No Sex please, We are Post-Human
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-01-20 · 1:20:27 · 11,643 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismcinema-art-cultureliberalism-political-correctnessreligion-theologyrace-antisemitismdemocracygeopolitics-wareveryday-lifehegel-dialecticsphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture on the critique of ideology, arguing that ideology today operates not through explicit rules but through a two-tiered structure of official norms plus an obscene, unwritten underside that sustains them. He ranges across examples, charity advertising, organic food, Abu Ghraib, Casablanca, Kung Fu Panda, Starbucks, healthcare reform, and an unreleased Danish documentary about Indonesian mass killers, to show that post-ideological cynicism and 'authentic human experience' are themselves the most refined ideological positions. The talk concludes with a defense of anti-Semitism analysis through Lacanian logic, arguing that the fight against ideology must begin with a 'spiritual violence aimed at yourself', a transformation of your own dreams rather than direct action.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The Pauline/Marxist project of unmasking not corrupt individuals but systemic authority, global order, and the ideological mystification sustaining it.
The dense implicit context that ideology's simplified abstractions systematically suppress, and whose suppression is precisely what makes them ideological.
Charity ads interpellate the viewer as a guilty but redeemable subject who can buy their way out of complicity, naming them within an ideological position.
Performing gestures (buying organic food, donating to charity) that create the feeling of doing something without challenging structural conditions, thereby reproducing the system.
as “two-level rules”
Every community has explicit rules and second-level meta-rules that tell you how to deal with (including how to violate) the explicit rules; true membership requires mastering the meta-level.
The unspoken, transgressive complement to official ideology, rituals, obscene jokes, secret initiations, that sustains the official rules by providing their libidinal enjoyment.
Operates in the background of the Casablanca analysis: the ambiguous object-cause of desire (what happened in the fade-out) that the film sustains without resolving.
as “big Other”
Referenced in the discussion of ideology as a symbolic agency, the moral/ideological agent addressed by the film's double-coding of the Casablanca scene.
as “transgression as rule-governed”
Apparently spontaneous hedonistic outbursts (drinking, smoking, sex) are themselves learned, coded, and regulated, they belong to ideology's obscene underside, not outside it.
Ideology today presents itself as its own opposite, as a return to authentic human identity beneath political labels, and this self-concealment is its most powerful form.
The narrative screen individuals construct about their inner life and motivations, which is constitutively a mystification rather than a path to truth about what they are actually doing.
as “belief without a believing subject”
The paradoxical structure in which a belief (Santa Claus, democracy, horseshoe superstition) operates socially even though no individual actually endorses it.
Freudian register invoked to describe Kung Fu Panda's replacement of sexual desire with eating/gluttony as the hero's primary drive, suggesting a pre-genital libidinal organization.
as “decaffeinated Dalai Lama”
Žižek's label for today's dominant ideological stance, enlightened hedonism telling you to 'be truly yourself and realize your potentials', a watered-down spirituality serving capitalist self-improvement.
A stage of capitalism in which consumerism and humanitarian/altruistic concern are synthesized into a single act of purchase, neutralizing the critique of consumerism by incorporating it.
The ideological enrichment of a commodity with layers of ethical, communal, and political meaning (as with Starbucks), so that purchasing it feels like a complete moral act.
The move by which uncertainties created by dismantling the welfare state are repackaged as new freedoms and consumer choices, making precarity feel like personal empowerment.
as “moral vacuum”
The ethical void opened by capitalist globalization's dismantling of traditional normative frameworks, into which figures like the Indonesian mass killers step without remorse.
as “Zionism as ultimate stage of anti-Semitism”
Žižek's provocation that contemporary Zionist discourse deploys the same characterizations of the rootless, money-driven, unbelonging Jew that 19th-century anti-Semites deployed.
as “subject supposed to know”
Invoked implicitly through Lacan's formula, the anti-Semite's jealous husband who 'needs' the fantasy, the one whose subjectivity depends on an attributed knowledge or fantasy in the Other.
as “spiritual violence aimed at yourself”
The first necessary act of any genuine radical politics: a transformation of your own fantasies and dreams before turning outward, exemplified by Fight Club's self-beating scene.
Stories he reaches for 16
Niels Bohr had a horseshoe above his country house door; when a visiting scientist asked how a physicist could be superstitious, Bohr said 'I don't believe in it, but I was told it works even if you don't believe it.'
“I of course I don't believe in it that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe it.”
In the late 1930s D.T. Suzuki wrote texts justifying Japanese aggression on China and used Zen enlightenment, the dissolution of the substantial self, as a technique for making soldiers able to kill without psychological resistance.
“if you reach enlightenment and see the vanity of substantial reality, then I can experience the same scene in a totally different way... here is my hand moving around in an impersonal dance”
Darian Leader's formula for X-Files, all the aliens happen 'out there' to cover up the fact that nothing sexual happens between the two leads, applies equally to The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, where the absence of romance between the leads is displaced onto global conspiracies.
