Maybe We Just Need a New Chicken
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2008-11-09 · 1:42:23 · 15,448 words
with Narrator
ideologypsychoanalysiscinema-art-cultureecology-climaterace-antisemitismliberalism-political-correctnessreligion-theologyfascism-populismcapitalismhistoryeveryday-lifehegel-dialecticsgeopolitics-wardemocracy
Žižek delivers a lecture at Powell's Books in Portland (September 2008) promoting his book 'Violence', but pivots to a sustained analysis of how ideology functions today through the mechanisms of politeness, civility, and the split between explicit and implicit messages. He argues that contemporary ideology operates not through overt mystification but through the 'fetishist split' (I know very well, but nonetheless…), the logic of the 'big Other' whose innocence must be protected, and the necessary obscene supplement that underlies every official discourse. The talk ranges across ecology, racism, tolerance, Hollywood cinema, pornography, Yugoslav history, and the 2008 US election to illustrate how explicit permissive hedonism conceals implicit ideological commands. In the Q&A, Žižek elaborates on love, true fundamentalism, authentic communication through obscenity, and the paradox that subjectivity requires absolute contradiction rather than the dropping of appearances.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Implicit in Žižek's account of ideology as not merely illusory but as the very form through which we engage real problems, ideology works precisely because it addresses real issues like racism and ecology, mystifying through the form not the content.
Žižek uses 'tolerance' as a symptomatic ideological concept: the reframing of racism as a problem of tolerance depoliticizes it, shifting it from economic exploitation and legal rights to cultural prejudice and psychoanalytic trauma.
The current condition in which genuine political-economic antagonism is displaced into cultural wars and identity conflicts, with Fukuyama's end of history and Huntington's clash of civilizations as two faces of the same coin.
The mode of political struggle at the 'end of history': when economic-ideological alternatives are foreclosed, passion enters politics only through cultural-identity conflict, as Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' shows.
as “fetishist split”
The psychoanalytic structure of 'I know very well, but nonetheless I act as if I believe', which Žižek identifies as the dominant mode of ideological functioning today, we know democracy is corrupt, global warming is real, Santa Claus is fake, but we act as if we believe.
The anonymous, virtual agency whose innocence or ignorance ideology must maintain, illustrated by the Stalinist encyclopedia replacing Beria with Bering Strait, and by Hollywood censorship of underwear in Vertigo: the chicken whose knowledge must be protected.
The dirty, transgressive underside that is a necessary and constitutive part of every official ideological edifice, military obscene songs, Karadzic's permissive poem, the Milosevic regime's lawlessness, not subversion but the system's own inner glue.
The ideological operation by which genuinely political-economic problems (racism, poverty, ecology) are translated into cultural, therapeutic, or charitable frames, removing them from the domain of economic structure and political power.
Žižek's shorthand for the big Other, the anonymous agent (a child, an imagined censor, the public, a dying president) whose presumed naivety the ideological apparatus must protect, generating the split between explicit and implicit levels.
as “sincere hypocrisy”
The condition of everyday politeness, saying 'nice to see you, how are you?' without meaning it, which Žižek defends as a necessary and functional form of social alienation, not to be overcome by radical authenticity.
Christian communal love, which Žižek (via Eagleton) distinguishes from eros and reads as political love binding the emancipatory community together, the Holy Spirit as the party.
For Žižek here, ideology is not an abstract worldview that distracts from real problems but is the very way we perceive real problems, the mystification resides in the form of the question, not just the answer.
as “true fundamentalism vs fake fundamentalism”
Žižek distinguishes authentic fundamentalists (Amish, Tibetan monks) who feel no envy toward liberal lifestyles from fake fundamentalists (Swaggart, televangelists) who are secretly fascinated by what they denounce and turn religion into a narcissistic ego trip.
as “enlightened hedonist”
The subject-position that contemporary ideology interpellates us into: not sacrifice for a cause but self-realization, being truly yourself, the spiritual-hedonist addressed by today's consumerism and new age discourse.
Stories he reaches for 16
Bohr has a horseshoe above his door. Asked if he believes in it, he says no, but he has it because 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' Žižek uses this to illustrate the structure of contemporary ideology: belief is outsourced to the object/practice, not held subjectively.
“i don't believe in it, but i have it here above my door because i was told that it works even if you don't believe in it”
In John Carpenter's They Live (1988), a homeless man finds sunglasses that reveal the hidden ideological command behind consumer images (e.g. 'obey', 'don't think'). Žižek uses the film to argue that ideology doesn't need paranoid aliens, the hidden message is inscribed in the form of the explicit message itself.
“getting free, liberating yourself is a very violent process”
Parents pretend to believe in Santa for the children; children pretend to believe for the parents and the presents. Neither actually believes, yet the system of belief functions because everyone presupposes another believer.
“it's enough that everyone presupposes that another one believes and the whole system of belief functions”
Asked in a TV interview whether his first sexual experience was with a man or a woman, bisexual Gore Vidal replied: 'I was too polite to ask.' Žižek calls this the perfect response, neither conservative nor liberal, it defends the domain of civility against intrusive self-disclosure.
“i was too polite to ask”
In Vertigo, a long panning shot shows what appears to be Madeleine's underwear drying, but freeze-framing reveals only abstract pieces of cloth, to satisfy the Hays Code censor. The censor wasn't protecting the audience (who assume underwear anyway) but the big Other of the censorship institution.
“whom were the sensors protecting not us the public because we automatically assume that we see underwear there. the chicken was again this anonymous big other”
Žižek reads aloud Karadzic's poem offering 'nothing is forbidden in my faith, there is laughing and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want', arguing it exemplifies the obscene libidinal promise of ethnic nationalism: join us and all prohibitions are lifted.
“convert to my new faith or crowd i offer you what no one has had before... nothing is forbidden in my faith”
After Rick and Ilsa embrace, there is a three-second fade out to the Casablanca airport tower, then they resume their conversation. The film simultaneously sends signals that they had sex (fade-out convention, post-coital cigarettes) and that they didn't (dressed, no disturbed bed). Žižek uses this to show that ideology requires both levels, the official denial and the obscene hint, to function.
“the feeling of casablanca is not here so much ambiguous as consciously contradictory. it gives you simultaneously the opposite signals”
A patient cured of believing he is a grain of corn is discharged, but returns afraid a chicken will eat him. When told the chicken doesn't know he is cured, he says: 'But does the chicken know it?' The joke captures how the big Other's presumed knowledge structures our behavior even when our own rational belief has changed.
“yes, i know it, but does the chicken know it”
At a Harvard faculty dinner, the host asked each person to introduce themselves including their sexual orientation. Žižek found this more intrusive than being asked salary, but analyzes it as actually desexualizing the situation by making orientation explicit, paradoxically functioning as a form of discretion.
“wouldn't it be much nicer and intimate and unpleasant to ask for that each one should say how much you earn per year”
Žižek proposes an alternative ending in which the father discovers that the son knew all along the father was lying and only pretended to believe to make it easier for the father, this, not Benigni's sentimental ending, would be the truly uncanny situation, and it reveals the 'chicken must not know' logic.
“wouldn't it be much more uncanny if the father were to discover at the end that the small kid knew all the time that the father is lying to him”
Žižek encountered Amish and Tibetan Buddhist practitioners who showed genuine, benevolent indifference to liberal lifestyles, no envy, no secret fascination. He uses them as the model of 'true fundamentalism' against the envious fake variety.
“they don't envy us... it's just this benevolent indifference”
When Beria was shot as a traitor, subscribers to the Soviet encyclopedia received instructions to cut out his two-page entry and replace it with a new page about the Bering Strait. The question 'who was duped?' reveals the big Other: the anonymous agency for whom the historical continuity had to be maintained.
“it is as if there is what in lacian theory we call the big other, some anonymous agency, the chicken, whose innocence had to be protected”
A friend who knew Lacan told Žižek that in private, Lacan was exactly the same artificial, performative, role-playing creature as in public, there was nothing behind the mask. Žižek calls this 'absolute contradiction', the authentic form of subjectivity.
“when you met laccon in private, having dinner with him, going somewhere, was that there was nothing behind. he was exactly the same.”
Hard-line nationalist ethnic cleansers told Žižek that modern liberal Western life was all too regulated, they couldn't beat their wives, rape, brawl, or swear freely. Nationalism gave them a new freedom to do all this 'on behalf of the nation'. This reverses the standard sociological account of fundamentalism as fear of freedom.
“if i were to live there, i cannot even beat my wife. i cannot rape a nice girl if see her... for them liberal society was all too regulated and stifling”
Kim Jong-il played the first golf round on North Korea's new golf course and scored 19 holes-in-one, not 18, because someone added one to make it 'more realistic.' The joke illustrates the paradox of ideological authenticity: the genius had to appear slightly imperfect to be credible.
“somebody probably said, no, this wouldn't be realistic. let's add one so that it would be more”
Serbian columnist Alexander Tijanic described the Milosevic regime as changing Serbian daily life into 'one great holiday', smuggling, black market, insulting world leaders on state TV, driving stolen cars, Žižek uses this to illustrate the libidinal appeal of transgressive permissiveness in nationalist rule.
“milosevic changed the daily life of serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip”
Works invoked 14
Vertigo film
Analyzed for the censorship scene where apparent underwear is actually pieces of cloth; used to demonstrate how the big Other (censorship board) operates as an anonymous agency whose innocence must be maintained.
They Live film
Called a 'wonderful leftist Hollywood film' by John Carpenter (1988); used to argue that the ideological message is already inscribed in the form of the explicit message, no alien conspiracy needed.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book, mentioned as the source for the Niels Bohr horseshoe anecdote which he is 'repeating' here with a new twist.
Casablanca film
Called 'the greatest film of all times'; the fade-out scene is analyzed to show Hollywood's consciously contradictory double coding, simultaneously signaling that the couple did and didn't have sex.
Žižek's companion book; he notes a 'tense relationship of censorship' with Violence, material cut from one went into the other. Develops the ecology chapters he references in the talk.
Mentioned by the narrator as Žižek's documentary work; Žižek also references a book on David Lynch published in Seattle that the audience may not know.
Violence book
Žižek's own book being promoted on this tour; he decides not to focus on it directly but to address what he calls 'almost the opposite of violence, politeness'.
Kung Fu Panda film
Seen four or five times with his son; used to illustrate how cynical irony and irrational belief combine in contemporary ideology, 'there is no special ingredient, it's only you'.
The Dark Knight film
Žižek hates the film's 'psychological depth' trend but uses it as ideological case study: its resolution endorses lying for social stability, the old authoritarian motive recycled.
Žižek is 'totally opposed' to the film's ending, which he finds sentimentally wrong; but uses it productively to argue that the 'chicken must not know' logic underlies its premise, and proposes a more uncanny alternative ending.
Underground film
Kusturica's film is criticized as 'ideology at its purest', a Westward-pandering Orientalist image of Yugoslavia as a place of permanent drunken orgy, which fetishized Balkan 'primitivism' for Western consumption.
Works of Love book
Kierkegaard's book is called his 'maybe greatest work' (strangely not written under a pseudonym); used to demonstrate the radical desenimentalization of Christian love as cold and merciless.
Minima Moralia book
Adorno's book contains a paragraph on politeness that Žižek cites as a 'wonderful' analysis showing how politeness can be both kindness and a brutal instrument of distance and dismissal.
Called 'a bad film, but interesting underlying ideology'; Žižek uses it to argue that Anakin/Darth Vader is a quasi-Christian figure from Lucas's gnostic standpoint, and imagines a Jacobin rewrite where the Emperor and Vader are the progressive heroes.
People invoked 25
Samuel Huntington negative
Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' is argued to be not an alternative to Fukuyama but its complement, culture wars are the form political struggle takes at the end of history.
Slobodan Milošević negative
Used as example of the nationalist obscene supplement: the Milosevic regime transformed Serbian life into 'one great holiday' of lawlessness, black markets, and impunity.
John Carpenter positive
They Live (1988) described as a wonderful leftist Hollywood film that stages the visibility/invisibility structure of ideology through the sunglasses device; praised as not as naive as it appears.
Radovan Karadžić negative
Žižek reads aloud Karadzic's pre-war poem offering radical permissiveness ('nothing is forbidden in my faith') as evidence that war criminals knew exactly what libidinal promise they were making.
Jimmy Swaggart negative
Paradigmatic fake fundamentalist: attacking others for licentiousness while secretly fascinated by it, justifying his visit to a prostitute as 'knowing evil to fight it'. Žižek calls him his 'favorite disgusting creature'.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited approvingly for the surprising fact that in his late years, Lenin's main argument against Stalin was that he was impolite, illustrating the political importance of civility and form.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for two points: his analysis of the psychological structure of fascist propaganda (Hitler as transgressive liberator, not paternal authority), and a paragraph in Minima Moralia on the ambiguity of politeness.
Gore Vidal positive
His reply 'I was too polite to ask' when asked about the gender of his first sexual partner is called the 'perfect reaction', a defense of civility against intrusiveness without any conservatism.
Jacques Lacan positive
The concept of the 'big Other' is attributed to Lacanian theory. Also cited anecdotally: Lacan's private and public personas were identical, exemplifying 'absolute contradiction as subjectivity'.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Žižek says he is 'extremely, very critical of Dalai Lama and of all this western Buddhism stuff', though he acknowledges Tibetan monks personally impressed him with their lack of envy.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek argues Fukuyama's 'end of history' and Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' are two faces of the same coin, not opposed theses but complementary accounts of the same post-ideological condition.
Terry Eagleton positive
Called 'way too liberal' personally, but credited with the nice idea of translating Christian agape as 'political love' binding together the emancipatory community.
George Lucas positive
Žižek argues that from Lucas's own gnostic/pseudo-Buddhist standpoint, he was right to make Anakin/Darth Vader a quasi-Christian figure, because Christianity's radical imbalance maps onto the dark side.
Golda Meir positive
Her formula 'I believe in the Jewish people and they believe in God' is used as a precise, non-totalitarian illustration of how belief can function through presupposition of another believer.
Sarah Palin negative
Called 'slimy' and 'that disgusting daughter who was doing this', used as an example of the 2008 Republican populist ideology with its explicit reformist rhetoric and implicit cynical messaging.
Michel Foucault negative
Žižek critiques Foucault's description of discursive mechanisms as too simple, Foucault only accounts for what you see and don't see, missing the third level of what you must pretend not to see.
Kurt Vonnegut positive
Credited with the line 'appearances are all we have, so we should be very careful with appearances', used to support Žižek's argument for the importance of politeness and form.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
In 'Works of Love', Kierkegaard radically desenimentalizes Christian love, 'you are ready to kill your neighbor out of love', cited as evidence that true love is cold, not sentimental.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote is attributed to Bohr and used as the key illustration of ideological belief: the practice works even if you don't believe in it.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo is analyzed at length as a case study in how the big Other (censorship) operates, the underwear-that-isn't scene used to reveal ideology's anonymous agency.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Used as authority for the claim that racism is a problem of equality, economic exploitation, and legal rights, not tolerance; King's speeches barely mention the word 'tolerance'.
Wilhelm Reich negative
Reich was totally wrong, Žižek argues, in reading Hitler as a paternal authority figure demanding sacrifice and order; Adorno's contrary analysis (Hitler as transgressive liberator) is preferred.
Used as the paradigmatic 'chicken' in the Yugoslav anecdote, the dying leader whose comfort was more important to the nomenklatura than fiscal reality, leading to the country's eventual collapse.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the claim that a good portrait looks more like its subject than the subject looks like themselves, used to argue that Hollywood films capture our ideology more purely than we do in reality.
Emir Kusturica negative
Žižek dislikes Kusturica's film 'Underground' and accuses him of playing into Western Orientalist fantasies about Yugoslavia, fetishizing Balkan 'primitivism' (drinking, fighting, copulating) as exotic permanence.
What it argues
fetishist split and the logic of 'I know very well, but nonetheless'the big Other as the anonymous agency whose innocence ideology must protectthe obscene supplement as a necessary underside of official powerdepoliticization through tolerance, charity, and cultural discoursepoliteness and civility as ideological mechanismspost-political culture wars replacing economic and class strugglethe normalization of the previously unacceptable as the site where ideology shifts
Dialectical moves 12
“Ideology is not what mystifies real problems from the outside — ideology is the very way we perceive real problems.”
The mystification is in the form of the question, not the content of the answer; even urgent realities like racism and ecology are ideologically captured in how they are framed.
“The solution to ecological inaction is not less alienation from nature but more — we need to denaturalize ourselves precisely because our embeddedness in nature prevents us from grasping its fragility.”
The standard progressive move (reconnect with nature) is itself the obstacle; more alienation, not less, enables the cognitive grasp needed to act.
“So-called deep ecologists are not too pessimistic — they are too optimistic, because they still presuppose a natural balance to which we can return.”
The apparent radicalism of ecological mourning conceals a consoling presupposition; the truly radical position is that there is nowhere to return to.
“The obscene military marching chants are not resistance to official ideology — they are a necessary constituent of the ideological edifice itself.”
What appears to be transgressive subversion from below turns out to be the system's own obscene supplement, which holds the edifice together.
“Fundamentalism's appeal is not that it offers a refuge from too much freedom — it offers a new freedom: on behalf of the nation, nothing is forbidden.”
The standard sociological account (fear of freedom → flight to tradition) misses the libidinal appeal of transgressive permission that nationalist fundamentalism actually provides.
“Huntington's clash of civilizations and Fukuyama's end of history are not opposed — culture wars are the mode of political struggle at the point of the end of history.”
Two apparently contradictory theses prove complementary: when ideological alternatives are foreclosed, the only way to inject passion into politics is cultural conflict.
“The 'human touch' that reveals soldiers' fear and soldiers' tears is ideology at its purest — precisely because it blurs the crucial political question.”
Humanizing the perpetrator does not undermine ideology but constitutes it: empathy forecloses political analysis.
“The message of the Republican 'change' campaign is: we promise to change something so that things will really remain the same.”
The Lampedusa formula, the claim to change functions to preserve the status quo, and the implicit message is more honest than the explicit one.
“Getting rid of the chicken would be too much — maybe we just need a different chicken.”
A certain level of fundamental hypocrisy in social language (sincere hypocrisy, politeness) is not an error to overcome but a necessary condition for social interaction.
“With Lacan there was nothing behind the public mask — he was exactly the same in private: that is absolute contradiction, another name for subjectivity.”
The expectation of a 'real person' behind the persona is itself the illusion; the identity of mask and subject, with no private remainder, constitutes genuine subjectivity.
“True love is cold love — cold without mercy; far from being sentimental, passionate love is a catastrophic imbalance that destabilizes everything.”
