbolic order and so on and so on. And only, again, I would say in late '60s does he develop his, let’s call it mature theory of object small a. And here reference to Marx, especially to Marx's notion of surplus value, is crucial. It enabled Lacan to articulate his notion of object small a as surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*. The predominant motive which penetrates all Lacan's references to Marx's analysis of commodities is the structural homology between surplus value of Marx and what Lacan calls surplus enjoyment. The key, if we are looking for the roots to surplus enjoyment in Freud, then I think the crucial notion is the one, the phenomenon called by Freud *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure. This does not designate a simple acceleration of pleasure, like you can have sex this way but take that drug and you will get even more pleasure or whatever. No, it—it means additional pleasure provided by the very formal detour in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. For example, an example from literature which always fascinated me. Do you know Brecht's *Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen* (Book of Changes)? Where basically, what does Brecht do there? He is retelling the history of revolutionary movements in Europe, but he transposes this history into an imaginary China. For example, he speaks about a wise Chinese leader called To-tsi, which is of course Trotsky, and so on and so on. So our re-translation of these pseudo-Chinese names back into their European original—"Aha," we say, "To-tsi is Trotsky"—now I guessed it, makes the text much more pleasurable. This would be a nice case of *Lustgewinn*. Just imagine, it could have been done easily. Just imagine rewriting Brecht's book without this Chinese bullshit, just replacing Chinese names with real, as it were, European names. You get something very vulgar, common. Brecht's insights are even from today’s perspective at least very suspicious sometimes, like... this is not a popular to say today when many people still celebrate Brecht, but till the end—it means till '55-'56, no—he was bothered with it, he wrote a couple of texts which are very difficult to locate, because people try to hide them, defending Stalinist monstrous show trials. He does it in a very objective way, he says, "Okay, maybe there is something problematic about them, but can we nonetheless imagine in what conditions this might be true? What could have pushed Trotsky towards becoming a traitor?" and so on and so on. Or, the most elementary example, how much a process of seduction gains with its intricate innuendos, false denials and so on and so on. It’s—you know, it’s not just that because of cultural obstacles we do this game, like—sorry for being male chauvinist direct—I want to sleep with a lady, but and what I really want is just to tear her clothes off and do it, but unfortunately because of the social oppression and so on, I have to play all these games. No, it’s not like that. I claim that if you take away these games, you maybe get some purely biological satisfaction, but you don't get pleasure. Let me—here we could lose time, but I will not lose it too much by giving you wonderful example, for example an example that I often use. Did you see a—I relatively liked it because it’s kind of a moderately left British melodrama from some years ago, *Brassed Off*, with Ewan McGregor playing a working-class hero. This is Ewan McGregor, the old one, before he became Jedi and all big things, no? And it’s—I always say it, you know it, I always refer to it because it’s a wonderful example. It’s—there is erotic tension between him who plays a worker to be fired, and a slightly more upper-class girl who is an accountant for the managers there. And okay, they flirt and he accompanies her to her home. And in front of her house, she says, "Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?" and he says, "I would love it but I don't drink coffee," and then she says, "No problem, I don't have any." I cannot, can you imagine, it happens apparently, it happens, nothing happens, you know. Just an offer is rejected. "Do you want coffee?" "No." "Okay, I don't have it." So you would say, "Heh-heh, so what?" It’s total—I mean if you take it literally, it’s total stupidity. Basically, the conversation really is about, "Do you want to come up and fuck me?" "Yes." But my god, by the very vulgarity of what I said now, you see how much you gain by doing an empty detour. Now let’s complicate this a little bit more. In the same way that in libidinal economy there is no pure pleasure principle undisturbed by the perversities of compulsion to repeat, perversities which cannot be accounted for in the terms of pleasure principle. In the sphere of the exchange of commodities, there is no direct closed circle of exchanging commodities, this what Marx calls C-M-C, Commodity-Money-Commodity. I sell a commodity which is mine to gain money to buy with it another commodity which satisfies some of my needs. And here one has to be very careful. The point of Marx is not that this is—this is still natural, this is non-alienated production because production serves human needs. You know, like, you know, at and then in capitalism madness explodes. As Marx put it, C-M-C, Commodity-Money-Commodity: I sell something to buy something else which satisfies my needs. Here we can say production still serves concrete needs of concrete people. Capitalist formula as Marx shows is M-C-M: Money invested into commodity generating more money. What happens here is not just a reversal, but as Marx put it very nicely, the—the whole process becomes eternal. Because in C-M-C exchange is just a detour, so that I get at the end what I really need. But in M-C-M, the moment money becomes predominant, the process becomes endless. Because, you know, it never stops. You—you get money to get more money to get more money and so on and so on. But what is crucial here—I don't have time to develop it—I would like to refer you here to a book which was now published by Verso, it's doing quite well, of a one of the younger colleagues of mine in Slovenia, Samo Tomšič. It's called *The Capitalist Unconscious*, where I have of course, as always, that's my business as a grumpy old man, I am critical of that book, but I think he does this basic job very well in that book. Especially he shows that for Marx, C-M-C, this basic zero-level of not yet perverted exchange where exchange still serves concrete human needs, that it never existed. That it’s a myth. It’s a retroactive myth to justify capitalism. Because you know what’s true capitalism? Capitalist ideology is its re-normalization. Capitalist ideology is not, "Oh, it's only money, money engendering more money." No, capitalist ideology is, "It's really about people," you know. Even the most crazy speculative dance, it all serves satisfaction of the needs of concrete people and so on and so on. So the point is that—that for Freud—it’s—I hope you will get the point because here now things will start to get complicated—it's the same with a simple direct pleasure without a detour. Exactly in the same way as for Marx, there is no immediate satisfaction in exchange, but there is always a gap where exchange becomes its own goal. It’s exactly the same movement as again in what Freud calls compulsion to repeat, and the compulsion to repeat is of course the basic movement of what Freud calls drive. Lacan in reading closely Freud distinguishes in the notion of drive between its goal and its aim. The goal is, for example, oral drive, the most elementary example. The goal, direct goal of the oral drive is, okay, like child sucking breast, getting fed, satisfying your need. But for Lacan, the true aim of drive is the very repetitive movement of satisfying it. What really brings satisfaction is just sucking the breast, the repetitive action as such. Here we have *Lustgewinn*. *Lustgewinn* precisely also in the sense of *plus-de-jouir*, no more enjoyment. Because you get *Lustgewinn*, you get more of pleasure precisely by endlessly postponing the final satisfaction, because it's not really about that and so on. So again, the idea is that in our libidinal economy, that to put it bluntly in Freudian terms, *Lustprinzip*, the pure pleasure principle, doesn't exist. It's a myth. The same myth as some direct natural exchange for Marx. From the very beginning, *Lustprinzip*, that is to say the principle of psychic activity where the goal is direct pleasure, is corrupted, eternalized, subverted through what Freud calls compulsion to repeat, *Wiederholungszwang*. Here there is so much work to be done in—in going further from Marx, sorry, from even from Lacan in reading Freud exactly. Just a couple of motives to amuse you maybe or to allow you to see in new light the most standard concepts, for example: death drive. It’s usually dismissed as some Freudian stupidity, like oh, it's a kind of a quasi-biological term or some kind of a Nirvana principle, "Oh, I want to disappear" and so on. But read Freud closely and I think it can be demonstrated that death drive is paradoxically Freud's name for immortality on the contrary. You know what's death drive? Here, I'm sorry this an old line of thought of mine, but I'm telling it because I think it works well. Okay, maybe this is my *Lustgewinn* to repeat it to you, to get additional pleasure, no? Or compulsion to repeat. Think about a living dead. This is a wonderful concept, very Lacanian one I think, the living dead. And here, sorry to make this short philosophical exercise, in Immanuel Kant you find an absolutely crucial philosophical distinction. The distinction between a negative or and infinite or indefinite judgments. A negative judgment negates a predicate. What Lacan—sorry what Kant calls infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Now you will tell me, "But fuck it, it's the same shit." No, it’s not. And let me give you precisely the Stephen King example of undead. Let’s say you say about someone like you, let’s—you are alive. So let’s first negate a predicate: "You aren't dead." What does this mean? Means you are alive, no? It's logical. But now bear in mind, recall all your legacy of guilty pleasures of zombie horror stories, no? If I say, "He is undead." If you are normal, you will run the hell out of this room. Because you know it means he is—he is still alive while already dead. He is undead, he cannot die. You see how you get here precisely this infinitization. You kill him, it returns again and again and again. And this is what Freud calls *Wiederholungszwang*, the compulsion to repeat, this undeadness. This is why I claim Freud should be read already against the background of Richard Wagner. Because that's the basic predicament—I love Wagner, I'm sorry—of Richard Wagner's operas. The typical Wagnerian hero, his problem is not "Oh, I want to live, I don't want to die." No, the typical Wagnerian hero wants to die. The only way to find peace is to die. And the tragedy is how to die properly. From the first opera, first big Wagnerian opera, *Flying Dutchman*, he wants to die properly. He is condemned to live in eternity and so on and so on. So again, not to get lost, this denaturalization, let’s call it, of desire in drive, where the point is not satisfaction but this endless postpone—like here we have *Lustgewinn*, profit-gaining pleasure at its purest, when the very endless postponement of satisfaction brings, generates the additional pleasure. And although I'm often in polemics with her, but here I would advise you to read—she's not stupid—Judith Butler, in her best book I claim—it may surprise you—*The Psychic Life of Power*. She has a very good chapter on Freud's reflexivity and so on, where in a wonderful way she isolates this fundamental Hegelian dialectical reversal. She says that fundamental mechanism described by Freud is how repression of desire always reverts into desire of repression. You know, desire is not simply... or this is for example the basic mechanism of obsessional neurosis. The problem of obsessional neurosis is what? You are, let’s say—I simplify of course—traumatized by some illicit pleasure: "I want to do that." I will not name it, I'm criticized enough for being a fascist and so on. Imagine something really dirty. You cannot assume it. So the obsessional neurotic or compulsive strategy is to invent rituals to deny, to oppress, to give—to—to keep this satisfaction at a distance. But you know what happens? You then start to enjoy perversely this—these defensive rituals themselves. And that's so important to bear this in mind because already through this simple insight, you can get rid of this all pseudo-postmodern stupidity of Lacan as a poet of