“all these things happen out there, here an alien, there an alien, to cover up the fact that nothing goes on here between the two of them.”
The architect of the Holocaust spent his spare time playing late Beethoven string quartets in a string quartet with SS friends, Žižek insists the playing may have been authentic, proving there is no necessary link between inner cultural experience and external atrocity.
“Maybe he played them with a real authenticity, blah blah, and nonetheless he was able to do it.”
The film works at two levels, sincere Orientalist Buddhist-military ideology and constant self-mocking humor, yet the ideology survives the jokes; the ending reveals: 'There is no special ingredient, it functions if you believe it.' Žižek also notes the film's absence of romantic interest and the hero's oral-anal economy (eating rather than sex).
“To make something special, you just have to believe it's special... It functions even if you know that there is nothing.”
Adults pretend for children; children pretend not to disappoint parents, in neither case does anyone actually believe in Santa Claus, yet the belief functions in the social network.
“you can have a belief functions as element of a social network. It functions except although even if nobody effectively in the first person believes.”
An Israeli soldier breaking into a suspected terrorist's apartment discovers the daughter's name matches his own daughter's name, shows his wallet photo, and says 'we are human', Žižek calls this an obscenity in that situation.
“I claim in that situation this was an obscenity. You know, to emphasize in that sense humanity.”
Chinese scientists privately suggested the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes may have been triggered by the pressure changes from Three Gorges Dam reservoirs, illustrating how human activity now generates risks whose consequences are opaque to us.
“these earthquakes were probably the product of human activity... the gigantic lakes they created have changed so much the pressure on different strata”
In Fight Club, Ed Norton's character beats himself in front of his boss, Žižek reads this as the correct model for radical politics: a spiritual violence aimed at oneself, transforming your own dreams, before any outward action.
“That's how you should begin: change your dreams.”
When asked if she believed in God, Israeli PM Golda Meir said 'Jewish people believe in God and I believe in Jewish people', Žižek takes this as the perfect formula for impersonal belief: no one needs to believe directly, belief circulates through the social network.
“Jewish people believe in God and I believe in Jewish people.”
For every pair of shoes you buy, another pair goes to a child in need, the formula lets consumerism present itself as philanthropy, so the more you consume the more virtuous you are.
“you may engage in consumerism because the more you do it, the more also those who are excluded profit by it”
Sister Maria goes to the Mother Superior to be punished for her sexual desire for Baron von Trapp; the Mother Superior instead sings 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain', effectively telling her to go seduce him, demonstrating that church ideology solicits transgression while maintaining surface prohibition.
“the Mother Superior starts to sing a song... which means almost literally, 'Go back, seduce and screw the guy.'”
A friend shown the first Abu Ghraib torture photo (prisoner in strange dress attached to cords) thought it looked like off-off-Broadway avant-garde theater; Žižek reads it as the staging of the obscene underside of American and military culture, not an aberration.
“those guys in prison there by annoying, torturing, those being cruel to the prisoners, they were effectively staging there this obscene underground other side”
TV charity ads showing a suffering child and offering relief 'for the price of a cappuccino' function ideologically by giving the viewer a cheap way to feel good, ensuring structural suffering continues.
“we pay charities not so much to help those out there but to make sure that they remain there, no? That they don't come.”
Nobody enjoys smoking or whisky on first encounter, it requires a transgressive initiatic experience and deliberate learning; even sex at its deepest level is a transgressive duty rather than pure pleasure, proving that transgressive enjoyment is fully rule-governed.
“you literally have to learn to enjoy as part of the initiatic ritual. I claim it's the same with drinking.”
Žižek filled his NYU office-hour sign-up sheets with invented names so students who didn't know each other wouldn't realize the slots were taken, allowing him to go to the cinema, he confirms the story is true despite the introducer calling it false.
“since they didn't know each other, I filled it myself with invented names so I went to a movie theater”
Works invoked 28
The Parallax View book
One of Žižek's own books mentioned by the introducer.
The Da Vinci Code film
The film version is analyzed (not the book) for displacing libido onto global conspiracy because no sexual tension exists between the leads.
Fight Club film
Called one of Žižek's favorite Hollywood movies; he defends it against the accusation of proto-fascism; the self-beating scene is the model for 'spiritual violence aimed at yourself'.
Casablanca film
Sincerely liked; the fade-out scene is analyzed as a masterwork of double-coding ideology, simultaneously giving moral cover and feeding dirty imagination.
Quantum of Solace film
First James Bond film with no sex; cited as evidence for the disappearing Hollywood couple formula.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's book on Zen Buddhism's support for Japanese imperialism; referred to as always; demonstrates no necessary link between inner enlightenment and ethical action.
The Sound of Music film
Called one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization; the Mother Superior singing 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' is analyzed as the paradigm case of religious ideology's obscene underside.