Love is not warmth and harmony but a violent rupture in the equilibrium of daily life, which is why Christianity (the religion of love) is from a pagan standpoint the religion of evil.
“From George Lucas's gnostic standpoint he is right: Darth Vader is a Christian figure and Christianity is evil.”
Christianity's radical imbalance, the crazy cut against pagan homeostasis, makes it structurally analogous to the dark side; Lucas unwittingly encodes a theological truth.
Claims 20
asserts
Ideology today does not function as an explicit worldview that mystifies reality, but as the very form through which we perceive real problems — there are not only wrong answers but wrong questions.the nature of ideology
asserts
Framing racism as a problem of tolerance depoliticizes it, shifting the analysis from economics, law, and power to cultural prejudice and psychoanalytic trauma.racism and tolerance discourse
asserts
Huntington's clash of civilizations and Fukuyama's end of history are two sides of the same coin: culture wars are the mode of political struggle in a post-historical moment.Fukuyama and Huntington
asserts
The first axiom of truly progressive ecology is that there is no nature in the sense of a balanced homeostatic system that we have disturbed — nature is one big catastrophe and imbalance.ecology and the concept of nature
asserts
We need more alienation from nature, not less — our embeddedness in nature is precisely why we cannot imaginatively grasp or act on ecological catastrophe.the fetishist split and ecological inaction
asserts
The dominant mode of ideological functioning today is the fetishist split: I know very well that this is false, but I nonetheless act as if I believe it.contemporary ideology
asserts
The appeal to humanizing depth — showing soldiers crying, the 'human touch' on book covers — is ideology at its purest because it blurs the crucial political question.psychological depth and humanization as ideology
asserts
Hollywood's The Dark Knight endorses lying as a necessary ingredient of social stability, reactivating the old authoritarian motif that truth must be sacrificed for the common good.The Dark Knight's ideological message
asserts
Kung Fu Panda's formula — 'there is no special ingredient, it's only you, just believe it's special' — combines cynical irony with a call to totally irrational belief, the structure of contemporary ideology.Kung Fu Panda and cynical ideology
asserts
The obscene supplement (dirty jokes, marching chants, ritual obscenities) is not resistance to ideology but a necessary constituent of the ideological edifice — power is power plus its own obscene double.the obscene supplement as part of power
asserts
Constant charity appeals function as a token of superstition that depoliticizes poverty — do a small act so you don't have to think about structural causes.charity and depoliticization
asserts
So-called religious and ethnic fundamentalism's appeal lies not in providing firm values against excess freedom but in offering a new transgressive freedom — the nationalist can rape, kill, and rob on behalf of the nation.the appeal of fundamentalism and nationalism
asserts
Political correctness catastrophically misfires by penalizing directly what should be governed by the informal mechanisms of civility and politeness.political correctness vs civility
rejects
La Vita è Bella is fundamentally wrong in making the son the ignorant 'chicken' — a more uncanny ending would have the father discover the son knew all along and was pretending for the father's sake.La Vita è Bella's ideological premise
asserts
Yugoslavia disintegrated not because of primordial Balkan nationalism but because the communist nomenclatura, having concealed an economic crisis from Tito for a decade, then used nationalist pacts to retain legitimacy after his death.the causes of Yugoslav disintegration
asserts
The left should not let the right determine the terms of debate on family values but should counter that Reaganomics destroyed more family life than any leftist moral critique.left political strategy
asserts
True authentic fundamentalists (Amish, Tibetan Buddhists) are characterized by an absence of envy toward liberal lifestyles, while fake fundamentalists are obsessively fascinated by what they denounce.authentic vs fake fundamentalism
asserts
Subjectivity requires absolute contradiction — not the dropping of the mask to reveal a true self behind it, but the identity of mask and person (as exemplified by Lacan in private life).subjectivity, masks, and authenticity
asserts
Racist jokes between friends can function as a form of authentic communication and genuine solidarity rather than as humiliation — the exchange of obscenities signals real closeness.obscenity, racism, and authentic communication
asserts
The public debate about torture is itself a symptom of ideological decay — one should live in a society where advocating torture is simply disqualifying, as with rape.torture, Guantanamo, and ideological normalization
Quotes 16
“ideology is not for me some crazy abstract intellectual edifice. it's the very way we perceive real problems. the lesson is that there are not only wrong answers to questions there are also wrong questions.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as the form of perception, not its content
“yes, i know it, but does the chicken know it”Slavoj Žižek · the big Other: the anonymous agency whose ignorance ideology must maintain
“i don't believe in it, but i have it here above my door because i was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. this is our ideology today.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist split: belief outsourced to the practice, not held subjectively
“appearances are all we have. so we should be very careful with the appearances.”Slavoj Žižek · the necessity of politeness and formal appearance (attributed to Kurt Vonnegut)
“to understand how an ideology edifice functions you have to take into account the explicit level and what comes by it — all this implicit obscene underground. there is nothing subversive in it.”Slavoj Žižek · the obscene supplement is not resistance but ideology's own inner glue
“it's what you see, what you don't see, but at the same time what you have to pretend not to see but you have to see it without admitting that you see it.”Slavoj Žižek · the three-level structure of ideological visibility
“we promise to change something. to change that what is necessary to change so that things will really remain the same.”Slavoj Žižek · Lampedusa formula: change as conservation
“i was too polite to ask.”Slavoj Žižek · Gore Vidal's perfect defense of civility against intrusive self-disclosure
“nothing is forbidden in my faith. there is laughing and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want and this godhead forbids you nothing.”Slavoj Žižek · Karadzic's poem: nationalism as radical permissive freedom
“for the price of one or two of your cappuccinos, you can change the life of... what if i were to put your glasses on? i claim something like, don't think, don't politicize.”Slavoj Žižek · charity appeals as depoliticization tokens
“i would like to live in a dogmatic society where when somebody starts to advocate the right of men to rape women, you simply disqualify yourself. and unfortunately, i would like to live in the same society where the same goes for torture.”Slavoj Žižek · the public debate on torture as symptom of ideological decay
“true love is cold love. true love is cold without mercy.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's anti-sentimental definition of love as catastrophic imbalance
“absolute contradiction is for me another name of subjectivity.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectivity as the identity of public and private without remainder
“what i would find more sympathetic is something opposite... getting rid of the chicken would be too much of actor studio marlon brando for me. maybe we just need a different chicken.”Slavoj Žižek · the need for a functional big Other, not its elimination
“in hollywood you find more our ideology than in ourselves.”Slavoj Žižek · Hollywood as ideological laboratory — echoing Hegel on portraiture
“the reaction of family values should not be yeah okay family is good but what about gay marriages. the reply of the left should be who are you to talk about family values — reaganomics has more ruined more family and community life than all the leftist attacks on morality.”Slavoj Žižek · left strategy: refuse the enemy's terms of debate
Transcript 22 turns
Slavoj Žižek
a little bit ridiculous, but we'll manage. thanks very much also for the nice introduction. i accept giant of ljubljana because it's a small shitty city, so easy to be a giant on there. no, it means nothing. okay. i just feel bad for you. my god, go and read a book, even if it's a book of mine, better than standing here. but okay, free country, your choice. i nonetheless want to do some relatively serious things tonight. i don't want to focus on what i'm supposed to talk about, my new book, violence, which basically comes together with the other book, in defense of lost causes,... there is a tense relationship of censorship because i had to cut out some things from violence, i put them into the other book and so on. but what i want to... to focus on today is almost the opposite of violence it is politeness all these unwritten rules of politeness civility which i think play the central role of how ideology effectively functions today or to put it in the terms which are in the last two three days very actual in your electoral politics now what's that dog that you put the lipstick on of sarah pal's, bull something. sorry? the bulldog? no. pitbull, no pitbull without lipstick, no? lipstick is ideology you have to put on. so, uh... your first reaction probably will be, am i crazy? ideology where is ideology today? i mean, where do we live today? in what kind of society? isn't it clear that we live in some sense in a post-ide ideological society? now you will say, am i crazy? didn't i see what republicans are saying our country first, sacrifice, war, whatever? no, but nonetheless, i think the digital or reactive phenomena that our the basic way the society addresses us today, like what society, its symbolic space, what does it expect from us? it's no longer to sacrifice yourself for some cause, to dedicate your life to a higher duty or whatever i think basically we are addressed as enlightened like slightly spiritualized hedonists the order as it were today is be truly yourself realize yourself and so on and so on, all the possible variations on this so. where is here ideology? let me give you a somewhat simplified definition of where i see ideology. ideology is not for me some crazy abstract intellectual edifice. artic articulated worldview made to distract you from real problems, to mystify them. it's the very way we perceive real problems. ideology is efficient because it deals with very real problems ecology, racism and so on. the mystification is in the way it... formulates perceives these problems the lesson is that. there are not only wrong answers to questions there are also wrong questions in the sense that the very way we perceive a problem which can be a very real problem the way we perceive a problem is effectively a part of the problem it mystifies the problem that would be ideology what do i mean by this let me give you immediately one or two examples. tolerance. why am i against tolerance as a slogan? of course, this doesn't mean that i'm for intolerance. i know very well that problems like sexism, racism and so on are very real. but let me focus, for example, on racism. the question to be raised i think is why do we today at least this is my impression correct me if i am wrong why do we today automatically as it were tend to translate problems of racism into something which concerns tolerance as if the mode of functioning of racism is that you don't tolerate. the other. i don't think this is by any means self-evident. look at martin luther king. download his speech, put search, look for words tolerance, intolerance. you are practically absent. you will not find them. for him, it would have been obscene to say that racism is a problem of tolerance. the same as for you, if you are, i hope you are feminists, it would have been, i hope, obscene for you to claim our feminist struggle is so that men will tolerate. much more or whatever. it's ridiculous. for martin luther king, racism is a problem of equality, economic exploitation, legal rights, racist prejudices, and so on, anything but not intolerance. so, you see, here it comes ideology. serious problem. racism, i claim, the designation of tolerance, putting tolerance up in front as the main to to catch racist phenomena mystifies it. why? because i claim it basically depoliticizes the problem. instead of talking about economy, political power, legal power, we talk about cultural prejudices. and we end up, i'm sorry to tell you this, it will maybe shock you because i'm some kind of analyst, you end up with psychoanalytic traumas and so on. like, no. like i noticed this when in south california, they deal with this resentment towards mexican immigrants. you end up, if you are at the cultural studies department, with what inner traumas do you project into mex so that you don't tolerate them and so on and so on. so, again, so why do we do this? that's the true question. i claim it's precisely the sign, one of the signs of our so-called post-political era where we less and less talk about economy politics political structure and so on and more and more about culture wars that is to say all phenomena the only way practically to introduce passion into politics to get out of this grey expert dialogue is to move into the domain of is to move into the domain of culture works and that's. what what does this say? as i developed in one of my earlier books, i think the lesson is that the two guys who appear to be opposed francis fukuyama and samuel huntington are really two sides of the same coin you know fukuyama the end of history, that is to say even if there is a long period of struggle blah blah we have found according to him the formula which is if not the best at least the least bad of the possible world capitalism with liberal democracy huntington, on the other hand, as you know, predicts the clash of civilizations, that is to say culture wars. but i claim culture wars are the mode of political struggles at the point of the end of history. i mean, i don't really think that we are at the end of history, but one has to be very careful here. there is something in our experience which fits this designation, the end of history, precisely this post-1990 feeling of big ideological projects are over. we live finally in an era which, again, found at least the least worst of the possible worlds. so this is where i see. ideology. or let me take another topic which we are all. well aware of how serious it is, maybe it will even decide our lives, my god. it's a very question of survival ecology. of course it's a very real problem. but i claim ideological mystifications investments are all the more strong in ecology. like just think about all this new age mythology of gaia mother earth, that is to say the notion of nature as some kind of a balanced homeostatic organic, holistic, whatever system which then in a typical secular theological mood, we humans with our hubris disturbed the balance raped the mother earth and so on and so on and now our duty is to repay the debt to re-establish the balance i think that this kind of uh... ecology should be rejected as part of the problem not a solution for me at least the abc the first axiom of truly progressive ecology and also the only serious way to cope with ecological problems it's to. except that there is no nature to cut a long story short i don't mean by this some kind of crazy discursive idealist subjective subjectivist approach. i'm not saying there is no objectivity. everything that we perceive as reality out there is our discursive construct. no. i'm saying that nature is not what we understand by this notion, some kind of organic, self-contained homeostatic reproduction which we disturbed. to cut a long story short, if there is a lesson to be learned from progressive darwinists like steve and g gould and others, is that nature doesn't exist in the sense that it's one big catastrophe, one big imbalance. let's think, okay, we are talk about now this p obscenities, drilling and so on and so on. i rather stop my associations there. but that girl likes drilling, obviously, but what i want to say is that oil the problem is oil are we aware just think what kind of a mega ecological catastrophe had to happen on our earth i don't know how many hundreds of thousands or millions years ago so that we got oil reserves that's nature nature is not balanced reproduction. nature is total imbalance which from time to time temporarily gets temporary usually balance and so on and so on. that's the beginning for me. what's the lesson of it? i tried to develop this in the last chapter of my book more in detail on the last causes. the lesson is, let me go a little bit further here in a study of ideology. the lesson i claim, uh. the lesson is that. it's not that. so-called deep ecologists are too pessimists in the sense oh we betrayed mother earth and so on. no, in a way they are too optimistic even. why? because they still presuppose that, how should i put it, that there is at least a measure of stability, nature, natural balance, sustainability and so on, that we have somewhere to return to, as it were. i claim the situation is radically open. we don't have anywhere to return to even. there is no standard of natural balance which we should take as the ideal. all we can do is improvise, test, and you can never be quite sure if by doing something you will not at a different level, unknown to you, cause even a larger catastrophe. this is why, as i develop in that book lost causes, i like this paradoxical result proposals of intelligent ecologists. for example, a guy in germany recently claimed that the problem is that nature itself is already nature itself by this he means the reproduction, the cycle of nature on our earth. the entire earth as biosphere is already so much accustomed to a certain degree of our pollution. that if we change things radically, even if for the good, you never know what kind of imbalance this will call in nature. you see the paradox. we have nowhere to return to. another thing that i want to improvise here on about ecology is that shouldn't we ask ourselves a simple question? how is it my god how is it that although we know very well that things are pretty serious did you notice this strange inability as it were selfab sabotageage to act to do something and i think it is way too to simply refer to the old fashioned marxist explanation yes companies through their propaganda are blinding us so that we cannot see how serious the situation is no, we know very well it's serious, but you see what's the result. the last meeting of great powers in bali, i think, indonesia, was hailed as a success. why? because the conclusion was that they will meet in two years again to continue the debate. why don't we do it? now, here another aspect of ideology. this is a little bit stronger thesis. i wonder if you would agree. my proposal the first ecological proposal for me is there is no nature. the second one for me goes even further. it is that... i putin to be very precise that i just don't want to make things more is that. we need more alienation from nature. it's not that we are not connected with nature. no we should totally break with this new age spiritualist approach telling us the problem is our cartesian technological civilization which makes us reduce nature to just an object of our technological manipulation and so on and so on. but as they put it nature is not just out there as the object that we exploit. we are part of nature. we are breathing with nature. nature is the very texture, background of our living. we should learn to rediscover how we are, like your glorious reporters in iraq, how we are embedded in nature. i would say exactly the opposite. that's why we don't act. isn't it that i mean, maybe i'm here, the strange guy, but i think it's pretty common, this reaction. when somebody explains to you, you know, maybe this will happen, global warming, whatever things will totally change, rationally you believe him or them. but then you step out and you see there is sun, there are trees, some stupid birds singing, whatever you want. and you take her, but wait a minute, this cannot really, you get my point. precisely because we are, as it were, wired into nature, into our environment, we cannot really imagine that it can radically change. and i claim we are, we. in our everyday life, experience situations as that of what in psychoanalysis we call fetish split. i know very well, but i still cannot in my guts really accept it. and this so i claim again the only solution is to alienate ourselves even more from nature in the sense of to experience how fragile, contingent our natural background is. how we never know when it can disintegrate, it can fall apart and so on and so on. we need more alienation, i think, from nature. we need to truly denaturalize ourselves. now, this brought me already to the first thesis of ideology also, how ideology functions today. i think quite a lot of it is determined by this fetishist split. i use here psychoanalytic terms, but i think one should be very careful about using psychoanalysis in social and ideological field why i claim no wonder that many old-fashioned marxists love psychoanalysis. why do they love it? because it allows them to avoid the truly tough self critical questions namely if you approach an old marxist he will tell you we know what's going on american imperialism their mantras. it may appear that nothing is happening today just wait for a couple of years when the third world will organise itself we will have even stronger class struggle and so on and so on. okay an optimistic so then you ask them, but nonetheless, according to marxism, classical marxism, certain things should have happened, revolution, why didn't they happen if your analysis is true? then they tell you, oh, ask freud. you know, like imperialists are using all the libidinal manipulations of propaganda and so on and so on. that's only a way to avoid the tough question, which is, where was your analysis wrong or where today it no longer is appropriate. but nonetheless, this notion of fetishistic split in the sense of i know very well that it's a fake what i'm saying, blah, blah. but i nonetheless, in a way, believe in it. i claim, if you want one big lesson in all this, just look at the republican national convention, if you did look at it. i don't think they really, they somehow all know that all this thing, you know, change, or whatever they say, that it's bullshit. but nonetheless, at a certain point, they believe in it. how does this constellate? work ah here one should turn to hollywood maybe. i claim that hollywood films, especially big blockbusters, are for me so interesting because effectively you often find in them our basic ideological constellation coordinates at its purest. you know hegel, the big german guy, said. somewhere a wonderful thing in his aesthetics. he said apropos painting that a good portrait of a person looks more like that person than that person. itself looks like itself in this sense, i think in hollywood you find more our ideology than in ourselves. what do i mean by this? my god, let me just take two recent blockbusters, the dark knight, the last batman film. first ideological trend i hope i will have some time later to return to it is and i really hate this it's this psychological depth. did you notice is something horrible i mean i'm a flat vulgar person i hate this how they are telling us that in the orman or it was the same spider-man, whatever, that you know, the hero is no longer just a flat cartoon hero. you can see his anxieties, his weakness, his traumas and so on, as if somehow this makes it deeper or more artistic or whatever. and i think this is general a general ideological move today. did you notice how, i don't know, when i visited israel, my jewish friends draw my attention to this how the whole propaganda of idf israel defense forces today is no longer this old arrogance of oh one of our battalions can take over an egyptian or arab army in an afternoon whatever no it to emphasize repeatedly we are humans like everybody else. like you see on israeli tv soldiers crying even i saw one literally shitting out of fear whatever but that was their point you know like as one of the officers put it military is not in our genetics like but we are normal human beings like you look at us in our humanity. that's ideology at its purest because it blurs the crucial political question. when i visited israel, there was a wonderfully disgusting manipulation there, precisely when i was there. all media reported on strange event when israeli defense forces or some anti-terrorist unit broke into a house of an alleged terrorist. he was the father of the family. the supposed terrorist wasn't there, only his family was wife and children. and of