non-satisfaction, lack, *jouissance*, full enjoyment is never here, it's castrated, it's on—you never get the object. Or the primitive Oedipal version, "No woman is really a mother," you know. We always—we men in so-called normal sexuality, which for Lacan is not normal and so on—we always want... No, but you know, Lacan, and this is where psychoanalysis begins in exact parallel with Marx again. Lacan's premise is not just this tragic negativity, we have to heroically confront assume the void of desire, desire is a—is a gap, no object can satisfy it and so on and so on. No, the first complication of Lacan is, "Okay, no woman is a mother, but we have to add even mother herself isn't the mother, you know." In other words, what I want to say with this is that Lacan's point is not just this negativity, but it's also the opposite one: full enjoyment, it's not just something that we cannot ever get fully hold of, that forever evades. Much more tragically, it's also something we cannot ever get rid of. It insists, it remains, it haunts you, the more you erase it—like the tragic, and believe me I know what I'm talking about, if there ever was an obsessional neurotic it's me—the more by these true rituals you want to get rid of it, the more it haunts you. And now to give you some example of this, I will give you two examples which are very problematic. I want to live through this pleasure of being a little bit politically incorrect. I find this *Lustgewinn* in its perverted way as ideological category with—in many—in some predominant politically correct discourse. Where is—because for example, I was always suspicious of this endless will to self-humiliation of white liberal politically correct people where they have a couple of dogmas. The one is whenever something horrible is happening in the third world countries, we must be somehow guilty, no? There is, you remember—you're too young many of you—20 years ago, big ethnic slaughter in Rwanda, Hutu-Tutsi. Oh, it must be an effect of post-colonialism and so on. I mean, I'm not saying this is not true. I'm saying something else. I'm saying this: how now are we Europeans masochists or what? Why are we doing this? I claim the Freudian answer is *Lustgewinn*. Where is the *Lustgewinn*? It’s so easy to detect. First in this way, by insisting that if the ethnic others, those that we consider primitives, whatever, by insisting that we are always guilty, I claim it's an inverted version of white man's burden. You know, in the old times, we white men had the historical task of taking care of other races which are more primitive and so on, you know the disgusting story. Now it's as if they want to say, "Well, if we cannot be that, at least we can be the big guilty one." Why? What's the profit of us? The profit is that we are the only active agent who know it. We—we patronize the others, because—I will develop to you this patronization at another level. Did you notice how—I don't know how you do it here in Canada—but in United States I noticed this all the time. Just ask a white politically correct liberal: how does he relate to asserting one's national identity? I noticed that you have a clear hierarchy of permitted, not permitted. The further you are from white Protestant, possibly men, the more you are allowed to assert it. If you are Native American—but I hate that term "Native American" and some of my Indian—I proudly call them then—friends hate it also. You see this is how—this is where politically correct changing names doesn't work. A—a Native American friend of mine that I met in Missoula, Montana, told me openly, "Why—I don't want to be a Native American, because the opposite of nature is culture, so we are native, you are cultured or what, my god," and so on. And he told me a wonderful argument for remaining, for sticking to the name of Indian—maybe you know my joke, but it’s wonderful. He said, "At least if we remain Indians, our name is a—an eternal reminder of the stupidity of white men who thought they were in India, you know." No, they are—I love those friends because they are so sensitive about this falsity of celebrating in an ecological whatever way the others. Like this friend of mine gave me a study he wrote—he’s a doctor—demonstrating how Native Americans burned more forests and killed more buffaloes than all white men together. Is he crazy? No. He did something ingenious. He detected very well the racist patronizing undertone in this, you know, "We white people just totally exploit nature, but natives have an organic relation to nature" and so on and so on. For them this is something... so let me go on. Okay, they can do it. Blacks, roots, search for roots, their identity, they can still do it. It’s okay, no? Hollywood loves it, Alex Haley, that disgusting, I claim, TV series *Roots*, you know. Because we white racists, if we are, in so far as we are, we love black people to search for their roots. Which means they stay there, no? They search for their roots, we white are of course the only truly universal and so on. Then with Italians, eh eh eh, you can do it but not really, no? Problems began. Germans, Swedes, so-so. But if you say, "We white Anglo-Saxons"—which I'm not—"want to assert our ethnic roots," you're a fascist, no? Or whatever. And of course there is a lot of truth in this, that usually this white assertion of our identity is racist. But I want to say something else, that this prohibition is—why is it false? Because at the same time that we apparently humiliate ourselves, there is an incredible *Lustgewinn*, gain of pleasure. Because precisely because we are not allowed our own roots, we are the only ones who really have a universal position. We are the one, the neutral ones who can allocate to all of—you know, we are exempt, the only true universal subject. That’s at least—that’s—that’s my problem with it. And it's the same, this is again what is bringing me such a—so many trouble, also in this moralist, instead of doing something in Europe, we have all these moralist protests: "Europe is losing its heart, not receiving more refugees." Incidentally, I think Europe should receive more refugees, absolutely. But in a much more organized way. For example, just I don't know if you saw the news, the latest one, I tend to agree with it, a very nice proposal from Germany that EU should reserve at least of its funds for taking care of refugees. And we are talking about enormous sums of money here. No, no, it's so—it's so popular now in Europe to—to now to claim Europe is regressing into barbarism, it’s becoming a new concentration camp and so on and so on. What's my problem here? Why I dare doing it? Because I think that—I observe with horror how those who complain, the—the moralistic satisfaction of the beautiful soul that they find in it. Liberals love to write now comments on, "My God, Europe is getting fascist," or whatever, you know, like it's—it’s their moral superiority which is asserted in this way instead of simply doing something. Doing for example what here Bernie... here down there, okay, Bernie Sanders is doing, you know. I—I mean you know why I admire Sanders? Because with all his limitations, compromises and so on, he did something that this politically correct cultural left was not doing for decades. He found contact with so-called ordinary people who are usually the social base of populist right-wingers. This is an absolute miracle for me. The—the social base which is the very base of Bible Belt, he got. And this is I think the crucial task, not this arrogance of our superiority and so on and so on. And so not to understand me: if by political correctness you mean we shouldn't humiliate other races—true, or true—I don't know, true openness, tolerance and so on, of course I am totally for it. But I'm just saying that, and that's how ideology functions, even words which may appear to be positive, progressive, can function in an ambiguous way. That's why for example I'm absolutely suspicious about words like harassment. Of course I am totally against sexual harassment. I mean I'm a madman, I'm for death penalty, no problem, kill the rapists. But—but when we talk about harassment, you know what bothers me? I noticed systematically in the United States the class dimension of harassment, although they would never have said it. But it's usually white academic liberals using this, like: who is experienced as harassing? It's mostly lower class—lower-class white people or those who are considered too vulgar, who talk in a vulgar way, are sexist in a vulgar way. So in a way, harassment, the way the term is effectively used, I claim, has an incredibly strong component of this "don't trust your neighbor," you know, "remain at a distance." When do we expe—I mean you know who knew this? I met him once in a cafeteria, he’s a wonderful guy, Spike Lee, in his which—film before his big biopic, before *Malcolm X*, I don't know where—where he deploys in a wonderful way this idea how, you know, "We—we love blacks, but..." and then "but," we feel, you know, "but do they have to play"—this was done years ago—"those big boombox system, their music is intruding, their food smells bad" and so on and so on. That's the reality of harassment. That's for me the suspicious aspect of harassment. Or another example: tolerance. I wrote a book in Europe—here it would be prohibited—*A Plea for Intolerance*. It's obvious for me. Why is it—this is not neutral fact that we almost automatically translate problems of racism into problems of tolerance. But my god this is not self-evident. Make a simple experiment: go to Google, copy big speeches by Martin Luther King and search in them for "tolerance." You practically don't find the word. He would have felt obscene if—if somebody would read him like "white people should show more tolerance for black people" or whatever. No, the problem with tolerance is I think that first it culturalizes the problem, you know. All of a sudden problems are not economic, legal, but "why are we traumatized by other races? What are the fears deep in ourselves that we are really escaping from?" and so on and so on. So you see, here things get really—here things get really complicated for me. And here again you find all different ways of obscure *Lustgewinn*. We should learn when we are dealing with racism, and even with critics of racism, we should learn the old lesson of Adorno. He saw this clearly already in the late '30s in a wonderful short text about the structure of fascist propaganda. How beneath all this rhetoric of renouncement, "Enough of decadent pleasures, sacrifice yourself for the country," all of fascism functioned in this way that officially it’s prohibition, secretly it offers you some obscene pleasure—carnivalesque pleasure usually, like "let’s beat the Jews, let’s rape women" or whatever. Even I think it's crucial, sorry if I repeat my old examples, to read in this way Ku Klux Klan. I read some good books describing everyday life in United States in let’s say when was the golden era of Ku Klux Klan in 20th century? I think the '20s, no? Yes. Officially it was Catholic Church, white race predominance, but what was the reality of Ku Klux Klan? It was the obscene *Lustgewinn*, like "It's Saturday evening, guys, if we are white let’s gather, let’s hang some black guys, let’s rape some black women" and so on and so on. This is I think absolutely crucial, without this *Lustgewinn*, without this surplus pleasure, an ideology doesn't function. That's why, incidentally, I'm deeply critical of those leftists—there is something of it even in Toni Negri—who celebrate Carnival. "Wonderful, social hierarchy is canceled, the poor are the rich, king is a beggar" and so on. Yeah, but there is also a terrifying totalitarian Carnival. And you know who is the big theorist of Carnival? Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian fellow traveler of formalists. But you know what I heard now from my Russian friends? Before World War II he survived the purges because he was happy to live in province, they put him into some small library in Kazan, and when he was writing his book on François Rabelais, which is his book apparently celebrating Carnival, he took many notes, they now found these notes and they were shocked to discover that the secret model for Carnival for him was not some, I don't know, public festivity and so on, but KGB, Stalinist purges, Gulag and so on. This is Carnival at its purest. Today you—haha—today you are maybe secretary of the central committee, tomorrow you are English spy in Gulag. You know this total reversibility and so on. And it's absolutely clear if you read the best memoirs of Gulag and of Auschwitz, for example Primo Levi. Auschwitz was a carnival at a certain level. It was—it began, the carnival began with "Arbeit macht frei," you know. This is for me a carnivalesque statement, it's immediately inverted and so on. Even Gulag, incidentally, if you want to learn about Gulag, ignore Solzhenitsyn, read the real guy, Varlam Shalamov, *Kolyma Tales*. He is the authentic one. But what I wanted—what I wanted to say is that I'm really sick and tired, and this is I think the tragedy of the left. They love these carnivalesque moments, you know, "Oh people explode, hierarchy is over." Isn't this getting boring and so on? The—the big problem that left has not resolved is what I call "the day after." I said this yesterday at the unfortunate thing at Left Forum, that I use this example that I always use. Have you seen the movie *V for Vendetta*? Yes, you know how it ends: crowds penetrate the parliament, people takes over, and then "The End." As I usually say, I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a movie called *V for Vendetta Part But what did they do then next day? For me, the true test of a revolution is not "We all cry, one million people on Tahrir Square, on Gezi Square." Fuck you, I'm not fascinated by that. What interests me is when things return back to normal, a week, a month later, how will ordinary people feel the change? How, you know, the difficult—it's relatively easy to do this big ecstatic explosion. The really difficult thing is what Badiou calls the "work of love" or "fidelity to the event." To translate this explosion into new rules, new order for everyday life. That's why I like Antonio Gramsci, who you know, from the '30s onwards if in Europe you use the word "New Order," it basically meant fascism. But Gramsci still uses the term, he even edited a journal called *L'Ordine Nuovo*. I love this, that how you know in the '20s still the term "New Order" didn't mean fascism, it meant on the contrary the crucial task of the left and so on and so on. So again, back to my main line: we have to distinguish here as you probably all know between pleasure and enjoyment. What Lacan calls enjoyment, *jouissance*, is a deadly excess over pleasure. It's beyond pleasure principle. So now comes of course the basic paradox: surplus enjoyment is a nonsensical tautology because for Lacan, we do not have a zero-level enjoyment which is then supplemented by some surplus, enjoyment is in itself a surplus. So this is why I claim, a little bit of social or sociopsychological if you want analysis, which is why I claim we do not live today really in a true society of unconstrained consummation and so on and so on. The—this is the trick of our consumerist society, that it's extremely self-controlled and regulated. Yes, we are solicited all the time "Enjoy!" and so on. But then you get a series of discriminatory measures, like—I mean this is when I meet people from some swingers or gay communities where they really dedicate their life to pleasure more or less, I'm always shocked at the price they pay for it. But then you have to do the jogging, body training, behave in an appropriate way what you eat, it's horrible. And I think that one of the reactions, populist reactions against this official hedonism is not "Oh, it’s too decadent." No, I can almost understand ordinary people. They experience this, let's call it naively, politically correct regulated official hedonism as way too disciplined. You know where I got this truth? It was a—there was some obviously right-wing publicity some years ago when I was in New York, I loved it. It was publicity for beef. It showed this classic, no: barbecue, family singing country songs, barbecuing beef. And then just short expression: "Beef: real food for real people," you know. Okay, now you can say it's a proto-fascist—of course it is, it’s disgusting. But the subtle message was like, "Do we really have to go through this over-regulated hedonism?" Permit me to repeat another of my old stories. That's why one of my formative, basic experiences was when I visited in early-mid '90s, half in legally risky Belgrade, and met them by a chance in a restaurant, some probably people strong nationalists who were probably engaged in ethnic cleansing. And I was stupid enough to engage in a debate with them. And it was wonderful what a lesson they gave me. I behaved as an arrogant European sociologist and tried to sell them the story of "escape for freedom": "Ah, probably you are afraid of modernity, in modern world your roles are not prescribed, you know, like you know all this, you know, Anthony Giddens and so on stuff, we have to reinvent ourselves, too much freedom so you cannot sustain this, you want to escape back into old certainties." And they started to laugh like mad. And they gave me a lesson. They told me, "No, sorry, it's the exact opposite. For us, modern Western liberal society is over-regulated and frustrating." Of course, they understood this, they were not theorists, in an extremely vulgar way. They said, "I cannot even beat my wife, I see a nice girl there, I—I cannot rape her, I cannot..." And for them, becoming a nationalist means precisely this: "I go to Bosnia, engage in ethnic cleansing, I'm free again." Don't under—don't underestimate this. So who are today consumerists? We are more than ever afraid of true consumers. True consumers are three more or less today, I claim: drug addicts, smokers, and maybe up to a point alcoholics. And that's why we are so obsessed—I always found suspicious ideologically the all this campaign against smoking. No, no, I'm for punishing the big companies, I don't smoke, no problem here. But just this absolute obsession, and I just had to laugh—do you also have it here?—how the very people who pretend to be usually for liberalization of drugs, no, I notice this total inconsistency, like in some politically correct way it was decided that drugs are okay, you know, the—but smoking is whatever. Although, my god, sorry to tell you but I think that nonetheless drugs are generally much more dangerous than... and this absolute educational furor which cannot be accounted for in—in medical terms. For example, was it also in Canada? I know that in the United States already half a year ago companies or big airline companies decided on prohibiting e-smoking, electronic smoking. And it was extremely interesting, I was shocked to read the justification. It was not, "Oh, we don't yet know, maybe e-smoking is also dangerous." No, they even concede this point. I was shocked. The justification was that by using e-cigarettes in public, you publicly display your moral weakness, your inability to abstain fully from smoking, and that's why this shouldn't be allowed. So I think to repeat some other of my old jokes that the way—this is the antagonism, if you want to put it in this way, this is the antagonism inscribed into our consumerism. It may appear to be unlimited consumerism—you know, this is the opposite of *Lustgewinn*. It is: you are allowed totally, but then the conditions are so... your solicitation to enjoy is so filtered through regulations and so on that it's ruined. I always have here remember a horror story, the examples that I always mention. You know the dream, our consumerist controlled consumerist dream is: "Yes, enjoy, but with a product where you enjoy without paying the price for it." Like Coke but Diet Coke. I don't know, so sweet dessert without sugar, beer without alcohol, sausage without fat and so on and so on. And even in sex, this is what people call safe sex usually. You know, so I—like we are allowed to enjoy if it's properly justified. I remember when I took a year ago already a flight, I think it was United in their *Hemispheres*, the journal that you get there. There was a two-page essay celebrating sex. And it was the most depressive text that I've read. Because all of it is one argumentation how good sex is for your body, I mean—I mean for your body in the sense of health. They say, "Do a lot of deep French kissing, why? Because in this way your muscles will remain more firm and when you will be old the saliva will not drip from your..." It's so disgusting, it really—it really—it really ruins everything. You know, and—and this is where psychoanalysis can do its job today. You know, the standard story is, "Ooh, psychoanalysis, it’s old-fashioned, Victorian, we now have no prohibition." No, already if you read properly Freud, his problem is not "We want to enjoy but a prohibition, social prohibitions that we internalize prevent us from enjoying, so the function of the psychoanalyst is to enable you to get rid of these prohibitions so that you can do it." No, as Freud knew it very well, the true problem is not a father who terrorizes you prohibiting you sexuality. Such a father is usually a good father. Why? Because you normally, you rebel against him and so on, it works. The true problem is a father—and now I will be intimate, believe me I know what I'm talking about, I had it—a father who, I remember when I was fifteen my father came to me, "Are you a true man? Are you attracted to girls? Should I show you how? Do you know how to do it?" and so on. Believe me, this caused big troubles and so on, you know. So again, the situation is here—so again, the big paradox Freud is struggling with is not this simple one, social norms prohibit enjoyment so we have to get rid of them or replacement with different norms. The big problem is why what Lacan calls the super-ego injunction to enjoy sabotages enjoyment in the most efficient way. Because I claim the classic authoritarian, moderately authoritarian society works so-so—I'm not celebrating it—but there there is always a limited space for enjoyment open to you. As Lacan puts it very nicely, "Every—in every person of every figure of authority, there always allows a space, a small niche: 'I don't see you there, I don't want to know what you are doing there, but discretely just do it there.'" Even, and I checked this with my Jewish friends—by Jewish friends I mean people who really know about the Bible—that even in—in the Bible you find this, you know, the Ten Commandments. Which is this, the first or the second? "Do not celebrate other gods," you know. But this is, check it up if it's a good translation, every good Jewish specialist in the Bible will tell you: this is not what it says there. It says, "Do not celebrate other gods in front of me." You know, it's this: "I run the public space, don't do it here. What you are doing back there, it’s your problem." And—and we often—that's the tragedy of political correctness, we don't see this. Do you remember when was it? I think two—he was still president, so it must be four years ago, the unfortunate Ahmadinejad visited United Nations and then he was invited to Columbia University. And—I'm no friend with Ahmadinejad, incidentally I was even engaged there in Iran in polemics, remember when Mousavi, who was the guy who lost elections. I wrote a text defending Mousavi, and then for two days I was told by some friends I was the main target of attack in—from Ahmadinejad press claiming that I am—I'm paid by CIA to ruin Iran. No, my reaction was to write an open letter to CIA: "Hey, where is my money? My bank account!" No, but more seriously, one thing has to be said for Ahmadinejad. I hope that—some of you know it more in detail, but two Iranian friends of mine were there. And—to avoid misunderstanding, they were—they emigrated from Iran, they were not—but they told me that, remember all big media our laughed at it, made fun how Ahmadinejad was asked, "How is it with homosexuality in Iran?" And officially the translation was that he said, "We don't have this problem because we don't have homosexuality in Iran." And everyone laughed. It was a mistranslation, I was told. He said something much more, okay I wouldn't say refined, but different. His point was, "We do it differently than you. We don't talk about it, we prohibit it in public space and what you do discretely is your problem." The message was—I'm not saying this is true, but I am saying what I even heard from a—an old friend of Michel Foucault, that my god I'm very vulgar now, he went to Iran to screw the priests there, of course, no? I mean, homosexuality is extremely expanded in—in Iran. But it's what I'm—okay let me give you another example which I like here. I mention it in one of my books. Did you see that shitty movie which is very fascinating I think, it's really a movie about a religious experience today. Did you see the movie, it's horror, cheap, stupid, *Project X*? Yeah, it's so crucial about the... it's in some small town two jerks, nerds, want to organize a big party, the—the father, family of one of them goes for a weekend to another city, and before leaving, father tells the son, "Listen, you can have your party but not more than five