Angels and Demons film
The film version eliminates even the minimal sexual tension of the novel; used alongside Da Vinci Code to identify the trend of Hollywood displacing libido onto external catastrophe.
Kant's work mentioned in the Monica Lewinsky airport anecdote as the respectable dust jacket under which the biography should have been hidden.
Kung Fu Panda film
Called a perfect almost clinical example of how ideology functions; analyzed for its two-level structure of Buddhist mysticism and self-mocking humor, and for its oral-anal hero economy.
Titanic film
Standard reference for the Hollywood formula of framing catastrophe with the creation of a romantic couple.
The X-Files tv
Used via Darian Leader's formula: all paranormal events happen out there to cover up the absence of sexual relationship between the leads.
The Lost Symbol book
Dan Brown's latest novel; Žižek says he almost killed himself reading it and judges it bad even by Brown's own standards; not even a minimal sexual tension.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's historical work on Père Joseph; praised as absolutely crucial for showing the coexistence of authentic mysticism and political atrocity.
Shoah film
Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary; mentioned as the model (in a positive sense) whose interview methodology was then applied in a more ideological way in Tsahal.
One of Žižek's own books mentioned by the introducer.
The Ticklish Subject book
One of Žižek's own books mentioned by the introducer.
Source of the marching chant example ('Eskimo pussies are rather cold'), used to illustrate obscene military rituals as the underside of official culture.
The Act of Killing film
Danish documentary (not yet premiered at time of talk, working title used); shows Indonesian mass killers publicly boasting; some participants threatened; Žižek finds it shattering and illuminating about moral vacuums.
Jonathan Littell's novel is cited as the best example of ideology as non-ideology in art; it presents an SS executioner as a normal human being.
Lebanon film
Samuel Maoz's film shot from inside a tank; called ideology at its purest because it erases historical context and substitutes claustrophobia and inner suffering.
Stage Fright film
Hitchcock film with Marlene Dietrich; described as an obvious failure; Fredric Jameson would have championed it as the secret masterpiece in their planned book.
Topaz film
Hitchcock's anti-communist drama from the 1960s; Žižek's own selection as the 'lowest you can go', the Hitchcock failure he would have championed as secret masterpiece.
Tsahal film
Lanzmann's documentary on the IDF; criticized for endlessly humanizing Israeli soldiers ('we are human') at the expense of political accountability.
Waltz with Bashir film
Ari Folman's animated documentary about the Lebanon war; mentioned alongside Lebanon as an Israeli film that performs ideology by substituting inner experience for political analysis.
Ephesians (Paul) other
Cited as providing the shortest definition of ideology critique: the struggle is against rulers and ideological mystification, not flesh and blood.
2012 film
Cited alongside Titanic as an example of the Hollywood catastrophe-plus-couple formula; the hero (John Cusack) loses and regains his wife.
Risk Society book
Ulrich Beck's work is cited with partial agreement for its analysis of how contemporary risks are generated by human activity itself, not just external events.
People invoked 25
Lead figure in the Danish documentary about Indonesian mass killers; publicly boasts about rapes and torture, illustrating the moral vacuum created by capitalist globalization.
17th-century French priest/politician who helped devastate Europe through the Thirty Years' War while writing beautiful mystical meditations, isolated as a potential origin point for what became Nazism.
Samuel Maoz negative
Director of Lebanon; the film is called ideology at its purest for presenting the war entirely from within the tank, erasing historical and political context.
The introducer and old friend; Žižek corrects her story about office hours (confirming it is true) and thanks her warmly.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the formula on jealousy being pathological even when factually warranted, and for 'The picture that I see is my eye, I am also in the picture', both used to illuminate ideology and anti-Semitism.
Brian Victoria positive
His book Zen at War is referred to always (Žižek's phrase); documents Zen community's support for Japanese imperialism in the 1930s-40s.
Père Joseph's superior, mentioned as the context for the Thirty Years' War machinations.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Debated at New York Public Library; his liberal tolerance argument is used to illustrate how abstract ideological agreement proves both parties are in ideology.
Jonathan Littell positive
Author of Les Bienveillantes; his novel is used as an example of ideology in art, presenting the Holocaust executioner as a normal human being.
Fredric Jameson positive
Called 'my good friend Fred Jameson'; planned to co-edit a book championing obvious Hitchcock failures as secret masterpieces; Jameson chose Stage Fright.
Used as the limit case against the liberal formula 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard', Hitler's story is simply a lie constructed to obscure what he was doing.
Golda Meir positive
Her formula 'Jewish people believe in God and I believe in Jewish people' is praised as the perfect articulation of impersonal belief.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Called authentic in his Zen practice, but his late-1930s texts justifying Japanese aggression and providing Zen-based instructions for killing demonstrate no necessary link between inner enlightenment and ethical conduct.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes negative
Cuban crime novelist whose critical depictions of Cuban misery are supported by the state because the underlying ideological message is heroic acceptance, a refined mode of ideology.