course, since the soldier brutally entered the house, the wife and the children awakened a daughter ran crying to the mother and the mother trying to calm her down shouted her name of course. it was something like sarah also. sarah, everything will be okay and so on. and then a soldier, one of the soldiers who... entered the house brutally, now, in this way, learned that his own small daughter had the same name as that palestinian daughter. and he showed the mother the picture. you see, ah we are human nonetheless, and so on. this is ideology at its purest. this, you know, we are nonetheless all humans. it serves a precise function. two. blur the crucial question. if we are like in that case, if we are all humans, my god, why are you doing what you are doing to me at this point and so on. i mean, this reference to the wealth of inner life, which doesn't make us only ideological categories is ideology, which is why, to give you a funny vulgar story, when not this publisher,, another one asked me to do this disgusting thing. i hated it. this is for me, you know, the back cover of the books. usually you have a couple of lines on your work, professor blah blah deals with hegel and so on. and then you are supposed sometimes to add a line or two on your, you know, to give a human touch on your private life. you know, like in free time, professor likes to sail and grow tulips or whatever. they asked me to do this. i, of course, don't be afraid. i'm not doing this, but just to provoke them, to show them i told them, okay, fine, put it in his free time professor zk serves the internet for pedophilia and teaches his small son how to pull legs of living spiders and so on. it's a fake. that's what i wanted to tell them. it's a fake. it's a fake. precisely this human tax is a fake. i had really to laugh. lesson of how dysfunction was. i learned recently that the guy who will even die now, i learned he wasn't at the parade, kim jong-il, the leader of north korea, opened up recently, a couple of months ago, the first golf course in north korea. open, of course, only for foreigners to earn foreign currency. so the leader, kim jong-il, was the first one to test it, of course. so it's an 18 holes1-8, 18 holes golf course. you know how many he needed to fill in to finish all 18. not 18, 19. and i can imagine how first probably they wanted to put it18, he is a genius. but then somebody probably said, no, this wouldn't be realistic. let's add one so that it would be more. this is the problem. so back to... how it functions. that is one the other much more ominous aspect of the dark night. here it's really an echo of our worries, predicaments. did you notice that in its final denouement, the movie, okay, some of my friends who like the movie try to read it that it's an implicit critique. i have my doubts. at least the story of the movie, of what i will now describe, basically condones lying as a necessary ingredient of social stability. you remember what happens at the end? the policeman who was supposed to be a good guy is discovered to be the murderer. then the judgment is if this will be known to the public, it will undermine the trust, the confidence and so on. so heroically batman takes upon himself the crimes. this is this is very logic which i would have been very afraid of if somebody this logic of this is the old authoritarian motive of how. in order to have social stability you need a lie. how? the highest service to do to society is not to tell the truth, but to lie for the common good and so on and so on and so on. that's the message. okay. another film where you have a recent relative blockbuster. i saw it four or five times but because of my son who likes it, which is ideology at its purest, at the same level as kung fu panda. you saw the cartoons why? but, but what has this film to do about ideology? did you notice how the film combines, mixes two opposed attitudes? on the one hand, the utter all this sacredness of, you know, fate, the new kung fu master, all this oriental mystique, as it were, it combines this with our western sarcasm. you notice how all the time they are making fun and so on of it. but i claim these two attitudes are not contradictory. they perfectly supplement each other. here is the key formula of the film when they discover that to become a kung fu master, but also as for the hero's father to cook the perfect soup, there is no special ingredient. here is the quote. there is no special ingredient. it's only you. to make something special, you just have to believe it's special. that's where we are today. you can beic you can be sarcastic as you want. you can make fun of everything. nonetheless, it's a call to totally irrational belief. that is to say, have all your doubts, be cynical, you don't have to really believe, you just have to, as it were, act as if you believe. i will now repeat from my parallax view short. anecdote which i really like so sorry for repeating it if some of you know it about niels borg the copenhagen guy you know who once he was visited at his country house in denmark by a friend scientist and the friend was surprised to see above the entrance door to this country house a horseshoe you know i don't know if it's here but in europe horseshoe above the entrance door is a superstitious item the idea is that it prevents evil spirits to enter the house. so the friend asked nis bohr, but wait a minute, if you are a scientist, do you believe in this superstition? nbor said, of course not. then ask him, but why do you have it here? nisbor answered a wonderful, precise answer. i don't believe in it, but i have it here above my door because i was told that it works, preventing spirit enter, that it works even if you don't believe in it. this is our ideology today. nobody believes. if you say democracy oh it's corrupted, who cares, blah, blah, blah. but we have it up there. first let put it now. we act as if we believe in it. and this was the first one, i think, to formulate this formula was goldamir, the ancient prime minister of israel. it's a wonderful formula. when asked, do you believe in god? here is her answer. i believe in jewish people and they believe in god. so i don't believe and i think that eh. we should read this formula in a very precise way it's not a totalitarian formula it's not the same as the stalinist formula where you say okay i only allow all these illusory celebrations to go on not to disappoint the ordinary people who need a great leader like stalin whatever no the point is that... you even do not need another! actual subject who really believes. the whole system of belief functions is just every agent every individual presupposes that there is another one who believes even if this other one. doesn't exist at all. it's the same as we do it with santa claus. if you ask parents, they will tell you, i'm not crazy. of course there is no santa claus. i buy the presents, but i pretend to take it seriously so that my children will not be disappointed. they believe. then if you ask privately the children, of course they will tell you, i'm not an idiot, but i pretend, i don't know, not to disappoint parents to get presents. you know what i mean? but the beliefs. but it's enough that everyone... presupposes that another one believes and the whole system of belief.. functions. now, let me, and this will be then the end of repetitions, but i will give another twist to this old story that i know i i repeated it five times in my books. everybody knows it. i want to repeat it because, again, i will give a different reading to it. to get at this logic let me tell you a joke again which you all know, you know the old one about a man who thought he was a grain, you know, returning to mental hospital saying i'm afraid i will be eaten by a chicken and then the psychiatrist asks him, but wait a minute, we cured you. you know you are not a piece of a seed of grain you are a human. he says, so a chicken cannot eat you. the guy answers yes, i know it, but does the chicken know it i no longer. it is a very realistic joke. how our ideology function. we know very well that we are not a piece of grain or whatever, but our problem is, as it were, does the chicken know it. that's also, if i may make another reference to cinema, what i find fundamentally wrong about a film which many people like, but i'm totally opposed to it, about the holocaust, the holocaust comedy, la vita e bella, life is beautiful. benigni. first we have to accept a very traumatic fact there is a lot to learn from it why almost all really good films about holocaust comedies no, no, i'm not here trying to provoke you to be open. i'm not making fun of it. i'm not crazy. i mean, i sold this thesis, i'm proud to tell you, at a conference in jerusalem. and my god, some old ladies with all those tattoo numbers came to me and totally agreed with me. that. to have a tragedy a tragic situation still presupposes that the victim has the victim retains a minimum of dignity to play the tragic role. when things go really bad, you no longer have a tragedy. you have something which can paradoxically be rendered only as a comedy. in other words, to claim that the fate of the jews and other prisoners in auschwitz and so on was tragic, you concede to the nazis too much. you underestimate the radical humiliation. so that's okay with the film. my problem is the end when you are supposed to stop laughing and cry, you know last five minutes when the father sacrifices himself for the son and so on. i can imagine a different ending which would have been much more uneasy, i claim. i hope you know the film, no the story that father and son jews are put into a concentration camp from italy and in order to enable his son to survive the camp without being too traumatized, father tells him a fiction that in reality this is just a big competition game who will who will endure life in this camp without breaking down that if they want they can leave at any moment it's just one big game. okay. i claim, and that's the premise of the field. wouldn't it be much more uncanny if the the father were to discover at the end that the small kid knew all the time that the father is lying to him, but just pretended to believe to make it easier. for father that would have been a truly desperate situation i think okay so again in la vita e bella he is the chicken, the son. we can be brutal, ruthlessless. the chicken doesn't know. there has to be a chicken. that's, i think, the premise of liberal permissivity. we can do whatever. sexual orgies with cows, whatever. i don't know what you do here. but there must be a chicken who doesn't know. usually these chicken are children. did you notice how in today's era where we proclaim o permissivity fraud is outdated, we are no longer live in a victorian era nonetheless the central insight of freud death into children's sexuality is. again. it disappeared. it's a taboo. that is to say, did you notice how, and again i have no sympathy for pedophiles, but nonetheless i find it interesting as an ideological phenomenon how in the last 20 or so years child child molesting was elevated into the ultimate figure of a crime i think again it is as if we can play our dirty games adults but children's innocence has to be protected and we find this logic off protect the innocence of children. that is to say, there is an agency whose appearance has to be protected. this is where ideological mechanisms start to function. let me tell you a totally crazy story. i know a country which fell apart because a chicken wasn't allowed to know. it's my own ex-country, yugoslavia. what do you mean by this? now that old communist nomenclatura guys are publishing their memoirs we learned something very strange that already in the early seventies it was clear to the circle around the old big legendary whatever president tito that the economic situation is horrible and that at some point it will be necessary to do what we euphemistically today call necessary structural readjustments' like you know what this means but they decided tito is old and it will make his last years very unhappy to see the economic crisis so they decided to postpone the outbreak of the crisis till tito. so, throughout the 70s, the state of yugoslavia was acquiring new debts like crazy just to sustain this artificial half welfare. 1980, tito died. the economic crisis was allowed to explode. the result was, of course, explosion of nationalism, which incidentally, that's another ideological trap. please, it's even worse than elvis of culture. theory whatever this story of yes, balkan, primitive part of europe where they are still living in their medieval dreams. if you want to understand the yugoslav war, you have to know the last 500 years of history and so on and so on. i think absolutely not. that was the trap of the west. pure ideology. you were fetishizing balkans into some exotic place sustained by film makers whom i don't like who played this game, like the most famous yugoslav emir kustica, his underground. ideology at its purest. the west got there what it wanted. the image of ex-yugoslavia as a country where people drink, fight, copulate all the time, a permanent orgy and so on. so what i wanted to say is that uh if you want to account for the disintegration of yugoslavia, forget about this old nationalist myth. the problem was a very simple one, i claim. communist nomenclatura in each republic had to find a way how to retain its legitimacy. and the only way was by making a pact with nationalists. but let me go back. so here, again, one can say that, in a way, one of the crucial elements in the conditions for the country falling apart was that for the last eight years of his life, the chicken president tito wasn't allowed to know. and this logic can get very mysterious. it is at the level of these mysterious excesses that you get ideology at its purest. for example, since we are close to, okay, we are not as north as washington and alaska, but close to that area, let me tell you a weird story. story which i found wonderful. what happened in soviet union in 1953? okay, stalin died and then in the summer of 1953 the first volume of the new soviet encyclopedia covering letters from a to c appeared. a to c. there was a problem. in it there were two pages almost on beria lavrenti beria. you know he was stalin's boss of kgb, but immediately after stalin's death he was arrested by kushchev and his gang and shot as a traitor english spy and so on and so on. so for the stalinist universe there was a problem here like. you know, in stalinism, when you are off, you are a non-person. so what to do? what was the solution of the editors? it was a big. a big printing, it was like three, four million copies encyclopedia. every subscriber got a letter from the editor with a new page and he was ordered to cut off. the old page leaves with entry on barrier and put in the new one and they perfectly. restored the continuity on the new page the previous entry went on than it was this page to the end, the beginning of next page on ah here is the genius you know what did they replace barrier with? here i come to alaska, bering strait, the same ber with some photos and so on. so now ask yourself a naive question why this worry to erase all the traces of barrier to restore perfect continuity. who was duped here? not the ordinary people they had to do it, my god. it is as if. there is what in lacian theory we call the big other, some anonymous agency, the chicken, whose innocence had to be protected. the chicken shouldn't know that once there was barrier, for the chicken barrier shouldn't exist. now you will say, ha, yes, this comes from primitive slavic communists. does it hold for us? it does. hollywood. hitchcock's vertigo. incredible detail which follows the same logic. know know vertigo maybe even better than me the movie do you know how around one hour even a little bit less into the movie after scotty saves madeleine from her as we learn afterwards fake suicide jump into the golden gate into gate the water beneath the golden gate. he takes her home and puts undresses her, puts her into the bed. so we have a long panning shot. first we see in his living room scotty behind his table. then the camera moves slowly towards the left. we see the kitchen sink. above it, the underwear drying there of madeleine. signal. what did he do that he undressed her, dried her up and put her into bed and then moved further left to the door of the bedroom. we get in one long shot the whole situation. there is only one problem. if you don't believe me, do it. check it. put your dvd on freeze it, on still. when the camera is above the kitchen sink and you will see that what you see is not underwear. but just abstract pieces of cloth and i read in a french book on vertigo, very good one, i forgot, i don't know, the guy is called esterhazy, but it's, again, not yet translated, but it's a wonderful book. why was this the case? this was still, vertigo was caught in 19557, still h code, and the censorship ins that. there should be no underwear effectively there drying up because if it's really underwear this would have been a proof that scott is so her naked. but this is hollywood. it shouldn't happen. why is this so mysterious? because just ask yourself a naive question whom were the sensors protecting not us the public because we automatically assume that we see underwear there. it was not our, we were not the chicken here. the chicken was again this anonymous big otherer. like it's as if imagine yourself being questioned by some. sensor! oh, what dirty. and you can say, no, no, no, nothing happened. just pieces of cloth, there was no underwear and so on and so on. this is what i'm getting at. this is what fascinates me so much. this double level fact. this is the basic split of how ideology functions. always bear this in mind. so you have the explicit message which maintains the appearances and sustaining it all the dirty obscenity and so on. which is why i will be very brief here. i'm sorry, but i want to improvise on another point which is part of my book on david lynch published, as it were, up street here in seattle some years ago, so i hope you don't know it, where you have this mechanism at its absolutely purest. you know, i hope, the greatest film of all times casablanca you know the famous scene two-thirds into the film when during the night ingrid bergman comes to humphrey bogart r to get those famous visas whatever and then what happens is that they had a conversation with all this noir ridicule dialogue you know, like she wants to shoot him, he says, go on, you will be doing me a favor and so on all that mar then they kiss, embrace. fade out! two three seconds and a half. for three seconds and you see the tower of the casablanca airport with the lights turning around and back to them continuing the same conversation. now, every normal person asks here a question. did they do it or not? that is to say, are these three seconds. just a... metaphoric condensed substitute for the sexual act or... il juste... real time goes on now the mystery is as in a the british cinema historian richard maltby, in a wonderful analysis of this scene, demonstrated the problem is that the feeling of casablanca is not here so much ambiguous as consciously contradictory. it gives you simultaneously the opposite signals. on the one hand, you get a series of signals telling you they did it. for example after a couple embraces in h code standard hollywood end and then you have a fade out, it's a way to hint they did it. furthermore, after we return to them, they are smoking cigarettes. this is basic hollywood rule. like what is the second and third best thing in the world? the drink before and the cigarette after. so these are all codified signs to indicate the sexual act. but at the same time, there is a whole series of signs indicating the contrary. like a, they are dressed, there is no bed disturbed in the bedroomgar the same conversation seems to go on and so on and so on i think it is crucial to see how d functions these two levels. both levels are necessary it's not that we have the official hollywood puritanan and then there is some kind of subversion in all these obscene hints no everything is codified the hollywood ideology is both at the same time. hollywood tricks you by telling you okay i will give you a front so that you will be able in face of some imagined moral authority of censorship to pretend but nothing happens, nothing dirty happens. at the same time, i will give you a whole series of precisely codified signals of what you can then imagine with your dirty mind, what happened and so on and so on. and there is a whole series of procedures. i don't want to. all i want to tell you is that to understand how an ideology edifice functions you have to take into account the explicit level and what has put. what comes by it all this implicit obscene underground. there is nothing subversive in it. this is why, if you read some of my work, you know why i'm so fascinated with military life. when i went 30 years ago to serve the infamous yugoslav army, i went with pleasure. i'm privately a kind of a leftist fascist, disciplinarian, i like order and i was terribly disappointed. it was a big chaos full of sexual obscenities and so on and so on. that the truth of the army life. from what i learned it's the same with your army, it's all the discipline stuff and so on, but then you have fragging, you have all these rituals, you have all this obities for example, this is why they always fascinated me this so-called marching chants the songs okay, all i know is from hollywood films that the marines sing when you know this weird obscene mixture of nonsense rhymes and sexual obscenities like i remember in a few good men they sing sorry for the obscenity something like i don't know but i was told that eskimo pushes are rather cold like this total meaningless of you know what's my message this is not kind of a resistance towards the official ideology? no, this is a necessary constituent of for the functioning of the edifice of power. power is power and its own. obscene double as it were and at this level ideology functions at the level of it's not simply what you see and what you don't see. as michel foucault sometimes in an all too simple way describes discursive mechanisms they tell you what you see what you don't see how can you argue and so on no it's what you see what you don't see but at the same time what you have to pretend not to see but you have to see it without admitting that you see it and so on and so on. where did i encounter this? for example. recently, a couple of months ago, i was at harvard giving a talk there. afterwards we had a dinner i had official dinners where ten people, we didn't even know well each other, so the presiding guy, older professor, told each of us to present him or herself. he told us it should say his name and affiliation, the field of his work and sexual orientation. no. i found the... my idea was almost to tell him but i didn't want to disturb the hospitality that wouldn't it be much nicer and intimate and unpleasant to ask for that each one should say how much you earn per year and how much wealth you possess privately besides that that would have been much better but what i want to say is that okay in harvard this was considered normal, non-intrusive. but i'm now not playing the usual boring european game of you vulgar americans against us. no, i had a similar but opposite adventure with a friend of mine who visited me two years ago in. summer in slovenia. we went to adriatic coast and to swim it was summer and my friend was shocked when he saw practically all women on the beach. with breasts naked without brass i mean, in our country, i think even in italy, in germany, all the time, it's considered totally normal now. it simply, nobody even notices it. but for him, it was pretty traumatic. he felt uneasy all the time as he was... you see, this is, i think, ideology at its everyday level. this rules which are not so much explicit rules as this implicit as it were implicit spontaneous substance which makes you uneasy when you see something and so on and so on and so i think that. the perfect! what i was tempted to ask somehow, but this wasn't the question. the best reaction to this kind of intrusive questions was provided by gore vidal, your great writer. you know what he said when in a tv interview he was asked, he is, as you probably know, a well-known bisexual, was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman? his reply was, i was too polite to ask. i think this was a perfect. nothing conservative about it. i think that today the right-wingers are impolite, vulgar. i'm more and more convinced that the left radicals should take over the cause of civility and so on and politeness. again, what interests me here is in what way things are very complex here. did you notice how in both these cases where i had to state that i didn't by sexual orientation, and in the case of my friend shocked by seeing bearbrecht, the openness was basically a form of discretion of withdrawal in the sense of the message of for example, young women there showing their breasts. it was not oh, here i'm available, grab me. it was no, i don't care about you, i don't see you. like it was to paradoxically, it meant to signal