Negativity in Materialist Theology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-07-06 · 1:28:26 · 11,529 words
liberalism-political-correctnessideologydemocracycapitalismgeopolitics-warpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismrace-antisemitismreligion-theologyeconomicssubjectivityethicseveryday-life
A wide-ranging Cambridge lecture in which Žižek argues that liberal tolerance is inherently inconsistent: any genuinely open society must maintain contingent, dogmatic prohibitions that inevitably encroach on particular ways of life. He moves from the limits of multiculturalism and trigger-warning culture, through the Western role in producing refugee crises, to the Greek debt crisis and Syriza's confrontation with 'the Real of capital', concluding with brief previews on China's internal contradictions and the Heidegger Black Notebooks controversy.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “ethical dogmatism”
Žižek's positive reappropriation of dogmatic moral prohibitions (e.g. on rape) as necessary markers of civilisation that cannot be grounded in neutral universal reason.
His phrase for the insulated, protected existence sought by the privileged classes who consume horror at a safe mediated distance through charity and media while avoiding direct encounter.
as “self-reflection (Hegelian)”
The Hegelian move of including oneself in the picture of the totality; used to argue that Western countries must recognise their own role in producing the refugee crisis rather than merely debating whether to admit refugees.
Hegel's figure of the subject who deplores the state of the world while refusing to acknowledge its own complicity in producing that state; here applied to left-liberal humanitarian rhetoric about refugees.
The symbolic order whose recognition is required for an act to be meaningful; invoked to explain why self-marriage still requires witnesses and formal ritual.
Drawing on Lacan's reading of the biblical commandment, Žižek argues that one's true 'neighbor' is oneself as an impenetrable foreign body, loving others is a way of escaping the horror of self-proximity.
The Hegelian movement by which a thing is internally split from itself; used to argue that the self is not immediately one with itself, as illustrated by the self-marriage example.
The assumption of human superiority over other species; invoked satirically to push liberal logic about marriage to its absurd limit.
The perverse libidinal investment a subject has in its own oppressive situation, which complicates any straightforward attempt to 'rescue' it.
Žižek's label for the film tradition (Searchers, Taxi Driver) that shows the rescuer's violence emerging from his own libidinal obsession rather than the victim's genuine need.
as “trigger warning culture”
Žižek's label for the politically correct demand to protect individuals from traumatic content even in fiction, which he diagnoses as a class privilege of the wealthy and a symptom of growing real-world brutality.
His diagnosis that the Greek debt negotiations failed not on numbers but because the two sides were operating in entirely different political languages: technocratic administration versus fundamental politico-economic choice.
Žižek's borrowed phrase for the European Union's strategy of rolling over Greek debt while knowing it can never be repaid, maintaining a fiction of solvency.
as “the Real of capital”
The inescapable, quasi-objective constraint that capitalist economic reality imposes on any democratic government that tries to challenge it, regardless of electoral mandate.
A wordplay on Athens' Syntagma Square implying the need to shift from protest to a new political paradigm of everyday organisation.
Žižek uses the official Chinese slogan ironically to point out that the 'Chinese characteristic' is in fact global capitalism, a Hegelian inversion of the stated content.
Althusserian concept of ideological hailing; present in the background of Žižek's analysis of how individuals are positioned within liberal tolerance discourse.
Hegelian sublation/cancellation-and-preservation; implicit in the structure of Žižek's dialectical reversals throughout the talk.
The perverse enjoyment found in a situation (e.g. the rape victim scenario, the exploited subject) that the rescuer's intervention misrecognises or cannot simply remove.
The elusive object-cause of desire; implicit in the discussion of what the subject really seeks when turning toward others to escape the horror within itself.
Stories he reaches for 6
Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see Part Two of V for Vendetta showing what happens the day after the crowd takes Parliament, how do they organise daily life? This is the real political question that the left perpetually evades.
“I would sell my mother into slavery to see part two of that movie. What happens then the next day? How do they organize life?”
A young Roma girl in Slovenia escaped her community claiming she faced a prearranged marriage; multicultural feminists demanded her protection, but the Roma leader replied that arranged marriages are constitutive of their community's existence and that prohibiting them ends multiculturalism itself.
“okay, you prohibit this then don't talk about multiculturalism. Then in one, two generations we cease to exist.”
Oil was discovered in the Muslim northeast of Central African Republic. France, despite its anti-fundamentalist rhetoric, made a deal with the Muslim minority, staged a 'primordial ethnic rebellion', allowed Muslims to occupy the capital, then intervened militarily to protect their oil interests. Alain Badiou could only find this reported in the right-wing weekly Le Point.
“France, the great fighter against Muslim fundamentalism, made a deal with Muslims there and basically staged that primordial ethnic rebellion.”
Hundreds of thousands of workers from Nepal, Indonesia etc. in the UAE have their passports confiscated, work for minimal pay, and are formally barred from public city spaces, not formal slaves but de facto slaves, a new form of apartheid existing alongside global human rights discourse.
“their passports are taken, they work for absolutely miserable sums... formally they are not allowed to enter the public space the city”
Male chauvinists use a rape survivor's inconsistent testimony as evidence against her; Žižek inverts this: inconsistency is precisely a marker that the trauma was real, while a perfectly coherent, cold account would be the suspicious one (suggesting a psychotic dissociation).
“if anything such inconsistencies are a subjective proof that she really underwent a trauma”
Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni, frustrated with clumsy German assistants at a Schiller festival, shouted that such incompetence would have prevented the Holocaust. Žižek joined in with an even more provocative remark. The Germans' perplexed inability to laugh proved they were sincere but occupying an unclear moral position.
“we were practicing actual anti-racism with all our vulgarity”
Works invoked 9
V for Vendetta film
Used to raise the question of what happens after revolutionary victory; Žižek says he'd do anything to see a Part Two showing day-after organisation, the film's ending is deployed to expose the left's failure to think beyond the moment of rupture.
Personally finds the creature repellent ('the moment I see E.T. I became a Nazi I want to squash it'); intellectually deployed as an early symptom of politically correct censorship via its Scandinavian ban.
The Searchers film
Paired with Taxi Driver as part of the 'great American narrative' of self-critique; John Ford's film deployed to illustrate the rescuer's problematic libidinal investment.
Taxi Driver film
Part of what Žižek calls the 'great American narrative', an intellectual self-critique film showing how the rescuer's violence stems from his own libidinal obsession; used to illustrate the ambiguity of permissiveness.
Listed among canonical works containing racism/sexism/violence as examples of where trigger-warning logic would lead to widespread literary censorship.
Charlie Hebdo journal
Used as a case study to argue that even satirical journals celebrated for their freedom have their own unacknowledged prohibitions; Žižek is interested in the limits of their freedom, not just the freedom itself.
Metamorphoses book
Ovid's Metamorphoses used as the Columbia trigger-warning case study; Žižek deploys it to illustrate the absurdity of applying safe-space logic to canonical literature.
Heart of Darkness book
Conrad's novella referenced to characterise the DRC as a 'Conrad-type heart of darkness' that is simultaneously integrated into Western economic exploitation.
Announced as the topic for the following day's lecture; Žižek plans to defend Heidegger against the political use of the Notebooks scandal by Habermasian liberals.
People invoked 22
Udi Aloni positive
Described as 'the crazy Israeli movie maker' and a friend; Žižek recounts the Holocaust joke episode at the Schiller festival with evident affectionate amusement.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem negative
Described as 'that Dutch idiot' and 'a local agricultural expert totally idiot'; criticised for explicitly refusing to engage with the ideological dimension of the negotiations, embodying the technocratic reduction of politics.
René Girard positive
Cited approvingly for the insight that the sacred is always linked to horror and that sacrifice is at the foundation of the sacred.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited approvingly for his reading of 'love thy neighbor as thyself', the true neighbor is oneself as an impenetrable foreigner; also invoked for the Lacanian-Marxist concept of the Real of capital.
George W. Bush negative
Blamed for the Iraqi and Middle Eastern refugee wave by attacking Iraq; his suggestion to 'help them in Africa' dismissed as insufficient.
Judith Butler negative
Criticised for prioritising anti-Muslim racism over gay rights in the Berlin medal controversy, described as having 'gone a little bit too far'.
Mentioned in passing as 'a big idiot, even more than Goethe', a throwaway aesthetic dismissal.
Robin Blackburn positive
Cited approvingly (despite political disagreements) for his analysis of how capitalist modernity paradoxically revived slavery at the very moment it proclaimed freedom and human rights.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my friend' who drew Žižek's attention to the suppressed reporting on oil in the Central African Republic conflict; cited as a research collaborator.
Mentioned in the context of Varoufakis's resignation and the possibility that Tsipras may move toward Grexit with a more compliant finance minister.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Ironically called 'my colleague philosopher'; blamed for convincing Sarkozy to attack Libya, thereby creating the Libyan refugee crisis.
Nicolas Sarkozy negative
Mentioned as the French president convinced by Bernard-Henri Lévy to attack Libya.
Cited alongside Mandela as an example of the pattern of left hope followed by compromise with capital; also mentioned for the favela improvement programme in Brazil.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Žižek describes him as 'the only true intellectual' among the Greek negotiators; quotes him directly on the 'extend and pretend' formula and on the EU's dreamland economics; laments his resignation.
Described as 'total scum' personally for his Nazism, but Žižek intends to defend him in the following lecture against the Habermasian liberal attack on radical French theory via the Black Notebooks scandal.
Referred to as a friend ('I hate him in a friendly way'); criticised for using Žižek's Rabinovich joke without crediting him and for using the term 'hysteresis' to describe Greek strategy in a way Žižek found demoralising.
Mao Zedong positive
Cited for the maxim 'whatever you do, cling to power', used approvingly as tactical advice for Syriza.
Jürgen Habermas negative
The Heidegger Black Notebooks attack is characterised as the latest stage in the 'Habermasian rational Enlightenment liberal campaign' against Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida.
Cited as an example of the pattern where an authentic democratic government is elected with great hope but ultimately must make a deal with capital.
Joseph Conrad positive
Congo described as a 'Conrad-type heart of darkness', reference used to characterise the extreme dystopian condition of the DRC.
Provocatively suggested as a model for Syriza in terms of penetrating the state apparatus and laying organisational foundations, used as a tactical, not moral, reference.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the concepts of the beautiful soul, self-reflection, and negativity; also noted approvingly in the self-marriage discussion (the gap within selfhood as a Hegelian insight).
What it argues
the internal contradictions of liberal tolerancetrigger warnings and the 'safe space' ideology as class privilegeWestern economic imperialism as the root cause of the refugee crisisthe Real of capital and the limits of left-wing governmentsGreek debt crisis and Syriza's political deadlockself-marriage and the horror of self-knowledgereturning slavery under global capitalism
Dialectical moves 13
“The very growing sensitivity to being traumatized and hurt is just the obverse of a growing brutality out there.”
Trigger-warning culture and real-world violence are not opposites but two faces of the same phenomenon: the cocooned sensitivity of the privileged is sustained by and masks increasing global brutality.
“Charity is fundamentally ambiguous — charity is the way to keep the horror at a distance.”
What presents itself as moral concern for distant suffering is actually the mechanism that prevents genuine engagement with its structural causes.
“If you want to be really tolerant you have to develop such a universe of breathtaking prohibitions.”
Tolerance, pushed to its logical conclusion, requires an expanding regime of intolerance; permissiveness and prohibition are not opposites but co-constitutive.
“We are not living out here and then the choice should we stop them to enter or should we oh gracious give European openness — we should begin by asking ourselves in what way we are responsible for what is happening there.”
The refugee debate is falsely framed as a question of European generosity vs. closure; the real question is Western complicity in producing the crisis.
“Sacred is always linked to horror. There is no sacred without horror. Sacred is a mask of horror.”
The sacred does not transcend violence but conceals it; invoking the sacred to protect religion from criticism only confirms Girard's point that the sacred is constitutively tied to sacrificial horror.
“The true neighbor is to yourself — you yourself. Neighbor in the sense of the foreigner which is impenetrable to you.”
The biblical commandment 'love thy neighbor as thyself' is inverted: the most uncanny, impenetrable stranger is not the other but oneself; the self is one's own neighbor.
“Turning to others, loving others, is just an escape from yourself — and it is, but why not? It's the only good thing that we can do.”
What is usually disparaged as fleeing oneself is revalued as the only liveable response to the horror one finds at the core of the self.
“Relaxed self-identification, self-acceptance, imperceptibly turns into radical self-alienation.”
The New Age project of accepting and loving oneself produces its own opposite: by identifying with an idealised image of oneself one becomes radically alienated from what one actually is.
“It's not Greece which is living in dreamland — it is the European Union.”
The standard accusation that Greece is unrealistic is inverted: it is the EU technocrats who maintain the fantasy that austerity will generate repayment of a debt that mathematically cannot be repaid.
“Even if they are very modest demands of moderate social democracy, they are a threat to the system — and this is the horror and which at the same time gives us hope.”
The fact that the mildest Keynesian proposals appear radical confirms that the system cannot accommodate even minimum reform, which paradoxically signals that change is necessary and possible.
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics — and what is this Chinese characteristic? Global capitalism.”
China's official self-description as socialist is exactly inverted by its actual content; the 'characteristic' that differentiates Chinese socialism is capitalism itself.
“You should not believe too much even in communism — because the true danger for them are communists who still believe in communism.”
The Chinese Communist Party's atheism campaign paradoxically targets not just religion but sincere communist belief, revealing that ideological fidelity itself has become the system's enemy.
“The prohibition to tell something protects us from the fact that you cannot tell it. We are not afraid that we would have learned too much, but that we cannot do it.”
The social prohibition on hearing trauma narratives in full is not about protecting listeners from excess knowledge but about warding off the recognition that traumatic experience is fundamentally non-narratable.