people, don't use the pool, don't touch the car," and so on. And then the guy puts note on the web, no? "Come!" and then... I don't know if it happens here, but this is based on a true story in Europe, in Belgium it really happened. In Belgium I think forty, fifty—you know, a girl invited "come to a party" and then fifty thousand people came. Okay, something similar happens in this movie, like five, ten thousand people come, they ruin the house, they burn the car, the—the—the—the—the—police have to intervene with helicopters, everything is wrong. What's interesting in this, this is my answer to those, I hate them, how do they call "post-secular" people who claim our societies are too secular, we need to enter the new sense of the sacred post-secular. I claim at a certain point in the film, it’s pretty nicely shown, this simple stupid amusement, it's clearly that it acquires a sacred dimension. This is really a movie about a rediscovery of the sacred, and not this Christian symbolic sacred, but old sacred orgies in our societies. So what I want to say is that then, yes, the absolutely crucial thing happens at the end. When father returns, and you would have thought father would explode. He does explode. He says to his son, "Listen, you didn't follow my orders, you will have to work hard," and then the father... and X, and this is the end of the movie. Then the father adds, "But nonetheless, I admit it: you did have a courage to do this, I didn't expect..." You know, father plays this game of traditional authority. While modern authority, okay, let me—I will give you—I will propose you a solution for me cheating here. Just—to conclude with another story from one of my books, what's the problem with this permissive authority? How it can be even more oppressive? It's my old story, sorry if you know it. Imagine it’s, let’s say, Saturday, Sunday afternoon, you are a small boy or a girl, and your father wants you to visit some stupid old senile grandmother. And of course you don't want to go. Okay, let’s say you are a traditional authoritarian father. You say to the boy or girl, "Listen, I don't care how you feel, you just go there and treat grandmother respectfully, treat her nicely." That's okay, I claim, no problem. You feel oppressed but you rebel secretly and so on. But then comes the most monster code, the postmodern whatever you call him, permissive father who will tell you something different. I know, again, obviously I had some problems here, my father used to do this to me. His typical phrase to me would have been something like this: "You know how much your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless I'm not telling you to visit her unless you want to visit her." You can see that beneath the appearance of a free choice, there is a much stronger order. The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. It orders you not what to do but even what to desire to do. And I claim this is regular trick of our, I don't have time to go into it now, of our free choice societies. We are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice, as it were. Okay, listen, are you centralized here? Centralized in this sense, the usual thing happened because I wanted to say, to go through many other things, for example how with modern science—just to recapitulate—then I wanted to pass on to modern science where we have the same surplus paradox. Which is why very nicely Lacan speaks about primordial accumulation of—of knowledge with modern science. You know, in traditional societies, you have some basic common sense knowledge, we all have it, and then you have the surplus knowledge which is the secret knowledge: religion, sects, whatever, another type of knowledge, today what would have been New Age knowledge. But with science something else happens: science always can work only through a—it's not just a tradition passed from one to another brain, it's just—it works through its own surplus, as it were. So I wanted to go into this, to this parallel, how modern science functions then through what is, who is the subject of science. And I wanted to end with—I wanted to end with where are we today with symbolic authority. Is it true, because there is a certain image of where our societies are moving, that was to be the leftist conclusion. Where they say in modern capitalism we no longer have authorities, that Oedipus is past, it's just usually the term used is "generalized perversion." We are just thrown out like crazy, running from one object to another, hyperactive all the time, like all prohibitions are over and so on and so on. Even my original teacher, the nephew of Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, unfortunately bought this story. How the new century will be the century of the real, it's no longer Oedipus, no longer symbolic construction, is real outside the law and so on and so on. I wanted to oppose this radically, claiming that no, this idea of the crazy free circulation of capital real without law nonetheless covers up prohibition, covers up a fundamental antagonism. And you know this, to conclude with a problematic statement if you allow me. Okay, no, now I will do my dirty trick. I agree with you, I've talked too much, debate. So okay, debate. I ask myself, "Professor, what did you want to say in the remaining..." No-no, don't be afraid. I wonder if you will agree, I will conclude with how this same topic of how to deal with excess, real outside law, we encounter it—do you also have them here? how do you call this LGBTQ okay, segregated toilets problem. Let me make it clear what's my position here: of course I totally support it, in the sense of ending this last segregation and so on. Just beware that you will not get out of it what you will expect. You know why? Let me—let me say it. You know the first thing to note is that it's not simply that our societies are progressing. I mean, I read this even in a cover story of *Time* magazine, everybody knows with that. On the one hand, in our societies, call them developed whatever, Western, I don't care, more and more you have abortion, women's rights, gay marriages, whatever. But you know, as a maybe reaction, maybe not, in many of the third world or other countries, you have more and more homophobia and so on. And this is a crucial thing to understand. Now you will say this is because these countries are poor and so on. No, let me give you a fact which may be so surprising. People usually try to account for this new populism by "people feel exploited, poor, blah blah, cheated by modernity." But look at a country like Poland where I have good connections. It’s maybe the only up till now true economic miracle of post-communism. You can say with other countries that they screwed it up and so on, but Poland, in Poland really the standard of life went up, they never had it so good. And still you have now an incredible hardline reaction. Like, my god, you got at one public demonstration almost one million people demonstrating against abortion. And wait a minute, not just against abortion, it's already outlawed, they even want to close these last loopholes which are: abortion is now I think permitted in Poland if mother's life is in danger, if it was the result of rape, or if the child is, how do you call it, freak, ill, distorted so that it will probably die. Now they want even to close this loophole. So you cannot explain it in this simple economic sense. But what I'm saying is that this is one pole. And in Europe it’s very funny to observe this struggle. The one pole that I call politics of new sexual difference, which means how maintaining traditional hierarchic sexual difference is perceived as the central issue in escaping today's decadence in reconstituting a new society. So we shouldn't too much make fun of those primitives, Boko Haram whatever. Boko Haram is the in Northern Nigeria, no, this is the clearest example. It's very paradoxical: you have a big movement, they want to reconstruct all society, the basic premise Boko Haram: no Western education for women and so on. And the thing is very sad if you read their statement—I did, I even met some of them. They consider their fight as anti-colonialist fight. They claim, "From our everyday experience, the basic effect, result, the most destructive result of colonization of our countries is the disintegration of our traditional communal structures." So they claim this is where it begins. The basic—the first move in fighting anti-colonialism is to firmly re-establish sexual hierarchy. The first thing that made me suspicious is how all the big business enthusiastically supports it. You know, like Tim Cook on Apple said, "We should..." Well, it would be better maybe for him to do something for slave workers of Foxconn in China who are... But you know where I see the problem in this? I want to reconstruct something that maybe be called the primordial scene of transgenderism, and it's totally authentic experience. They always mention it, like: you come to the—okay, you have certain need, no? You come to the toilet and... anxiety. You cannot recognize yourself. Like, you may be determined socially as a man, but sorry I don't recognize, I'm not that, I'm not that. Well, for Lacan, the first note here would have been that it's always like this. Okay, not to such a degree, but sorry, maybe I am a pervert idiot here, but quite often when I go to a toilet and see "Gentlemen," I... am I that? you know, maybe... I mean, and this I'm not making just a joke here. For Lacan, sexual identity is ultimately always an escape, a desperate attempt to cover up a fundamental anxiety: "Am I that?" or whatever. This is why for Lacan subjectivity as such... Yes, sorry, no but just to go on. And so you know what would have been my solution? It's a little bit funny. You know the three, you know—okay, with other ways, not excrements—you know, I noticed in your country probably that when they try to—they try to put for different ways different, no, to recycle. You have, for example, in my country you have paper, plastics, organic waste, whatever. And then I noticed you always have another one which is "waste in general." And it’s a wonderful Hegelian paradox as if the universal dimension must appear aside as another particular. That would have been my solution, if you ask me: "Men, women, general sex, sex as such." Why? Because you know what's the problem from Lacanian theory? Okay, you can disagree with the term, but when Lacan speaks about what he calls symbolic castration, he means precisely this fundamental anxiety, unease, as if by way of entering sexuality I am deprived of a part of myself, I never can find myself in it. And I think the disappointment maybe of transgenderism is that if you neutralize it that you will get rid of it. You will not get rid of it. I claim that this type of unease about "Who am I?" is constitutive. They—they think they will—they will get too much from that—from that operation. So I—my—my solution would have been, of course we should do it, but no, my solution would have been three doors if you ask me. Because it always works like three. True antagonism is never double, it's never me and them. Antagonism always fails and then there must be a third—you know, it’s like this is the old Hegelian lesson, whenever you try to categorize something, you always have one paradoxical category which basically means all that that doesn't fit in any of the previous categories. Like isn't it clear that with Marx, my old example I'm playing with your nerves now many times, isn't it clear that with Marx what Marx called Asiatic—no Asian, that how is it called, Asiatic mode of production? It's not a concept. Marx theorized primitive tribal societies, whatever you call them, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever the shit is, if anything at all, that come afterwards. Then he noticed that there are social formations which don't fit to it. And he created a category of Asiatic mode of production. But I think the only true meaning of Asiatic mode of production is all those societies which do not fit the other one. And this is crucial symbolic operation. It's also crucial for racism because the other in racism always functions like that, but I talk too much, you should stop me. Okay, I'm... ah, sorry, no no no! No no no, this is not what you think. It's another—are you somehow connected because I really had a whole line of thought, and I feel that I cheated. So is there a master here? Are you? Now I make a racist remark: are you so bad in Canada that crazy guy from my decadent part of you that is your master? He is! Anyway that I send you the file and you address him and you know, because it seems to me nonetheless that you came here expecting to hear more of this, and