even greater discretion. i i think in a more refined way the same goes for being asked about sexual orientation. it is if anything meant to dissexualise possible tensions of the situation. the extreme of this attitude which is why i think it is an ideological genre at its purest the extreme of this attitude i think is hardcore pornography did you notice a strange form of censorship, at least in traditional hardcore pornography if it's a full feature filler, of course you cannot just show on and on erotic plays or copulation, you have to have some kind of a story. but did you notice how utterly embarrassingly stupid the story is? i don't think they can be as stupid as that. i think it's a necessity, a message you need. like i even remember now, i'm traumatized when i was young, i saw one, you know, the standard story, housewife is alone at home, plumber comes, fixes a hole in the bathroom, then the wife said, i have another hole to fix. can you maybe... you are embarrassed. but where is the censorship here? i think the message is, okay, you can see it all. at the level of penetration and so on, but there must be no, how do you call it, traditionally, emotional engagement. the story must be ridiculous. what is censored is to have both at the same time. that is to say, an engaging pathetic where you feel empathy, narrative with seeing it all, which is why catherine briat in france and some others in europe now, who try to do precisely this, making film at the same time show sexual act in all the details and try to make a convincing pathetic and so on story. do not really catch on in the public. now you will tell me what i'm usually told, but where do i live? this kind of hardcore obviously will tell me i must be old. this was going on like 30 years ago. where are we now? oh, i asked this question to my friends and they told me that now the predominant form of hardcore or at least the typical one is so called gonzo gonzo i think the way i understand it. ich even worse. you know what's the rule of gonzo? there even isn't a story. that is to say, gonzo means that like the actors and the cameraman or director directly interact, like actors look into the camera, make funny remarks, oh do i look well enough? cameraman tell them move a little bit and so on. this is for me the utmost censorship. they are terribly afraid that you, they are kind of ultra brechtians, terribly afraid that you would be caught in identification, in delusion. they had to sabotage this all the time. so again these rules are these rules of what you see, what you don't see, what you. see, this is what i want to emphasize. what you of course see, you are even supposed to see it, but you have to pretend, act as if you don't see it and so on. this is ideology at its purest. this is where civility. enters because what is civility or politeness? it's something pretty mysterious it's neither. goodness, generosity, kindness, generosity and kindness are less obligatory. you are somehow obliged to be polite, to behave in a civilized way, but we are not in any way obliged to be kind and generous. on the other hand, civility, politeness is less than... legal or direct explicit social obligation nobody can force you to be pol, to behave in a civilized way. and this is crucial, i think. here i have a problem with so-called political correctness. what it does is that it directly penalizes something like talking in a brutal, harassing way, which should be a matter of politeness and civility. i think that the result is necessarily catastrophic. but what i want to tell you is that this is the lesson again to learn that we should be aware of what way to live in a free individualist society which is more or less ours how many what a complex cobweb texture of implicit rules has to be there so that we can interact with each other with. as free individuals many rules have to be here so that we can be free as it were and this i think enables us to throw a new light on this so famous phenomenon of ethnic or religious fundamentalism there is a pretty stupid sociological clichliche which claims that fundamentalism means that people today are afraid of too many freedoms the idea is we live in a society where you do whatever you want you can choose even your sexual orientation your ethnic belonging like too much freedom you have to choose to recreate yourself all the time so the idea is people are afraid of this excess over of freedom and they escape into some old set of traditional firm values to give meaning and stability to their lives i would say yes and no this is the less important part of the story what is more important is the exact opposite what do i mean by this? i got a lesson of a lifetime when some more than ten years ago i visited briefly belgrade and by chance in some local restaurant got in contact with some really hard nationalist guys, ethnic cleansers probably and so on. i got really a lesson of a lifetime from them namely they told me openly that why are they what they are? they told me no, it's not who they escape freedom, they want old values. no, they told me on the contrary, modern life was for them all too well regulated with all its politically correct and so on rules. as one of them brutally told me, my god, if you want to live in a free western society, if i were to live there, i cannot even beat my wife. i cannot rape a nice girl if see her. i cannot beat a friend, i cannot swear, i cannot whatever. for them liberal society was all too regulated and stifling and for them recognising yourself identifying yourself as a nationalist fundamentalist meant a new freedom i'm a nationalist which means on behalf of my nation i can do whatever you want let's go to bosnia let's kill let's rape let's rob and so on and so on this is a crucial element of so-called totalitarian appeal, as it was already very clear to adorno, the good old frankfurt guy, who already in late 30s, he wrote a wonderful short text on the psychological structure of fascist propaganda, where he emphasizes how hitler was not a figure of paternal authority. wilhelm reich was totally wrong here. the message of hitler was not, i'm now a good father, you were too wild, my children. in weimar germany with moral decadence social chaos now i want from you order sacrifice for germany discipline' that's the public discourse but it was always supplemented by this implicit obscenity. join me! play my game and we can have fun killing the jews, beating the nazi discourse promised you all this obscenity. and what? and now i will read you a song. sorry, a song, a poem. which translated into english please listen to it it is a nice short poem convert to my new faith or crowd i offer you what no one has had before i offer you inclemency and wine the one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. people, nothing is forbidden in my faith. there is laughing and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want and this godhead forbids you nothing. oh obey my call brothers people crowd you know who wrote this poem? radovan karadic, the guy who is now in hague. and i think he knows what he was doing. did you notice this moment of radical permissivity? nothing is forbidden in my faith. godhead forbids you nothing, and so on and so on. he was well aware what he was doing. a proof is that is how it functions here. i want to quote you a passage in which aleander tianic, a leading serb columnist, described how the milosevic regime functions when in serbia milosevic, the radical nationalist, was in power. quote, milosevic generally switches the serbs. in the time of his rule, serbs abolished the time for working. no one does anything. he, milosevic, allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling you can appear on the state tv and insult blair clinton or any else of the world's dignitaries my brief remark here this was literally true i remember when nato was bombing ex yugoslavia serbia there was a talk show on serb tv where behind the person talking was a big poster a reference to monica leinsky and clint this was just after the leinsky affair the words were poor bill clinton did monica also suck out all of your brain or something like that? that was state tv okay go on. furthermore milosevic gave us the right to carry weapons he gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons he gave us also the right to drive stolen cars milosevic changed the daily life of serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip which means that nothing but really nothing of what you can do can be punishable you see now my point that's the attraction the reality of so called religious and so on fundamentalism the best metaphor for this is earth is a film i'm slowly approaching the conclusion which means i'm not even one half into the text but that's life okay i want to begin to conclude with a reference to a good old hollywood leftist film john carpenter yes the very guy who did halloween john carpenter i hope you know it although it's difficult to get i think now on dvd they live from 1988 you remember that wonderful it deserves a close analysis it's not as naive and primitive as it appears that wonderful idea of you know it's a story of john nada, wonderful reference to proletarian position. nada, you know, is spanish for nothing. a homeless guy who finds in an abandoned church some box with strange sunglasses, puts the glasses on and discovers that these glasses are kind of ide critical sunglasses. like you have the on. okay, yeah, yeah. i am afraid that i would be afraid to ask you, what do you see? like you see me, you see some pseudo-leftist stuff, you put the glasses on, this guy is paid by those in power to amuse you and keep you from serious engagement. i prefer not to ask you. okay, but you got the point. the idea is when you put these glasses on, you see the true, as it were, the true ideological message. like there is a big poster for visit hawaii, have a holiday of your lifetime. you put the glasses on, it's a mer. rejoy, produce, don't think, or something like that. you see the truth. now, this may appear naive. of course, there is a naivety because we all know we don't need all the paranoia about aliens taking over. i mean, this access that you see here through the glasses is inscribed into the very form of the message. no need for paranoia. but nonetheless, there is something very true in how the film stages this scene. why? did you notice, if you saw the film, one strange one would have expected exactly the opposite that is to say that we leave the lie. insofar as we look at the world with false glasses, that ideology are like mystifying glasses, and to go to this new age, be true to yourself, metaphoric, isn't then the truth. shouldn't it have been the opposite that to see the truth, you should become aware that you are wearing mystifying glasses and you should put glasses off to see with your own eyes the way things really are. no, the film emphasizes its opposite. getting free, liberating yourself is a very violent process. okay but another thing i want to say is that it is crucial nonetheless to combine this kind of split between implicit and explicit message, where again, the explicit message is the hedonist one. enjoy, have a good time. the true implicit message is the true ideological order. don't think. marry buy consummate whatever but even did that. more often or at least in traditional ideology as a rule we have the opposite procedure where what you directly see is the explicit message and what you were to see. if you would have put the glasses on, would have been... this obscene supplement for example i don't know let's return to nazi germany. the explicit message is, enough of decadence, sacrifice yourself, do your duty, germany needs you. you put the glasses on, what you see is, and we'll have fun, we'll beat the jews, we'll have our orgies, whatever. or go to south america, sorry, your own south, south of the united states in the 20s, 30s, a small town with kukux klan and so on. the explicit message, christian values, family, defense of our civilization, you put the glasses on. okay, and then at the weekend we gather, we rape some black girls, we lyned some blacks and so on and so on. so the... obscene supplement is invisible both this logic of have to put it... two levels implicit explicit are i claim today. more crucial than ever let me just give you another example which we encounter all the time today the one of charity you know, like, my god, you cannot even open a newspaper or tv without seeing some starving african kid or with some lip deformation and then the usual message. for the price of one or two of your cappuccinos, you can change the life of and so on and so on. very nice, but again, what if i were to put your glasses on? what would i have seen? i claim something like, don't think, don't politicize. forget about the true causes of their poverty just act contribute money so that you will not have to think i think these constant appeals to charity. work as a kind of almost token of superstition like do a small act so that you get rid of the problem so that you can go on. and i think the crucial message here is also the one if you ask me of depoliticization depoliticization in the sense of i remember when i was young. the motto of the left was still this motive of while we live in our relatively affluent upper middle class society are we aware that out there there are people who are starving dying and so on did you notice how in the last years the establishment took these metaphics over today it is bill gates who talks like this reminding us all the time oh there are people out there in africa india and so on why are they doing it i think the underlying message is the one of depoliticization and moralization. let's stop our ideological debates. people are starving there. who cares about socialism, capitalism, and so on? let's just come get together and do something. i think it's precisely the image of suffering is used to manipulate us in this way. it has also something to do. you are the master. do i get five minutes more? not more. three, okay okay. now i want to say how this, okay, i want to do just two things. first, to explain how this shift is part of a more global change in capitalism today. how is commodification working? grosso modo... vaguely there are three levels of how we are addressed when we are called to. bye. right. consume a product. the most elementary is a direct reference to utility. no, like buy land rover because you need it if you want to go to the countryside because it's a good car, strong enough, stable, doesn't use too much, whatever, all the qualities. next, strategy is more consumerist, is that of competition, keeping up with the jones status symbol. like buy it so that you will appear to others is what you want to be. but i think both of us are today slowly receding and more and more the predominant motive is that of almost spiritual self-realization. today they would tell you, you want to realize your potential, to feel authentic, to be alienated from big city, to breathe the fresh air. so by lentro, you will be what you really are. you know, it's as if... the point is your inner experience and so on and so on. this i claim is also let me give you an evil example how de facto i claim all that organic food shit. do. you really believe that if you buy those rotten apples which cost twice, okay, maybe there a little bit less poison, but i don't really think. i claim the reason you really buy it, it's not because you really believe. in purely, pure scientific facts, even not for keeping up with the jonas, who cares? it's not a big status symbol. it's, you know, to make you feel good like, you know, world is in a crisis, isn't it nice? i'm doing something, i'm participating in a larger, meaningful project, and so on and so on. this is what we should be looking at all the time. now, really to conclude, what i wanted to conclude with is to develop how? this game of two. labels implicit explicit rules. how these implicit rules of which we are not even aware how all this is changing today and i wanted to take different examples but i will probably stop now like global warming did you note how eh. the way we talk about, at least the way the big media talk about global warming changed, i think, around a year ago. up to a year or two ago, the large media reaction was, let's not exaggerate. maybe it's a serious problem, but those who see catastrophe, those who accept global warming as a fact, are some kind of a post-secular, like secularized version of fanatics, old communists who need a new catastrophe now. okay. all of a sudden, now, more and more, in the media, the message is, yes, it's a fact, but what's the fuss? it has good and bad things. there are new opportunities like cnn recently announced a new series typical manipulation, the greening of greenland. when they say, how wonderful, they already grow vegetables on greenland. new opportunities if the ice melts on the arctic ships will be able to bring us the chinese gulac staff directly across. it will cost less. in this way, we will burn less fuels and so on. what worries me is how something which till now was, how put it, was unacceptable for us morally unacceptable i mean like or impossible we couldn't imagine it is all of a sudden normalized this process is where you should be attentive where ideology works for example not only ecology but what about torture guantanamo now let me be serious here i mean i'm not a naive anti-american fanatic i even think that a certain way of america bashing is to play capitalist game in a very dangerous way but that's another story what i want to say is that what worries me is precisely the simple fact that we talk publicly about this. i mean, i know very well, i'm the first to admit when pro-american friends tell me, wait a minute, but let's be frank, in the united states, we at least debate torture. in china, in russia, they're probably doing it much more, but you don't even talk about it. okay, but we debate it. this worries me. why? let me. draw a parallel. rape. would you like to live in a society where you would have to debate and argue all the time that women shouldn't be raped? no, i would like to live in a dogmatic society where when somebody starts to advocate the right of men to rape women, you simply disqualify yourself. i mean, people don't even attack you. you're just a jerk like,, what's wrong with this guy or whatever. and unfortunately, i would like to live in the same society where the same goes for torture. i think the set signs that we debate about and there are many other signs that these unwritten between the lines rules are changing that is why i think we effectively are in the middle of change it is not maybe the change obama wants it's a much more ominous change it's the change of this very ideological background and this is why if you want to get what the message is. how these changes are operating. you should, i think, just all the time apply this mechanism of, okay, they are saying this, but what is the implicit message? they say i believe this. what do they really want us to believe? and i think things are clear. for example, when republicans are saying not obama, we are for change, we are the true candidates for change it's a little bit, i'm afraid, too short. to claim but they don't really mean change of course they don't i don't think that they the real message is we promise you to change something. to change that what is necessary to change so that things will really remain the same i mean, that's the message between the lines. so i think it's all too naive. i mean, it's clear. you know, when they are asked about economic, they say, what? the good old mantra. they say less state, less state spending, less taxes, strong foreign policy, absolutely nothing new. so it's changed so that nothing really changes. another thing, when people claim about how... all this populist rhetoric of you know we maverick simple people. of course republicans are now playing the populist game. but what are the true contours of this game again, i don't think the real message which is well understood by their voters is things are really that simple. we just will put into practice in washington your populist fury you feel screwed up gas and no the message is. we and you know very well that we need boys in the backroom experts to do the job let's play a game here. we will have the voice who will do the dirty job for you and it's better for you not to know it. i think that effectively between the lines, they are offering you exactly the opposite. which is why, again, it's too short trying to catch him at this inconsistency. they are, at a certain level of implicit argumentation, consciously inconsistent. which is why you remember with president bush
a little bit ridiculous, but we'll manage. thanks very much also for the nice introduction. i accept giant of ljubljana because it's a small shitty city, so easy to be a giant on there. no, it means nothing. okay. i just feel bad for you. my god, go and read a book, even if it's a book of mine, better than standing here. but okay, free country, your choice. i nonetheless want to do some relatively serious things tonight. i don't want to focus on what i'm supposed to talk about, my new book, violence, which basically comes together with the other book, in defense of lost causes,... there is a tense relationship of censorship because i had to cut out some things from violence, i put them into the other book and so on. but what i want to... to focus on today is almost the opposite of violence it is politeness all these unwritten rules of politeness civility which i think play the central role of how ideology effectively functions today or to put it in the terms which are in the last two three days very actual in your electoral politics now what's that dog that you put the lipstick on of sarah pal's, bull something. sorry? the bulldog? no. pitbull, no pitbull without lipstick, no? lipstick is ideology you have to put on. so, uh... your first reaction probably will be, am i crazy? ideology where is ideology today? i mean, where do we live today? in what kind of society? isn't it clear that we live in some sense in a post-ide ideological society? now you will say, am i crazy? didn't i see what republicans are saying our country first, sacrifice, war, whatever? no, but nonetheless, i think the digital or reactive phenomena that our the basic way the society addresses us today, like what society, its symbolic space, what does it expect from us? it's no longer to sacrifice yourself for some cause, to dedicate your life to a higher duty or whatever i think basically we are addressed as enlightened like slightly spiritualized hedonists the order as it were today is be truly yourself realize yourself and so on and so on, all the possible variations on this so. where is here ideology? let me give you a somewhat simplified definition of where i see ideology. ideology is not for me some crazy abstract intellectual edifice. artic articulated worldview made to distract you from real problems, to mystify them. it's the very way we perceive real problems. ideology is efficient because it deals with very real problems ecology, racism and so on. the mystification is in the way it... formulates perceives these problems the lesson is that. there are not only wrong answers to questions there are also wrong questions in the sense that the very way we perceive a problem which can be a very real problem the way we perceive a problem is effectively a part of the problem it mystifies the problem that would be ideology what do i mean by this let me give you immediately one or two examples. tolerance. why am i against tolerance as a slogan? of course, this doesn't mean that i'm for intolerance. i know very well that problems like sexism, racism and so on are very real. but let me focus, for example, on racism. the question to be raised i think is why do we today at least this is my impression correct me if i am wrong why do we today automatically as it were tend to translate problems of racism into something which concerns tolerance as if the mode of functioning of racism is that you don't tolerate. the other. i don't think this is by any means self-evident. look at martin luther king. download his speech, put search, look for words tolerance, intolerance. you are practically absent. you will not find them. for him, it would have been obscene to say that racism is a problem of tolerance. the same as for you, if you are, i hope you are feminists, it would have been, i hope, obscene for you to claim our feminist struggle is so that men will tolerate. much more or whatever. it's ridiculous. for martin luther king, racism is a problem of equality, economic exploitation, legal rights, racist prejudices, and so on, anything but not intolerance. so, you see, here it comes ideology. serious problem. racism, i claim, the designation of tolerance, putting tolerance up in front as the main to to catch racist phenomena mystifies it. why? because i claim it basically depoliticizes the problem. instead of talking about economy, political power, legal power, we talk about cultural prejudices. and we end up, i'm sorry to tell you this, it will maybe shock you because i'm some kind of analyst, you end up with psychoanalytic traumas and