Darian Leader positive
British psychoanalyst and friend who provided the formula for X-Files: nothing happens between the two leads, so everything must happen out there.
Claude Lanzmann negative
His film Tsahal (on the IDF) is criticized for endlessly humanizing Israeli soldiers at the expense of political analysis of their military actions.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited approvingly: her argument that behind terrifying acts are ordinary beings rather than demonic supermen anticipates Žižek's thesis about inner authenticity and external atrocity.
The architect of the Holocaust who played late Beethoven string quartets in his spare time, used as the most extreme example of authentic inner cultural life coexisting with external atrocity.
Ari Folman negative
Director of Waltz with Bashir; mentioned alongside Lebanon as an Israeli war film performing ideology by substituting inner experience for political accountability.
Niels Bohr positive
His horseshoe anecdote perfectly illustrates belief that works without a believing subject.
Dan Brown negative
His novels (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbol) are analyzed critically for their elimination of sexual tension between leads and their displacement of libido onto global conspiracies.
Ulrich Beck positive
His Risk Society is cited (with partial disagreement) for pointing out that contemporary risks are no longer external but generated by human activity itself.
Aldous Huxley positive
His Grey Eminence research into Père Joseph is praised as absolutely crucial work; Žižek accepts his diagnosis but rejects his conclusion that Zen Buddhism is the solution.
Mentioned as having a human side (loved his daughter) while committing atrocities, example of inner authenticity coexisting with external horror.
Paul the Apostle positive
Cited as providing the shortest definition of ideology critique via Ephesians: our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against rulers, authorities, and ideological mystification.
What it argues
ideology as two-level structure of explicit rules and obscene undersidepost-ideological cynicism as ideology's most refined formcultural capitalism and the commodification of humanitarian concernbelief without a believing subject—impersonal beliefinner authenticity as ideological mystificationtransgression as learned and regulated, not spontaneousthe necessity of transforming one's dreams before political action
Dialectical moves 10
“ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels”
The most powerful ideological operation today is to present itself as the absence of ideology, appeals to shared humanity are ideology's purest form.
“we are not given choices but that we have a choice but the situation is simply not transparent”
The problem is not the absence of choice but that our choices are structurally opaque to us, we act without being able to read the consequences of our own activity.
“the true question is not are Jews really like that; the true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew”
Reframes the fight against anti-Semitism: debunking facts concedes the wrong terrain; what must be analyzed is the structural function the Jewish figure performs for the anti-Semitic subject's identity.
“today's Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism”
Contemporary Zionist discourse against rootless, money-driven unbelonging Jews structurally replicates 19th-century anti-Semitic logic.
“jealousy is pathological even if it's true that his wife is doing this”
Truth of the proposition is irrelevant to the pathology; what matters is the structural need the subject has for the fantasy.
“the picture that I see is my eye, it's my fantasy, but I am also in the picture”
The anti-Semitic image is the subject's fantasy projection, yet the subject's very identity is constituted by and trapped within that fantasy.
“the more transgressive hedonistic they appear, they have to be learned”
Apparent spontaneity is the highest degree of rule-following; transgression is the most thoroughly regulated behavior.
“universal healthcare, if anything, provides for people much more freedom”
Far from restricting freedom, a universal healthcare background expands meaningful choice by removing healthcare anxiety from the field of agonizing personal decision.
“this mutual understanding was the proof that we were both deeply in ideology”
When two apparent antagonists (liberal and communist) discover they agree at the abstract level, this consensus is not reconciliation but the sign that both have stripped away the concrete antagonistic content.
“I claim we pay charities not so much to help those out there but to make sure that they remain there”
Charity's function is not to solve the problem but to manage the donor's guilt in a way that reproduces the structural conditions producing the suffering.