I feel obliged to—so let's do it like this, so that you know he or the other guy or whoever here, you the salami guy, sorry. No, whatever, okay, we'll do it. Thank you very much. Sorry! So, unfortunately, despite Zizek's best efforts, we still have time for questions. Yeah, you know that’s my—my aim was to be able to say with all hypocrisy I’m so sorry that we no longer have time for debate, you know. Okay, so one over there. Please, sorry. Um... oh. No, no. Okay. Um... I was wondering, so you talk about um... like borders and recently there's been a lot with the Syrian refugees. And I was watching a CNN broadcast the other day, um, and there were all these protests that say "borders kill." And um, I was just wondering what your thoughts would be on that in terms of like national identity and you were talking about gender identity and how to both um... live with borders that are not malicious but also exist like as a in a nation or as a national identity or something like that. Um because it... yeah, so... Yeah, I see—I see. You know, my problem is this one, at least—I don't know about the world situation, although I'm noticing that it's not just European problem, it's happening all around the world with violent consequences which are not properly reported in our media. For example, as we know now almost half of Zimbabwe is in South Africa. But are people aware that there are many violent acts of poor South African workers who feel that, you know, they are stealing Zimbabweans from there their jobs. Not to mention China, in whole of China ten-twenty millions people... So I think this is our future for economic reasons, global warming, or even natural disasters. Let me tell you something, my good friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophes. He is member of some official organization so he was when Fukushima happened, a day after he was there. And he told me, "Do you know that it was kept secret, but for one day the Japanese government thought that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area." How? Where will they go and so on. So we will confront—and I think it's absolutely crucial to do it in an organized way. Here all these misunderstandings emerge about my role here. I think that the way it was done in Europe was totally catastrophic. First, that they allowed—I more and more, and even this is based on some of the rumors that I hear from my friend diplomats in Brussels, that it was done consciously to secretly promote the right-wing anti-immigrant agenda. You know, it was done in this chaotic way: tens of thousands every day through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and so on, as if they wanted to provoke the backlash from... I think my solution would have been: absolutely even more immigrants into Europe. I always repeat this: the true threat to Europe are those who present themselves as defenders of Europe today. Like, would you like Europe where your beloved leader Viktor Orbán, or the same leader of... if such people take over in Europe, this is the end of Europe, my god. No, so this is not... what I'm saying is that, and this is the tragedy of European Union, maybe it's the end, the same thing could have been done in a minimally organized way. Which means I proposed even using the army, not to fight the refugees but establish on Libyan coasts, Syria, Turkey, big centers, process them, airlifts or whatever. It could have been done in a much more efficient simple way. The result of this chaotic way is that now—now after this experience—in every, every more or less European country, if you were to held a referendum, it would be mostly around two thirds against the refugees. And there is very difficult, there I had a conflict with my good friend Varoufakis, who said, "Oh, democratize Europe." I say, "Okay, but you must do something more." Because if you just render decisions in Europe now transparent democratic, it's very bad news for refugees. For example, I had a debate in Germany when I defended refugees, and then some right-winger in Berlin—big debate—some right-winger attacked me, said, "But you pretend to be for democratic transparency." He said, "Listen, Angela Merkel made the big gesture 'Kommt' (Come). Over one million people came. This is a big change in Germany. Where is her democratic legitimization?" She must have known very well that the majority is against. So what would be your answer here? My answer is extremely brutal but very problematic. Angela Merkel was right. Democracy, authentic democracy does not mean simply you follow the crowd. Fuck it, I'm ready to say this. Because again, it's very sad news but democracy in Europe at this moment... a true politician doesn't follow the crowd. A true politician does a very risky move, even going against the majority, hoping it's a wager, like in Pascal, that retroactively it will justify itself. That only through the result of his crazy decision it will appear retroactively that it was right that he did. So you see, I'm here—and even with helping Greece, that was my argument against Varoufakis. Is he aware that "we criticize Europe alienated bureaucracy in Brussels is screwing up Greece," fuck you, ordinary people were much more against Greece. God help us! It’s good news for Greece that the decisions in Brussels were obscure. Because I spoke with Slovenia representative in Brussels, my friend spoke with the one from Slovakia, and they all told the same story: in secret meetings we were able to do something for Greece. The moment we had to speak public, we were afraid of supporting Greece because our local populists would immediately explode, "Oh lazy Greeks," you know, "let them eat their yogurts" or whatever whatever. So you see, you see what I mean? I claim that it's—it’s—I'm—I'm not—not even only for pragmatic reasons. I know that some people sympathize with refugees like they are almost communists today because they are coming to Europe with a radical demand. Some of them say it openly, I almost like it. Their demand is, "You claim you are a society with open borders, so we have the right to go into whichever country of Europe we want—Norway, UK—and the state there has to take care of us somehow." Okay, it sounds nice, but what does this mean empirically concretely? This means, to be extremely brutal, that the only way to do this is to abolish democracy in Europe. What would be your solution here? My solution is some middle path with element of authoritarian support for refugees. Don't count on popular support. This is tragic news, the result of refugees is—you... we are now all happy, we just squeezed out that the Austrian guy was not elected—this would have been horror, because for our shitty countries, Slovenia, Hungary, it's normal if our guys took power, but you know that Frei-demokrat or what in Austria? That would have been the first case in a—the developed big Western country that a true right-winger... you remember UKIP, Farage? I met Farage, incidentally, at a round table, my friend, they did anti-immigrant there, or Marine Le Pen, France and so on. It’s a horrible thing that is going on, one shouldn't—one shouldn't joke here. That’s all I'm saying. For example, people accuse me—it was such a misinterpretation I read on a YouTube this morning—that I said there are murderers, rapists and thieves among the refugees. My point was very simple one. When one million of people come, of course there are, what did you expect? Let’s confront this openly. The worst thing—and I explicitly said that the problem is how to create space for more refugees—and the worst thing is to idealize refugees in Frank Capra style, you know. "Oh, but they are really poor people are good people." Are these guys who claim this normal? Don't they see, don't they know what is poverty? Poverty is not a noble thing, you know. This is what we learn, this is why they are worst ideology, Frank Capra movies, as if poor people are authentic, friendly. Poverty can ruin you ethically also. Poverty makes you brutal, survivalist and so on and so on. And also I hated when people approached me, "You don't want to open your heart to refugees." I said, "Of course not! I don't want to open our heart, the problem is to open our doors to get them in to live." I hate this moralistic pressure which I think serves just to retain our beautiful soul and avoid confronting real problems. Real problems: what is happening in African and Middle East countries from where refugees are coming? How are we, Europe, economically co-responsible for it? Whenever you—it's interesting how all those countries from which refugees are coming, with exception of Syria—but this is because it's caught into it—are not really simply poor countries, but are poor countries with some national resources fully included into Western capital and so on. Or... Let’s... sorry I have to interrupt you there... Okay, okay, haha! I really didn't answer your big one. Please. I moved originally from Pakistan which is much further right of Slovenia and Hungary. Yeah but sorry to interrupt then I will let you speak immediately. You know where I—I sympathize with you, even my Indian friends are telling me that you know the shitty movie *Gandhi*. *Gandhi*, you saw it, that big... it's
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totally unfair towards you. Indians like to put all the blame on Jinnah, no? But it was
totally unfair towards you. Indians like to put all the blame on Jinnah, no? But it was
Slavoj Žižek
a much more complex game in '48, '47, where—Gandhi himself, his hands were definitely not clean also. For sure. You would agree, no? Okay, sorry let's go... I'm suddenly on the spot. Okay so I just wrote my question down so I could be more coherent because I tend to fumble. No problem. Okay so I have experience
a much more complex game in '48, '47, where—Gandhi himself, his hands were definitely not clean also. For sure. You would agree, no? Okay, sorry let's go... I'm suddenly on the spot. Okay so I just wrote my question down so I could be more coherent because I tend to fumble. No problem. Okay so I have experience
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working as an executive producer for a Pakistani news
working as an executive producer for a Pakistani news
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channel for years almost. Pakistani news channel? In Pakistan, yes. Exactly. My time in the so-called fourth pillar of democracy has left me severely critical and bitter as I have witnessed narratives change much like the Orwellian flip-flops in Dictated by internal corporate interests or the pursuit of capital. My
channel for years almost. Pakistani news channel? In Pakistan, yes. Exactly. My time in the so-called fourth pillar of democracy has left me severely critical and bitter as I have witnessed narratives change much like the Orwellian flip-flops in Dictated by internal corporate interests or the pursuit of capital. My
Slavoj Žižek
question is, within the context of the zero institution and post-politics, what is your view on the normalization of spectacular statements like "the Muslim ban"? So that it becomes a point of discussion amongst pundits and trickles down. You mean Trump, what he said. Yeah I mean yeah, okay, so whatever. Are you aware what you asked him? Three hours talk just for the... Okay, of course, ah—now let me begin with something problematic for which I am often attacked. First, no doubt Trump is like disgust embodied, you know, like... but I find him interesting because not because, you know in Slovenia Trump is very popular, you know why? His wife is Slovene, Melania now, so "Uhh, we'll be in the White House." No, but more seriously, I think Trump is a filthy populist opportunist, but whenever he makes concrete proposals, commitments, they are quite often much more
question is, within the context of the zero institution and post-politics, what is your view on the normalization of spectacular statements like "the Muslim ban"? So that it becomes a point of discussion amongst pundits and trickles down. You mean Trump, what he said. Yeah I mean yeah, okay, so whatever. Are you aware what you asked him? Three hours talk just for the... Okay, of course, ah—now let me begin with something problematic for which I am often attacked. First, no doubt Trump is like disgust embodied, you know, like... but I find him interesting because not because, you know in Slovenia Trump is very popular, you know why? His wife is Slovene, Melania now, so "Uhh, we'll be in the White House." No, but more seriously, I think Trump is a filthy populist opportunist, but whenever he makes concrete proposals, commitments, they are quite often much more
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ambiguous.
ambiguous.