so on. like, no. like i noticed this when in south california, they deal with this resentment towards mexican immigrants. you end up, if you are at the cultural studies department, with what inner traumas do you project into mex so that you don't tolerate them and so on and so on. so, again, so why do we do this? that's the true question. i claim it's precisely the sign, one of the signs of our so-called post-political era where we less and less talk about economy politics political structure and so on and more and more about culture wars that is to say all phenomena the only way practically to introduce passion into politics to get out of this grey expert dialogue is to move into the domain of is to move into the domain of culture works and that's. what what does this say? as i developed in one of my earlier books, i think the lesson is that the two guys who appear to be opposed francis fukuyama and samuel huntington are really two sides of the same coin you know fukuyama the end of history, that is to say even if there is a long period of struggle blah blah we have found according to him the formula which is if not the best at least the least bad of the possible world capitalism with liberal democracy huntington, on the other hand, as you know, predicts the clash of civilizations, that is to say culture wars. but i claim culture wars are the mode of political struggles at the point of the end of history. i mean, i don't really think that we are at the end of history, but one has to be very careful here. there is something in our experience which fits this designation, the end of history, precisely this post-1990 feeling of big ideological projects are over. we live finally in an era which, again, found at least the least worst of the possible worlds. so this is where i see. ideology. or let me take another topic which we are all. well aware of how serious it is, maybe it will even decide our lives, my god. it's a very question of survival ecology. of course it's a very real problem. but i claim ideological mystifications investments are all the more strong in ecology. like just think about all this new age mythology of gaia mother earth, that is to say the notion of nature as some kind of a balanced homeostatic organic, holistic, whatever system which then in a typical secular theological mood, we humans with our hubris disturbed the balance raped the mother earth and so on and so on and now our duty is to repay the debt to re-establish the balance i think that this kind of uh... ecology should be rejected as part of the problem not a solution for me at least the abc the first axiom of truly progressive ecology and also the only serious way to cope with ecological problems it's to. except that there is no nature to cut a long story short i don't mean by this some kind of crazy discursive idealist subjective subjectivist approach. i'm not saying there is no objectivity. everything that we perceive as reality out there is our discursive construct. no. i'm saying that nature is not what we understand by this notion, some kind of organic, self-contained homeostatic reproduction which we disturbed. to cut a long story short, if there is a lesson to be learned from progressive darwinists like steve and g gould and others, is that nature doesn't exist in the sense that it's one big catastrophe, one big imbalance. let's think, okay, we are talk about now this p obscenities, drilling and so on and so on. i rather stop my associations there. but that girl likes drilling, obviously, but what i want to say is that oil the problem is oil are we aware just think what kind of a mega ecological catastrophe had to happen on our earth i don't know how many hundreds of thousands or millions years ago so that we got oil reserves that's nature nature is not balanced reproduction. nature is total imbalance which from time to time temporarily gets temporary usually balance and so on and so on. that's the beginning for me. what's the lesson of it? i tried to develop this in the last chapter of my book more in detail on the last causes. the lesson is, let me go a little bit further here in a study of ideology. the lesson i claim, uh. the lesson is that. it's not that. so-called deep ecologists are too pessimists in the sense oh we betrayed mother earth and so on. no, in a way they are too optimistic even. why? because they still presuppose that, how should i put it, that there is at least a measure of stability, nature, natural balance, sustainability and so on, that we have somewhere to return to, as it were. i claim the situation is radically open. we don't have anywhere to return to even. there is no standard of natural balance which we should take as the ideal. all we can do is improvise, test, and you can never be quite sure if by doing something you will not at a different level, unknown to you, cause even a larger catastrophe. this is why, as i develop in that book lost causes, i like this paradoxical result proposals of intelligent ecologists. for example, a guy in germany recently claimed that the problem is that nature itself is already nature itself by this he means the reproduction, the cycle of nature on our earth. the entire earth as biosphere is already so much accustomed to a certain degree of our pollution. that if we change things radically, even if for the good, you never know what kind of imbalance this will call in nature. you see the paradox. we have nowhere to return to. another thing that i want to improvise here on about ecology is that shouldn't we ask ourselves a simple question? how is it my god how is it that although we know very well that things are pretty serious did you notice this strange inability as it were selfab sabotageage to act to do something and i think it is way too to simply refer to the old fashioned marxist explanation yes companies through their propaganda are blinding us so that we cannot see how serious the situation is no, we know very well it's serious, but you see what's the result. the last meeting of great powers in bali, i think, indonesia, was hailed as a success. why? because the conclusion was that they will meet in two years again to continue the debate. why don't we do it? now, here another aspect of ideology. this is a little bit stronger thesis. i wonder if you would agree. my proposal the first ecological proposal for me is there is no nature. the second one for me goes even further. it is that... i putin to be very precise that i just don't want to make things more is that. we need more alienation from nature. it's not that we are not connected with nature. no we should totally break with this new age spiritualist approach telling us the problem is our cartesian technological civilization which makes us reduce nature to just an object of our technological manipulation and so on and so on. but as they put it nature is not just out there as the object that we exploit. we are part of nature. we are breathing with nature. nature is the very texture, background of our living. we should learn to rediscover how we are, like your glorious reporters in iraq, how we are embedded in nature. i would say exactly the opposite. that's why we don't act. isn't it that i mean, maybe i'm here, the strange guy, but i think it's pretty common, this reaction. when somebody explains to you, you know, maybe this will happen, global warming, whatever things will totally change, rationally you believe him or them. but then you step out and you see there is sun, there are trees, some stupid birds singing, whatever you want. and you take her, but wait a minute, this cannot really, you get my point. precisely because we are, as it were, wired into nature, into our environment, we cannot really imagine that it can radically change. and i claim we are, we. in our everyday life, experience situations as that of what in psychoanalysis we call fetish split. i know very well, but i still cannot in my guts really accept it. and this so i claim again the only solution is to alienate ourselves even more from nature in the sense of to experience how fragile, contingent our natural background is. how we never know when it can disintegrate, it can fall apart and so on and so on. we need more alienation, i think, from nature. we need to truly denaturalize ourselves. now, this brought me already to the first thesis of ideology also, how ideology functions today. i think quite a lot of it is determined by this fetishist split. i use here psychoanalytic terms, but i think one should be very careful about using psychoanalysis in social and ideological field why i claim no wonder that many old-fashioned marxists love psychoanalysis. why do they love it? because it allows them to avoid the truly tough self critical questions namely if you approach an old marxist he will tell you we know what's going on american imperialism their mantras. it may appear that nothing is happening today just wait for a couple of years when the third world will organise itself we will have even stronger class struggle and so on and so on. okay an optimistic so then you ask them, but nonetheless, according to marxism, classical marxism, certain things should have happened, revolution, why didn't they happen if your analysis is true? then they tell you, oh, ask freud. you know, like imperialists are using all the libidinal manipulations of propaganda and so on and so on. that's only a way to avoid the tough question, which is, where was your analysis wrong or where today it no longer is appropriate. but nonetheless, this notion of fetishistic split in the sense of i know very well that it's a fake what i'm saying, blah, blah. but i nonetheless, in a way, believe in it. i claim, if you want one big lesson in all this, just look at the republican national convention, if you did look at it. i don't think they really, they somehow all know that all this thing, you know, change, or whatever they say, that it's bullshit. but nonetheless, at a certain point, they believe in it. how does this constellate? work ah here one should turn to hollywood maybe. i claim that hollywood films, especially big blockbusters, are for me so interesting because effectively you often find in them our basic ideological constellation coordinates at its purest. you know hegel, the big german guy, said. somewhere a wonderful thing in his aesthetics. he said apropos painting that a good portrait of a person looks more like that person than that person. itself looks like itself in this sense, i think in hollywood you find more our ideology than in ourselves. what do i mean by this? my god, let me just take two recent blockbusters, the dark knight, the last batman film. first ideological trend i hope i will have some time later to return to it is and i really hate this it's this psychological depth. did you notice is something horrible i mean i'm a flat vulgar person i hate this how they are telling us that in the orman or it was the same spider-man, whatever, that you know, the hero is no longer just a flat cartoon hero. you can see his anxieties, his weakness, his traumas and so on, as if somehow this makes it deeper or more artistic or whatever. and i think this is general a general ideological move today. did you notice how, i don't know, when i visited israel, my jewish friends draw my attention to this how the whole propaganda of idf israel defense forces today is no longer this old arrogance of oh one of our battalions can take over an egyptian or arab army in an afternoon whatever no it to emphasize repeatedly we are humans like everybody else. like you see on israeli tv soldiers crying even i saw one literally shitting out of fear whatever but that was their point you know like as one of the officers put it military is not in our genetics like but we are normal human beings like you look at us in our humanity. that's ideology at its purest because it blurs the crucial political question. when i visited israel, there was a wonderfully disgusting manipulation there, precisely when i was there. all media reported on strange event when israeli defense forces or some anti-terrorist unit broke into a house of an alleged terrorist. he was the father of the family. the supposed terrorist wasn't there, only his family was wife and children. and of course, since the soldier brutally entered the house, the wife and the children awakened a daughter ran crying to the mother and the mother trying to calm her down shouted her name of course. it was something like sarah also. sarah, everything will be okay and so on. and then a soldier, one of the soldiers who... entered the house brutally, now, in this way, learned that his own small daughter had the same name as that palestinian daughter. and he showed the mother the picture. you see, ah we are human nonetheless, and so on. this is ideology at its purest. this, you know, we are nonetheless all humans. it serves a precise function. two. blur the crucial question. if we are like in that case, if we are all humans, my god, why are you doing what you are doing to me at this point and so on. i mean, this reference to the wealth of inner life, which doesn't make us only ideological categories is ideology, which is why, to give you a funny vulgar story, when not this publisher,, another one asked me to do this disgusting thing. i hated it. this is for me, you know, the back cover of the books. usually you have a couple of lines on your work, professor blah blah deals with hegel and so on. and then you are supposed sometimes to add a line or two on your, you know, to give a human touch on your private life. you know, like in free time, professor likes to sail and grow tulips or whatever. they asked me to do this. i, of course, don't be afraid. i'm not doing this, but just to provoke them, to show them i told them, okay, fine, put it in his free time professor zk serves the internet for pedophilia and teaches his small son how to pull legs of living spiders and so on. it's a fake. that's what i wanted to tell them. it's a fake. it's a fake. precisely this human tax is a fake. i had really to laugh. lesson of how dysfunction was. i learned recently that the guy who will even die now, i learned he wasn't at the parade, kim jong-il, the leader of north korea, opened up recently, a couple of months ago, the first golf course in north korea. open, of course, only for foreigners to earn foreign currency. so the leader, kim jong-il, was the first one to test it, of course. so it's an 18 holes1-8, 18 holes golf course. you know how many he needed to fill in to finish all 18. not 18, 19. and i can imagine how first probably they wanted to put it18, he is a genius. but then somebody probably said, no, this wouldn't be realistic. let's add one so that it would be more. this is the problem. so back to... how it functions. that is one the other much more ominous aspect of the dark night. here it's really an echo of our worries, predicaments. did you notice that in its final denouement, the movie, okay, some of my friends who like the movie try to read it that it's an implicit critique. i have my doubts. at least the story of the movie, of what i will now describe, basically condones lying as a necessary ingredient of social stability. you remember what happens at the end? the policeman who was supposed to be a good guy is discovered to be the murderer. then the judgment is if this will be known to the public, it will undermine the trust, the confidence and so on. so heroically batman takes upon himself the crimes. this is this is very logic which i would have been very afraid of if somebody this logic of this is the old authoritarian motive of how. in order to have social stability you need a lie. how? the highest service to do to society is not to tell the truth, but to lie for the common good and so on and so on and so on. that's the message. okay. another film where you have a recent relative blockbuster. i saw it four or five times but because of my son who likes it, which is ideology at its purest, at the same level as kung fu panda. you saw the cartoons why? but, but what has this film to do about ideology? did you notice how the film combines, mixes two opposed attitudes? on the one hand, the utter all this sacredness of, you know, fate, the new kung fu master, all this oriental mystique, as it were, it combines this with our western sarcasm. you notice how all the time they are making fun and so on of it. but i claim these two attitudes are not contradictory. they perfectly supplement each other. here is the key formula of the film when they discover that to become a kung fu master, but also as for the hero's father to cook the perfect soup, there is no special ingredient. here is the quote. there is no special ingredient. it's only you. to make something special, you just have to believe it's special. that's where we are today. you can beic you can be sarcastic as you want. you can make fun of everything. nonetheless, it's a call to totally irrational belief. that is to say, have all your doubts, be cynical, you don't have to really believe, you just have to, as it were, act as if you believe. i will now repeat from my parallax view short. anecdote which i really like so sorry for repeating it if some of you know it about niels borg the copenhagen guy you know who once he was visited at his country house in denmark by a friend scientist and the friend was surprised to see above the entrance door to this country house a horseshoe you know i don't know if it's here but in europe horseshoe above the entrance door is a superstitious item the idea is that it prevents evil spirits to enter the house. so the friend asked nis bohr, but wait a minute, if you are a scientist, do you believe in this superstition? nbor said, of course not. then ask him, but why do you have it here? nisbor answered a wonderful, precise answer. i don't believe in it, but i have it here above my door because i was told that it works, preventing spirit enter, that it works even if you don't believe in it. this is our ideology today. nobody believes. if you say democracy oh it's corrupted, who cares, blah, blah, blah. but we have it up there. first let put it now. we act as if we believe in it. and this was the first one, i think, to formulate this formula was goldamir, the ancient prime minister of israel. it's a wonderful formula. when asked, do you believe in god? here is her answer. i believe in jewish people and they believe in god. so i don't believe and i think that eh. we should read this formula in a very precise way it's not a totalitarian formula it's not the same as the stalinist formula where you say okay i only allow all these illusory celebrations to go on not to disappoint the ordinary people who need a great leader like stalin whatever no the point is that... you even do not need another! actual subject who really believes. the whole system of belief functions is just every agent every individual presupposes that there is another one who believes even if this other one. doesn't exist at all. it's the same as we do it with santa claus. if you ask parents, they will tell you, i'm not crazy. of course there is no santa claus. i buy the presents, but i pretend to take it seriously so that my children will not be disappointed. they believe. then if you ask privately the children, of course they will tell you, i'm not an idiot, but i pretend, i don't know, not to disappoint parents to get presents. you know what i mean? but the beliefs. but it's enough that everyone... presupposes that another one believes and the whole system of belief.. functions. now, let me, and this will be then the end of repetitions, but i will give another twist to this old story that i know i i repeated it five times in my books. everybody knows it. i want to repeat it because, again, i will give a different reading to it. to get at this logic let me tell you a joke again which you all know, you know the old one about a man who thought he was a grain, you know, returning to mental hospital saying i'm afraid i will be eaten by a chicken and then the psychiatrist asks him, but wait a minute, we cured you. you know you are not a piece of a seed of grain you are a human. he says, so a chicken cannot eat you. the guy answers yes, i know it, but does the chicken know it i no longer. it is a very realistic joke. how our ideology function. we know very well that we are not a piece of grain or whatever, but our problem is, as it were, does the chicken know it. that's also, if i may make another reference to cinema, what i find fundamentally wrong about a film which many people like, but i'm totally opposed to it, about the holocaust, the holocaust comedy, la vita e bella, life is beautiful. benigni. first we have to accept a very traumatic fact there is a lot to learn from it why almost all really good films about holocaust comedies no, no, i'm not here trying to provoke you to be open. i'm not making fun of it. i'm not crazy. i mean, i sold this thesis, i'm proud to tell you, at a conference in jerusalem. and my god, some old ladies with all those tattoo numbers came to me and totally agreed with me. that. to have a tragedy a tragic situation still presupposes that the victim has the victim retains a minimum of dignity to play the tragic role. when things go really bad, you no longer have a tragedy. you have something which can paradoxically be rendered only as a comedy. in other words, to claim that the fate of the jews and other prisoners in auschwitz and so on was tragic, you concede to the nazis too much. you underestimate the radical humiliation. so that's okay with the film. my problem is the end when you are supposed to stop laughing and cry, you know last five minutes when the father sacrifices himself for the son and so on. i can imagine a different ending which would have been much more uneasy, i claim. i hope you know the film, no the story that father and son jews are put into a concentration camp from italy and in order to enable his son to survive the camp without being too traumatized, father tells him a fiction that in reality this is just a big competition game who will who will endure life in this camp without breaking down that if they want they can leave at any moment it's just one big game. okay. i claim, and that's the premise of the field. wouldn't it be much more uncanny if the the father were to discover at the end that the small kid knew all the time that the father is lying to him, but just pretended to believe to make it easier. for father that would have been a truly desperate situation i think okay so again in la vita e bella he is the chicken, the son. we can be brutal, ruthlessless. the chicken doesn't know. there has to be a chicken. that's, i think, the premise of liberal permissivity. we can do whatever. sexual orgies with cows, whatever. i don't know what you do here. but there must be a chicken who doesn't know. usually these chicken are children. did you notice how in today's era where we proclaim o permissivity fraud is outdated, we are no longer live in a victorian era nonetheless the central insight of freud death into children's sexuality is. again. it disappeared. it's a taboo. that is to say, did you notice how, and again i have no sympathy for pedophiles, but nonetheless i find it interesting as an ideological phenomenon how in the last 20 or so years child child molesting was elevated into the ultimate figure of a crime i think again it is as if we can play our dirty games adults but children's innocence has to be protected and we find this logic off protect the innocence of children. that is to say, there is an agency whose appearance has to be protected. this is where ideological mechanisms start to function. let me tell you a totally crazy story. i know a country which fell apart because a chicken wasn't allowed to know. it's my own ex-country, yugoslavia. what do you mean by this? now that old communist nomenclatura guys are publishing their memoirs we learned something very strange that already in the early seventies it was clear to the circle around the old big legendary whatever president tito that the economic situation is horrible and that at some point it will be necessary to do what we euphemistically today call necessary structural readjustments' like you know what this means but they decided tito is old and it will make his last years very unhappy to see the economic crisis so they decided to postpone the outbreak of the crisis till tito. so, throughout the 70s, the state of yugoslavia was acquiring new debts like crazy just to sustain this artificial half welfare. 