Claims 23
asserts
Ideology is not primarily explicit content but the reduction to a simplified essence that suppresses the background noise which gives statements their actual meaning.ideology
asserts
Charity advertising functions ideologically by offering people a cheap way to feel good about global suffering, which ensures the suffering continues rather than being structurally addressed.charity and ideology
asserts
Buying organic food is an instance of pseudo-activity: it satisfies the need to feel one is doing something about ecological crisis without confronting its structural causes.ecology and consumer ideology
asserts
Every social community operates through two-level rules: explicit rules and implicit meta-rules governing how and when to violate the explicit ones.social norms and ideology
asserts
Official ideology includes not just the explicit rules but the entire space of the explicit plus the implicit obscene underside—the transgression is not resistance but part of the system.ideology's structure
asserts
What happened at Abu Ghraib was not an aberration but the staging of the obscene underside of American military and cultural life.Abu Ghraib and ideology
asserts
The appeal to 'authentic humanity' beneath ideological labels is itself ideology's most refined contemporary form.post-ideological humanism
asserts
Our innermost identity and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are not truth but constitutively a lie—a screen concealing what we are actually doing.subjectivity and self-narration
asserts
Israeli war films like Lebanon perform ideology at its purest by substituting the soldier's inner suffering for any historical and political account of what is being done.Israeli cinema and ideology
asserts
The coexistence of authentic inner experience (violin-playing, mystical meditation) with horrific external acts proves there is no necessary link between inner experience and social consequences.inner authenticity and moral action
asserts
D.T. Suzuki's Zen mobilization to enable killing demonstrates that Buddhist enlightenment has no inherent ethical check on political atrocity.Zen Buddhism and violence
asserts
Cultural capitalism synthesizes consumerism with humanitarian concern so that buying becomes simultaneously an act of consumption and of caring, neutralizing the critique of consumerism.capitalism and ideology
asserts
Beliefs function socially even when no individual holds them in the first person—the structure of belief is impersonal and does not require a believing subject.ideology and belief
asserts
The precarity of short-term contracts and the dismantling of the welfare state is sold to us as a new freedom of self-reinvention, which is ideology at its purest.neoliberalism and freedom of choice
asserts
Universal healthcare would increase actual freedom by providing the background infrastructure against which meaningful individual choices can be made, just as water and electricity do.healthcare and freedom
asserts
Today's Zionism has reached the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism by deploying the same discourse about the rootless, money-driven, unbelonging Jew that 19th-century anti-Semites used.Zionism and anti-Semitism
asserts
Anti-Semitism must be fought not at the level of factual debunking but at the level of the anti-Semitic subject's structural need for the figure of the Jew.anti-Semitism and ideology
asserts
Jealousy is pathological even if factually warranted, because what makes it pathological is the subject's structural need for the fantasy, not the truth of the proposition.Lacanian jealousy and ideology
asserts
Genuine radical movements must begin with a spiritual violence aimed at oneself—transforming one's own dreams—rather than rushing to direct action.revolution and political action
rejects
We live not in a post-ideological era but in an era where we are more deeply in ideology than ever, because ideology now circulates without anyone needing to explicitly believe in it.post-ideological era thesis
asserts
The 20th-century revolutions failed not because of bad tactics but because the revolutionaries did not first transform their own dreams and fantasies.20th-century revolutions
asserts
Transgressive enjoyment (smoking, drinking, sex) is not spontaneous but learned and rule-governed, making it part of ideology's obscene underside rather than a site of resistance.transgression and ideology
rejects
The narrative position 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' reaches its limit with figures like Hitler, whose story is precisely a lie constructed to obscure what he was doing.liberal humanist dialogue approach to enmity
Quotes 20
“our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of ideology—Paul's definition
“ideology is precisely such a reduction to the simplified essence which conveniently forgets what comes up within as the price to be paid, the background noise which provides the density of the actual meaning”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as suppression of background noise
“we pay charities not so much to help those out there but to make sure that they remain there, no? That they don't come.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as ideological management of guilt
“you are simply an idiot if you follow the rules”Slavoj Žižek · two-level rules: some prohibitions are literally meant not to be respected
“you can make fun of it but nonetheless it functions. And this is the mystery. This is I think how beliefs function today. Nobody really believes.”Slavoj Žižek · impersonal belief—ideology without a believing subject
“Jewish people believe in God and I believe in Jewish people.”Slavoj Žižek · Golda Meir formula for impersonal belief
“I of course I don't believe in it that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe it.”Slavoj Žižek · Niels Bohr horseshoe—belief works without a believer
“To make something special, you just have to believe it's special.”Slavoj Žižek · Kung Fu Panda formula for impersonal belief
“these stories are fundamentally lies to obfuscate the reality of what we are doing”Slavoj Žižek · inner self-narrative as fundamental lie
“an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. It sounds very deep, no?”Slavoj Žižek · liberal humanist dialogue formula—and its limit
“what makes it pathological, it's not is it true or not, but why does he in order to maintain the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need that wife who is cheating him”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian jealousy—truth is irrelevant to pathological structure
“The picture that I see is my eye, it's my fantasy, but I, I am also in the picture.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan—subject constituted by its own fantasy