Slavoj Žižek
Did you notice that Trump was the only Republican who said something minimally reasonable about Middle East peace process? That we should also listen to the Palestinian side and so on and so on. Trump said we should start seriously negotiating with Putin instead of just, you know, warmongering. Trump said he is in principle for raising minimal wage and so on and so on. So I think if you ask me—I agree with who was the guy who was the Congress leader—John Boehner, who said, "Ted Cruz is Lucifer in flesh." I'm much more afraid of somebody like Ted Cruz who may appear a little bit more polite, civilized, you know, but you know—okay, I'll put it like this. If I were a Muslim here, I wouldn't be afraid of these vulgar types like Trump too much, much because nonetheless there is I hope, although one has doubts, a certain limit to this vulgar populist appeal. I'm much more worried about people who basically say the same thing, but in a superficially more civilized way, you know, acceptable for general media and so on and so on. For example, I've written about it, it's similar to what you say, torture. For me, the true scandal is not that some people are now openly for torture. Also my beloved Trump, I know he said "Ooh, waterboarding, much more, much more." The true horror is that torture became a topic of public debate at all. The true problem is normalization of torture. And I'm here very open, not a naive idiot. I'm well aware that people do torture. Now I will go to the end and then you can put me on YouTube and again claim that I'm a fascist. I can imagine a situation where I would maybe torture someone. Let's go into this ridiculous sentimentality: my daughter whom I love, years, is kidnapped by bad men who, and then I have someone in my hands, I know he knows where is my daughter, it's ridiculous. Maybe I would... but isn't it crucial that if I do it out of pure despair, I should become all the time aware that I did something terrifying out of despair, it shouldn't be normalized. You know what I mean? The true horror is the moment you normalized it, like Alan Dershowitz did: "There should be doctors who..." and I... they check you, your heart, you can torture him like that, not too much and so on. The normalization is the true horror. So I think that in a way those who were skeptical about torture but accepted the debate were even worse. Because as far as some right-wing nuts advocate torture, okay, the moment it becomes the topic of debate, there we are winning or losing true battles. And there I think more and more we are ethically—I really think that we are now in the last two, three decades in an era of ethical disintegration, decay. You know what we need? I said this yesterday again, didn't like it in New York—oh no the day before yesterday, sorry—we need more dogma, dogmatism. But don't be afraid, you know what I mean by this? Let’s take rape. Sorry, maybe you know my line, my old example. I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to argue all the time that women shouldn't be raped. Sorry, but I would like to live in a society where the moment a guy starts to play this disgusting game, "Oh, do they really don't want to be raped? What if they secretly want it?" The guy's just small—he appears as an idiot, you know. The—the problem—I would like—and the same goes for torture. I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to argue for or against torture. Torture should be simply the moment you say you are discredited. We need more of—I know the paradox of the term—progressive dogmatism. You know, that certain things should be automatically assumed: we don't debate that. And here I think the fact again that we are debating about all this, and things that you can say—you remember Madeleine Albright when she made that horrible statement years ago? When a journalist asked her that in Iraq, as a result of American intervention, half a million children died. Does she think that it was worth this price? She said, "Yeah, it’s difficult, but yes, it was worth the price." My god that you can make such a statement. My answer to her would have been—you remember when she said, supporting Hillary, that "there is a special place in hell for women who don't support other women," which meant for women who vote for Sanders, no? Well I would say maybe, maybe if there is God, and if God is not totally evil—which is again matter of big debate—maybe what there is in hell is a special place for women who claim that to bomb half a million children to death is an acceptable price. Maybe she got it wrong, what it is. No, but you know... Okay sorry, yeah. Was your father a secret police agent? Yeah and you—you inherited his brutality! Vulgarian, okay. Two more questions, short questions please, and also please short answers, okay? I didn't... your—your pleading was not sincere enough! It wasn't desperate. Desperate! Sorry, please. So, um, first, I am originally from India and I agree with both of you what you just said. So... You know what's my problem in India? Ambedkar against Gandhi. I'm for Ambedkar to make my position clear. Yeah, that... no, there is another yeah, there is very interesting dynamics going on in India right now, but I won't go into that right now. Sorry. But um, I mean in your recent book on refugees you mention that the refugee crisis is over-determined by class struggle as such, and one of the solutions is, as you say, or one of the tactical solutions is to some kind of organized manner in which Europe accepts refugee and... Exactly, because I'm afraid otherwise we get a populist backlash and it's the end. That's why... But what do you see in terms of this, the class struggle that you think is over-determining the refugee crisis as well as other... Well, I enumerate this in my book. First, I would say, it's clear that the ultimate cause of this refugee crisis is the way global capital functions. Here I even refer, you may remember in the book, to my half-friend, he is a right-winger but not a stupid right-winger, we should learn from them: Peter Sloterdijk. Who in his book of global capitalism used this wonderful metaphor which has a great echo in movies—from *Wizard of Oz*, this of *cupola*. That global is also globus, like—how do you call it in
Did you notice that Trump was the only Republican who said something minimally reasonable about Middle East peace process? That we should also listen to the Palestinian side and so on and so on. Trump said we should start seriously negotiating with Putin instead of just, you know, warmongering. Trump said he is in principle for raising minimal wage and so on and so on. So I think if you ask me—I agree with who was the guy who was the Congress leader—John Boehner, who said, "Ted Cruz is Lucifer in flesh." I'm much more afraid of somebody like Ted Cruz who may appear a little bit more polite, civilized, you know, but you know—okay, I'll put it like this. If I were a Muslim here, I wouldn't be afraid of these vulgar types like Trump too much, much because nonetheless there is I hope, although one has doubts, a certain limit to this vulgar populist appeal. I'm much more worried about people who basically say the same thing, but in a superficially more civilized way, you know, acceptable for general media and so on and so on. For example, I've written about it, it's similar to what you say, torture. For me, the true scandal is not that some people are now openly for torture. Also my beloved Trump, I know he said "Ooh, waterboarding, much more, much more." The true horror is that torture became a topic of public debate at all. The true problem is normalization of torture. And I'm here very open, not a naive idiot. I'm well aware that people do torture. Now I will go to the end and then you can put me on YouTube and again claim that I'm a fascist. I can imagine a situation where I would maybe torture someone. Let's go into this ridiculous sentimentality: my daughter whom I love, years, is kidnapped by bad men who, and then I have someone in my hands, I know he knows where is my daughter, it's ridiculous. Maybe I would... but isn't it crucial that if I do it out of pure despair, I should become all the time aware that I did something terrifying out of despair, it shouldn't be normalized. You know what I mean? The true horror is the moment you normalized it, like Alan Dershowitz did: "There should be doctors who..." and I... they check you, your heart, you can torture him like that, not too much and so on. The normalization is the true horror. So I think that in a way those who were skeptical about torture but accepted the debate were even worse. Because as far as some right-wing nuts advocate torture, okay, the moment it becomes the topic of debate, there we are winning or losing true battles. And there I think more and more we are ethically—I really think that we are now in the last two, three decades in an era of ethical disintegration, decay. You know what we need? I said this yesterday again, didn't like it in New York—oh no the day before yesterday, sorry—we need more dogma, dogmatism. But don't be afraid, you know what I mean by this? Let’s take rape. Sorry, maybe you know my line, my old example. I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to argue all the time that women shouldn't be raped. Sorry, but I would like to live in a society where the moment a guy starts to play this disgusting game, "Oh, do they really don't want to be raped? What if they secretly want it?" The guy's just small—he appears as an idiot, you know. The—the problem—I would like—and the same goes for torture. I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to argue for or against torture. Torture should be simply the moment you say you are discredited. We need more of—I know the paradox of the term—progressive dogmatism. You know, that certain things should be automatically assumed: we don't debate that. And here I think the fact again that we are debating about all this, and things that you can say—you remember Madeleine Albright when she made that horrible statement years ago? When a journalist asked her that in Iraq, as a result of American intervention, half a million children died. Does she think that it was worth this price? She said, "Yeah, it’s difficult, but yes, it was worth the price." My god that you can make such a statement. My answer to her would have been—you remember when she said, supporting Hillary, that "there is a special place in hell for women who don't support other women," which meant for women who vote for Sanders, no? Well I would say maybe, maybe if there is God, and if God is not totally evil—which is again matter of big debate—maybe what there is in hell is a special place for women who claim that to bomb half a million children to death is an acceptable price. Maybe she got it wrong, what it is. No, but you know... Okay sorry, yeah. Was your father a secret police agent? Yeah and you—you inherited his brutality! Vulgarian, okay. Two more questions, short questions please, and also please short answers, okay? I didn't... your—your pleading was not sincere enough! It wasn't desperate. Desperate! Sorry, please. So, um, first, I am originally from India and I agree with both of you what you just said. So... You know what's my problem in India? Ambedkar against Gandhi. I'm for Ambedkar to make my position clear. Yeah, that... no, there is another yeah, there is very interesting dynamics going on in India right now, but I won't go into that right now. Sorry. But um, I mean in your recent book on refugees you mention that the refugee crisis is over-determined by class struggle as such, and one of the solutions is, as you say, or one of the tactical solutions is to some kind of organized manner in which Europe accepts refugee and... Exactly, because I'm afraid otherwise we get a populist backlash and it's the end. That's why... But what do you see in terms of this, the class struggle that you think is over-determining the refugee crisis as well as other... Well, I enumerate this in my book. First, I would say, it's clear that the ultimate cause of this refugee crisis is the way global capital functions. Here I even refer, you may remember in the book, to my half-friend, he is a right-winger but not a stupid right-winger, we should learn from them: Peter Sloterdijk. Who in his book of global capitalism used this wonderful metaphor which has a great echo in movies—from *Wizard of Oz*, this of *cupola*. That global is also globus, like—how do you call it in
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English, cupola—you know, that there are those around
English, cupola—you know, that there are those around
Slavoj Žižek
who are in, there are those who are out. And I claim this is a new form of class struggle, we have to rethink Marx here. I
who are in, there are those who are out. And I claim this is a new form of class struggle, we have to rethink Marx here. I
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think
think
Slavoj Žižek
that to put—to bring the paradox to the extreme, what for Marx was the ideal proletarian, exploited: you work in a factory, you have a permanent job, okay you are exploited, but life goes on. This is
that to put—to bring the paradox to the extreme, what for Marx was the ideal proletarian, exploited: you work in a factory, you have a permanent job, okay you are exploited, but life goes on. This is
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almost a privileged situation today. I think the much more crucial element of those exploited or however you call it today are
almost a privileged situation today. I think the much more crucial element of those exploited or however you call it today are
Slavoj Žižek
those
those