1980, tito died. the economic crisis was allowed to explode. the result was, of course, explosion of nationalism, which incidentally, that's another ideological trap. please, it's even worse than elvis of culture. theory whatever this story of yes, balkan, primitive part of europe where they are still living in their medieval dreams. if you want to understand the yugoslav war, you have to know the last 500 years of history and so on and so on. i think absolutely not. that was the trap of the west. pure ideology. you were fetishizing balkans into some exotic place sustained by film makers whom i don't like who played this game, like the most famous yugoslav emir kustica, his underground. ideology at its purest. the west got there what it wanted. the image of ex-yugoslavia as a country where people drink, fight, copulate all the time, a permanent orgy and so on. so what i wanted to say is that uh if you want to account for the disintegration of yugoslavia, forget about this old nationalist myth. the problem was a very simple one, i claim. communist nomenclatura in each republic had to find a way how to retain its legitimacy. and the only way was by making a pact with nationalists. but let me go back. so here, again, one can say that, in a way, one of the crucial elements in the conditions for the country falling apart was that for the last eight years of his life, the chicken president tito wasn't allowed to know. and this logic can get very mysterious. it is at the level of these mysterious excesses that you get ideology at its purest. for example, since we are close to, okay, we are not as north as washington and alaska, but close to that area, let me tell you a weird story. story which i found wonderful. what happened in soviet union in 1953? okay, stalin died and then in the summer of 1953 the first volume of the new soviet encyclopedia covering letters from a to c appeared. a to c. there was a problem. in it there were two pages almost on beria lavrenti beria. you know he was stalin's boss of kgb, but immediately after stalin's death he was arrested by kushchev and his gang and shot as a traitor english spy and so on and so on. so for the stalinist universe there was a problem here like. you know, in stalinism, when you are off, you are a non-person. so what to do? what was the solution of the editors? it was a big. a big printing, it was like three, four million copies encyclopedia. every subscriber got a letter from the editor with a new page and he was ordered to cut off. the old page leaves with entry on barrier and put in the new one and they perfectly. restored the continuity on the new page the previous entry went on than it was this page to the end, the beginning of next page on ah here is the genius you know what did they replace barrier with? here i come to alaska, bering strait, the same ber with some photos and so on. so now ask yourself a naive question why this worry to erase all the traces of barrier to restore perfect continuity. who was duped here? not the ordinary people they had to do it, my god. it is as if. there is what in lacian theory we call the big other, some anonymous agency, the chicken, whose innocence had to be protected. the chicken shouldn't know that once there was barrier, for the chicken barrier shouldn't exist. now you will say, ha, yes, this comes from primitive slavic communists. does it hold for us? it does. hollywood. hitchcock's vertigo. incredible detail which follows the same logic. know know vertigo maybe even better than me the movie do you know how around one hour even a little bit less into the movie after scotty saves madeleine from her as we learn afterwards fake suicide jump into the golden gate into gate the water beneath the golden gate. he takes her home and puts undresses her, puts her into the bed. so we have a long panning shot. first we see in his living room scotty behind his table. then the camera moves slowly towards the left. we see the kitchen sink. above it, the underwear drying there of madeleine. signal. what did he do that he undressed her, dried her up and put her into bed and then moved further left to the door of the bedroom. we get in one long shot the whole situation. there is only one problem. if you don't believe me, do it. check it. put your dvd on freeze it, on still. when the camera is above the kitchen sink and you will see that what you see is not underwear. but just abstract pieces of cloth and i read in a french book on vertigo, very good one, i forgot, i don't know, the guy is called esterhazy, but it's, again, not yet translated, but it's a wonderful book. why was this the case? this was still, vertigo was caught in 19557, still h code, and the censorship ins that. there should be no underwear effectively there drying up because if it's really underwear this would have been a proof that scott is so her naked. but this is hollywood. it shouldn't happen. why is this so mysterious? because just ask yourself a naive question whom were the sensors protecting not us the public because we automatically assume that we see underwear there. it was not our, we were not the chicken here. the chicken was again this anonymous big otherer. like it's as if imagine yourself being questioned by some. sensor! oh, what dirty. and you can say, no, no, no, nothing happened. just pieces of cloth, there was no underwear and so on and so on. this is what i'm getting at. this is what fascinates me so much. this double level fact. this is the basic split of how ideology functions. always bear this in mind. so you have the explicit message which maintains the appearances and sustaining it all the dirty obscenity and so on. which is why i will be very brief here. i'm sorry, but i want to improvise on another point which is part of my book on david lynch published, as it were, up street here in seattle some years ago, so i hope you don't know it, where you have this mechanism at its absolutely purest. you know, i hope, the greatest film of all times casablanca you know the famous scene two-thirds into the film when during the night ingrid bergman comes to humphrey bogart r to get those famous visas whatever and then what happens is that they had a conversation with all this noir ridicule dialogue you know, like she wants to shoot him, he says, go on, you will be doing me a favor and so on all that mar then they kiss, embrace. fade out! two three seconds and a half. for three seconds and you see the tower of the casablanca airport with the lights turning around and back to them continuing the same conversation. now, every normal person asks here a question. did they do it or not? that is to say, are these three seconds. just a... metaphoric condensed substitute for the sexual act or... il juste... real time goes on now the mystery is as in a the british cinema historian richard maltby, in a wonderful analysis of this scene, demonstrated the problem is that the feeling of casablanca is not here so much ambiguous as consciously contradictory. it gives you simultaneously the opposite signals. on the one hand, you get a series of signals telling you they did it. for example after a couple embraces in h code standard hollywood end and then you have a fade out, it's a way to hint they did it. furthermore, after we return to them, they are smoking cigarettes. this is basic hollywood rule. like what is the second and third best thing in the world? the drink before and the cigarette after. so these are all codified signs to indicate the sexual act. but at the same time, there is a whole series of signs indicating the contrary. like a, they are dressed, there is no bed disturbed in the bedroomgar the same conversation seems to go on and so on and so on i think it is crucial to see how d functions these two levels. both levels are necessary it's not that we have the official hollywood puritanan and then there is some kind of subversion in all these obscene hints no everything is codified the hollywood ideology is both at the same time. hollywood tricks you by telling you okay i will give you a front so that you will be able in face of some imagined moral authority of censorship to pretend but nothing happens, nothing dirty happens. at the same time, i will give you a whole series of precisely codified signals of what you can then imagine with your dirty mind, what happened and so on and so on. and there is a whole series of procedures. i don't want to. all i want to tell you is that to understand how an ideology edifice functions you have to take into account the explicit level and what has put. what comes by it all this implicit obscene underground. there is nothing subversive in it. this is why, if you read some of my work, you know why i'm so fascinated with military life. when i went 30 years ago to serve the infamous yugoslav army, i went with pleasure. i'm privately a kind of a leftist fascist, disciplinarian, i like order and i was terribly disappointed. it was a big chaos full of sexual obscenities and so on and so on. that the truth of the army life. from what i learned it's the same with your army, it's all the discipline stuff and so on, but then you have fragging, you have all these rituals, you have all this obities for example, this is why they always fascinated me this so-called marching chants the songs okay, all i know is from hollywood films that the marines sing when you know this weird obscene mixture of nonsense rhymes and sexual obscenities like i remember in a few good men they sing sorry for the obscenity something like i don't know but i was told that eskimo pushes are rather cold like this total meaningless of you know what's my message this is not kind of a resistance towards the official ideology? no, this is a necessary constituent of for the functioning of the edifice of power. power is power and its own. obscene double as it were and at this level ideology functions at the level of it's not simply what you see and what you don't see. as michel foucault sometimes in an all too simple way describes discursive mechanisms they tell you what you see what you don't see how can you argue and so on no it's what you see what you don't see but at the same time what you have to pretend not to see but you have to see it without admitting that you see it and so on and so on. where did i encounter this? for example. recently, a couple of months ago, i was at harvard giving a talk there. afterwards we had a dinner i had official dinners where ten people, we didn't even know well each other, so the presiding guy, older professor, told each of us to present him or herself. he told us it should say his name and affiliation, the field of his work and sexual orientation. no. i found the... my idea was almost to tell him but i didn't want to disturb the hospitality that wouldn't it be much nicer and intimate and unpleasant to ask for that each one should say how much you earn per year and how much wealth you possess privately besides that that would have been much better but what i want to say is that okay in harvard this was considered normal, non-intrusive. but i'm now not playing the usual boring european game of you vulgar americans against us. no, i had a similar but opposite adventure with a friend of mine who visited me two years ago in. summer in slovenia. we went to adriatic coast and to swim it was summer and my friend was shocked when he saw practically all women on the beach. with breasts naked without brass i mean, in our country, i think even in italy, in germany, all the time, it's considered totally normal now. it simply, nobody even notices it. but for him, it was pretty traumatic. he felt uneasy all the time as he was... you see, this is, i think, ideology at its everyday level. this rules which are not so much explicit rules as this implicit as it were implicit spontaneous substance which makes you uneasy when you see something and so on and so on and so i think that. the perfect! what i was tempted to ask somehow, but this wasn't the question. the best reaction to this kind of intrusive questions was provided by gore vidal, your great writer. you know what he said when in a tv interview he was asked, he is, as you probably know, a well-known bisexual, was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman? his reply was, i was too polite to ask. i think this was a perfect. nothing conservative about it. i think that today the right-wingers are impolite, vulgar. i'm more and more convinced that the left radicals should take over the cause of civility and so on and politeness. again, what interests me here is in what way things are very complex here. did you notice how in both these cases where i had to state that i didn't by sexual orientation, and in the case of my friend shocked by seeing bearbrecht, the openness was basically a form of discretion of withdrawal in the sense of the message of for example, young women there showing their breasts. it was not oh, here i'm available, grab me. it was no, i don't care about you, i don't see you. like it was to paradoxically, it meant to signal even greater discretion. i i think in a more refined way the same goes for being asked about sexual orientation. it is if anything meant to dissexualise possible tensions of the situation. the extreme of this attitude which is why i think it is an ideological genre at its purest the extreme of this attitude i think is hardcore pornography did you notice a strange form of censorship, at least in traditional hardcore pornography if it's a full feature filler, of course you cannot just show on and on erotic plays or copulation, you have to have some kind of a story. but did you notice how utterly embarrassingly stupid the story is? i don't think they can be as stupid as that. i think it's a necessity, a message you need. like i even remember now, i'm traumatized when i was young, i saw one, you know, the standard story, housewife is alone at home, plumber comes, fixes a hole in the bathroom, then the wife said, i have another hole to fix. can you maybe... you are embarrassed. but where is the censorship here? i think the message is, okay, you can see it all. at the level of penetration and so on, but there must be no, how do you call it, traditionally, emotional engagement. the story must be ridiculous. what is censored is to have both at the same time. that is to say, an engaging pathetic where you feel empathy, narrative with seeing it all, which is why catherine briat in france and some others in europe now, who try to do precisely this, making film at the same time show sexual act in all the details and try to make a convincing pathetic and so on story. do not really catch on in the public. now you will tell me what i'm usually told, but where do i live? this kind of hardcore obviously will tell me i must be old. this was going on like 30 years ago. where are we now? oh, i asked this question to my friends and they told me that now the predominant form of hardcore or at least the typical one is so called gonzo gonzo i think the way i understand it. ich even worse. you know what's the rule of gonzo? there even isn't a story. that is to say, gonzo means that like the actors and the cameraman or director directly interact, like actors look into the camera, make funny remarks, oh do i look well enough? cameraman tell them move a little bit and so on. this is for me the utmost censorship. they are terribly afraid that you, they are kind of ultra brechtians, terribly afraid that you would be caught in identification, in delusion. they had to sabotage this all the time. so again these rules are these rules of what you see, what you don't see, what you. see, this is what i want to emphasize. what you of course see, you are even supposed to see it, but you have to pretend, act as if you don't see it and so on. this is ideology at its purest. this is where civility. enters because what is civility or politeness? it's something pretty mysterious it's neither. goodness, generosity, kindness, generosity and kindness are less obligatory. you are somehow obliged to be polite, to behave in a civilized way, but we are not in any way obliged to be kind and generous. on the other hand, civility, politeness is less than... legal or direct explicit social obligation nobody can force you to be pol, to behave in a civilized way. and this is crucial, i think. here i have a problem with so-called political correctness. what it does is that it directly penalizes something like talking in a brutal, harassing way, which should be a matter of politeness and civility. i think that the result is necessarily catastrophic. but what i want to tell you is that this is the lesson again to learn that we should be aware of what way to live in a free individualist society which is more or less ours how many what a complex cobweb texture of implicit rules has to be there so that we can interact with each other with. as free individuals many rules have to be here so that we can be free as it were and this i think enables us to throw a new light on this so famous phenomenon of ethnic or religious fundamentalism there is a pretty stupid sociological clichliche which claims that fundamentalism means that people today are afraid of too many freedoms the idea is we live in a society where you do whatever you want you can choose even your sexual orientation your ethnic belonging like too much freedom you have to choose to recreate yourself all the time so the idea is people are afraid of this excess over of freedom and they escape into some old set of traditional firm values to give meaning and stability to their lives i would say yes and no this is the less important part of the story what is more important is the exact opposite what do i mean by this? i got a lesson of a lifetime when some more than ten years ago i visited briefly belgrade and by chance in some local restaurant got in contact with some really hard nationalist guys, ethnic cleansers probably and so on. i got really a lesson of a lifetime from them namely they told me openly that why are they what they are? they told me no, it's not who they escape freedom, they want old values. no, they told me on the contrary, modern life was for them all too well regulated with all its politically correct and so on rules. as one of them brutally told me, my god, if you want to live in a free western society, if i were to live there, i cannot even beat my wife. i cannot rape a nice girl if see her. i cannot beat a friend, i cannot swear, i cannot whatever. for them liberal society was all too regulated and stifling and for them recognising yourself identifying yourself as a nationalist fundamentalist meant a new freedom i'm a nationalist which means on behalf of my nation i can do whatever you want let's go to bosnia let's kill let's rape let's rob and so on and so on this is a crucial element of so-called totalitarian appeal, as it was already very clear to adorno, the good old frankfurt guy, who already in late 30s, he wrote a wonderful short text on the psychological structure of fascist propaganda, where he emphasizes how hitler was not a figure of paternal authority. wilhelm reich was totally wrong here. the message of hitler was not, i'm now a good father, you were too wild, my children. in weimar germany with moral decadence social chaos now i want from you order sacrifice for germany discipline' that's the public discourse but it was always supplemented by this implicit obscenity. join me! play my game and we can have fun killing the jews, beating the nazi discourse promised you all this obscenity. and what? and now i will read you a song. sorry, a song, a poem. which translated into english please listen to it it is a nice short poem convert to my new faith or crowd i offer you what no one has had before i offer you inclemency and wine the one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. people, nothing is forbidden in my faith. there is laughing and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want and this godhead forbids you nothing. oh obey my call brothers people crowd you know who wrote this poem? radovan karadic, the guy who is now in hague. and i think he knows what he was doing. did you notice this moment of radical permissivity? nothing is forbidden in my faith. godhead forbids you nothing, and so on and so on. he was well aware what he was doing. a proof is that is how it functions here. i want to quote you a passage in which aleander tianic, a leading serb columnist, described how the milosevic regime functions when in serbia milosevic, the radical nationalist, was in power. quote, milosevic generally switches the serbs. in the time of his rule, serbs abolished the time for working. no one does anything. he, milosevic, allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling you can appear on the state tv and insult blair clinton or any else of the world's dignitaries my brief remark here this was literally true i remember when nato was bombing ex yugoslavia serbia there was a talk show on serb tv where behind the person talking was a big poster a reference to monica leinsky and clint this was just after the leinsky affair the words were poor bill clinton did monica also suck out all of your brain or something like that? that was state tv okay go on. furthermore milosevic gave us the right to carry weapons he gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons he gave us also the right to drive stolen cars milosevic changed the daily life of serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip which means that nothing but really nothing of what you can do can be punishable you see now my point that's the attraction the reality of so called religious and so on fundamentalism the best metaphor for this is earth is a film i'm slowly approaching the conclusion which means i'm not even one half into the text but that's life okay i want to begin to conclude with a reference to a good old hollywood leftist film john carpenter yes the very guy who did halloween john carpenter i hope you know it although it's difficult to get i think now on dvd they live from 1988 you remember that wonderful it deserves a close analysis it's not as naive and primitive as it appears that wonderful idea of you know it's a story of john nada, wonderful reference to proletarian position. nada, you know, is spanish for nothing. a homeless guy who finds in an abandoned church some box with strange sunglasses, puts the glasses on and discovers that these glasses are kind of ide critical sunglasses. like you have the on. okay, yeah, yeah. i am afraid that i would be afraid to ask you, what do you see? like you see me, you see some pseudo-leftist stuff, you put the glasses on, this guy is paid by those in power to amuse you and keep you from serious engagement. i prefer not to ask you. okay, but you got the point. the idea is when you put these glasses on, you see the true, as it were, the true ideological message. like there is a big poster for visit hawaii, have a holiday of your lifetime. you put the glasses on, it's a mer. rejoy, produce, don't think, or something like that. you see the truth. now, this may appear naive. of course, there is a naivety because we all know we don't need all the paranoia about aliens taking over. i mean, this access that you see here through the glasses is inscribed into the very form of the message. no need for paranoia. but nonetheless, there is something very true in how the film stages this scene. why? did you notice, if you saw the film, one strange one would have expected exactly the opposite that is to say that we leave the lie. insofar as we look at the world with false glasses, that ideology are like mystifying glasses, and to go to this new age, be true to yourself, metaphoric, isn't then the truth. shouldn't it have been the opposite that to see the truth, you should become aware that you are wearing mystifying glasses and you should put glasses off to see with your own eyes the way things really are. no, the film emphasizes its opposite. getting free, liberating yourself is a very violent process. okay but another thing i want to say is that it is crucial nonetheless to combine this kind of split between implicit and explicit message, where again, the explicit message is the hedonist one. enjoy, have a good time. the true implicit message is the true ideological order. don't think. marry buy consummate whatever but even did that. more often or at least in traditional ideology as a rule we have the opposite procedure where what you directly see is the explicit message and what you were to see. if you would have put the glasses on, would have been... this obscene supplement for example i don't know let's return to nazi germany. the explicit message is, enough of decadence, sacrifice yourself, do your duty, germany needs you. you put the glasses on, what you see is, and we'll have fun, we'll beat the jews, we'll have our orgies, whatever. or go to south america, sorry, your own south, south of the united states in the 20s, 30s, a small town with kukux klan and so on. the explicit message, christian values, family, defense of our civilization, you put the glasses on. okay, and then at the weekend we gather, we rape some black girls, we lyned some blacks and so on and so on. so the... obscene supplement is invisible both this logic of have to put it... two levels implicit explicit are i claim today. more crucial than ever let me just give you another example which we encounter all the time today the one of charity you know, like, my god, you cannot even open a newspaper or tv without seeing some starving african kid or with some lip deformation and then the usual message. for the price of one or two of your cappuccinos, you can change the life of and so on and so on. very nice, but again, what if i were to put your glasses on? what would i have seen? i claim something like, don't think, don't politicize. forget about the true causes of their poverty just act contribute money so that you will not have to think i think these constant appeals to charity. work as a kind of almost token of superstition like do a small act so that you get rid of the problem so that you can