“all good radical movements start with this first act of violence which is a spiritual violence aimed at yourself”Slavoj Žižek · political transformation begins with self-transformation
“don't think that ideology doesn't matter today. Precisely today in our upmost cynical era, we are more deeper in ideology than we ever were.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical era deepens ideology rather than escaping it
“ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as self-concealing non-ideology
“university is a nice place without students”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's self-ironizing persona
“we should not succumb too quickly to this idea 'Oh, children are starving, let's do something.' First we should change ourselves, first we should put in order our dreams.”Slavoj Žižek · primacy of ideological self-transformation over direct action
“today's Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism”Slavoj Žižek · Zionism as dialectical inversion of anti-Semitism
“the true question is not are Jews really like that. The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology must be fought at the level of structural need, not factual debunking
“That's how you should begin: change your dreams.”Slavoj Žižek · Fight Club as model for radical self-transformation
Transcript 5 turns
unknown
My name is
My name is
unknown
Hillary Neroni, I’m a professor of film and television studies in the English department, and we are very excited today to introduce, I’m very excited to introduce our guest today as Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School. He also has taught semester-long seminars at universities around the globe. One such seminar called “Violence and Ethics” was where I met him as a graduate student, now too long ago, been a while, where I learned that the image that he uses to describe himself as a professor who writes fake names into his office hour slots is completely false. He’s a very generous teacher. Sorry to... As we saw this morning in his Q&A with students, he has published over thirty books including *Tarrying with the Negative*, *The Ticklish Subject*, and *The Parallax View*. If I were to describe what his books do, I would say that they stage an engagement between philosophy and culture. In this engagement, he has a unique ability to see the speculative identity between, for example, let’s say Hegel and the new film for example. In light of this idea, I would like to tell you one brief story about him. One time I ran into him in an airport where I actually think he does most of his writing these days, and I found him reading the recently released biography of Monica Lewinsky. Upon seeing me, he joked that he should have had the dust jacket of Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason* hiding the biography. But as his talk today will undoubtedly show, it only requires a slight change in perspective to see the one as the other. So please join me again in thanking Slavoj for coming
Hillary Neroni, I’m a professor of film and television studies in the English department, and we are very excited today to introduce, I’m very excited to introduce our guest today as Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School. He also has taught semester-long seminars at universities around the globe. One such seminar called “Violence and Ethics” was where I met him as a graduate student, now too long ago, been a while, where I learned that the image that he uses to describe himself as a professor who writes fake names into his office hour slots is completely false. He’s a very generous teacher. Sorry to... As we saw this morning in his Q&A with students, he has published over thirty books including *Tarrying with the Negative*, *The Ticklish Subject*, and *The Parallax View*. If I were to describe what his books do, I would say that they stage an engagement between philosophy and culture. In this engagement, he has a unique ability to see the speculative identity between, for example, let’s say Hegel and the new film for example. In light of this idea, I would like to tell you one brief story about him. One time I ran into him in an airport where I actually think he does most of his writing these days, and I found him reading the recently released biography of Monica Lewinsky. Upon seeing me, he joked that he should have had the dust jacket of Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason* hiding the biography. But as his talk today will undoubtedly show, it only requires a slight change in perspective to see the one as the other. So please join me again in thanking Slavoj for coming
Slavoj Žižek
today. Thank you. Does this work? Okay. Thanks very much, I’m really glad to be here also to be with my old friends Hillary and Todd. Just one correction, Hillary: that story was true. The problem was that students when were annoying me at NYU, I was lucky enough to have many students who didn’t know each other. So I made a list: you don’t wait for office hours, you put your names, you put your names there onto a grid so that you know each takes twenty minutes, and then since they didn’t know each other, I filled it myself with invented names so I went to a movie theater. This
today. Thank you. Does this work? Okay. Thanks very much, I’m really glad to be here also to be with my old friends Hillary and Todd. Just one correction, Hillary: that story was true. The problem was that students when were annoying me at NYU, I was lucky enough to have many students who didn’t know each other. So I made a list: you don’t wait for office hours, you put your names, you put your names there onto a grid so that you know each takes twenty minutes, and then since they didn’t know each other, I filled it myself with invented names so I went to a movie theater. This
unknown
gave me time to do your work because you know, for me to be frank,
gave me time to do your work because you know, for me to be frank,
Slavoj Žižek