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in so-called failed states, which never fail in themselves. Their failure is always the result of their inclusion into global market, like take Congo. The tragedy of Congo is its wealth itself: coltan and all that stuff. If you—it's tragic, crazy idea—but if somehow you make disappear all the natural resources, minerals from Congo, the war there would have been over, the civil war in a month or two. So—so what I'm saying is that
in so-called failed states, which never fail in themselves. Their failure is always the result of their inclusion into global market, like take Congo. The tragedy of Congo is its wealth itself: coltan and all that stuff. If you—it's tragic, crazy idea—but if somehow you make disappear all the natural resources, minerals from Congo, the war there would have been over, the civil war in a month or two. So—so what I'm saying is that
Slavoj Žižek
we have those who live in so-called failed states, we have—I mean did you read probably you did the book by Mike Davis, *Planet of Slums* or what? About how—about slums, favelas. This is something very paradoxical, how more and more in our societies you have parts which are simply not fully covered by the legal order. And it's not necessarily only poverty. When I visited Brazil, I learned very interesting things, how they even have the term now "favela capitalism." Which means precisely because you are not constrained by any legal rules, you can do crazy, okay, brutal, but also sometimes creative. So what I'm saying and then we have for example precarious workers. It's not marginal, in Slovenia, my shitty country, almost of workers are already precarious. And here we should fight ideology. Why? Because the trick of successful neoliberal ideology is that it presents your very new forms of slavery as new forms of freedom. When you say, "My God, I don't have a permanent job, every year or two will I get a new contract? I'm in anxiety," then comes somebody like Anthony Giddens and tells you, "But listen, this is new form of freedom. You are not alienated fixed into one role, every year or second year you can reinvent yourself" and so on all that stuff. So you see my point: we—that's for me the basic paradox. The more capitalist global, the more there is this invisible barrier within countries, between countries. And this is how I see basically the problem of refugees: this new global division, those who are in, those who are out. And violating, transgressing this barrier, which is getting stronger and stronger. Berlin Wall fell down, but new walls are emerging everywhere. And so I am simply here—the miracle always happens, but I no longer have this Marxist trust: you know, history moves forward. I'm much closer to Walter Benjamin here, who said the task today is not to ride the train of history towards progress but to put the—pull the emergency brake, you know. So again, I'm saying that today, precisely with reference to problems that you mentioned, we live at an extremely interesting moment. It's the moment when in Europe and in the United States, the old logic of manufacturing consensus on how politics reproduces itself, those in power, is breaking down. That's the meaning of phenomena like in Europe and also down there like Trump, Sanders and so on. And these are very dangerous moments, but also moments of hope. This—we shouldn't be afraid of this moment when here I remain a Maoist, you know that wonderful saying of Mao: "Everything under heaven is in disorder, so the situation is excellent." You see, this is what it—it's happening today. I mean, without—without Trump there wouldn't have been Sanders. Not because they are opponents, but the same situation that in the case of Trump means the breakdown of this standard way how democracy officially reproduces itself. Because that's the basic lesson: democracy appears an abstract procedure, we vote, blah blah. But we all know that this abstract procedure is embodied in very precise unwritten rules, who decides what is admissible. It's the same paradox that I mentioned there: you are free to vote if you remain within the constraints of... and that's so interesting, that’s basic paradox. The moment people are confronted with a real choice, those in power interpret this as a crisis of democracy. Crises of democracy are precisely moments when there is a chance that maybe democracy, that people are confronting a real choice. So if you ask me for the United States where I am: no, I cannot do that, but what I will say now... but a part of me even says like those some of radical Bernie Sanders supporters: maybe better Trump than Hillary, you know. No, don't be afraid, I'm not ready to do this, but just part of my heart moving in that direction. Okay so let's have one final question, maybe from this side. Sorry, go ahead. So I was actually just at Left Forum before you got there on Saturday and then came here after to this Bloomplatz festival, and kept having in my head this like striking difference between these two conferences, you know. This like populist American, you know where it’s like people that work very hard and and completely sort of for me non-academic context, and then this this conference here. What can we do as academics to help the leftists and the the populist effort? Like what should what is our role here? I am here a conditional pessimist, how should I put it. First, let's face it, my god, apart from pushing for what years ago would have been perceived
we have those who live in so-called failed states, we have—I mean did you read probably you did the book by Mike Davis, *Planet of Slums* or what? About how—about slums, favelas. This is something very paradoxical, how more and more in our societies you have parts which are simply not fully covered by the legal order. And it's not necessarily only poverty. When I visited Brazil, I learned very interesting things, how they even have the term now "favela capitalism." Which means precisely because you are not constrained by any legal rules, you can do crazy, okay, brutal, but also sometimes creative. So what I'm saying and then we have for example precarious workers. It's not marginal, in Slovenia, my shitty country, almost of workers are already precarious. And here we should fight ideology. Why? Because the trick of successful neoliberal ideology is that it presents your very new forms of slavery as new forms of freedom. When you say, "My God, I don't have a permanent job, every year or two will I get a new contract? I'm in anxiety," then comes somebody like Anthony Giddens and tells you, "But listen, this is new form of freedom. You are not alienated fixed into one role, every year or second year you can reinvent yourself" and so on all that stuff. So you see my point: we—that's for me the basic paradox. The more capitalist global, the more there is this invisible barrier within countries, between countries. And this is how I see basically the problem of refugees: this new global division, those who are in, those who are out. And violating, transgressing this barrier, which is getting stronger and stronger. Berlin Wall fell down, but new walls are emerging everywhere. And so I am simply here—the miracle always happens, but I no longer have this Marxist trust: you know, history moves forward. I'm much closer to Walter Benjamin here, who said the task today is not to ride the train of history towards progress but to put the—pull the emergency brake, you know. So again, I'm saying that today, precisely with reference to problems that you mentioned, we live at an extremely interesting moment. It's the moment when in Europe and in the United States, the old logic of manufacturing consensus on how politics reproduces itself, those in power, is breaking down. That's the meaning of phenomena like in Europe and also down there like Trump, Sanders and so on. And these are very dangerous moments, but also moments of hope. This—we shouldn't be afraid of this moment when here I remain a Maoist, you know that wonderful saying of Mao: "Everything under heaven is in disorder, so the situation is excellent." You see, this is what it—it's happening today. I mean, without—without Trump there wouldn't have been Sanders. Not because they are opponents, but the same situation that in the case of Trump means the breakdown of this standard way how democracy officially reproduces itself. Because that's the basic lesson: democracy appears an abstract procedure, we vote, blah blah. But we all know that this abstract procedure is embodied in very precise unwritten rules, who decides what is admissible. It's the same paradox that I mentioned there: you are free to vote if you remain within the constraints of... and that's so interesting, that’s basic paradox. The moment people are confronted with a real choice, those in power interpret this as a crisis of democracy. Crises of democracy are precisely moments when there is a chance that maybe democracy, that people are confronting a real choice. So if you ask me for the United States where I am: no, I cannot do that, but what I will say now... but a part of me even says like those some of radical Bernie Sanders supporters: maybe better Trump than Hillary, you know. No, don't be afraid, I'm not ready to do this, but just part of my heart moving in that direction. Okay so let's have one final question, maybe from this side. Sorry, go ahead. So I was actually just at Left Forum before you got there on Saturday and then came here after to this Bloomplatz festival, and kept having in my head this like striking difference between these two conferences, you know. This like populist American, you know where it’s like people that work very hard and and completely sort of for me non-academic context, and then this this conference here. What can we do as academics to help the leftists and the the populist effort? Like what should what is our role here? I am here a conditional pessimist, how should I put it. First, let's face it, my god, apart from pushing for what years ago would have been perceived
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as
as
Slavoj Žižek
not even radical but moderate social democratic agenda, does the left have any concrete idea how to
not even radical but moderate social democratic agenda, does the left have any concrete idea how to
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restructure society or whatever? That was the great
restructure society or whatever? That was the great
Slavoj Žižek
tragedy and experience with Greece. As Varoufakis emphasized all
tragedy and experience with Greece. As Varoufakis emphasized all
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the time: they were denounced as crazy lunatic radical left, but if you look at what Syriza demanded, it’s something that years ago in Europe it would have been considered not even radical but very moderate centrist social democracy. And the same goes for United States: if you take into account general trends
the time: they were denounced as crazy lunatic radical left, but if you look at what Syriza demanded, it’s something that years ago in Europe it would have been considered not even radical but very moderate centrist social democracy. And the same goes for United States: if you take into account general trends
Slavoj Žižek
today, then I'm
today, then I'm
unknown
sorry to tell you Richard Nixon is a—a radical leftist. Yes, you know this is Fred Jameson told me this. Richard Nixon is an extremely interesting figure. He was a big jerk,
sorry to tell you Richard Nixon is a—a radical leftist. Yes, you know this is Fred Jameson told me this. Richard Nixon is an extremely interesting figure. He was a big jerk,
Slavoj Žižek
whatever you want, but if you define left in a very primitive way about how much money do you give for students, for social health care, Richard Nixon was the most leftist US president. And he opened up with China and so on and so on. So I never—not for a second believed in that story, Watergate, you know, like, which is pure ideology: "What a great country United States are! Two simple journalists can overthrow the strongest man in the world." Yes, with the help of who knows whom in the background, you know. It’s—this is why, although I don't like Oliver Stone too much, I appreciate his film on Nixon, which is not just against Nixon, you know, Anthony Hopkins—it’s a nice idea, okay, Hannibal Lecter as Nixon, so okay—but you know it points nicely this deep ambiguity of—of Nixon. Don't write Nixon simply off. He is... so what I'm saying is that again: okay, classical social democracy unfortunately because of global—the way global capital functions is over. State socialism is over, although it's over in a paradoxical way where Communists are still in power, they are usually the best managers of new capitalism, no? I claim that China—China thrives if it will we'll see, precisely only Communist Party could have done this. That's what liberals cannot accept. I knew someone—okay, I can tell you who, Wang Hui, the great Chinese social philosopher—he has some obscure connections even with the daughter of Deng Xiaoping. And he told me a wonderful story: the daughter told him that when Deng Xiaoping was dying, all these ass-kissing guys around him, flattering him, asking him, "What do you think your greatest act was? They thought he will say, "Yeah, opening China, blah blah, reform." No, he said that when things open, that I wasn't tempted... and now we know that almost the majority of the party was tempted by going to the end, full Western democracy. And he said it would have meant chaos. No, it breaks my heart—I—I wrote critical texts about China, I’m now a friend of mine there told me when they translate my books that how they are censored heavily and so on. But what I'm saying is it’s very sad sign of our predicament that probably Deng Xiaoping was right. That if you want modern type of dynamic capitalism with stability, authoritarianism can do much better. It's very sad. So what I'm saying, ex-communist, this: then the last surviving hope of traditional left is this endless poetry of local democracy, you know, against ossified state apparatus, representation, local communities and so on. I'm totally opposed to this. I think first for theoretical reasons: the problems we are facing today—refugees, ecological catastrophes and so on—if anything, we have to invent even larger forms, transnational forms of collective decision-making and so on. Second thing, I think that as a model this doesn't work. This is again this stupid leftist fascination with "We should be engaged." Maybe I'm alienated, but I don't know how you feel it, I don't want to be too much engaged. For me, one of the visions of hell is that I live in a local community where every afternoon we have some shitty meeting, you know, how we will distribute water, how we will educate... No! I want an efficient anonymous half-invisible machine which takes care of all that bullshit, so that I can read my books, write my books, watch movies, whatever. And—so again, I think that it simply doesn't work. You know what's the truth of this? I have also connections in Venezuela they tell me: people celebrate, "Ugh, Chávez wonderful, people self-organize themselves, communes and so on." Yeah but every good analyst knows that the absolutely necessary obverse of this is the strong Caudillo role. You need a strong, more than democratically strong leader. You know