go on. and i think the crucial message here is also the one if you ask me of depoliticization depoliticization in the sense of i remember when i was young. the motto of the left was still this motive of while we live in our relatively affluent upper middle class society are we aware that out there there are people who are starving dying and so on did you notice how in the last years the establishment took these metaphics over today it is bill gates who talks like this reminding us all the time oh there are people out there in africa india and so on why are they doing it i think the underlying message is the one of depoliticization and moralization. let's stop our ideological debates. people are starving there. who cares about socialism, capitalism, and so on? let's just come get together and do something. i think it's precisely the image of suffering is used to manipulate us in this way. it has also something to do. you are the master. do i get five minutes more? not more. three, okay okay. now i want to say how this, okay, i want to do just two things. first, to explain how this shift is part of a more global change in capitalism today. how is commodification working? grosso modo... vaguely there are three levels of how we are addressed when we are called to. bye. right. consume a product. the most elementary is a direct reference to utility. no, like buy land rover because you need it if you want to go to the countryside because it's a good car, strong enough, stable, doesn't use too much, whatever, all the qualities. next, strategy is more consumerist, is that of competition, keeping up with the jones status symbol. like buy it so that you will appear to others is what you want to be. but i think both of us are today slowly receding and more and more the predominant motive is that of almost spiritual self-realization. today they would tell you, you want to realize your potential, to feel authentic, to be alienated from big city, to breathe the fresh air. so by lentro, you will be what you really are. you know, it's as if... the point is your inner experience and so on and so on. this i claim is also let me give you an evil example how de facto i claim all that organic food shit. do. you really believe that if you buy those rotten apples which cost twice, okay, maybe there a little bit less poison, but i don't really think. i claim the reason you really buy it, it's not because you really believe. in purely, pure scientific facts, even not for keeping up with the jonas, who cares? it's not a big status symbol. it's, you know, to make you feel good like, you know, world is in a crisis, isn't it nice? i'm doing something, i'm participating in a larger, meaningful project, and so on and so on. this is what we should be looking at all the time. now, really to conclude, what i wanted to conclude with is to develop how? this game of two. labels implicit explicit rules. how these implicit rules of which we are not even aware how all this is changing today and i wanted to take different examples but i will probably stop now like global warming did you note how eh. the way we talk about, at least the way the big media talk about global warming changed, i think, around a year ago. up to a year or two ago, the large media reaction was, let's not exaggerate. maybe it's a serious problem, but those who see catastrophe, those who accept global warming as a fact, are some kind of a post-secular, like secularized version of fanatics, old communists who need a new catastrophe now. okay. all of a sudden, now, more and more, in the media, the message is, yes, it's a fact, but what's the fuss? it has good and bad things. there are new opportunities like cnn recently announced a new series typical manipulation, the greening of greenland. when they say, how wonderful, they already grow vegetables on greenland. new opportunities if the ice melts on the arctic ships will be able to bring us the chinese gulac staff directly across. it will cost less. in this way, we will burn less fuels and so on. what worries me is how something which till now was, how put it, was unacceptable for us morally unacceptable i mean like or impossible we couldn't imagine it is all of a sudden normalized this process is where you should be attentive where ideology works for example not only ecology but what about torture guantanamo now let me be serious here i mean i'm not a naive anti-american fanatic i even think that a certain way of america bashing is to play capitalist game in a very dangerous way but that's another story what i want to say is that what worries me is precisely the simple fact that we talk publicly about this. i mean, i know very well, i'm the first to admit when pro-american friends tell me, wait a minute, but let's be frank, in the united states, we at least debate torture. in china, in russia, they're probably doing it much more, but you don't even talk about it. okay, but we debate it. this worries me. why? let me. draw a parallel. rape. would you like to live in a society where you would have to debate and argue all the time that women shouldn't be raped? no, i would like to live in a dogmatic society where when somebody starts to advocate the right of men to rape women, you simply disqualify yourself. i mean, people don't even attack you. you're just a jerk like,, what's wrong with this guy or whatever. and unfortunately, i would like to live in the same society where the same goes for torture. i think the set signs that we debate about and there are many other signs that these unwritten between the lines rules are changing that is why i think we effectively are in the middle of change it is not maybe the change obama wants it's a much more ominous change it's the change of this very ideological background and this is why if you want to get what the message is. how these changes are operating. you should, i think, just all the time apply this mechanism of, okay, they are saying this, but what is the implicit message? they say i believe this. what do they really want us to believe? and i think things are clear. for example, when republicans are saying not obama, we are for change, we are the true candidates for change it's a little bit, i'm afraid, too short. to claim but they don't really mean change of course they don't i don't think that they the real message is we promise you to change something. to change that what is necessary to change so that things will really remain the same i mean, that's the message between the lines. so i think it's all too naive. i mean, it's clear. you know, when they are asked about economic, they say, what? the good old mantra. they say less state, less state spending, less taxes, strong foreign policy, absolutely nothing new. so it's changed so that nothing really changes. another thing, when people claim about how... all this populist rhetoric of you know we maverick simple people. of course republicans are now playing the populist game. but what are the true contours of this game again, i don't think the real message which is well understood by their voters is things are really that simple. we just will put into practice in washington your populist fury you feel screwed up gas and no the message is. we and you know very well that we need boys in the backroom experts to do the job let's play a game here. we will have the voice who will do the dirty job for you and it's better for you not to know it. i think that effectively between the lines, they are offering you exactly the opposite. which is why, again, it's too short trying to catch him at this inconsistency. they are, at a certain level of implicit argumentation, consciously inconsistent. which is why you remember with president bush
Narrator
dirty work.
dirty work.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, yeah, yeah, but now literally, what less than one minute. you know with booth, the dirty guy boy in the back room was carl ro, i think, who didn't... so, if i were to meet, i never will, of course, john mccain or even the gloria's mother, i really hate it. i don't know what was your reaction, but... how could she, you know, that slimy daughter who was doing this to the... i mean okay, but seriously, what i would have asked mccain is not, are you serious blah blah, but... let's no bullshitting. tell me who will be your carl ro or who already is your carl ro. that's where things will be decided. thanks very much.
yeah, yeah, yeah, but now literally, what less than one minute. you know with booth, the dirty guy boy in the back room was carl ro, i think, who didn't... so, if i were to meet, i never will, of course, john mccain or even the gloria's mother, i really hate it. i don't know what was your reaction, but... how could she, you know, that slimy daughter who was doing this to the... i mean okay, but seriously, what i would have asked mccain is not, are you serious blah blah, but... let's no bullshitting. tell me who will be your carl ro or who already is your carl ro. that's where things will be decided. thanks very much.
Narrator
thank you. you've been listening to sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic dr. slavo jek, speaking at powell's city of books in portland, oregon, on a speaking tour for his latest book. violence. in a moment, we'll return to the question and answer session from the program. slavo jk's many books include in defense of lost causes. iraq. the borrowed kettle. enjoy your symptom. jacques lacan in hollywood and out. the parallax view. hand the sublime object of ideology. his work also includes the critically acclaimed documentary, a pervert's guide to cinema. and he is subject of two documentary films, jijek, the reality to the virtual, and more recently, gijac. and now we return to the question and answer session with slavo jek. the author spoke at powell's city of books in portland, oregon, on september 9, 2008.
thank you. you've been listening to sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic dr. slavo jek, speaking at powell's city of books in portland, oregon, on a speaking tour for his latest book. violence. in a moment, we'll return to the question and answer session from the program. slavo jk's many books include in defense of lost causes. iraq. the borrowed kettle. enjoy your symptom. jacques lacan in hollywood and out. the parallax view. hand the sublime object of ideology. his work also includes the critically acclaimed documentary, a pervert's guide to cinema. and he is subject of two documentary films, jijek, the reality to the virtual, and more recently, gijac. and now we return to the question and answer session with slavo jek. the author spoke at powell's city of books in portland, oregon, on september 9, 2008.
Slavoj Žižek
you know? you know why it's nice to talk too long? because then with all hypocrisy i can say now i'm sorry we don't have more time for debate and so on. i would like to stay over the night.
you know? you know why it's nice to talk too long? because then with all hypocrisy i can say now i'm sorry we don't have more time for debate and so on. i would like to stay over the night.
Narrator
ah.
ah.
Slavoj Žižek
okay, so please, nonetheless, now we pretend for 10 minutes that we are in democracy. no, okay, let's do it. i warn you, some of you are philosophers, i like dialogue, but i like late plato's dialogues. you know how they look, late plato. one guy talks all the time. the other guy every 10 minutes just says something like, by zeus, yes, so it is, socrates. let's have a dialogue. please.
okay, so please, nonetheless, now we pretend for 10 minutes that we are in democracy. no, okay, let's do it. i warn you, some of you are philosophers, i like dialogue, but i like late plato's dialogues. you know how they look, late plato. one guy talks all the time. the other guy every 10 minutes just says something like, by zeus, yes, so it is, socrates. let's have a dialogue. please.
Host
so we have time for two questions.
so we have time for two questions.
Slavoj Žižek
let me be extremely generous three three no sorry let's see i will tell you when i'm collapsing let's see please.
let me be extremely generous three three no sorry let's see i will tell you when i'm collapsing let's see please.
Narrator
the first question referred back to the author's story about the man who was afraid he would be eaten by a chicken. and how that represented a fundamental truth about contemporary ideology. how do we get rid of this chicken? this audience member asked. do you have suggestions for strategies for confronting ideology today?
the first question referred back to the author's story about the man who was afraid he would be eaten by a chicken. and how that represented a fundamental truth about contemporary ideology. how do we get rid of this chicken? this audience member asked. do you have suggestions for strategies for confronting ideology today?
Slavoj Žižek
okay what i am tempted to say maybe it will sound problematic to you is maybe we just need a different chicken. like why get rid of the chicken at a certain level in our society you need a chicken by chicken i mean this how should i call it fundamental hypocrisy of language weak! maybe... this may sound almost conservative it you know what i mean by this i all the time emphas this this. elementary alienation of language, like let's say we meet, we are half-f friends, we are not yet, we met today, full french, okay. we meet on the street, i tell you, nice to see you, how are you? we both know that i probably don't mean it seriously. you even especially know that i don't mean seriously, how are you? if i were to mean it seriously, you would have been totally justified to tell me f3 points of like, who are you? it's none of your business. but you see my point. it is it is, how to put it, it's in a way a hypocrisy. but i cannot put it otherwise, it's a sincere hypocrisy. and this works. i'll give you an example which if you are a leftist may surprise you. okay it's not actual figure today but all and all i am fascinated how lenin in his last years his big motive against stalin, and it looks crazy for a tough guy like lenin was politeness. you remember what lenin's main argument to why we have to get rid of stalin is he doesn't behave in a polite way towards his colleague. he's a brutal guy. so you know, politeness, form, wasn't it your writer, i think kurt vonegat who said this very nicely, said, appearances are all we have. so we should be very careful with the appearances. my message here is that cynicism doesn't work. every cynic has, you know, cynics are very tragic. cynical positions is appearances are only appearances. you can manipulate them, but they always pay the price. so again, you know, what i would find more sympathetic is something opposite at this level. getting rid of the chicken would be too much of actor studio marlon brando for me, which i don't like. you know, this idea, let's drop the false forms, fully express yourself and so on. no, i like... something that i learned a friend told me an old guy who was a friend of jacques laccon himself he told me that there was something incredible about laccon as a person when you saw him in public he was playing a certain role, acting in a very artificial way and so on. he was playing a role. then of course the enigma was this, like the 19th strike of kim jong-il. what kind of a warm human person is there behind this mask? and the shock was when you met laccon in private, having dinner with him, going somewhere, was that there was nothing behind. he was exactly the same.
okay what i am tempted to say maybe it will sound problematic to you is maybe we just need a different chicken. like why get rid of the chicken at a certain level in our society you need a chicken by chicken i mean this how should i call it fundamental hypocrisy of language weak! maybe... this may sound almost conservative it you know what i mean by this i all the time emphas this this. elementary alienation of language, like let's say we meet, we are half-f friends, we are not yet, we met today, full french, okay. we meet on the street, i tell you, nice to see you, how are you? we both know that i probably don't mean it seriously. you even especially know that i don't mean seriously, how are you? if i were to mean it seriously, you would have been totally justified to tell me f3 points of like, who are you? it's none of your business. but you see my point. it is it is, how to put it, it's in a way a hypocrisy. but i cannot put it otherwise, it's a sincere hypocrisy. and this works. i'll give you an example which if you are a leftist may surprise you. okay it's not actual figure today but all and all i am fascinated how lenin in his last years his big motive against stalin, and it looks crazy for a tough guy like lenin was politeness. you remember what lenin's main argument to why we have to get rid of stalin is he doesn't behave in a polite way towards his colleague. he's a brutal guy. so you know, politeness, form, wasn't it your writer, i think kurt vonegat who said this very nicely, said, appearances are all we have. so we should be very careful with the appearances. my message here is that cynicism doesn't work. every cynic has, you know, cynics are very tragic. cynical positions is appearances are only appearances. you can manipulate them, but they always pay the price. so again, you know, what i would find more sympathetic is something opposite at this level. getting rid of the chicken would be too much of actor studio marlon brando for me, which i don't like. you know, this idea, let's drop the false forms, fully express yourself and so on. no, i like... something that i learned a friend told me an old guy who was a friend of jacques laccon himself he told me that there was something incredible about laccon as a person when you saw him in public he was playing a certain role, acting in a very artificial way and so on. he was playing a role. then of course the enigma was this, like the 19th strike of kim jong-il. what kind of a warm human person is there behind this mask? and the shock was when you met laccon in private, having dinner with him, going somewhere, was that there was nothing behind. he was exactly the same.
Host
thank.
thank.
Slavoj Žižek
this would be my type of a person,.
this would be my type of a person,.
Narrator
the next audience member said that the author had wonderfully denounced the notion of universal love. and then that he had gone on to say that when you choose one person and love them above everyone else, that you create a desirable violence of imbalance, and that this was how love is evil. would you elaborate on that?
the next audience member said that the author had wonderfully denounced the notion of universal love. and then that he had gone on to say that when you choose one person and love them above everyone else, that you create a desirable violence of imbalance, and that this was how love is evil. would you elaborate on that?
Slavoj Žižek
no no first with this universal love, i mean i may be changing my position terry eagleton with whom otherwise he is way too liberal for me i don't agree but he made a nice proposal when he and it's a beautiful idea to translate the christian agape not as some dissexualized spiritual shit but as political love. agape is for him the love which links together the christian agape as opposed to eros which binds together the emancipatory community. this is how i read christianity holy spirit means the party. okay, but what you said, what i mean is simply that isn't love, no, i mean it in a very naive way. what is passionate love? isn't it a moment of terrifying imbalance? something like, imagine you have your nice daily life, maybe you have some... some, how do you put it in vulgar terms, sex body, occasional sex, but nothing very disturbing. it goes on, you have drinks happy life, then you fall in love. it's a catastrophe. i mean, everything is totally destabilized. you think about that and so on and so on. in this sense, i claim, but i don't have time to go into it now, that no wonder that christianity is, from a standpoint of traditional pagan spirituality, the religion of of evil because the message of christ is radical balance. christianity is not this religion of re-establishing the balance it's the religion of a crazy cut imbalance christianity totally breaks with this idea which is why this idea came to me, did you see, it's a bad film, but interesting underlying ideology. did you see what was the phantom menace, the first. the fourth but the first in the series of star wars. you remember how there is a whole series of signs which make anakin, later darth vader, a christological figure. the redeemer, even when you see his mother, there are some hints that it was an immaculate conception. then you have those chariots or whatever with small spaceship rays, which is an obvious reference to ben-hur, a tale of christ. so i think that from george lucas basically, whatever you call it, gnostic, pseudo-buddhist standpoint,, he is right. from that standpoint, dart wader is a christian figure and christianity is evil sense which is why my dream would have been. to remake star wars but from a kind of a hard jacobin marxist popular dictatorship standpoint, so that it's the emperor, the seatith, the emperor and dark vader who are good centralizing progressive rulers, and all these jedi creeps are some kind of, you know, reactionary, small feudal resistance to progress and so on. i would love to do it the other way around. it's a good question you asked because i think here we atheists materialists can learn from really intelligent theologists really radical like for example kierkegaard who makes it very clear who totally in his maybe greatest work which strangely is not even written in pseudonym but the works of love he explicitly. he so radically desentimentalizes christian love. he said, a true sign of christian love is that you are ready to kill your neighbor out of love and all that stuff and so on and so on. it's a very... love for me is not sentimental love. true love is cold love. true love is cold without mercy. but okay, that's another topic. you you decide, i.
no no first with this universal love, i mean i may be changing my position terry eagleton with whom otherwise he is way too liberal for me i don't agree but he made a nice proposal when he and it's a beautiful idea to translate the christian agape not as some dissexualized spiritual shit but as political love. agape is for him the love which links together the christian agape as opposed to eros which binds together the emancipatory community. this is how i read christianity holy spirit means the party. okay, but what you said, what i mean is simply that isn't love, no, i mean it in a very naive way. what is passionate love? isn't it a moment of terrifying imbalance? something like, imagine you have your nice daily life, maybe you have some... some, how do you put it in vulgar terms, sex body, occasional sex, but nothing very disturbing. it goes on, you have drinks happy life, then you fall in love. it's a catastrophe. i mean, everything is totally destabilized. you think about that and so on and so on. in this sense, i claim, but i don't have time to go into it now, that no wonder that christianity is, from a standpoint of traditional pagan spirituality, the religion of of evil because the message of christ is radical balance. christianity is not this religion of re-establishing the balance it's the religion of a crazy cut imbalance christianity totally breaks with this idea which is why this idea came to me, did you see, it's a bad film, but interesting underlying ideology. did you see what was the phantom menace, the first. the fourth but the first in the series of star wars. you remember how there is a whole series of signs which make anakin, later darth vader, a christological figure. the redeemer, even when you see his mother, there are some hints that it was an immaculate conception. then you have those chariots or whatever with small spaceship rays, which is an obvious reference to ben-hur, a tale of christ. so i think that from george lucas basically, whatever you call it, gnostic, pseudo-buddhist standpoint,, he is right. from that standpoint, dart wader is a christian figure and christianity is evil sense which is why my dream would have been. to remake star wars but from a kind of a hard jacobin marxist popular dictatorship standpoint, so that it's the emperor, the seatith, the emperor and dark vader who are good centralizing progressive rulers, and all these jedi creeps are some kind of, you know, reactionary, small feudal resistance to progress and so on. i would love to do it the other way around. it's a good question you asked because i think here we atheists materialists can learn from really intelligent theologists really radical like for example kierkegaard who makes it very clear who totally in his maybe greatest work which strangely is not even written in pseudonym but the works of love he explicitly. he so radically desentimentalizes christian love. he said, a true sign of christian love is that you are ready to kill your neighbor out of love and all that stuff and so on and so on. it's a very... love for me is not sentimental love. true love is cold love. true love is cold without mercy. but okay, that's another topic. you you decide, i.