university is a nice place without students. Sorry for this surprise, that’s how it is. Okay, let’s nonetheless do some serious work. What I want to provide today is simply a couple of examples of practicing the old half-forgotten art of the critique of ideology. The shortest definition of what critique of ideology is was I think perhaps provided by Paul, the one from the Bible, who in Ephesians wrote, listen: this is quite a short but great text. This is Paul speaking. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers [cosmocratores in Greek] of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens.” End of quote. Or, to translate it into today’s language, our struggle is not primarily against concrete corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it. What then is ideology? When are we in ideology? Let me give you an example from my own public life. During a debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library a year or so ago, Henri Lévy made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance, something like would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they like and so on, while I made a similarly pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? So what happened? The irony of the situation was that when we both stated our case in such abstract terms, we both couldn’t but agree with each other. What should I say? No, I want women to be oppressed, not to marry the... And even Bernard-Henri Lévy, a hardline liberal anti-communist, ironically remarked that if this is communism what I said, even he is a communist. Now, this mutual understanding was the proof that we were both deeply in ideology. Ideology is precisely such a reduction to the simplified essence which conveniently forgets what comes up within as the price to be paid, the let’s call it background noise which provides the density of the actual meaning of a statement. This is why, for example, I claim you get now in our media, newspapers, TV, all those charity ads, you remember, some usually a black child or a native child from Guatemala, from Africa, with I don’t know, crippled, twisted limbs and so on, and then comes the message: something like, something like you can make a difference for the price of a couple of cappuccinos or whatever, you can change that child’s life for the better. Why is this ideology? Because again, in abstract, of course, my god, we should all be doing it, what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with it with it with it, I claim, is a concrete message in it, which is, if we read it a little bit cynically: you who are lucky to lead relatively safe lives and so on and so on, I know you feel bad because of the hunger, horrors and so on in which you even in a not direct way but indirectly participate. We offer you a simple way out: for the price of a couple of cappuccinos, you can even feel well for it and you can forget about it. Like the message is that you, I claim, we pay charity, charities not so much to help those out there but to make sure that they remain there, no? That they don’t come. Or another example of ideology. Most of us probably are buying organic food. Now, in itself, this is of course okay. But ask yourself deeply: why are you really buying it? I don’t think you really believe that all those half-rotten apples which cost twice the normal and which we all love, normally genetically manipulated apples and so on, that they are really any less poisonous. Maybe they are. But I don’t think this is why we buy them. There’s a certain reflexivity in it. We buy organic apples because it makes you feel good: “I am doing something, mother earth is in danger, I feel I’m part of a wonderful movement to do something.” It’s this sense of pseudo-activity, I think, my god, doing something without paying any serious price and so on and so on. So the first conclusion here is, you know every, not only ideological, every field of meaning or more specifically, every space of rules which regulate interaction within a certain community, from large national communities up to families and so on, I claim that the rules in such a space are always, how should I call them, two-level rules. You have the explicit rules: do this, don’t do that, you may do this and so on, and this is for me crucial, you always get rules which I call the second-level rules, rules which tell you how to deal with the explicit rules. This is why, give you a popular example, okay, today it is no longer popular, when ordinary people still thought that those from the upper classes have true manners and they tried to learn these manners, you had you know all those courses: we can teach you how to behave among the elite and so on. Why you always fail when you follow only learning those rules? Because you do learn the rules, but you do not learn the unwritten rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules. If you are member of any community with regulated with such rules, you know that to truly be in, you must not only follow the rules but there is a very codified way, nothing contingent about it, of how to softly here and there violate violate the explicit rules. In both directions: A, there are rules, prohibitions which are literally meant not to be respected, like you are simply an idiot if you follow the rules. Now, this differs from different cultures. In some cultures, like pay the taxes and so on, if you don’t try to avoid paying taxes you are considered an idiot and so on. Or especially in sexuality, for example, most of the prohibitions, the standard prohibitions, at least the conservative patriarchal ones, are basically half-hidden injunctions to do it but do it discreetly. And it would be wonderful another time, which I don’t have time to do it, to show you how ideology functions at this level, how official ideology is not only the explicit rules which then you are allowed a space for for for playing a little bit within resisting undermining it. Official ideology is the entire space of what is explicitly said and the implicit. So before I give you a couple of examples, just also the opposite case which I find even more interesting. Especially at universities, I don’t know how it is here, maybe you are an a bit a big exception, but everywhere where I was, I encounter much more interesting the opposite example: things that you are not only allowed to do but even solicited to do on condition that you don’t do them too much, no? You know, to cut a long story short, you are given a certain freedom, but god help you if you take that too literally and you actually do it. The mystery is here, we don’t have time to go into it, the mystery of appearance. Why don’t those in power simply directly tell you you should do it? Why do they play this game of maintaining the appearances? For example, let’s take a harsh totalitarian regime, Soviet Union in the 1930s. I don’t know if you know that in the Soviet Constitution of or when Stalin won, not only was there guaranteed, it says bombastically, Soviet Union guarantees it says citizenship, the right to organize a political party. It even says that the state has the duty to provide any group of citizens who want a political party with means to do it, with offices, with newspaper and so on and so on. Of course, if you just tried to do it, you were arrested. Why, why this rule of appearances? And are we aware to what extent even our daily lives are penetrated with this paradox with this paradoxical condition? What is politeness? Politeness is precisely a complex network of making offers that you know they will be rejected. The example I use all the time: let’s say an older guy who has money, I don’t mean a predator, but just invites you to dinner. It’s clear absolutely to both of you that he will