whatever you want, but if you define left in a very primitive way about how much money do you give for students, for social health care, Richard Nixon was the most leftist US president. And he opened up with China and so on and so on. So I never—not for a second believed in that story, Watergate, you know, like, which is pure ideology: "What a great country United States are! Two simple journalists can overthrow the strongest man in the world." Yes, with the help of who knows whom in the background, you know. It’s—this is why, although I don't like Oliver Stone too much, I appreciate his film on Nixon, which is not just against Nixon, you know, Anthony Hopkins—it’s a nice idea, okay, Hannibal Lecter as Nixon, so okay—but you know it points nicely this deep ambiguity of—of Nixon. Don't write Nixon simply off. He is... so what I'm saying is that again: okay, classical social democracy unfortunately because of global—the way global capital functions is over. State socialism is over, although it's over in a paradoxical way where Communists are still in power, they are usually the best managers of new capitalism, no? I claim that China—China thrives if it will we'll see, precisely only Communist Party could have done this. That's what liberals cannot accept. I knew someone—okay, I can tell you who, Wang Hui, the great Chinese social philosopher—he has some obscure connections even with the daughter of Deng Xiaoping. And he told me a wonderful story: the daughter told him that when Deng Xiaoping was dying, all these ass-kissing guys around him, flattering him, asking him, "What do you think your greatest act was? They thought he will say, "Yeah, opening China, blah blah, reform." No, he said that when things open, that I wasn't tempted... and now we know that almost the majority of the party was tempted by going to the end, full Western democracy. And he said it would have meant chaos. No, it breaks my heart—I—I wrote critical texts about China, I’m now a friend of mine there told me when they translate my books that how they are censored heavily and so on. But what I'm saying is it’s very sad sign of our predicament that probably Deng Xiaoping was right. That if you want modern type of dynamic capitalism with stability, authoritarianism can do much better. It's very sad. So what I'm saying, ex-communist, this: then the last surviving hope of traditional left is this endless poetry of local democracy, you know, against ossified state apparatus, representation, local communities and so on. I'm totally opposed to this. I think first for theoretical reasons: the problems we are facing today—refugees, ecological catastrophes and so on—if anything, we have to invent even larger forms, transnational forms of collective decision-making and so on. Second thing, I think that as a model this doesn't work. This is again this stupid leftist fascination with "We should be engaged." Maybe I'm alienated, but I don't know how you feel it, I don't want to be too much engaged. For me, one of the visions of hell is that I live in a local community where every afternoon we have some shitty meeting, you know, how we will distribute water, how we will educate... No! I want an efficient anonymous half-invisible machine which takes care of all that bullshit, so that I can read my books, write my books, watch movies, whatever. And—so again, I think that it simply doesn't work. You know what's the truth of this? I have also connections in Venezuela they tell me: people celebrate, "Ugh, Chávez wonderful, people self-organize themselves, communes and so on." Yeah but every good analyst knows that the absolutely necessary obverse of this is the strong Caudillo role. You need a strong, more than democratically strong leader. You know
unknown
that’s a very nice paradox which for me is not even necessarily a bad thing. I'm here very realist, skeptical, sarcastic, cynical whatever. I don't think that the strong leader is always necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you need a fascination with a strong leader to—to push you to go a little bit further. So you see what I'm saying, I'm saying that apart from this... Okay, they we have two main positions today. One is the social democratic which is "Let’s push it further, health care,
that’s a very nice paradox which for me is not even necessarily a bad thing. I'm here very realist, skeptical, sarcastic, cynical whatever. I don't think that the strong leader is always necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you need a fascination with a strong leader to—to push you to go a little bit further. So you see what I'm saying, I'm saying that apart from this... Okay, they we have two main positions today. One is the social democratic which is "Let’s push it further, health care,
Slavoj Žižek
free education, blah blah." And then most of the leftists adopt today an extremely tragic position. My good friend otherwise but here I have the same debate with Fred Jameson, told me once and isn't this very sad thing that the only thing we can do today is to push for social democratic agenda, knowing in advance that it will fail and in this way to educate people in the long term. I find this a very tragic position. So you push for a—a measures which in the long term not only you know they will fail, but you secretly even want them to fail so that people will get radicalized in the long term and so on and so on. Because nobody even thinks about this. Why is this tragic? Because I often... okay often people who write about this are cheap popularizers like my friend Paul Mason or Jeremy Rifkin. But I basically agree with them: things are happening in today's capitalism which clearly point over, announce, point towards a dimension over market economy. The whole problem with for example intellectual property. It’s a death knell for capitalism. It’s clear that in the long term it will not work, that intellectual property is the death knell of capitalism. I mean new forms are emerging of exchange, new economic, and it’s... but we don't know how to organize. I think this is the true problem. You know your question, I agree with it, but there is another question hidden behind. The way you said it is as if we intellectuals know what to be done and the problem is how to reach the people. I claim: what if the people in their skepticism about us are at least partially right, what if we don't really know? Because I always like to play this role, like I asked Fred Jameson: "Fuck you, okay, what do you want? What should be done today?" and immediately he starts to sweat, you know, it's a complex situation and so on. When leftists say that the situation is very complex, it means they are in deep shit always, you know. On that note... No, but you know what I meant... sorry we just run out of time so... this is typically Eastern European censorship! No, what I mean... I, just to finish with this please... I loved it, there was a certain sense of sad melancholy which was so typical of countries like Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, and East Germany. For example, you can find it on YouTube, from the darkest time of East Germany, they had a popular comedy, *Die Legende von Paul und Paula* (The Legend of Paul and Paula), which is kind of a sex—okay, sex, love comedy. A woman, lone—sorry—mother of a child, divorced, has an affair with another guy who is married, at the end they get together, happy ending, a kind of a erotic comedy. It was one of the greatest hits of German Democratic Republic, everything clear. But you know what's the end of the film? Then we saw her happy, everything ends happily walking on a Berlin street, and she enters a dark subway passage to—to subway, and the voiceover says: "She is on her way to a doctor, the doctor will inform her that she has breast cancer, she will die in three months." This is something so typical, you know even in the harshest Stalinist terror, totally out of sync with the whole atmosphere of the movie. Or for example, the—the famous Polish proverb Christopher Zanussi made a movie on that, famous graffiti, it’s absolutely the best definition of life: popular Polish, "You know what is life? A disease which always ends in death and which is transmitted by sex." It's totally true! That is life! But you see, I liked it so much how even if we were living under the harshest of Stalinism or whatever, this spirit remains there. And maybe this is our legacy to world culture. Excellent.
free education, blah blah." And then most of the leftists adopt today an extremely tragic position. My good friend otherwise but here I have the same debate with Fred Jameson, told me once and isn't this very sad thing that the only thing we can do today is to push for social democratic agenda, knowing in advance that it will fail and in this way to educate people in the long term. I find this a very tragic position. So you push for a—a measures which in the long term not only you know they will fail, but you secretly even want them to fail so that people will get radicalized in the long term and so on and so on. Because nobody even thinks about this. Why is this tragic? Because I often... okay often people who write about this are cheap popularizers like my friend Paul Mason or Jeremy Rifkin. But I basically agree with them: things are happening in today's capitalism which clearly point over, announce, point towards a dimension over market economy. The whole problem with for example intellectual property. It’s a death knell for capitalism. It’s clear that in the long term it will not work, that intellectual property is the death knell of capitalism. I mean new forms are emerging of exchange, new economic, and it’s... but we don't know how to organize. I think this is the true problem. You know your question, I agree with it, but there is another question hidden behind. The way you said it is as if we intellectuals know what to be done and the problem is how to reach the people. I claim: what if the people in their skepticism about us are at least partially right, what if we don't really know? Because I always like to play this role, like I asked Fred Jameson: "Fuck you, okay, what do you want? What should be done today?" and immediately he starts to sweat, you know, it's a complex situation and so on. When leftists say that the situation is very complex, it means they are in deep shit always, you know. On that note... No, but you know what I meant... sorry we just run out of time so... this is typically Eastern European censorship! No, what I mean... I, just to finish with this please... I loved it, there was a certain sense of sad melancholy which was so typical of countries like Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, and East Germany. For example, you can find it on YouTube, from the darkest time of East Germany, they had a popular comedy, *Die Legende von Paul und Paula* (The Legend of Paul and Paula), which is kind of a sex—okay, sex, love comedy. A woman, lone—sorry—mother of a child, divorced, has an affair with another guy who is married, at the end they get together, happy ending, a kind of a erotic comedy. It was one of the greatest hits of German Democratic Republic, everything clear. But you know what's the end of the film? Then we saw her happy, everything ends happily walking on a Berlin street, and she enters a dark subway passage to—to subway, and the voiceover says: "She is on her way to a doctor, the doctor will inform her that she has breast cancer, she will die in three months." This is something so typical, you know even in the harshest Stalinist terror, totally out of sync with the whole atmosphere of the movie. Or for example, the—the famous Polish proverb Christopher Zanussi made a movie on that, famous graffiti, it’s absolutely the best definition of life: popular Polish, "You know what is life? A disease which always ends in death and which is transmitted by sex." It's totally true! That is life! But you see, I liked it so much how even if we were living under the harshest of Stalinism or whatever, this spirit remains there. And maybe this is our legacy to world culture. Excellent.