Claims 21
asserts
No society can be organised on a purely neutral universal tolerance; any set of universal rights will inevitably encroach on some particular way of life.liberal multiculturalism and tolerance
asserts
The idea that individuals should be protected from traumatic experiences even in fiction (trigger warnings, safe spaces) is structurally the strategy of the privileged classes, not of victims.trigger warning culture and political correctness
asserts
The task of the teacher is not to make students feel safe but on the contrary to force them to confront the horrors that exist in the world.pedagogy and political correctness
asserts
People who feel hurt are not automatically right; the feeling of being hurt does not in itself constitute a moral claim.victim politics and moral authority
asserts
The growing sensitivity to trauma and triggering in Western developed countries is the direct obverse of growing real-world brutality, not a sign of progress.the relation between trigger culture and real violence
asserts
All the major refugee hotspots were created directly by Western military or economic interventions.the causes of the European refugee crisis
rejects
The left-liberal humanitarian response to the refugee crisis — deploring European heartlessness while knowing open borders are unworkable — is hypocritical, a 'beautiful soul' position.left-liberal humanitarianism on refugees
asserts
De facto slavery is massively returning under global capitalism despite the proliferation of human rights discourse.global capitalism and slavery
asserts
The Greek debt crisis is not a technical financial disagreement but a fundamental political conflict between technocratic administration and genuine democratic politics.the Greek debt crisis and European technocracy
asserts
What Syriza was demanding amounts to nothing more than modest social democracy of the kind that would have been mainstream fifty years ago; the fact that it appears radical shows how far the centre has shifted.Syriza and the current political horizon
asserts
European debt, like US debt, will simply never be repaid; the policy of 'extend and pretend' is a fiction everyone knows to be false.sovereign debt and global financial system
asserts
A left government, once in power, should cling to power and make necessary compromises while quietly working to transform the state apparatus, rather than resigning on principle.left-wing political strategy
asserts
It may be impossible for any single national government to undermine the rule of capital at a local level.the limits of left-wing governments
asserts
Loving others is ultimately a way of escaping the horror one discovers when looking deep into oneself; the self, when truly examined, is not something one can easily accept.love, self-knowledge, and psychoanalysis
reframes
The prohibition on telling traumatic experience in full detail protects us not from knowing too much but from confronting the impossibility of telling it all — trauma cannot be fully narrated.trauma, testimony, and prohibition
asserts
Sacred texts themselves, including the Bible and the Quran, would be the first to be prohibited under any rigorous blasphemy law, since they contain the most explicit incitements to violence.blasphemy laws and religious tolerance
asserts
The Chinese infrastructure deal with Congo was the only viable path to making Congo a functioning state, and its sabotage by Western-backed warlords is the true reason Congo remains a catastrophe.Congo, China, and Western economic imperialism
asserts
Aggressive Islamism, wherever it appears (ISIS, Northern Africa, Syria, Iraq), is fundamentally an oil phenomenon, not a product of religious fanaticism.Islamism and resource geopolitics
asserts
Charity is fundamentally ambiguous because it is a way of keeping horror at a distance rather than addressing its structural causes.charity and ideology
rejects
Judith Butler went too far in prioritising anti-Muslim racism over gay rights in the Berlin medal controversy.Judith Butler's position on Islamophobia vs. gay rights
asserts
The real threat in China today is not Tibetan separatism or Western human rights concerns but the potential alliance between old communist cadres and marginalised workers.China's internal political contradictions
Quotes 15
“I don't think you should feel safe in the classroom. I think on the contrary my task as a teacher is not to make you feel safe, if anything on the contrary. To make you feel unsafe.”Slavoj Žižek · pedagogy against safe-space ideology
“Human life itself is triggering. Triggering in the sense that it always shocks you, unsettles you.”Slavoj Žižek · the absurdity of trigger warning logic taken to its conclusion
“People get hurt but they are not automatically right if they feel hurt.”Slavoj Žižek · the limits of victim politics
“Sacred is always linked to horror. There is no sacred without horror. Sacred is a mask of horror.”Slavoj Žižek · Girardian insight on the sacred and violence
“As Lacan put it very nicely, the true neighbor is to yourself — you yourself. Neighbor in the sense of the foreigner which is impenetrable to you.”Slavoj Žižek · the self as one's own uncanny neighbor
“Turning towards others, loving others, is just an escape from yourself — and it is, but why not? It's the only good thing that we can do.”Slavoj Žižek · love as productive escape from self-horror
“There is the Real of the capital. It's this eternal story — a democratic government popular authentic is elected and then ultimately you have to make a deal with capital. Capital is serious real.”Slavoj Žižek · the Real of capital as limit on democratic governance
“Where are we now where in order to practice modest social democracy you appear as a radical leftist.”Slavoj Žižek · the rightward shift of the political horizon
“Even such modest demands are radical. They are a threat to the system. I think this is the horror and which at the same time gives us hope.”Slavoj Žižek · the system's inability to absorb even minimal reform as a sign of its fragility
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics — and what is this Chinese characteristic? Global capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic Hegelian reversal of Chinese official ideology
“The true danger for them now are communists who still believe in communism.”Slavoj Žižek · the Chinese Communist Party's fear of sincere communist belief
“I would sell my mother into slavery to see part two of that movie [V for Vendetta]. What happens then the next day? How do they organize life?”Slavoj Žižek · the left's failure to think the day after revolution
“It's not simply that some rich bankers are getting rich while others are in debt. There is even a class hierarchy between indebted countries themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · the hierarchical structure of global debt
“You cannot live in this safe cocoon universe and just be taught from a safe distance about horrors going on out there.”Slavoj Žižek · the impossibility of learning about horror from safety
“If I preach tolerance, we should be open blah blah, then of course I have to be intolerant towards intolerance.”Slavoj Žižek · the self-undermining logic of tolerance
Transcript 14 turns
unknown
What I’m claiming here is that
What I’m claiming here is that
Slavoj Žižek
not that again we can simply become should raise our tolerance and so on and so forth. It’s something first I want to claim is that every society is based on some things which are impossible to support. And I reject this logic of oh, but we must widen the circle. No, at certain levels we must even narrow the circle of what is permitted. For example, classical example, rape. In many countries it’s not considered such an horror as rape. But in our societies it is. And probably if you were to mockingly make fun of some victim of rape or defend not openly, but you know in this disgusting, sneering way, some foolish way, who knows, maybe the bitch enjoyed it a little bit too much, you would have been isolated, excluded. And it’s not it’s very dogmatic. And I say why not? Maybe this is even one of the measures of civilization, how how elevated this let’s call it ethical dogmatic approach is. And I found this quite good. So what I want to say is that first this is again what annoys me when people see in these satirical newspapers Charlie Hebdo and so on only this oh, freedom, we make fun of everything. No, look just at the limits of this freedom and our prohibitions. And again, I am not opposed to it. I’m just saying that we cannot afford it’s unworkable. The simple idea of okay, enjoy your freedoms but don’t mess with other people’s lives. The moment we live in an open global society like today, this is unworkable. Let’s say another, I’m sorry if I repeat an old example that probably most of you know it, but let’s see what happened in my own country Slovenia. Roma, the gypsies community had a problem some five years ago. A lady, not a lady, a young girl escaped from them claiming they want her parents already sold her in advance a prearranged marriage and so on. And then all the multicultural feminists exploded in rage, of course, you should give her protection and so on. But then a leader of the Roma community says wait a minute, where is your multiculturalism? Arranged marriages are a basic feature which holds our community together. It’s a community which is not exclusively but very strongly based on prearranged marriages. So as this Roma leader said very nicely, okay, you prohibit this then don’t talk about multiculturalism. Then in one, two generations we cease to exist. So you see where is the problem? Okay, in a similar way, for example, when in some Western European countries, I know examples from from Sweden, from Netherlands, from Germany, when so-called Muslim fundamentalists are attacking homosexuals and so on and so forth. I find this wonderful, not in the sense that I agree with this example, but wonderful in the sense that it shows all the ambiguity even of prohibitions. First thing that’s problematic here is that you know, even if you say okay, let the Muslims do whatever they want, the problem so-called fundamentalists, of course, the problem is what if they are bothered with another way of life? What if they find intolerable not what is done to them, but what others are simply doing? Because this is, for example, what I know happened in Berlin and Judith Butler I think went a little bit too far there. It was a nice heroic act. You know, she was given some medal, I don’t know, for supporting the gay rights and then and then she rejected that medal because gay activists there attacked Muslims for attacking them. And she still thought that anti-Muslim racism is a priority over gay rights. So heroically she still rejected that medal criticizing the organization which offered her that medal for being anti-Islamophobic, anti-Islamist and so on and so forth. But nonetheless, so again, this what I’m saying is that you cannot organize in this sense society you see my point now we come a little bit closer to theory. You cannot organize a society on some universality where you say okay, to each of you your particular mode of life, but universally we have to respect certain rules. You cannot do it because at a certain level and it’s not some abstract, extreme, eccentric idiosyncratic possibility, but in a very concrete way. This universal, proclaimed universal rights will always encroach upon certain of these particular ways. They are never neutral. And the only thing I’m for is here is simply to to accept this deadlock. There is no easy liberal tolerant solution. What do I again let’s go on. What do I mean by this? Now when is the intolerance of our very tolerant ways? The problem I see is this one. Okay, where do you set the limit? For example, I don’t know if you know but among many religious leaders, ideologists in Europe, there is now a popular idea circulating that that blasphemy or attacking, humiliating another religion should also be made illegal. That we need a code of religious tolerance. Of course, not surprisingly it’s Muslim leaders which basically want in this way to impose in Europe a prohibition of criticizing Islam. Although one must say that like if you try to criticize to criticize Judaism you get even faster into trouble. But what I’m saying is that is this what interests me. That here you got immediately into a problem. For example, once I had recently, where was I? I think somewhere close to my country in Austria where a debate with a Muslim intellectual. And he said that the point of this rejection of blasphemy okay is simply that they don’t feel properly treated, they don’t feel respect enough. He said something which in a way was true. He told me it’s not enough for me that you tolerate us. We want to be respected properly. And we want to be respected not in this patronizing way like a stupid child, you know, you have your crazy religion but okay you are human beings I respect you. We want to be respected for what we are as Muslims. We want to be respected. Then I told him okay, I’m an atheist. I think religion is bullshit. Do you respect me for that? You know, I said I just want the same rule, not okay you are crazy here you don’t see there is God, how beautiful nature is, all these miracles and so on, but you know in the top I said do you respect me for that? And of course, he didn’t basically answer. Later I heard that this guy said to a friend and my friend was listening, how can I respect a dog who doesn’t believe in God? No, you know what I mean, but there is a further problem here and I like this. The most ingenious answer to was given to these people was given by a some religious scientist who said that if you really apply and this gives us a deeper lesson if you really apply this rule of you know, with no blasphemy, no humiliating of other religion, well, isn’t there a self-evident fact that the first texts that should be prohibited then are the founding texts of our religion themselves. So I said I totally agree with you but begin with yourself. Bible goes out, Quran goes out, because you can find, my god, it’s even worth mentioning, you can take take each of them, take the Old Testament. And I I did a little bit of inquiry. It’s a wonderful moment, you know, you know Moses on the top of the mountain, you know, oh, I see the valley already down and then usually the story stops there, you know. But you know what happens then? Who is the guy? Is it Joshua who takes over and it’s the first fully recorded case of pure radical ethnic cleansing. You know, the people who were living down there in the valley, the valley was not empty. There were many tribes there and God says to I think Joshua, like kill them all, children, wives, and so on and so forth. Now it’s interesting to read how advocates of the Bible try to squeeze out of it, you know. It’s very first they play historicism, you know, they say oh these were different times, they had different codes. Okay, my obvious answer is of course, but these are not our codes, you know, like it’s different codes. And but their religion emerged precisely in that society with those codes. Second point they say is that this I find the most naive one, that that the second counter-argument is that how do we know that these tribes down there in the valley were not really evil, you know? The third one which I find most interesting, it’s like small book accountancy is they found some places in the Bible later which mention a person obviously still alive from those who should have been totally ethnically cleansed. And they see so you see they were not so bad, they didn’t kill them all, some of them survived. No, but seriously, what I what I want to say here is that in this sense because then if you when you try to convince them then okay but nonetheless Bible preaches slaughter and Quran also and so on. You the ultimate reply you get we cannot debate this, it’s a sacred text. Well, all I can say is that if there is anything we learned from people like René Girard and so on is that sacred is always linked to horror. You know that there is no sacred without horror. Sacred is a mask of horror. But now let me go on with intolerance in our society, the most benevolent intolerance. Do you know I learned this lately and I like it, E.T., you know, the creepy movie E.T. I’m sorry I’m evil here. The moment I see that figure E.T. I became a Nazi I want to squash it, disgusting like a frog. Do you know that upon its release E.T. was prohibited in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark? Do you know why? This is the second point of that movie. Because it provides a non-sympathetic portrayal of adults. And this was the official justification. And it was for this reason considered dangerous for the relation between children and their parents. So it there is an ingenious detail which confirms this perspective. You know what I even like in the movie? You know the rule in cartoons like Tom and Jerry that adults, humans, you don’t see them above the waist, you see just the lower part. And it’s a very subtle feature, many people didn’t notice that in E.T. the first minutes, half hour follows this rule. You know the guards which attack them, the discoverers, whatever, you see them only from down the waist. So what I’m saying is that from today’s perspective we can see this prohibition of E.T. as an early sign of the politically correct obsession with protecting individuals from any experience that may hurt them in any way. Not only real life experiences, even fiction should be censored. For example, I’m not sure if you follow it in the media, something happened now recently, a couple of months ago, even less, at Columbia University in New York. They have something called Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board. What they demanded is that so-called their name trigger warnings should be put on canonical works of art. What happened was the following thing: a student complained, a student who was a victim of sexual assault claimed that she was triggered by the vivid depictions of rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that she was instructed to read in her class. And since the professor dismissed the student her complaint, this multiple affairs advisory board proposed sensitivity training classes for professors teaching them how to deal with attacks, with attacks on with survivors of attacks, with persons of color, from low income and so on and so forth. Now, of course, the problem again is here that where do you stop? Isn’t it that in all classical literature, Bible, Dante, up to as we all know Huckleberry Finn and so on and so forth, you find racism, sexism, violence, hatred, they are simply everywhere. So again where do you where do you put the limit? And it’s not only that poor people victim may feel hurt. What about the rich people who limit themselves to avoid getting triggered by close encounters with actual lower classes. What so again my first reproach to this