Narrator
the next audience member observed that perhaps politeness is a kind of trivial word for civilization. perhaps if we switch the chicken story so that the man is the chicken rather than the grain, you would understand civilization in a different way. in all of the author's examples, paradoxes aren't really paradoxes, and they seem central for civilization to exist. all of the paradoxes seem to be ones of content as actually separable entities, and they're winking and thus disarming. but the answer to paranoia, could it possibly be true paradox, something that seems contradictory, two things that seem absolutely contradictory, but nevertheless are two parts of the whole?
the next audience member observed that perhaps politeness is a kind of trivial word for civilization. perhaps if we switch the chicken story so that the man is the chicken rather than the grain, you would understand civilization in a different way. in all of the author's examples, paradoxes aren't really paradoxes, and they seem central for civilization to exist. all of the paradoxes seem to be ones of content as actually separable entities, and they're winking and thus disarming. but the answer to paranoia, could it possibly be true paradox, something that seems contradictory, two things that seem absolutely contradictory, but nevertheless are two parts of the whole?
Slavoj Žižek
if i got it correctly i tend to agree but. maybe i would just like to add another point which seems to me crucial. i don't have time. i didn't want to go into that direction today, but i'm well aware also of the fundamental ambiguity of politeness. i think that adorno in his minima moralia has a wonderful like one paragraph on politeness, how it can be kindness, but it can also be a moment of co. of distance, of brutality. i mean, we all know that. like when somebody approaches you in deep crisis, the best, most efficient way to cruelly dismiss him is to be superficially polite and so on and so on. so i am well aware how much more mixed the situation is i am well aware that at the same time that obscenities are in the service of those in power as the supplement of power and so on all the military dirty rituals dirty jokes and so on at the same time they can also play an incredibly important role progressive. good role. which is why, to shock my friends, when they ask me about racism, my usual answer is i love racism. i cannot imagine my life without racist jokes. but i tell them i'm an egalitarian consequent racist, which means racism against everybody. which means what? no, no i'm very personal here. look, in old yugoslavia, we had racist jokes like crazy. all about each nation was identified with a certain clichliche, you know, we slovenes were misers, montenegro were lazy and so on and so on. but these jokes didn't function as racist in the sense of humiliating others. on the contrary, we were mostly telling these jokes about ourselves to others. like, i met my montegr friend, i told him the last jokes about slovenes. he told and this, far from functioning in a racist way, rather, how should i call it an exchange of obscenities. whose function was to guarantee to put it in very naive terms authentic communication the message was now we are really close it's not just this disgusting politically correct like, for example, if i were to visit you here, isn't it clear that as long as i would stay at this disgusting level of what interesting culture do you have here? show me your museums, your paintings this is this is patronizing, but you tell me a dirty jokes, we communicate, we are there. it has to be and let me tell you another, i think it's one of my less known books, i can tell it to you, stories which makes this point at its pure level. i was in the army. i i became very friendly with an albanian soldier and... but then we wanted to break the ice to signal to each other that we really are friends so one morning he approached me and told me. i'll screw f. okay, your mother. uh. i knew what this meant. he was offering me true friendship.
if i got it correctly i tend to agree but. maybe i would just like to add another point which seems to me crucial. i don't have time. i didn't want to go into that direction today, but i'm well aware also of the fundamental ambiguity of politeness. i think that adorno in his minima moralia has a wonderful like one paragraph on politeness, how it can be kindness, but it can also be a moment of co. of distance, of brutality. i mean, we all know that. like when somebody approaches you in deep crisis, the best, most efficient way to cruelly dismiss him is to be superficially polite and so on and so on. so i am well aware how much more mixed the situation is i am well aware that at the same time that obscenities are in the service of those in power as the supplement of power and so on all the military dirty rituals dirty jokes and so on at the same time they can also play an incredibly important role progressive. good role. which is why, to shock my friends, when they ask me about racism, my usual answer is i love racism. i cannot imagine my life without racist jokes. but i tell them i'm an egalitarian consequent racist, which means racism against everybody. which means what? no, no i'm very personal here. look, in old yugoslavia, we had racist jokes like crazy. all about each nation was identified with a certain clichliche, you know, we slovenes were misers, montenegro were lazy and so on and so on. but these jokes didn't function as racist in the sense of humiliating others. on the contrary, we were mostly telling these jokes about ourselves to others. like, i met my montegr friend, i told him the last jokes about slovenes. he told and this, far from functioning in a racist way, rather, how should i call it an exchange of obscenities. whose function was to guarantee to put it in very naive terms authentic communication the message was now we are really close it's not just this disgusting politically correct like, for example, if i were to visit you here, isn't it clear that as long as i would stay at this disgusting level of what interesting culture do you have here? show me your museums, your paintings this is this is patronizing, but you tell me a dirty jokes, we communicate, we are there. it has to be and let me tell you another, i think it's one of my less known books, i can tell it to you, stories which makes this point at its pure level. i was in the army. i i became very friendly with an albanian soldier and... but then we wanted to break the ice to signal to each other that we really are friends so one morning he approached me and told me. i'll screw f. okay, your mother. uh. i knew what this meant. he was offering me true friendship.
Narrator
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Slavoj Žižek
i knew what he expected of me to return in a kind. believe me, i didn't have a problem. i immediately answered him, go on after i finish with your sister. and and then this was it. by this i mean that from that on we were friends and then we stopped talking dirty like this. the only remainder of this was that every morning till the end of the military service, when we met each other, instead of the usual hello, good morning, whatever. we just said the words, mother, sister. but we even didn't laugh. it was totally without humor. it was just a kind of a token, now we are friends. now i will be a good boy and tell you i am well aware of the price we paid ideological price first obviously this is sexpekt. the ritual was, of course, only symbolic. we didn't really do... but the idea was to humorously enact, you know, boys exchanging girls, men exchanging women. i'm aware of this. so the least i can say is, i would like to see two of you meeting, you know, screw my husband nice after i finish with your brother or something like this. it would at least establish the balance. okay. second thing is the question of authority. i mean, this was, possible because we were both ordinary soldiers. i mean like you don't go to an officer and tell him screw your mother better not no which is why i hate today's today's post-authoritarian capitalism where bosses, they are called today, not even, they don't like to be called bosses, they are managers, coordinators and so on, like to treat you as equals, you know, they tell you dirty jokes and so on. why i find this so horrible? because we all know that they still keep all the power. but by at the same time, behaving friendly towards you, they block much more efficiently all criticism. you cannot even protest. they can be hurt, my god, we are french, how can you talk like that and so on. and so on. so, okay, back to you. i agree with your point here. i vaguely know, but i don't want to go too far today. it was a very nice point that i totally agree with you, that what i was describing is just a kind of a complementary functioning of two levels, which is not really a contradiction at all. and i like your point, which is that to break out of this, it's not so much that we have to, i don't know, drop the appearance and be just consistent. it's an even more radical true contradiction. maybe this is how i would interpret what i described to you as how lacon acts. there is no duality there. he's just in private life the same totally affect disgusting artificial monster as in public life that's absolute that's pure contradiction in contrast to all in contrast to all these games you play how to put it this is why. i wonder if you agree with me. maybe it's my... eurocentric spontaneous racism but this is the paradox i find spontaneously in guys this new age who enter some kind of shitty meditation whatever and then they claim be calm now, you see i'm no longer caught in this artificial map. world of i'm at peace at myself but they talk like automataton, like doll, you know, like at the very point when they pretend to be purely themselves, no longer alienated and so on, they appear puppets to me. so you need absolute contradiction. yes, absolute contradiction is for me another name of subjectivity but okay. maybe. no, one more, one more., because i noticed your tendency of privileging the right. there was a centrist question and a leftist question. let's do this and then i end.
i knew what he expected of me to return in a kind. believe me, i didn't have a problem. i immediately answered him, go on after i finish with your sister. and and then this was it. by this i mean that from that on we were friends and then we stopped talking dirty like this. the only remainder of this was that every morning till the end of the military service, when we met each other, instead of the usual hello, good morning, whatever. we just said the words, mother, sister. but we even didn't laugh. it was totally without humor. it was just a kind of a token, now we are friends. now i will be a good boy and tell you i am well aware of the price we paid ideological price first obviously this is sexpekt. the ritual was, of course, only symbolic. we didn't really do... but the idea was to humorously enact, you know, boys exchanging girls, men exchanging women. i'm aware of this. so the least i can say is, i would like to see two of you meeting, you know, screw my husband nice after i finish with your brother or something like this. it would at least establish the balance. okay. second thing is the question of authority. i mean, this was, possible because we were both ordinary soldiers. i mean like you don't go to an officer and tell him screw your mother better not no which is why i hate today's today's post-authoritarian capitalism where bosses, they are called today, not even, they don't like to be called bosses, they are managers, coordinators and so on, like to treat you as equals, you know, they tell you dirty jokes and so on. why i find this so horrible? because we all know that they still keep all the power. but by at the same time, behaving friendly towards you, they block much more efficiently all criticism. you cannot even protest. they can be hurt, my god, we are french, how can you talk like that and so on. and so on. so, okay, back to you. i agree with your point here. i vaguely know, but i don't want to go too far today. it was a very nice point that i totally agree with you, that what i was describing is just a kind of a complementary functioning of two levels, which is not really a contradiction at all. and i like your point, which is that to break out of this, it's not so much that we have to, i don't know, drop the appearance and be just consistent. it's an even more radical true contradiction. maybe this is how i would interpret what i described to you as how lacon acts. there is no duality there. he's just in private life the same totally affect disgusting artificial monster as in public life that's absolute that's pure contradiction in contrast to all in contrast to all these games you play how to put it this is why. i wonder if you agree with me. maybe it's my... eurocentric spontaneous racism but this is the paradox i find spontaneously in guys this new age who enter some kind of shitty meditation whatever and then they claim be calm now, you see i'm no longer caught in this artificial map. world of i'm at peace at myself but they talk like automataton, like doll, you know, like at the very point when they pretend to be purely themselves, no longer alienated and so on, they appear puppets to me. so you need absolute contradiction. yes, absolute contradiction is for me another name of subjectivity but okay. maybe. no, one more, one more., because i noticed your tendency of privileging the right. there was a centrist question and a leftist question. let's do this and then i end.
Narrator
the next question referred back to the author's discussion of the clash of civilizations and so-called fundamentalism. obviously, this audience member observed, a lot of what passes for fundamentalism in our discourse about various sorts of conflicts today doesn't seem to actually be fundamentalism. this member of the audience asked what the author thought true and authentic fundamentalism looks like and what role it plays.
the next question referred back to the author's discussion of the clash of civilizations and so-called fundamentalism. obviously, this audience member observed, a lot of what passes for fundamentalism in our discourse about various sorts of conflicts today doesn't seem to actually be fundamentalism. this member of the audience asked what the author thought true and authentic fundamentalism looks like and what role it plays.
Slavoj Žižek
this is this is such a nice question that i suspect almost that you read some of my work and know what will be the answer, which is that i'm in total sympathy with true authentic fundamentalism. let's take amish in the united states. i have no illusions about them. i mean, they have the highest family rape percentage. but nonetheless, i met some of them. you know what's the key feature? fake fundamentalists are caught in envy. for them, what liberals are doing, them orgies and so on, so the perfect figure of faith fundamentalism for me is my favorite disgusting creature i will not call him human you remember that old preacher jimmy swaggart who was first attacking jim baker then when he was caught visiting a prostitute. you know what his justification? this totally disgusting of i'm fighting evil, so i've got to know evil to fight it more efficiently. but the point is this absolute fascination, you know, what goes on them? what are jews, liberals, blacks, what are they doing? what i found so nice with amish, with all their imperfections, i'm not idealizing them, is that they were genuinely amused and friendly without evil towards the englishmen. they just thought, okay, they didn't find their way, they are probably less happy than us, but let them leave. no absolutely no envy. and although i am, as some of you may know, extremely, very critical of dalai lama and of all this western buddhism stuff, the tibetans that i met, nonetheless met, nonetheless made a good impression on me. because i encountered the same phenomenon. they don't envy us. their vision is not, oh, i pretend to be this sacred monk, but secretly i'm bothered. what are you doing? you know, no, it's just this benevolent indifference. and from one of them, i got a wonderfully correct remark where he told me that in your fascination with our buddhism, you do something which is totally alien to our culture. us as being far away we are for you kind of you know that lost secret up there secret place which you have to travel suffering and he told me this idea of a dangerous voyage to truth is foreign to them the basic buddhist insight is that you don't have to travel it's all here you don't have to move we are imposing on it a totally different narrative so in this sense to be concrete my god i mean true. fundamentalists like amish. you know that they were very much against vietnam war, they're usually very peaceful, very critical, they're almost dissidents and so on. i'm in no way at all afraid of them. so it's very important to show as what the you called her, i think she deserves the title delayed lady before when she told me about this simple, not true contradiction. that's for me the problem with fake fundamentalism. take our beloved guy like jimmy swger, jim baker and other younger the problem is not that they are fundamentalists. the problem is that the way they deliver, articulate their message undermines the message. the message is, you know, liberal pleasures, sonism, ego trip, no, there is something more. but the way they appear and act is one big ego trip. they are effectively changing religion into one more narcissistic hedonist ego trip. they are the greatest hedonists. so, another lesson from this. when you hear about family values or all this motive, i think the left should not determine or allow the enemy the opponent to determine the field the terms of the debate. the reaction of family values should not be yeah okay family is good but what about gay marriages and so on of course i'm for gay marriages but the reply of the left should be who are you to talk about family values reganomics your economic policy has more ruined more family and community life than all the leftist attacks on morality what they call together and so on and so on don't allow the enemy to determine the field of struggle. okay. thank you.
this is this is such a nice question that i suspect almost that you read some of my work and know what will be the answer, which is that i'm in total sympathy with true authentic fundamentalism. let's take amish in the united states. i have no illusions about them. i mean, they have the highest family rape percentage. but nonetheless, i met some of them. you know what's the key feature? fake fundamentalists are caught in envy. for them, what liberals are doing, them orgies and so on, so the perfect figure of faith fundamentalism for me is my favorite disgusting creature i will not call him human you remember that old preacher jimmy swaggart who was first attacking jim baker then when he was caught visiting a prostitute. you know what his justification? this totally disgusting of i'm fighting evil, so i've got to know evil to fight it more efficiently. but the point is this absolute fascination, you know, what goes on them? what are jews, liberals, blacks, what are they doing? what i found so nice with amish, with all their imperfections, i'm not idealizing them, is that they were genuinely amused and friendly without evil towards the englishmen. they just thought, okay, they didn't find their way, they are probably less happy than us, but let them leave. no absolutely no envy. and although i am, as some of you may know, extremely, very critical of dalai lama and of all this western buddhism stuff, the tibetans that i met, nonetheless met, nonetheless made a good impression on me. because i encountered the same phenomenon. they don't envy us. their vision is not, oh, i pretend to be this sacred monk, but secretly i'm bothered. what are you doing? you know, no, it's just this benevolent indifference. and from one of them, i got a wonderfully correct remark where he told me that in your fascination with our buddhism, you do something which is totally alien to our culture. us as being far away we are for you kind of you know that lost secret up there secret place which you have to travel suffering and he told me this idea of a dangerous voyage to truth is foreign to them the basic buddhist insight is that you don't have to travel it's all here you don't have to move we are imposing on it a totally different narrative so in this sense to be concrete my god i mean true. fundamentalists like amish. you know that they were very much against vietnam war, they're usually very peaceful, very critical, they're almost dissidents and so on. i'm in no way at all afraid of them. so it's very important to show as what the you called her, i think she deserves the title delayed lady before when she told me about this simple, not true contradiction. that's for me the problem with fake fundamentalism. take our beloved guy like jimmy swger, jim baker and other younger the problem is not that they are fundamentalists. the problem is that the way they deliver, articulate their message undermines the message. the message is, you know, liberal pleasures, sonism, ego trip, no, there is something more. but the way they appear and act is one big ego trip. they are effectively changing religion into one more narcissistic hedonist ego trip. they are the greatest hedonists. so, another lesson from this. when you hear about family values or all this motive, i think the left should not determine or allow the enemy the opponent to determine the field the terms of the debate. the reaction of family values should not be yeah okay family is good but what about gay marriages and so on of course i'm for gay marriages but the reply of the left should be who are you to talk about family values reganomics your economic policy has more ruined more family and community life than all the leftist attacks on morality what they call together and so on and so on don't allow the enemy to determine the field of struggle. okay. thank you.
Narrator
you've been listening to sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic dr. slavo zek speaking at powell's city of books in portland, oregon, on a speaking tour for his latest book, violence. this program was produced by pdx justice media productions. for more information about this and our many other video and audio programs, please visit our website at www.pxjustice.org. you'll find streaming video and audio programs featuring such speakers as jonathan koozal, susan faludi, amira haas, noam chomsky, jonathan cook, and many others. thanks for tuning in. and thanks for supporting listener-sponsored radio, public access cable television, net neutrality, independent bookstores, and all forms of grassroots, democratic, community media.
you've been listening to sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic dr. slavo zek speaking at powell's city of books in portland, oregon, on a speaking tour for his latest book, violence. this program was produced by pdx justice media productions. for more information about this and our many other video and audio programs, please visit our website at www.pxjustice.org. you'll find streaming video and audio programs featuring such speakers as jonathan koozal, susan faludi, amira haas, noam chomsky, jonathan cook, and many others. thanks for tuning in. and thanks for supporting listener-sponsored radio, public access cable television, net neutrality, independent bookstores, and all forms of grassroots, democratic, community media.