strategy, protect the victims protect protect us from traumatic experiences is that this is precisely predominantly from my experience at least the structure of those of the privileged classes. Well, they for them any experience with this is always my reproach to this politically correct people who are sensitive against insults, dirty talking and so on and so forth like but do you have any contact with actual lower classes? Do you know how they talk? Do you you wouldn’t survive among them for five minutes actually. I mean I’ve been at so again my first reproach is this logic of being of dwelling in cocooned safe spaces. This is precisely the strategy this is precisely the strategy of the of the rich. So my problem is the following one. This politically correct idea that you need to feel safe in the classroom. I don’t think you should feel safe in the classroom. I think on the contrary my task as a teacher, although I may be a weird teacher, is not to make you feel safe, if anything on the contrary. To make you feel unsafe. To make even brutally to force you to control to force you to confront to force you to confront the horrors that are out there. Now, of course, the politically correct answer for me would be of course people should be taught about racism and so on, just they shouldn’t be exposed to it directly. I claim again you cannot do it. You cannot do it. You cannot live in this safe cocoon universe and just be taught from a safe distance about horrors going on out there. I think that the ultimate paradoxical formula would have been that well, basically human life itself is is is is triggering. Triggering in the sense that it always shocks you, unsettles you. So if you want to play this game to the end, you know, just before you are born I would send a little bit of message into the mother, you know, trigger warnings you are entering a traumatic world and so on and so forth. Again one should be taught that we do not live in a safe world. The point is not how to protect you from that world, but point is how to intervene with it, how to change it, and so on and so forth. So again, of course, there are victims and so on and so forth and I’m totally for protecting them, but not in this way. Not in this way, you know what again what I find wrong is this attitude of just not hurting people and so on and so forth. Well, the first thing to do is an elementary reflection. People get hurt but they are not automatically right if they feel hurt. For example, for an imagine this beautiful image from novels a lady from old American South upper class on on a plantation. Of course she gets too close to slaves, not too close but to educated slaves this is very traumatic and she’s hurt. But is she right? I mean so again the entire coordinates I think are wrong. The world in which we live in this cocoon basically the world of our charities where we want to live in our isolated cocoon universe and of course, we are constantly informed on the media, oh bit of Afghanistan, Somalia here and there. But but this is done in such an ambiguous way basically, you know, horror is out there we retain a proper distance and so on. This is why for me again charity is fundamentally ambiguous, charity is the way to keep the horror at a distance. Now I will put it even in Hegelian terms. What we should learn, you know this is what Hegel calls self-reflection. What if we should learn it’s not that we live here in our safe space with good manners, I cannot even talk to you in the eye, it’s already sexual rape, whatever no, but out there there are horrors. What if from the perspective of totality or from others we are the way we act in this world. I will give you an example. It wasn’t published in English because again I notice that this tendency goes on, you know, I’m not kidding, I am now prohibited in Guardian. A good half a year ago they were inviting me. Now they don’t even answer my letters. The only invitations I get and I hate it is for totally stupid things like, you know where it’s politically totally benevolent meaningless like which was your favorite food this summer or which movie did you enjoy or do you like seriously, I was once asked could you describe once I wrote there was a big crisis going on and I sent them a tough political text and they go no, we are not into it now, could you rather describe when did you decide to wear a beard? I didn’t want to answer that. But sorry, what I want to say is that I published this text in German in Germany, my god now Germans are my new friends, they are dear. And you know, for example, to give you a wonderful example of this image of politically correctness. I was recently a week ago, a month ago in Mannheim close to Frankfurt. There was a big Friedrich Schiller festival, you know Schiller the big German writer, big idiot, even more most more more than even Goethe. Okay and my friend Udi Aloni, the crazy Israeli movie maker was staging some performance there. And I was there, I enjoyed it. In the morning before the performance he was doing last minute stage preparations, rearrangement and his German assistants, I mean stage workers were a little bit clumsy and screwed it up something some tables fell down whatever. And he shouted at them, he’s I mean if you think I’m tasteless you should listen to him. He told them where is your German organization? If Germans if you were to be if you were to be in the Nazi era clumsy like that you would never have succeeded even in doing the Holocaust, you know which is and it was wonderful because all the people there, you know they didn’t dare to laugh, they were totally totally at a loss, you know. Yeah? And then I stepped in, I couldn’t resist to things even worse, I told him Udi listen, I know Holocaust was a horrible thing, they killed millions. But I told him listen, if we accept that it had to happen, why couldn’t they also throw into the oven your parents so that a monster like you embarrassing people here wouldn’t disturb us? And again he laughed, embraced me, the others were even more perplexed. But but you see my point how we we were practicing actual anti-racism with all our vulgarity and wait a minute, I’m not now saying that to be anti-racist you have to do this, you know, it would be a nice world where the only way to prove that you are not anti-Semitic is to participate in a dirty Holocaust joke and so on, you know. But no seriously what I want to say is that there the Germans embarrassed reply was if anything a proof that not just that they feel guilty that they were sincere. But that, you know, their position wasn’t clear. So what I want to say, let me go on is that yes, in Germany they like me. So I published there a comment, you know this wave of refugees in Southern across the Mediterranean, no? I don’t know how people react here in Britain but in Europe two replies are predominant. One is the anti-immigrant populist one, no? Oh, they are a threat to our way of life, hordes of black Africans are coming, we must stop them and so on whatever. Then then then there is the left-liberal approach. It’s a shame, where are we in Europe, primitives, thousands are dying there, it’s an ethical fiasco of Europe and so on. If anything I hate this second attitude even more. Why? Because I claim it’s such an hypocritical stance. They know very well that simply totally opening the borders is not the solution. That if you do this probably one million, two millions will come, you would have right-wing working class probably unrest in Europe. You would probably get Le Pen in power in France and so on and so forth. But it allows them left liberals to assume this beautiful soul positions. You know this is what intellectuals like to do, this moral attitude of oh, we are scandalized how can people be so cruel we are the only ones with blah blah blah because they know they will not have to pay the price for it. So how would I approach it? First my my solution would be now I come to the point I wanted to make not to not to the choice is not should we allow them in or should we stop them. It’s also not enough just to say the solution is not to accept them all, the solution is to the solution is to help them there in Africa. I mean George Bush, the president was saying this all the time. It’s good to do this, of course, but it’s not the solution. I think that if you really worry about starving Africans, getting drowned out there, you know you should begin with but what accounts for this recent mega-flow of refugees? And you discover something about which you don’t read a lot in the media. That all, and when I say all I mean all, all the hotspots were created by Western interventions directly military or economic. Okay I will not repeat my mega-point of that I mention in my books of the ultimate humanitarian catastrophe Democratic Republic of Congo, which is kind of a Conrad, Joseph Conrad-type heart of darkness, but as such totally integrated into Western economy. The state may be a true rogue state in total chaos and so on but but mining functions and the extraction of natural it functions perfectly to everybody’s satisfaction. As I told you now look you remember two years, three years ago I’ve written about it, there was a military rebellion against the central government close to Rwanda and okay our media again went into oh another ethnic war, oh this tragic story of whatever. But then you just read in close detail what was the main demand of the rebels. You know what? That the federal government in Kinshasa should break should should how to say should cancel a big contract with China. Because the central government did something which may be objectively just another gesture of Chinese economic imperialism but I think in Congo it could have worked, because this is what Congo needs. The Chinese made this deal, this offer: we will invest enormous sums, we talk about two-three hundred billions I think minimum, to to simply provide the entire infrastructure of Congo. You know Congo doesn’t function as a state. So the idea is phone, post, railways, highways, universities simply to make it a functioning state. Of course, there is a price to pay, that is the way Chinese will get most of the minerals. But I think it’s the first step, it’s the only solution. And this is what triggered those warlords in the east to protest because they had their own mining contracts and so on and so forth. So again it had nothing to do with some kind of a primordial primitive ethnic conflict. And let’s go closer now. You remember if you read about it in Central African Republic. It’s incredible, I even checked it in Wikipedia and you don’t find any of the true background. It’s like this: in Central Africa look you have here southwest a Christian Catholic majority and you have had in the northeast the Muslim minority. Not minority, they are some percent. Then as we like to say some crazy ethnic hatred exploded, brutal civil war between Muslims and Catholic majority and France intervene establishing this this old hatred, high passions, this blah blah. In reality you get them even in some right-wing media, but you know small letters. What ethnic hatred. In the Muslim northeast oil was discovered. And Chinese have good relations with Catholic majority. They wanted the access to that oil. France, the great fighter against Muslim fundamentalism, made a deal with Muslims there and basically staged that primordial ethnic rebellion. And then France did something disgusting. They first allowed the Muslims to occupy the capital of the country and then they intervened militarily to introduce order, but basically protected Muslim control of that oil area and so on and so forth. And again, all these staged enemies of prop what about refugees from Syria, Iraq and so on and so forth? Well, thanks to George Bush attacking Iraq, no? I mean the whole Middle East refugee wave. What about Libya? Well, thanks to my colleague philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy who as you know convinced convinced who was the president then still Sarkozy, Sarkozy to to attack Libya. Again it’s absolutely incredible how we we created with our not so much even political as economic interest. Again also my friend Alain Badiou who draw my attention to this he showed me some reports. He even said that in all French left-center main media Le Monde and so on, you couldn’t get this information about oil discovered in northeast of Central African Republic. He got it only in the right-wing weekly Le Point where there was a little note on it and then he looked further and discovered it. He told me that it’s also interesting how I even think that even if it may appear a local this desperate movement whatever but whenever you have really radical Islamism which is really aggressive. For example, Taliban are different here. Whatever they are, they are not aggressive. They are not exporters. But whenever wherever you have aggressive Islamism, there is oil behind. You know where they come from, you know, Northern Africa, Syria, Iraq, ISIS, ISIS is an oil phenomenon. You cannot abstract economic. So again what I’m saying, you see this is it, the first thing to do is to admit why there were no refugees, not such a great wave at least till I don’t know five ten years ago. We we did it, we triggered it. So this is where we should begin. Neither not to to ask, this is Hegel’s definition of a beautiful soul. You know you deplore oh what a horrible state but you you don’t ask yourself in what way you co-created this world. Now to I hope you understand me correctly, my point is not some silly bullshit that oh so we are guilty, this you know self-humiliation of white people. No, Africans like all people can be really evil and so on. And I often made fun of this politically correct patronizing racism where whenever there is a big a horrible thing going on in African country we must somehow begin. But nonetheless at this level it’s clear that we created, we should include ourselves in the picture. We are not living out here and then the choice should we stop them to enter or should we oh gracious give European openness, solidarity, open or no. The to begin with we should begin by asking ourselves in what way we are responsible for for what is happening there. And this is why, although and I will immediately go into it, although I’m very critical of China, it’s also practicing a version of let’s call it economic colonialism. But nonetheless, in the case of Congo, this was the only chance, you know. You have to have the basic infrastructure for a minimally functioning state. And it was successfully sabotaged. Congo remains the ultimate place of horror on the earth, nobody cares. Okay, sorry if I jump a little bit here and there. Now so again at this another point, sorry at this level let me return to my main point which is this limits of tolerance and so on and so forth. I think it’s very interesting to to analyze the so-called limit phenomena, phenomena from the edge which may appear crazy but say something about the world we live in. Like you know, it was reported I think in your media, and I love the example, who is Grace Gelder? You don’t know? Oh my god, it’s a wonderful phenomenon. Earlier this year, this is a professional photographer, a single woman in her thirties who was looking for a partner and didn’t found a proper partner. And then she decided literally to marry herself. Yeah, it was reported in the media. She organized, that’s what I like, a formal wedding with herself. White dress, there were witnesses, she gave the vows towards herself, then she put ring on herself and then she and then she kissed herself in the mirror. Even nice imitation of Hegelian theory. Of course, all this was based was founded in some crazy New Age teaching that, you know, as they say and I think it’s exactly the wrong thing to say, that you can only love others if you first love yourself, if you accept yourself. So she says quite reasonably, okay, I will begin with myself. So she the idea is this one and it’s so disgusting. And now she triggered a marginal trend but nonetheless a trend, which tell you how to organize you begin with self-dating. Like you say tonight you tell your friends sorry I’m busy, I already have a date. Then you prepare a nice dinner with candles for yourself, you even have some crazy websites where they give you technical details how to do it. Like it’s so nice that in the evening before you go to sleep you put on the fridge a love message to yourself. And then in the morning you are so nicely surprised, oh so and so, you know. Then you put your apartment in order, you put on your best dress best dress and so on and you do it. But and then the idea is there that when you make a date with yourself, you frankly talk with yourself about yourself. You admit all your weak points and when you finally get to know yourself, self-marrying means you fully accept yourself. Now first I wouldn’t laugh too much at this. I think there is a correct insight in it. We are not directly self you know what I like in this idea of self-marriage is that you know if you marry yourself you means you are not immediately one with yourself, you know. Like there is a gap. But what I also like is that this idea that it has to be a formal procedure. It’s not just oh I’m myself I like no it has to be a ritual. In the eyes of the big other there are witnesses you marry yourself. So but what I claim is that this marriage self-marriage is even more difficult than a marriage marrying another person. Because you know when they say you have to reconcile yourself with yourself and so on and so forth. Now my first cynical reaction was of course, but what if looking deep into yourself you discover that you don’t like yourself, you know. You become to realize you are a piece of shit. So my idea I debated with one of those guys in United States and I asked him okay, can I then divorce myself from myself. And what happens then? So again what my my claim here would have been that first such an act of marrying yourself is at the same time extremely violent towards yourself because, classic psychoanalytic topic, I don’t think you can really reconcile yourself with yourself. If you really want to know yourself as a neighbor in the biblical sense, it means you discover all the horror of yourself. And that this marrying yourself is the ultimate self-control. The second point why I prefer marrying others. I think that that loving others is ultimately a nice way to escape from yourself. That you know you turn towards others not to confront the horror that is in yourself. That’s why for me the well-known motto, be yourself is so problematic. Be yourself, which self? The problem is again that when you marry yourself you marry basically your ideal ego, what’s the best in you. The idealized image of yourself. And this is why relaxed self-identification, self-acceptance, imperceptibly turn into radical self-alienation. I think again that self I again what I what I’m telling you is that oh turning out to others, loving others is just an escape from yourself and it is but why not? It’s the only good thing that we can do. You see my point is the much more pessimistic one. If you look deep into yourself you discover shit, you discover this the only thing that can make our life tolerable is to turn towards others. In other words, as Lacan put it very nicely, the true neighbor is to yourself is you yourself. Neighbor in the sense of the foreigner which is impenetrable to you. So this is why as Lacan put it so nicely in one of his early seminars, you know this biblical motto love your neighbor as yourself. That this is never it has to be done in the second person. It would be obscene for me to say in the first person: I love my neighbor as myself, it would be obscene. The problem is the self. You see the similarity, I’m not getting totally lost, this is what I call negativity, with that formula of Congo, we are responsible and so on. You know, don’t look to the horror out there, look the problem is the horror in yourself. So again I even the other problem I have, don’t misunderstand me, I’m totally for gay rights, but not but in the sense but it’s nonetheless anti-Christian or something. But the problem is again the fact as about intolerance at the beginning. Where do we set the limit? Like if we now, I think we should extend, but for example what if you would have said not in a Muslim way where obviously men have priority, one man can have I think up to four wives, but what if we say in a more open liberal Western way, why should I marry or you of course for woman it goes the same, only one man or one woman. What if some deconstructionist idiot comes and tells you isn’t this binary logic binary opposites? Can’t I love a man and a woman? Two men, two women? Why shouldn’t we intermarry all of us? And I incidentally I read in the United States there already is a tendency. Not a religious fundamentalist tendency, but the libertarian tendency and they are already thinking about how to how to regulate it legally, you know, because then it gets a little bit more complicated who inherits and so on. Then let me go on, since it’s so fashionable to criticize to sorry to accuse people of speciesism, you know, like we humans we think we are something superior to other species. Okay, let’s say I’m really deeply attached to my dog or cat blah blah. Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t marry him or her? Why, isn’t it brutal human speciesism? You see you see my point? I’m not saying you see what I’m trying to pack on you is simply that it’s not an ideal liberal solution which we should be approached, but that ultimately it’s a deadlock and you have to set basically some contingent arbitrary limits. Because again, why not? Tell me why not? Why not marrying more than another human person? The moment you go, the only way to argue for it which would not be conservative is to evoke inheritance, you know, but of course we should reject this. So the moment you say there is nonetheless an exclusive bond between only two people I am even tempted to agree with it, but I think this is already a certain metaphysics which is in play here. You know, like I agree but like why should it be that it’s only one person? You have to go into some metaphysics of how exclude all others whatever. So again but let me so yes, that’s all I wanted to do it here. Just to give you some hints apropos tolerating lives of others, apropos sensitivity to pain and so on and so forth. About how liberal hedonism, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, my god, certainly has certain values. But it’s a very inconsistent project. It’s not simply an ideal that you can apply. And it’s in what sense inconsistent that you see, if I preach tolerance, we should be open blah blah, then of course I have to be intolerant towards intolerance. I don’t mean this in some abstract intellectual sense, but in a very concrete sense, like to what extent will I tolerate what I perceive as intolerance in others. Like for example, my neighbor has a strict patriarchal family, he is beating his children, his wife and so on. Now am I tolerant or not? And the most unpleasant here psychoanalysis enters and complicates everything. The most unpleasant thing and I’m not exaggerating here is this is what I call the great American narrative from Searchers to Taxi Driver. Is when you try when you try to save the other from being exploited or whatever you perceive as treated unfairly and you discover that the other has a perverse libidinal enjoyment. You know this is the point, if you see they are the great American narrative in a way an in advance intellectual self-critique movies like again I mention to you Taxi Driver and Searchers. John Ford and Taxi Driver for Scorsese. You saw I hope the Taxi Driver. You see the guy played by Robert De Niro who explodes in violence and so on. But this violence is precisely the ultimate deadlock outcome of his obsession to help the one he perceives as a victim, the young Jodie Foster, the prostitute and so on. You know and so this is for me again the ultimate ambiguity of permissiveness. That if you want to be really tolerant you have to develop such a universe of breathtaking prohibitions and so on, you know you shouldn’t be this you shouldn’t do that. And there is no simple solution here I claim. Even, you know when things are prohibited I think that it’s even much more ambiguous what is effectively prohibited. For for example why are we embarrassed when the victim tells us, the victim of rape, of torture tells us its her its experience the horror in detail. I don’t think it’s simply we don’t want to know the details. I think what we want to mask by this prohibition is the impossibility of telling it all. That truly, as we all know tragic thing about reporting on a truly traumatic experience, torture, rape, whatever, is that witnessing fails as we know you cannot tell it all. If you can, one can even say that if you can tell it all, were you really so traumatized? You know what I mean, like this elementary point, like when pro-feminist point, of course, when a woman who was raped reports, male chauvinists say claim oh but you see she was inconsistent, it wasn’t she said first this then that. My point is if anything then such inconsistencies are a subjective proof that she really underwent a trauma. If anything I would be suspicious, of course taking her seriously but like if I were to be suspicious of a rape report it would rather have been a rape report where a lady in a totally cold voice, you know, reports he put his finger there then he did this then I moved my ass like this then that and so on. I say wait a minute. No, I’m not saying it automatically disqualifies her, it’s possible that she had some kind of a psychotic breakdown and adopted a kind of a living dead perspective. But what I’m saying is that I more and more suspect that the prohibition to tell something is protects us from the fact that you cannot tell it. We are not afraid that we would have learned too much from but that we but that we cannot do it. So again the second point I want to emphasize from this confused reports to you here at Cambridge is that it’s absolutely crucial to see how the our in our secluded Western developed countries the growing sensitivity to being traumatized, hurt, you know all these trigger warnings and so on are just the obverse of a growing brutality out there. My god, you know, isn’t this absurd United States we are talking about a country which at the same time there are people there who want to put trigger warnings on classical works of art and the country which de facto legalized torture so-called, you know. And if you look at the brutality around the world, but it’s not even only around the world. It’s even I you know I reported this in one of my books like it’s so easy for us to deplore sweatshops down there in Indonesia, Chinese do like but you you remember three years ago or when they discovered in the suburb of Florence, Florence the top of Western culture civilization, that there is some small city in the suburbs of Florence. How did they discover it? Some barracks where migrant workers were sleeping then burnt and there were immediately Chinese dead or what why? Because the conditions were absolutely horrible that they discovered that there were only in that city illegal Chinese workers living in total slave conditions. So, you know it’s not even there. It’s here. If anything when you have real slums out there I’m not for a sentimental approach. I did this, I made some friends in Brazil. You know that in Sao Paulo I love this image in in Rio de Janeiro, the favela people you have now favela tours, you know. Tourist agencies they show you and so on and it’s a nice paradox there, I don’t know if I told you this. That the Lula government, the previous one, did some good things, they put at least in many central slums, they did put water, electricity. But you know what’s the result? I laughed so much. That slums, some slums this one which were regulated well, they are now too expensive for the really poor, you know. Like you have already the hierarchy of the hierarchy of slums. So again what another point that I want to tell you here my my conclusion. For example, we live in an epoch where the ultimate signifier is human rights. Okay, but are you aware that at the simple economic level de facto slavery is massively returning. This is what fascinates me. With all the talk of sensitivity human rights, there are so many forms of de facto slavery, new versions of apartheid. Of course, the big example is and I was there this Arab Emirates. You have there hundreds of thousands of people in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Bahrain who are not formally slaves but de facto slaves. They were hired from poor Asian countries, Nepal, Indonesia, I don’t know to come there, their passports are taken, they work for absolutely miserable sums without money, formally they are not allowed to enter the public space the city. You have and who knows what’s happening in Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth. Then you have in all Africa again it’s not formal slavery but it’s de facto slavery. Like in the one that I already mentioned, Congo, mining industries again. You have hundreds of thousands of people de facto working as slaves there, kidnapped by armed gangs, forced to work there. China, Indonesia sweatshops in China, they are embarrassed, I read there in official statements how hundreds of thousands of people are sold by poor farming families to work especially, you know that I don’t know if it’s still the case but three, four years ago half of all the buildings constructions in the world were done in in China. So they need an incredible amount of building material bricks and then while they are making bricks there in the middle of inner China desert child labor can be very useful for the simple carrying it so it’s quite a formal it’s not for me to say but tolerated procedure, agents tour the impoverished villages and they buy for a certain period of time children up from four five years stay and so on and so on. So what I’m saying is that there are this is paradox which is from the beginning part of capitalism. Robin Blackburn with whom I otherwise don’t agree politically, he analyzed this phenomenon very nicely of how at the end of the Middle Ages slavery was more or less out in Europe. But then precisely with the explosion of capitalist modernity, slavery exploded. Although capitalism was formally founded on you know freedom, human rights and so on and so forth. What I’m claiming is that today with global capitalism exactly the same phenomenon is reproducing itself to us. So we do live in really really sad really really sad times. Now let me just conclude my god I talked too much with another point. Namely Greece to return to Greece. You know what made me so depressed just reading the news about Greece is when you know this endless negotiations where there is always when things happen go on the way they did, you remember? Like they said oh the agreement is almost there but it’s never there and so on. This is always a symptomatic sign, a symptom that there is a deeper disagreement. And I think this disagreement is if I may use this horrible word a discursive disagreement. They are simply talking two different languages, the European commissioners and the Greeks. And it’s not as the Europeans are saying that Varoufakis is a clown, they change conditions all the time while Europeans simply want to talk business and so on and so forth. I did you I think again the vision is much more tragic. I think the difference is that Greeks are and it’s incredible this manipulation how Greeks are this referendum was presented in the West as the decision between Grexit or remaining in Europe, Drachma or Euro. No, if anyone really wants to remain in Europe and retain Europe it’s the Greek government. The Greek the difference is between pure expert technocracy to put it very simply and politics. Basically Greeks are talking negotiating they were negotiating at the level of let’s call it big political decision. They admitted the situation is intolerable and they blame themselves Greeks most. They are not playing the game. This is total lie when Western media claim like the Greeks are saying oh oh we just have we want the debt wiped off and so on and so forth. No, the Greeks admit it. The Greeks even admitted that the great problem is not Western European pressure but that Greece is an inefficient corrupted clientelist state and so on. But they see it as a problem not just of expert economy how much you know that’s the tragedy the Western the European Union negotiators and I think the really bad guy is that Dutch idiot, Dijsselbloem or what Dijsselbloem I don’t know how you pronounce it correctly, Dijsselbloem or what Dijsselbloem I don’t know how you say. Who is incidentally a local agricultural expert totally idiot if one cannot say for Dutch people but he. And he said in a recent interview if I get into the ideological side of things I won’t achieve anything. That’s the problem of Europe. Of course by ideology here he didn’t mean and we shouldn’t mean some big phrases freedom and so on. But simply what the Greeks insisted is that the problem is basically an economico-political one. It’s not just this problem of detailed numbers as they presented it, you know. Because it’s so shocking and I followed negotiations closely, it’s so shocking at the level of numbers or even concrete measures how close they were all the time. Like the difference at many points was something that would have amounted in financial terms to one two billions per per year. No, the problem is that Greeks made a fundamental point which was till now is obvious one we followed a certain model. A certain model of austerity and so on. It obviously didn’t work. You the Western people you will never get any money back in this way. And surprisingly as Varoufakis pointed out did you read this? The one who get them round now is IMF itself which propose twenty years debt moratorium and so on and so forth. That’s the the basic Greek statement: Europe was following a certain politics and this is economic politics. This is not just some expert decisions technical. A certain politico-economic vision of how to approach it which doesn’t work. And Varoufakis I talked in detail with him he told me isn’t Europe seeing that in this way Europe itself is losing in the wrong sorry in the long term? Like the story I repeat in my books I already mentioned it here. Europe is in crisis, not world capitalism. As I told you the story no that when I was in Korea not yesterday this time I only went to catch that MERS virus. I talked about crisis and they started to laugh at me. They said who is in crisis? Latin America a little bit still not. Even even sub-Saharan Africa globally moving. Who who is in crisis? We in the Far East are not. You Western Europe part of it, you are in crisis. And I really think this that you like I put it now in a little bit hypocritical terms but that you you should be critical of Western Europe management not only if you are some kind of a crazy radical leftist. But even if you are now I will cynically moderate pro-capitalist Eurocentrist you should be worried. Because Europe is losing in the long term. My god if it goes like this in years we will be just the a popular tourist space for rich Chinese and Americans and so on you know we are losing. So the Greeks are saying no sorry it’s not just that do we lower the retirement the pension for five or for six percent. Do we I don’t know do we raise those taxes and so on more or less. No, they say a radically new approach is necessary if you want money back from us. Then my god you should somehow enable us to produce more so that we can pay you back. That’s their argument. Even when they talk about debt as Varoufakis put it very nicely, you should look it it’s really wonderful short eight minutes interview that I mentioned Bloomberg on July When he says that it’s not Greece which is living in dreamland it’s European Union. They still follow that formula extend and pretend. They know very well that debt will not be ever repaid. Not only this but if you follow economic news around the world you will discover that practically all the debt will never be repaid. Like now I read some analysis and the joke is not from left wingers from some conservative right wingers in America where they even mathematically demonstrated that the United States debt which is tremendous at this point is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per family. And they make this experiment they said let’s say that some kind of a totalitarian economic dictatorship takes place in United States so that all the surplus goes to repaying the debt, you know. They just provide a minimal standard of living for the people, they even cut the army or whatever, just the whole United States starts to work for the debt. Maybe in years probably not. But it’s a ridiculous solution. So first that’s the first problem. And and when so many cities, American states, like Puerto Rico now. Puerto Rico is three times worse than Greece and so on. But so you know the problem is this one first when we talk about debt. There are debtors and debtors you know like you have countries who are too big to fail and who are have an unfair advantage like if you worry about debt don’t talk about Greece talk about the United States. But United States are privileged why? Because they have dollar they can print dollar you know they can cheat. They are a country who is indebted but they can like print money can control the conditions of the debt then you have the big banks who cannot be allowed to fail and so on and so on. So maybe the time has come to talk it’s not simply that some rich bankers are getting rich while others are in debt. No there is even a class hierarchy between indebted countries themselves. So what what is so frustrating for the Greeks Varoufakis told me that this was what was designed you remember those reports I don’t know at what negotiations last that he went leave left the room. He told me he was talking about fundamental issues and he was treated like a pupil third grade. He said no no no don’t escape into generalities what about half percent here you didn’t give us a clear answer you know Europeans are treating this as a kind of a minor expert administrative problem. They don’t see the big political choice to be made and this has even nothing to do with the left. So what’s the conclusion from this? The conclusion is for me a very sad one. I don’t know what the reactions will be of Europe but the latest I heard heard this morning is that it looks pretty bad that the reaction of Europe will be pretty furious you know. I mean it’s a catastrophe for us. You know Varoufakis resigned no? Sorry? Do you know if Varoufakis resigned? No? Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah but do what do you know? You have inner no no no I mean this here I know but was this I wonder was this obviously he knew it before that he will do it probably. Yeah yeah he announced it this morning. Is this a strategy just to just to subtract to take away a problematic person or what? Because for me you know he is among all these guys the only true intellectual. It’s so sad that he was thrown out you know. I think he resigned at the right time because he made his point. I think he resigned after he won the argument so in some respects you resign. Yeah what argument did he win? The Yes. Okay but you know what I’m afraid plus if there is a sorry I don’t know no plus if there is a within the Syriza party there is obviously a lot of people who want Greece to exit the Euro altogether so now it’ll be easier if you know if Tsipras is going that way it’ll be easier to do it without having had the Yeah but you know what is the problem here? Kostas, I hate him in a friendly way. You saw he use in his text my old Rabinovich joke you know. Are you know this thing do you read then I should tell it to him I hate him. This is my my eternal joke if you read my books one thousand years you know that Rabinovich wants to emigrate emigrate from Soviet Union two reasons the first blah blah. You know that he told me that exactly the same joke is now circulating there. A Greek guy comes to Australian embassy and wants to emigrate. And he didn’t even report correctly the joke he lost the point he said I want to emigrate from Greece for two reasons. The first reason is that there will be Grexit and there will be further poverty chaos I want to go out. Then the Australian guy tells him but don’t worry it’s just negotiations at the end they will make a deal and European technocrats will rule Greece you know there will be order. And he says that’s my second reason to emigrate. So it is a difficult decision and so on but you know you know what I can you help us not only here. My problem nonetheless is this one: what okay I put it like this I was and Kostas’s talk remember if you were there we had some stupid roundtable about Greece a couple of months ago where Kostas made me very sad because he said that he described the Greek strategy as hysteresis if you were there you would remember as manipulating with poverty human catastrophe and playing a clown. Now I want he use this term it’s shocking like a little bit extravagant and so on. Okay do you remember how Kostas a year ago and two was saying a new type of leftist political subjectivity is emerging in Greece no? And I’m almost tempted to say in a very vicious way yes this is a new role for the left to play to play a begging clowns you know I mean no what I’m seriously saying is that no this this strategy it’s not that it’s humiliating and so on Europe technocracy is really evil they will not have mercy it will not work. So what I’m saying is this like nothing unexpected happening happened from the European side. Maybe I thought they the Greek government didn’t they have some big plan or what like you know what I mean did you hear any rumors here? What did they expect you know what I mean like nothing unexpected happened. If anything I expect if I were to be European defender of technocratic interest I would have been even much more brutal. They I hope maybe here they were surprised they didn’t manipulate enough the fact that for example it’s quite a shock but you know that in a discreet way United States even the right wingers there are more on the Greek side discrete. You know why? Because they are worried that if there is a Grexit this will push Greece into Russia China’s camp and out of NATO. Do you remember two-three days ago the NATO general secretary said Greece is crucial for defense especially now with Erdogan playing his own Islamist game and so on. So I thought they would succeed more here. No but again it’s an extremely it’s a you know what only is my okay I will repeat and then conclude with my last joke which I only mentioned it here. You saw the movie V for Vendetta. You know how it ends? The crowd takes over Parliament and so on. I would sell my mother into slavery which I would in any case my point is to see part two of that movie. What happens then the next day? How do they organize life? What measures and so on and so forth. And that’s for me the big problem and I infinitely appreciate Syriza for heroically at least confronting the problem. I don’t care about this what happens in Greece in Athens yes yes it’s wonderful people demonstrating crying shouting again these pathetic scenes but you know there is what I call in Lacanian Marxist terms the Real of the capital. It’s this eternal story a democratic government popular authentic is elected from Mandela to Lula and then there is big big hope but then ultimately you have to make a deal with capital. Capital is serious real. And that’s for me the problem. This is why I don’t think some people claim if there is too much of a compromise Syriza should simply step down or what. No I’m here a Maoist you know Mao said whatever you do cling to power. I would remain make all the compromises even you have to put some pressure on your leftist circles and silently work my god Syriza should learn from Stalin. What can they do? Fucking they can penetrate the state apparatus kill the people you know they can lay the organizational foundation you know that they will not be alone. Now they must be in a terrible situation probably. Terrible situation in the sense that police sorry yes? I was just going to say it’s not just about Greece is it they can do that they can also join up with Podemos in Spain and. Yeah but here they were disappointed this was the biggest disappointment. I agree
not that again we can simply become should raise our tolerance and so on and so forth. It’s something first I want to claim is that every society is based on some things which are impossible to support. And I reject this logic of oh, but we must widen the circle. No, at certain levels we must even narrow the circle of what is permitted. For example, classical example, rape. In many countries it’s not considered such an horror as rape. But in our societies it is. And probably if you were to mockingly make fun of some victim of rape or defend not openly, but you know in this disgusting, sneering way, some foolish way, who knows, maybe the bitch enjoyed it a little bit too much, you would have been isolated, excluded. And it’s not it’s very dogmatic. And I say why not? Maybe this is even one of the measures of civilization, how how elevated this let’s call it ethical dogmatic approach is. And I found this quite good. So what I want to say is that first this is again what annoys me when people see in these satirical newspapers Charlie Hebdo and so on only this oh, freedom, we make fun of everything. No, look just at the limits of this freedom and our prohibitions. And again, I am not opposed to it. I’m just saying that we cannot afford it’s unworkable. The simple idea of okay, enjoy your freedoms but don’t mess with other people’s lives. The moment we live in an open global society like today, this is unworkable. Let’s say another, I’m sorry if I repeat an old example that probably most of you know it, but let’s see what happened in my own country Slovenia. Roma, the gypsies community had a problem some five years ago. A lady, not a lady, a young girl escaped from them claiming they want her parents already sold her in advance a prearranged marriage and so on. And then all the multicultural feminists exploded in rage, of course, you should give her protection and so on. But then a leader of the Roma community says wait a minute, where is your multiculturalism? Arranged marriages are a basic feature which holds our community together. It’s a community which is not exclusively but very strongly based on prearranged marriages. So as this Roma leader said very nicely, okay, you prohibit this then don’t talk about multiculturalism. Then in one, two generations we cease to exist. So you see where is the problem? Okay, in a similar way, for example, when in some Western European countries, I know examples from from Sweden, from Netherlands, from Germany, when so-called Muslim fundamentalists are attacking homosexuals and so on and so forth. I find this wonderful, not in the sense that I agree with this example, but wonderful in the sense that it shows all the ambiguity even of prohibitions. First thing that’s problematic here is that you know, even if you say okay, let the Muslims do whatever they want, the problem so-called fundamentalists, of course, the problem is what if they are bothered with another way of life? What if they find intolerable not what is done to them, but what others are simply doing? Because this is, for example, what I know happened in Berlin and Judith Butler I think went a little bit too far there. It was a nice heroic act. You know, she was given some medal, I don’t know, for supporting the gay rights and then and then she rejected that medal because gay activists there attacked Muslims for attacking them. And she still thought that anti-Muslim racism is a priority over gay rights. So heroically she still rejected that medal criticizing the organization which offered her that medal for being anti-Islamophobic, anti-Islamist and so on and so forth. But nonetheless, so again, this what I’m saying is that you cannot organize in this sense society you see my point now we come a little bit closer to theory. You cannot organize a society on some universality where you say okay, to each of you your particular mode of life, but universally we have to respect certain rules. You cannot do it because at a certain level and it’s not some abstract, extreme, eccentric idiosyncratic possibility, but in a very concrete way. This universal, proclaimed universal rights will always encroach upon certain of these particular ways. They are never neutral. And the only thing I’m for is here is simply to to accept this deadlock. There is no easy liberal tolerant solution. What do I again let’s go on. What do I mean by this? Now when is the intolerance of our very tolerant ways? The problem I see is this one. Okay, where do you set the limit? For example, I don’t know if you know but among many religious leaders, ideologists in Europe, there is now a popular idea circulating that that blasphemy or attacking, humiliating another religion should also be made illegal. That we need a code of religious tolerance. Of course, not surprisingly it’s Muslim leaders which basically want in this way to impose in Europe a prohibition of criticizing Islam. Although one must say that like if you try to criticize to criticize Judaism you get even faster into trouble. But what I’m saying is that is this what interests me. That here you got immediately into a problem. For example, once I had recently, where was I? I think somewhere close to my country in Austria where a debate with a Muslim intellectual. And he said that the point of this rejection of blasphemy okay is simply that they don’t feel properly treated, they don’t feel respect enough. He said something which in a way was true. He told me it’s not enough for me that you tolerate us. We want to be respected properly. And we want to be respected not in this patronizing way like a stupid child, you know, you have your crazy religion but okay you are human beings I respect you. We want to be respected for what we are as Muslims. We want to be respected. Then I told him okay, I’m an atheist. I think religion is bullshit. Do you respect me for that? You know, I said I just want the same rule, not okay you are crazy here you don’t see there is God, how beautiful nature is, all these miracles and so on, but you know in the top I said do you respect me for that? And of course, he didn’t basically answer. Later I heard that this guy said to a friend and my friend was listening, how can I respect a dog who doesn’t believe in God? No, you know what I mean, but there is a further problem here and I like this. The most ingenious answer to was given to these people was given by a some religious scientist who said that if you really apply and this gives us a deeper lesson if you really apply this rule of you know, with no blasphemy, no humiliating of other religion, well, isn’t there a self-evident fact that the first texts that should be prohibited then are the founding texts of our religion themselves. So I said I totally agree with you but begin with yourself. Bible goes out, Quran goes out, because you can find, my god, it’s even worth mentioning, you can take take each of them, take the Old Testament. And I I did a little bit of inquiry. It’s a wonderful moment, you know, you know Moses on the top of the mountain, you know, oh, I see the valley already down and then usually the story stops there, you know. But you know what happens then? Who is the guy? Is it Joshua who takes over and it’s the first fully recorded case of pure radical ethnic cleansing. You know, the people who were living down there in the valley, the valley was not empty. There were many tribes there and God says to I think Joshua, like kill them all, children, wives, and so on and so forth. Now it’s interesting to read how advocates of the Bible try to squeeze out of it, you know. It’s very first they play historicism, you know, they say oh these were different times, they had different codes. Okay, my obvious answer is of course, but these are not our codes, you know, like it’s different codes. And but their religion emerged precisely in that society with those codes. Second point they say is that this I find the most naive one, that that the second counter-argument is that how do we know that these tribes down there in the valley were not really evil, you know? The third one which I find most interesting, it’s like small book accountancy is they found some places in the Bible later which mention a person obviously still alive from those who should have been totally ethnically cleansed. And they see so you see they were not so bad, they didn’t kill them all, some of them survived. No, but seriously, what I what I want to say here is that in this sense because then if you when you try to convince them then okay but nonetheless Bible preaches slaughter and Quran also and so on. You the ultimate reply you get we cannot debate this, it’s a sacred text. Well, all I can say is that if there is anything we learned from people like René Girard and so on is that sacred is always linked to horror. You know that there is no sacred without horror. Sacred is a mask of horror. But now let me go on with intolerance in our society, the most benevolent intolerance. Do you know I learned this lately and I like it, E.T., you know, the creepy movie E.T. I’m sorry I’m evil here. The moment I see that figure E.T. I became a Nazi I want to squash it, disgusting like a frog. Do you know that upon its release E.T. was prohibited in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark? Do you know why? This is the second point of that movie. Because it provides a non-sympathetic portrayal of adults. And this was the official justification. And it was for this reason considered dangerous for the relation between children and their parents. So it there is an ingenious detail which confirms this perspective. You know what I even like in the movie? You know the rule in cartoons like Tom and Jerry that adults, humans, you don’t see them above the waist, you see just the lower part. And it’s a very subtle feature, many people didn’t notice that in E.T. the first minutes, half hour follows this rule. You know the guards which attack them, the discoverers, whatever, you see them only from down the waist. So what I’m saying is that from today’s perspective we can see this prohibition of E.T. as an early sign of the politically correct obsession with protecting individuals from any experience that may hurt them in any way. Not only real life experiences, even fiction should be censored. For example, I’m not sure if you follow it in the media, something happened now recently, a couple of months ago, even less, at Columbia University in New York. They have something called Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board. What they demanded is that so-called their name trigger warnings should be put on canonical works of art. What happened was the following thing: a student complained, a student who was a victim of sexual assault claimed that she was triggered by the vivid depictions of rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that she was instructed to read in her class. And since the professor dismissed the student her complaint, this multiple affairs advisory board proposed sensitivity training classes for professors teaching them how to deal with attacks, with attacks on with survivors of attacks, with persons of color, from low income and so on and so forth. Now, of course, the problem again is here that where do you stop? Isn’t it that in all classical literature, Bible, Dante, up to as we all know Huckleberry Finn and so on and so forth, you find racism, sexism, violence, hatred, they are simply everywhere. So again where do you where do you put the limit? And it’s not only that poor people victim may feel hurt. What about the rich people who limit themselves to avoid getting triggered by close encounters with actual lower classes. What so again my first reproach to this strategy, protect the victims protect protect us from traumatic experiences is that this is precisely predominantly from my experience at least the structure of those of the privileged classes. Well, they for them any experience with this is always my reproach to this politically correct people who are sensitive against insults, dirty talking and so on and so forth like but do you have any contact with actual lower classes? Do you know how they talk? Do you you wouldn’t survive among them for five minutes actually. I mean I’ve been at so again my first reproach is this logic of being of dwelling in cocooned safe spaces. This is precisely the strategy this is precisely the strategy of the of the rich. So my problem is the following one. This politically correct idea that you need to feel safe in the classroom. I don’t think you should feel safe in the classroom. I think on the contrary my task as a teacher, although I may be a weird teacher, is not to make you feel safe, if anything on the contrary. To make you feel unsafe. To make even brutally to force you to control to force you to confront to force you to confront the horrors that are out there. Now, of course, the politically correct answer for me would be of course people should be taught about racism and so on, just they shouldn’t be exposed to it directly. I claim again you cannot do it. You cannot do it. You cannot live in this safe cocoon universe and just be taught from a safe distance about horrors going on out there. I think that the ultimate paradoxical formula would have been that well, basically human life itself is is is is triggering. Triggering in the sense that it always shocks you, unsettles you. So if you want to play this game to the end, you know, just before you are born I would send a little bit of message into the mother, you know, trigger warnings you are entering a traumatic world and so on and so forth. Again one should be taught that we do not live in a safe world. The point is not how to protect you from that world, but point is how to intervene with it, how to change it, and so on and so forth. So again, of course, there are victims and so on and so forth and I’m totally for protecting them, but not in this way. Not in this way, you know what again what I find wrong is this attitude of just not hurting people and so on and so forth. Well, the first thing to do is an elementary reflection. People get hurt but they are not automatically right if they feel hurt. For example, for an imagine this beautiful image from novels a lady from old American South upper class on on a plantation. Of course she gets too close to slaves, not too close but to educated slaves this is very traumatic and she’s hurt. But is she right? I mean so again the entire coordinates I think are wrong. The world in which we live in this cocoon basically the world of our charities where we want to live in our isolated cocoon universe and of course, we are constantly informed on the media, oh bit of Afghanistan, Somalia here and there. But but this is done in such an ambiguous way basically, you know, horror is out there we retain a proper distance and so on. This is why for me again charity is fundamentally ambiguous, charity is the way to keep the horror at a distance. Now I will put it even in Hegelian terms. What we should learn, you know this is what Hegel calls self-reflection. What if we should learn it’s not that we live here in our safe space with good manners, I cannot even talk to you in the eye, it’s already sexual rape, whatever no, but out there there are horrors. What if from the perspective of totality or from others we are the way we act in this world. I will give you an example. It wasn’t published in English because again I notice that this tendency goes on, you know, I’m not kidding, I am now prohibited in Guardian. A good half a year ago they were inviting me. Now they don’t even answer my letters. The only invitations I get and I hate it is for totally stupid things like, you know where it’s politically totally benevolent meaningless like which was your favorite food this summer or which movie did you enjoy or do you like seriously, I was once asked could you describe once I wrote there was a big crisis going on and I sent them a tough political text and they go no, we are not into it now, could you rather describe when did you decide to wear a beard? I didn’t want to answer that. But sorry, what I want to say is that I published this text in German in Germany, my god now Germans are my new friends, they are dear. And you know, for example, to give you a wonderful example of this image of politically correctness. I was recently a week ago, a month ago in Mannheim close to Frankfurt. There was a big Friedrich Schiller festival, you know Schiller the big German writer, big idiot, even more most more more than even Goethe. Okay and my friend Udi Aloni, the crazy Israeli movie maker was staging some performance there. And I was there, I enjoyed it. In the morning before the performance he was doing last minute stage preparations, rearrangement and his German assistants, I mean stage workers were a little bit clumsy and screwed it up something some tables fell down whatever. And he shouted at them, he’s I mean if you think I’m tasteless you should listen to him. He told them where is your German organization? If Germans if you were to be if you were to be in the Nazi era clumsy like that you would never have succeeded even in doing the Holocaust, you know which is and it was wonderful because all the people there, you know they didn’t dare to laugh, they were totally totally at a loss, you know. Yeah? And then I stepped in, I couldn’t resist to things even worse, I told him Udi listen, I know Holocaust was a horrible thing, they killed millions. But I told him listen, if we accept that it had to happen, why couldn’t they also throw into the oven your parents so that a monster like you embarrassing people here wouldn’t disturb us? And again he laughed, embraced me, the others were even more perplexed. But but you see my point how we we were practicing actual anti-racism with all our vulgarity and wait a minute, I’m not now saying that to be anti-racist you have to do this, you know, it would be a nice world where the only way to prove that you are not anti-Semitic is to participate in a dirty Holocaust joke and so on, you know. But no seriously what I want to say is that there the Germans embarrassed reply was if anything a proof that not just that they feel guilty that they were sincere. But that, you know, their position wasn’t clear. So what I want to say, let me go on is that yes, in Germany they like me. So I published there a comment, you know this wave of refugees in Southern across the Mediterranean, no? I don’t know how people react here in Britain but in Europe two replies are predominant. One is the anti-immigrant populist one, no? Oh, they are a threat to our way of life, hordes of black Africans are coming, we must stop them and so on whatever. Then then then there is the left-liberal approach. It’s a shame, where are we in Europe, primitives, thousands are dying there, it’s an ethical fiasco of Europe and so on. If anything I hate this second attitude even more. Why? Because I claim it’s such an hypocritical stance. They know very well that simply totally opening the borders is not the solution. That if you do this probably one million, two millions will come, you would have right-wing working class probably unrest in Europe. You would probably get Le Pen in power in France and so on and so forth. But it allows them left liberals to assume this beautiful soul positions. You know this is what intellectuals like to do, this moral attitude of oh, we are scandalized how can people be so cruel we are the only ones with blah blah blah because they know they will not have to pay the price for it. So how would I approach it? First my my solution would be now I come to the point I wanted to make not to not to the choice is not should we allow them in or should we stop them. It’s also not enough just to say the solution is not to accept them all, the solution is to the solution is to help them there in Africa. I mean George Bush, the president was saying this all the time. It’s good to do this, of course, but it’s not the solution. I think that if you really worry about starving Africans, getting drowned out there, you know you should begin with but what accounts for this recent mega-flow of refugees? And you discover something about which you don’t read a lot in the media. That all, and when I say all I mean all, all the hotspots were created by Western interventions directly military or economic. Okay I will not repeat my mega-point of that I mention in my books of the ultimate humanitarian catastrophe Democratic Republic of Congo, which is kind of a Conrad, Joseph Conrad-type heart of darkness, but as such totally integrated into Western economy. The state may be a true rogue state in total chaos and so on but but mining functions and the extraction of natural it functions perfectly to everybody’s satisfaction. As I told you now look you remember two years, three years ago I’ve written about it, there was a military rebellion against the central government close to Rwanda and okay our media again went into oh another ethnic war, oh this tragic story of whatever. But then you just read in close detail what was the main demand of the rebels. You know what? That the federal government in Kinshasa should break should should how to say should cancel a big contract with China. Because the central government did something which may be objectively just another gesture of Chinese economic imperialism but I think in Congo it could have worked, because this is what Congo needs. The Chinese made this deal, this offer: we will invest enormous sums, we talk about two-three hundred billions I think minimum, to to simply provide the entire infrastructure of Congo. You know Congo doesn’t function as a state. So the idea is phone, post, railways, highways, universities simply to make it a functioning state. Of course, there is a price to pay, that is the way Chinese will get most of the minerals. But I think it’s the first step, it’s the only solution. And this is what triggered those warlords in the east to protest because they had their own mining contracts and so on and so forth. So again it had nothing to do with some kind of a primordial primitive ethnic conflict. And let’s go closer now. You remember if you read about it in Central African Republic. It’s incredible, I even checked it in Wikipedia and you don’t find any of the true background. It’s like this: in Central Africa look you have here southwest a Christian Catholic majority and you have had in the northeast the Muslim minority. Not minority, they are some percent. Then as we like to say some crazy ethnic hatred exploded, brutal civil war between Muslims and Catholic majority and France intervene establishing this this old hatred, high passions, this blah blah. In reality you get them even in some right-wing media, but you know small letters. What ethnic hatred. In the Muslim northeast oil was discovered. And Chinese have good relations with Catholic majority. They wanted the access to that oil. France, the great fighter against Muslim fundamentalism, made a deal with Muslims there and basically staged that primordial ethnic rebellion. And then France did something disgusting. They first allowed the Muslims to occupy the capital of the country and then they intervened militarily to introduce order, but basically protected Muslim control of that oil area and so on and so forth. And again, all these staged enemies of prop what about refugees from Syria, Iraq and so on and so forth? Well, thanks to George Bush attacking Iraq, no? I mean the whole Middle East refugee wave. What about Libya? Well, thanks to my colleague philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy who as you know convinced convinced who was the president then still Sarkozy, Sarkozy to to attack Libya. Again it’s absolutely incredible how we we created with our not so much even political as economic interest. Again also my friend Alain Badiou who draw my attention to this he showed me some reports. He even said that in all French left-center main media Le Monde and so on, you couldn’t get this information about oil discovered in northeast of Central African Republic. He got it only in the right-wing weekly Le Point where there was a little note on it and then he looked further and discovered it. He told me that it’s also interesting how I even think that even if it may appear a local this desperate movement whatever but whenever you have really radical Islamism which is really aggressive. For example, Taliban are different here. Whatever they are, they are not aggressive. They are not exporters. But whenever wherever you have aggressive Islamism, there is oil behind. You know where they come from, you know, Northern Africa, Syria, Iraq, ISIS, ISIS is an oil phenomenon. You cannot abstract economic. So again what I’m saying, you see this is it, the first thing to do is to admit why there were no refugees, not such a great wave at least till I don’t know five ten years ago. We we did it, we triggered it. So this is where we should begin. Neither not to to ask, this is Hegel’s definition of a beautiful soul. You know you deplore oh what a horrible state but you you don’t ask yourself in what way you co-created this world. Now to I hope you understand me correctly, my point is not some silly bullshit that oh so we are guilty, this you know self-humiliation of white people. No, Africans like all people can be really evil and so on. And I often made fun of this politically correct patronizing racism where whenever there is a big a horrible thing going on in African country we must somehow begin. But nonetheless at this level it’s clear that we created, we should include ourselves in the picture. We are not living out here and then the choice should we stop them to enter or should we oh gracious give European openness, solidarity, open or no. The to begin with we should begin by asking ourselves in what way we are responsible for for what is happening there. And this is why, although and I will immediately go into it, although I’m very critical of China, it’s also practicing a version of let’s call it economic colonialism. But nonetheless, in the case of Congo, this was the only chance, you know. You have to have the basic infrastructure for a minimally functioning state. And it was successfully sabotaged. Congo remains the ultimate place of horror on the earth, nobody cares. Okay, sorry if I jump a little bit here and there. Now so again at this another point, sorry at this level let me return to my main point which is this limits of tolerance and so on and so forth. I think it’s very interesting to to analyze the so-called limit phenomena, phenomena from the edge which may appear crazy but say something about the world we live in. Like you know, it was reported I think in your media, and I love the example, who is Grace Gelder? You don’t know? Oh my god, it’s a wonderful phenomenon. Earlier this year, this is a professional photographer, a single woman in her thirties who was looking for a partner and didn’t found a proper partner. And then she decided literally to marry herself. Yeah, it was reported in the media. She organized, that’s what I like, a formal wedding with herself. White dress, there were witnesses, she gave the vows towards herself, then she put ring on herself and then she and then she kissed herself in the mirror. Even nice imitation of Hegelian theory. Of course, all this was based was founded in some crazy New Age teaching that, you know, as they say and I think it’s exactly the wrong thing to say, that you can only love others if you first love yourself, if you accept yourself. So she says quite reasonably, okay, I will begin with myself. So she the idea is this one and it’s so disgusting. And now she triggered a marginal trend but nonetheless a trend, which tell you how to organize you begin with self-dating. Like you say tonight you tell your friends sorry I’m busy, I already have a date. Then you prepare a nice dinner with candles for yourself, you even have some crazy websites where they give you technical details how to do it. Like it’s so nice that in the evening before you go to sleep you put on the fridge a love message to yourself. And then in the morning you are so nicely surprised, oh so and so, you know. Then you put your apartment in order, you put on your best dress best dress and so on and you do it. But and then the idea is there that when you make a date with yourself, you frankly talk with yourself about yourself. You admit all your weak points and when you finally get to know yourself, self-marrying means you fully accept yourself. Now first I wouldn’t laugh too much at this. I think there is a correct insight in it. We are not directly self you know what I like in this idea of self-marriage is that you know if you marry yourself you means you are not immediately one with yourself, you know. Like there is a gap. But what I also like is that this idea that it has to be a formal procedure. It’s not just oh I’m myself I like no it has to be a ritual. In the eyes of the big other there are witnesses you marry yourself. So but what I claim is that this marriage self-marriage is even more difficult than a marriage marrying another person. Because you know when they say you have to reconcile yourself with yourself and so on and so forth. Now my first cynical reaction was of course, but what if looking deep into yourself you discover that you don’t like yourself, you know. You become to realize you are a piece of shit. So my idea I debated with one of those guys in United States and I asked him okay, can I then divorce myself from myself. And what happens then? So again what my my claim here would have been that first such an act of marrying yourself is at the same time extremely violent towards yourself because, classic psychoanalytic topic, I don’t think you can really reconcile yourself with yourself. If you really want to know yourself as a neighbor in the biblical sense, it means you discover all the horror of yourself. And that this marrying yourself is the ultimate self-control. The second point why I prefer marrying others. I think that that loving others is ultimately a nice way to escape from yourself. That you know you turn towards others not to confront the horror that is in yourself. That’s why for me the well-known motto, be yourself is so problematic. Be yourself, which self? The problem is again that when you marry yourself you marry basically your ideal ego, what’s the best in you. The idealized image of yourself. And this is why relaxed self-identification, self-acceptance, imperceptibly turn into radical self-alienation. I think again that self I again what I what I’m telling you is that oh turning out to others, loving others is just an escape from yourself and it is but why not? It’s the only good thing that we can do. You see my point is the much more pessimistic one. If you look deep into yourself you discover shit, you discover this the only thing that can make our life tolerable is to turn towards others. In other words, as Lacan put it very nicely, the true neighbor is to yourself is you yourself. Neighbor in the sense of the foreigner which is impenetrable to you. So this is why as Lacan put it so nicely in one of his early seminars, you know this biblical motto love your neighbor as yourself. That this is never it has to be done in the second person. It would be obscene for me to say in the first person: I love my neighbor as myself, it would be obscene. The problem is the self. You see the similarity, I’m not getting totally lost, this is what I call negativity, with that formula of Congo, we are responsible and so on. You know, don’t look to the horror out there, look the problem is the horror in yourself. So again I even the other problem I have, don’t misunderstand me, I’m totally for gay rights, but not but in the sense but it’s nonetheless anti-Christian or something. But the problem is again the fact as about intolerance at the beginning. Where do we set the limit? Like if we now, I think we should extend, but for example what if you would have said not in a Muslim way where obviously men have priority, one man can have I think up to four wives, but what if we say in a more open liberal Western way, why should I marry or you of course for woman it goes the same, only one man or one woman. What if some deconstructionist idiot comes and tells you isn’t this binary logic binary opposites? Can’t I love a man and a woman? Two men, two women? Why shouldn’t we intermarry all of us? And I incidentally I read in the United States there already is a tendency. Not a religious fundamentalist tendency, but the libertarian tendency and they are already thinking about how to how to regulate it legally, you know, because then it gets a little bit more complicated who inherits and so on. Then let me go on, since it’s so fashionable to criticize to sorry to accuse people of speciesism, you know, like we humans we think we are something superior to other species. Okay, let’s say I’m really deeply attached to my dog or cat blah blah. Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t marry him or her? Why, isn’t it brutal human speciesism? You see you see my point? I’m not saying you see what I’m trying to pack on you is simply that it’s not an ideal liberal solution which we should be approached, but that ultimately it’s a deadlock and you have to set basically some contingent arbitrary limits. Because again, why not? Tell me why not? Why not marrying more than another human person? The moment you go, the only way to argue for it which would not be conservative is to evoke inheritance, you know, but of course we should reject this. So the moment you say there is nonetheless an exclusive bond between only two people I am even tempted to agree with it, but I think this is already a certain metaphysics which is in play here. You know, like I agree but like why should it be that it’s only one person? You have to go into some metaphysics of how exclude all others whatever. So again but let me so yes, that’s all I wanted to do it here. Just to give you some hints apropos tolerating lives of others, apropos sensitivity to pain and so on and so forth. About how liberal hedonism, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, my god, certainly has certain values. But it’s a very inconsistent project. It’s not simply an ideal that you can apply. And it’s in what sense inconsistent that you see, if I preach tolerance, we should be open blah blah, then of course I have to be intolerant towards intolerance. I don’t mean this in some abstract intellectual sense, but in a very concrete sense, like to what extent will I tolerate what I perceive as intolerance in others. Like for example, my neighbor has a strict patriarchal family, he is beating his children, his wife and so on. Now am I tolerant or not? And the most unpleasant here psychoanalysis enters and complicates everything. The most unpleasant thing and I’m not exaggerating here is this is what I call the great American narrative from Searchers to Taxi Driver. Is when you try when you try to save the other from being exploited or whatever you perceive as treated unfairly and you discover that the other has a perverse libidinal enjoyment. You know this is the point, if you see they are the great American narrative in a way an in advance intellectual self-critique movies like again I mention to you Taxi Driver and Searchers. John Ford and Taxi Driver for Scorsese. You saw I hope the Taxi Driver. You see the guy played by Robert De Niro who explodes in violence and so on. But this violence is precisely the ultimate deadlock outcome of his obsession to help the one he perceives as a victim, the young Jodie Foster, the prostitute and so on. You know and so this is for me again the ultimate ambiguity of permissiveness. That if you want to be really tolerant you have to develop such a universe of breathtaking prohibitions and so on, you know you shouldn’t be this you shouldn’t do that. And there is no simple solution here I claim. Even, you know when things are prohibited I think that it’s even much more ambiguous what is effectively prohibited. For for example why are we embarrassed when the victim tells us, the victim of rape, of torture tells us its her its experience the horror in detail. I don’t think it’s simply we don’t want to know the details. I think what we want to mask by this prohibition is the impossibility of telling it all. That truly, as we all know tragic thing about reporting on a truly traumatic experience, torture, rape, whatever, is that witnessing fails as we know you cannot tell it all. If you can, one can even say that if you can tell it all, were you really so traumatized? You know what I mean, like this elementary point, like when pro-feminist point, of course, when a woman who was raped reports, male chauvinists say claim oh but you see she was inconsistent, it wasn’t she said first this then that. My point is if anything then such inconsistencies are a subjective proof that she really underwent a trauma. If anything I would be suspicious, of course taking her seriously but like if I were to be suspicious of a rape report it would rather have been a rape report where a lady in a totally cold voice, you know, reports he put his finger there then he did this then I moved my ass like this then that and so on. I say wait a minute. No, I’m not saying it automatically disqualifies her, it’s possible that she had some kind of a psychotic breakdown and adopted a kind of a living dead perspective. But what I’m saying is that I more and more suspect that the prohibition to tell something is protects us from the fact that you cannot tell it. We are not afraid that we would have learned too much from but that we but that we cannot do it. So again the second point I want to emphasize from this confused reports to you here at Cambridge is that it’s absolutely crucial to see how the our in our secluded Western developed countries the growing sensitivity to being traumatized, hurt, you know all these trigger warnings and so on are just the obverse of a growing brutality out there. My god, you know, isn’t this absurd United States we are talking about a country which at the same time there are people there who want to put trigger warnings on classical works of art and the country which de facto legalized torture so-called, you know. And if you look at the brutality around the world, but it’s not even only around the world. It’s even I you know I reported this in one of my books like it’s so easy for us to deplore sweatshops down there in Indonesia, Chinese do like but you you remember three years ago or when they discovered in the suburb of Florence, Florence the top of Western culture civilization, that there is some small city in the suburbs of Florence. How did they discover it? Some barracks where migrant workers were sleeping then burnt and there were immediately Chinese dead or what why? Because the conditions were absolutely horrible that they discovered that there were only in that city illegal Chinese workers living in total slave conditions. So, you know it’s not even there. It’s here. If anything when you have real slums out there I’m not for a sentimental approach. I did this, I made some friends in Brazil. You know that in Sao Paulo I love this image in in Rio de Janeiro, the favela people you have now favela tours, you know. Tourist agencies they show you and so on and it’s a nice paradox there, I don’t know if I told you this. That the Lula government, the previous one, did some good things, they put at least in many central slums, they did put water, electricity. But you know what’s the result? I laughed so much. That slums, some slums this one which were regulated well, they are now too expensive for the really poor, you know. Like you have already the hierarchy of the hierarchy of slums. So again what another point that I want to tell you here my my conclusion. For example, we live in an epoch where the ultimate signifier is human rights. Okay, but are you aware that at the simple economic level de facto slavery is massively returning. This is what fascinates me. With all the talk of sensitivity human rights, there are so many forms of de facto slavery, new versions of apartheid. Of course, the big example is and I was there this Arab Emirates. You have there hundreds of thousands of people in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Bahrain who are not formally slaves but de facto slaves. They were hired from poor Asian countries, Nepal, Indonesia, I don’t know to come there, their passports are taken, they work for absolutely miserable sums without money, formally they are not allowed to enter the public space the city. You have and who knows what’s happening in Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth. Then you have in all Africa again it’s not formal slavery but it’s de facto slavery. Like in the one that I already mentioned, Congo, mining industries again. You have hundreds of thousands of people de facto working as slaves there, kidnapped by armed gangs, forced to work there. China, Indonesia sweatshops in China, they are embarrassed, I read there in official statements how hundreds of thousands of people are sold by poor farming families to work especially, you know that I don’t know if it’s still the case but three, four years ago half of all the buildings constructions in the world were done in in China. So they need an incredible amount of building material bricks and then while they are making bricks there in the middle of inner China desert child labor can be very useful for the simple carrying it so it’s quite a formal it’s not for me to say but tolerated procedure, agents tour the impoverished villages and they buy for a certain period of time children up from four five years stay and so on and so on. So what I’m saying is that there are this is paradox which is from the beginning part of capitalism. Robin Blackburn with whom I otherwise don’t agree politically, he analyzed this phenomenon very nicely of how at the end of the Middle Ages slavery was more or less out in Europe. But then precisely with the explosion of capitalist modernity, slavery exploded. Although capitalism was formally founded on you know freedom, human rights and so on and so forth. What I’m claiming is that today with global capitalism exactly the same phenomenon is reproducing itself to us. So we do live in really really sad really really sad times. Now let me just conclude my god I talked too much with another point. Namely Greece to return to Greece. You know what made me so depressed just reading the news about Greece is when you know this endless negotiations where there is always when things happen go on the way they did, you remember? Like they said oh the agreement is almost there but it’s never there and so on. This is always a symptomatic sign, a symptom that there is a deeper disagreement. And I think this disagreement is if I may use this horrible word a discursive disagreement. They are simply talking two different languages, the European commissioners and the Greeks. And it’s not as the Europeans are saying that Varoufakis is a clown, they change conditions all the time while Europeans simply want to talk business and so on and so forth. I did you I think again the vision is much more tragic. I think the difference is that Greeks are and it’s incredible this manipulation how Greeks are this referendum was presented in the West as the decision between Grexit or remaining in Europe, Drachma or Euro. No, if anyone really wants to remain in Europe and retain Europe it’s the Greek government. The Greek the difference is between pure expert technocracy to put it very simply and politics. Basically Greeks are talking negotiating they were negotiating at the level of let’s call it big political decision. They admitted the situation is intolerable and they blame themselves Greeks most. They are not playing the game. This is total lie when Western media claim like the Greeks are saying oh oh we just have we want the debt wiped off and so on and so forth. No, the Greeks admit it. The Greeks even admitted that the great problem is not Western European pressure but that Greece is an inefficient corrupted clientelist state and so on. But they see it as a problem not just of expert economy how much you know that’s the tragedy the Western the European Union negotiators and I think the really bad guy is that Dutch idiot, Dijsselbloem or what Dijsselbloem I don’t know how you pronounce it correctly, Dijsselbloem or what Dijsselbloem I don’t know how you say. Who is incidentally a local agricultural expert totally idiot if one cannot say for Dutch people but he. And he said in a recent interview if I get into the ideological side of things I won’t achieve anything. That’s the problem of Europe. Of course by ideology here he didn’t mean and we shouldn’t mean some big phrases freedom and so on. But simply what the Greeks insisted is that the problem is basically an economico-political one. It’s not just this problem of detailed numbers as they presented it, you know. Because it’s so shocking and I followed negotiations closely, it’s so shocking at the level of numbers or even concrete measures how close they were all the time. Like the difference at many points was something that would have amounted in financial terms to one two billions per per year. No, the problem is that Greeks made a fundamental point which was till now is obvious one we followed a certain model. A certain model of austerity and so on. It obviously didn’t work. You the Western people you will never get any money back in this way. And surprisingly as Varoufakis pointed out did you read this? The one who get them round now is IMF itself which propose twenty years debt moratorium and so on and so forth. That’s the the basic Greek statement: Europe was following a certain politics and this is economic politics. This is not just some expert decisions technical. A certain politico-economic vision of how to approach it which doesn’t work. And Varoufakis I talked in detail with him he told me isn’t Europe seeing that in this way Europe itself is losing in the wrong sorry in the long term? Like the story I repeat in my books I already mentioned it here. Europe is in crisis, not world capitalism. As I told you the story no that when I was in Korea not yesterday this time I only went to catch that MERS virus. I talked about crisis and they started to laugh at me. They said who is in crisis? Latin America a little bit still not. Even even sub-Saharan Africa globally moving. Who who is in crisis? We in the Far East are not. You Western Europe part of it, you are in crisis. And I really think this that you like I put it now in a little bit hypocritical terms but that you you should be critical of Western Europe management not only if you are some kind of a crazy radical leftist. But even if you are now I will cynically moderate pro-capitalist Eurocentrist you should be worried. Because Europe is losing in the long term. My god if it goes like this in years we will be just the a popular tourist space for rich Chinese and Americans and so on you know we are losing. So the Greeks are saying no sorry it’s not just that do we lower the retirement the pension for five or for six percent. Do we I don’t know do we raise those taxes and so on more or less. No, they say a radically new approach is necessary if you want money back from us. Then my god you should somehow enable us to produce more so that we can pay you back. That’s their argument. Even when they talk about debt as Varoufakis put it very nicely, you should look it it’s really wonderful short eight minutes interview that I mentioned Bloomberg on July When he says that it’s not Greece which is living in dreamland it’s European Union. They still follow that formula extend and pretend. They know very well that debt will not be ever repaid. Not only this but if you follow economic news around the world you will discover that practically all the debt will never be repaid. Like now I read some analysis and the joke is not from left wingers from some conservative right wingers in America where they even mathematically demonstrated that the United States debt which is tremendous at this point is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per family. And they make this experiment they said let’s say that some kind of a totalitarian economic dictatorship takes place in United States so that all the surplus goes to repaying the debt, you know. They just provide a minimal standard of living for the people, they even cut the army or whatever, just the whole United States starts to work for the debt. Maybe in years probably not. But it’s a ridiculous solution. So first that’s the first problem. And and when so many cities, American states, like Puerto Rico now. Puerto Rico is three times worse than Greece and so on. But so you know the problem is this one first when we talk about debt. There are debtors and debtors you know like you have countries who are too big to fail and who are have an unfair advantage like if you worry about debt don’t talk about Greece talk about the United States. But United States are privileged why? Because they have dollar they can print dollar you know they can cheat. They are a country who is indebted but they can like print money can control the conditions of the debt then you have the big banks who cannot be allowed to fail and so on and so on. So maybe the time has come to talk it’s not simply that some rich bankers are getting rich while others are in debt. No there is even a class hierarchy between indebted countries themselves. So what what is so frustrating for the Greeks Varoufakis told me that this was what was designed you remember those reports I don’t know at what negotiations last that he went leave left the room. He told me he was talking about fundamental issues and he was treated like a pupil third grade. He said no no no don’t escape into generalities what about half percent here you didn’t give us a clear answer you know Europeans are treating this as a kind of a minor expert administrative problem. They don’t see the big political choice to be made and this has even nothing to do with the left. So what’s the conclusion from this? The conclusion is for me a very sad one. I don’t know what the reactions will be of Europe but the latest I heard heard this morning is that it looks pretty bad that the reaction of Europe will be pretty furious you know. I mean it’s a catastrophe for us. You know Varoufakis resigned no? Sorry? Do you know if Varoufakis resigned? No? Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah but do what do you know? You have inner no no no I mean this here I know but was this I wonder was this obviously he knew it before that he will do it probably. Yeah yeah he announced it this morning. Is this a strategy just to just to subtract to take away a problematic person or what? Because for me you know he is among all these guys the only true intellectual. It’s so sad that he was thrown out you know. I think he resigned at the right time because he made his point. I think he resigned after he won the argument so in some respects you resign. Yeah what argument did he win? The Yes. Okay but you know what I’m afraid plus if there is a sorry I don’t know no plus if there is a within the Syriza party there is obviously a lot of people who want Greece to exit the Euro altogether so now it’ll be easier if you know if Tsipras is going that way it’ll be easier to do it without having had the Yeah but you know what is the problem here? Kostas, I hate him in a friendly way. You saw he use in his text my old Rabinovich joke you know. Are you know this thing do you read then I should tell it to him I hate him. This is my my eternal joke if you read my books one thousand years you know that Rabinovich wants to emigrate emigrate from Soviet Union two reasons the first blah blah. You know that he told me that exactly the same joke is now circulating there. A Greek guy comes to Australian embassy and wants to emigrate. And he didn’t even report correctly the joke he lost the point he said I want to emigrate from Greece for two reasons. The first reason is that there will be Grexit and there will be further poverty chaos I want to go out. Then the Australian guy tells him but don’t worry it’s just negotiations at the end they will make a deal and European technocrats will rule Greece you know there will be order. And he says that’s my second reason to emigrate. So it is a difficult decision and so on but you know you know what I can you help us not only here. My problem nonetheless is this one: what okay I put it like this I was and Kostas’s talk remember if you were there we had some stupid roundtable about Greece a couple of months ago where Kostas made me very sad because he said that he described the Greek strategy as hysteresis if you were there you would remember as manipulating with poverty human catastrophe and playing a clown. Now I want he use this term it’s shocking like a little bit extravagant and so on. Okay do you remember how Kostas a year ago and two was saying a new type of leftist political subjectivity is emerging in Greece no? And I’m almost tempted to say in a very vicious way yes this is a new role for the left to play to play a begging clowns you know I mean no what I’m seriously saying is that no this this strategy it’s not that it’s humiliating and so on Europe technocracy is really evil they will not have mercy it will not work. So what I’m saying is this like nothing unexpected happening happened from the European side. Maybe I thought they the Greek government didn’t they have some big plan or what like you know what I mean did you hear any rumors here? What did they expect you know what I mean like nothing unexpected happened. If anything I expect if I were to be European defender of technocratic interest I would have been even much more brutal. They I hope maybe here they were surprised they didn’t manipulate enough the fact that for example it’s quite a shock but you know that in a discreet way United States even the right wingers there are more on the Greek side discrete. You know why? Because they are worried that if there is a Grexit this will push Greece into Russia China’s camp and out of NATO. Do you remember two-three days ago the NATO general secretary said Greece is crucial for defense especially now with Erdogan playing his own Islamist game and so on. So I thought they would succeed more here. No but again it’s an extremely it’s a you know what only is my okay I will repeat and then conclude with my last joke which I only mentioned it here. You saw the movie V for Vendetta. You know how it ends? The crowd takes over Parliament and so on. I would sell my mother into slavery which I would in any case my point is to see part two of that movie. What happens then the next day? How do they organize life? What measures and so on and so forth. And that’s for me the big problem and I infinitely appreciate Syriza for heroically at least confronting the problem. I don’t care about this what happens in Greece in Athens yes yes it’s wonderful people demonstrating crying shouting again these pathetic scenes but you know there is what I call in Lacanian Marxist terms the Real of the capital. It’s this eternal story a democratic government popular authentic is elected from Mandela to Lula and then there is big big hope but then ultimately you have to make a deal with capital. Capital is serious real. And that’s for me the problem. This is why I don’t think some people claim if there is too much of a compromise Syriza should simply step down or what. No I’m here a Maoist you know Mao said whatever you do cling to power. I would remain make all the compromises even you have to put some pressure on your leftist circles and silently work my god Syriza should learn from Stalin. What can they do? Fucking they can penetrate the state apparatus kill the people you know they can lay the organizational foundation you know that they will not be alone. Now they must be in a terrible situation probably. Terrible situation in the sense that police sorry yes? I was just going to say it’s not just about Greece is it they can do that they can also join up with Podemos in Spain and. Yeah but here they were disappointed this was the biggest disappointment. I agree
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totally
totally
Slavoj Žižek
with you. But Podemos I had even stronger doubts although my god I publicly support them and so on Podemos. But you know I’m sorry for this obsession of
with you. But Podemos I had even stronger doubts although my god I publicly support them and so on Podemos. But you know I’m sorry for this obsession of
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mine
mine
Slavoj Žižek
which always brings me in trouble with Kostas no but fuck demonstrations what do you do then? For example some desperate people in Greece now say Syriza became too much a party of government. They should return
which always brings me in trouble with Kostas no but fuck demonstrations what do you do then? For example some desperate people in Greece now say Syriza became too much a party of government. They should return
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to
to
Slavoj Žižek
their roots and
their roots and
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so on. I agree blah blah but still what will you do? The big all other things are can be negotiated but how to deal with capitalist reality? With the Real of capital. Can you really disturb it? What to do and so on. And this is why I
so on. I agree blah blah but still what will you do? The big all other things are can be negotiated but how to deal with capitalist reality? With the Real of capital. Can you really disturb it? What to do and so on. And this is why I
Slavoj Žižek
know what people are saying
know what people are saying
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I
I
Slavoj Žižek
was saying this all the time and maybe we should get tired of it namely what? The obvious fact which it was right to emphasize that basically if you look closely at what Greek government was pursuing. This is also what you don’t get in the West. Forget about the debt but in inner Greek politics you can maybe Maria you know what I would like to do let’s say we are on TV and now I click the button our special correspondent from Athens you with they should do your square there is Syntagma Square constitution. We should maybe move I always make this joke from syntagma to paradigma to paradigm you know we need a new paradigm of everyday life you know what to do there. So again like all the time we are emphasizing I read this in some even Economist here or somewhere that if you look at what the government Syriza was doing within it was doing a very good job. Better collecting of taxes, no crazy spending and so on. It was doing even from standard bourgeois capitalist point of view moderate good politics. The point is that as I always repeat it that if you look at their politics it’s what would have been considered fifty years ago a very moderate social democracy. So of course the question is where are we now where in order to practice modest social democracy you appear as a as a radical leftist. Varoufakis is for me a true tragic figure. Now he is mocked as crazy leftist but did you read it was published in Guardian at least online his old speech in Zagreb where he said I want to give European capitalism a chance to reinvent itself as welfare like he even said a little bit problematically that he wants to save capitalism. But obviously it doesn’t work and what if now comes my pessimism what if the European establishment is right here. Right in the sense that no matter how much Syriza says but guys what’s the problem we are so modest it’s all moderate social democracy. What if nonetheless they are right in Europe? Haha you will not deceive us in this today’s conditions even such modest demands are radical. They are a threat to the system. I think this is the horror and which at the same time gives us hope. So I think even if Greece fails it it will just the problem will reproduce themselves. Even if Europe somehow stabilizes itself it will become another province and so on and so forth I am to cut a long story short. Maybe something new will happen but the big you know what’s my problem? How maybe it’s not even possible at a local level in the sense of one government to undermine the rule of the capital because again for me the problem is again this was always the limit of leftist governments you know. You can play your democratic games a little bit of justice blah blah but when it comes to confronting capital and again not at the level of big declarations but how to reorganize daily life and so on and so forth. So tomorrow I will tell you where we will go. I want to give you it’s funny a theory of China today. What is really happening there? Because crazy things are happening there. They have now a new atheist campaign for you know that there is a religious freedom but not but not for members of the Communist
was saying this all the time and maybe we should get tired of it namely what? The obvious fact which it was right to emphasize that basically if you look closely at what Greek government was pursuing. This is also what you don’t get in the West. Forget about the debt but in inner Greek politics you can maybe Maria you know what I would like to do let’s say we are on TV and now I click the button our special correspondent from Athens you with they should do your square there is Syntagma Square constitution. We should maybe move I always make this joke from syntagma to paradigma to paradigm you know we need a new paradigm of everyday life you know what to do there. So again like all the time we are emphasizing I read this in some even Economist here or somewhere that if you look at what the government Syriza was doing within it was doing a very good job. Better collecting of taxes, no crazy spending and so on. It was doing even from standard bourgeois capitalist point of view moderate good politics. The point is that as I always repeat it that if you look at their politics it’s what would have been considered fifty years ago a very moderate social democracy. So of course the question is where are we now where in order to practice modest social democracy you appear as a as a radical leftist. Varoufakis is for me a true tragic figure. Now he is mocked as crazy leftist but did you read it was published in Guardian at least online his old speech in Zagreb where he said I want to give European capitalism a chance to reinvent itself as welfare like he even said a little bit problematically that he wants to save capitalism. But obviously it doesn’t work and what if now comes my pessimism what if the European establishment is right here. Right in the sense that no matter how much Syriza says but guys what’s the problem we are so modest it’s all moderate social democracy. What if nonetheless they are right in Europe? Haha you will not deceive us in this today’s conditions even such modest demands are radical. They are a threat to the system. I think this is the horror and which at the same time gives us hope. So I think even if Greece fails it it will just the problem will reproduce themselves. Even if Europe somehow stabilizes itself it will become another province and so on and so forth I am to cut a long story short. Maybe something new will happen but the big you know what’s my problem? How maybe it’s not even possible at a local level in the sense of one government to undermine the rule of the capital because again for me the problem is again this was always the limit of leftist governments you know. You can play your democratic games a little bit of justice blah blah but when it comes to confronting capital and again not at the level of big declarations but how to reorganize daily life and so on and so forth. So tomorrow I will tell you where we will go. I want to give you it’s funny a theory of China today. What is really happening there? Because crazy things are happening there. They have now a new atheist campaign for you know that there is a religious freedom but not but not for members of the Communist
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Party. They want
Party. They want
Slavoj Žižek
to insist on atheism there. But the truly wonderful thing is that how ambiguous that atheism campaign is. Between the lines I found some official statements where they are even saying not only Communist Party members shouldn’t believe in religion it’s better even if they don’t believe too much in communism. Because the true danger for them now and you don’t read about this in the media are communists who still believe in communism you know. There is a potential mixture emerging of old disappointed honest communist cadres joining hands with these totally marginalized workers and so on. This is the true fear. Forget about Tibet and all that bullshit. It’s pure class struggle. The whole Chinese state is now organized this is why they emphasize so much Confucianism and there is such nice Hegelian irony. They say socialism with Chinese characteristics. And what is this Chinese characteristic? Global capitalism, you know. So it’s exactly the opposite what they are saying and all this all this Confucian stuff and so on is just okay. Then I will go into philosophy via something that should interest you. I will go in detail into it. Did you follow a little bit this Heidegger scandal, Black Notebooks? Okay, to provoke you of course I will defend Heidegger. Because I think it’s a politically total at first I’m disgusted with Heidegger to avoid a misunderstanding. He was a total scum and so on. But I’m claiming the political stakes of this attack on Heidegger is simply the last stage in this Habermasian rational Enlightenment liberal campaign against more radical French theory. It’s this old story we who follow Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida are closet fascists, irrationalists and so on and so forth. It’s another story besides. So through this we will go into I excuse myself for to you for today I was again jet-lagged. You know what I was doing in Japan? Ah you know what’s spiciness. No spiciness place where collectively you play computer games and so on. This is the only cultural place that I visited in Tokyo. I went to one palace royal palace I saw it from a taxi window then I said to the taxi driver okay nice to see it let’s go to Gundam to play computer games you know. So again I sincerely apologize I was totally jet-lagged. Tomorrow I warn you we go into theory. First China then Heidegger then Hegel religion and so on. Sorry again for the confusion and see you tomorrow then thank you very much.
to insist on atheism there. But the truly wonderful thing is that how ambiguous that atheism campaign is. Between the lines I found some official statements where they are even saying not only Communist Party members shouldn’t believe in religion it’s better even if they don’t believe too much in communism. Because the true danger for them now and you don’t read about this in the media are communists who still believe in communism you know. There is a potential mixture emerging of old disappointed honest communist cadres joining hands with these totally marginalized workers and so on. This is the true fear. Forget about Tibet and all that bullshit. It’s pure class struggle. The whole Chinese state is now organized this is why they emphasize so much Confucianism and there is such nice Hegelian irony. They say socialism with Chinese characteristics. And what is this Chinese characteristic? Global capitalism, you know. So it’s exactly the opposite what they are saying and all this all this Confucian stuff and so on is just okay. Then I will go into philosophy via something that should interest you. I will go in detail into it. Did you follow a little bit this Heidegger scandal, Black Notebooks? Okay, to provoke you of course I will defend Heidegger. Because I think it’s a politically total at first I’m disgusted with Heidegger to avoid a misunderstanding. He was a total scum and so on. But I’m claiming the political stakes of this attack on Heidegger is simply the last stage in this Habermasian rational Enlightenment liberal campaign against more radical French theory. It’s this old story we who follow Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida are closet fascists, irrationalists and so on and so forth. It’s another story besides. So through this we will go into I excuse myself for to you for today I was again jet-lagged. You know what I was doing in Japan? Ah you know what’s spiciness. No spiciness place where collectively you play computer games and so on. This is the only cultural place that I visited in Tokyo. I went to one palace royal palace I saw it from a taxi window then I said to the taxi driver okay nice to see it let’s go to Gundam to play computer games you know. So again I sincerely apologize I was totally jet-lagged. Tomorrow I warn you we go into theory. First China then Heidegger then Hegel religion and so on. Sorry again for the confusion and see you tomorrow then thank you very much.