pay, or she, I should say. But it’s the usual ritual, at least in my country, I don’t know how it is here, that you know when the bill gets arrives, for a little bit you have to resist. Now yes, I know what you will say and yes, it did happen to me: once I resisted a little bit too long. Okay, give me this and so on. But you know, what’s the mystery? You see the mystery, the mystery is that you both know that that he will pay, but you both know that your offer, or mine in this case, to pay is in a way hypocritical. But we must go through this ritual. Or, I mean, there are one cannot even cover all the examples. And then we come to more mysterious examples of this soliciting pleasure, prohibitions which solicit. For example, let me just give an obvious example, one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization, I hope you saw the movie *The Sound of Music*. Hope I don’t have to engage in the boring exercise of telling... Okay, if you know the movie, you know probably which scene, at least I even now shock at what kind of obscenity this scene really is. You remember a little bit less than half into the movie, Sister Maria, who gets a crush to the Baron von Trapp, escapes back to the monastery because she is in love with the Baron and cannot stand it and so on. There she still desires the Baron whose children she was serving, and goes to the Mother Superior and tells her, like, “What should I do? I have sinful desires.” Like she goes there with a plea to be properly punished so that she will control her desires. No, like I don’t know, put me on fasting, whatever. And then comes the obscene moment, I hope you remember it, when instead of admonishing her, the, I really didn’t believe it, the Mother Superior starts to sing a song, you remember which one? “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and so on, which means almost literally, “Go back, seduce and screw the guy.” And I think this shows you, if you really read a certain type of church ideology between the lines, they are not telling you “no sex.” They’re telling you effectively: “Accept our superficial rules, play, pay lip service to them, and your sex life done discreetly will be even better.” I think they know how they are doing it. Entire culture constructed in this way. Maybe this is, but I doubt, more difficult, I doubt effectively for Catholics than for Protestants. You know, this idea of do it discreetly and and everything is pardoned and so on and so on. So another example, I repeat it but it’s from a small unknown book of mine, so I hope you don’t know it, which I find perfect for this. I go again another movie which I most sincerely like, I hope you saw it, *Casablanca*, of course. You remember two-thirds into the movie, just a small scene, Ingrid Bergman in the middle of the night comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick’s Café, and of course to get to ask for those famous visas for Portugal whatever. And then something happens: they start to talk remembering their love affair in Paris a year or two ago, then they embrace, then a fade out. We see for two or three seconds the tower of the Casablanca airport, just the light turning around, then we jump back into the room where they are no longer embraced but they just continue the same conversation. What’s important here? Well, the important thing is of course the stupid vulgar question: did they do it or not? That is to say, those two seconds and a half, are they only, are they only here to mark the passage of real time or are they here to signal the whole, I don’t know, half an hour whatever? But what is so interesting in the movie is that it’s not so much that it’s not clear what happens. The movie rather gives you signals, a whole series of signals which point first in the direction they did do it, then in the direction they didn’t do it. It’s consciously contradictory. First, notice that notice that afterwards they are smoking. I hope you know this, that Hays Code Hollywood rules in the ‘30s and ‘40s, because explicit sex was prohibited, after a couple of embraces if you have a fade out and afterwards if you return to smoking, it was a quite quite unambiguous signal that there was sex. And a whole series of other obvious, like even that phallic primitive statue of the tower of the airport whatever. But then you have the whole series of signs that they didn’t do it. Like the same conversation seems to go on, there is no bed, no ruffled surface, everything clean and so on and so on. So I think the movie consciously plays a double game. The message is, I know you have dirty desires, but I will allow you, as if the movie talks to you, addresses you, I will allow you this to play this hypocritical game. On the one hand, I will make you safe from any reproaches from the moral ideological agency. If, imagine ideology as an agent asking you, “How how do you dare to watch such a dirty movie?” You say, “Well, nothing happens, we just talk and so on.” But at the same time, I will give you very specifically all the series of signals so that you can do all your dirty imagination and so on and so on. I don’t know if you know but there is a short story by an author I forgot who he was, who wrote a short story again called “As Time Goes By”, which focuses precisely on the paradox of this scene. It’s a twenty pages short story where first it’s the beginning of the scene, Ingrid Bergman arrives, the last half a page is the conversation we hear, and in between fifteen pages extremely open hardcore of what they were doing. But what is nice is that the short story does even something really nasty. It reinterprets in the terms of hardcore pornography some of the sayings, you know, these legendary sayings from the movie. You know we all know, we all know this famous Humphrey Bogart phrase to his lady, “Here’s to you, kid.” You know how it is interpreted? In the middle of lovemaking, he gives her her his his his penis to her mouth and says, “Here’s to you, kid.” Okay, but now you know what I am now saying. Now I’m arriving at my point. Your laughter now and okay my laughter too, no? This is what makes us such subjects of power. There’s absolutely nothing subversive. No, we didn’t screw them, we didn’t squeeze their balls so to speak. We played their games. Ideology is not just the explicit story. It’s not just nothing happens and then you think you play some subversive games whatever by imagining. Ideology needs both level: the explicit and the unspoken obscenity. This is how, this is how I read, not in any America-bashing way, in in any way I claim in Europe we were even worse at what happened in Abu Ghraib. I claim that what those guys in prison there by annoying, torturing, those being cruel to the prisoners, they were effectively staging there this obscene underground other side of not only military I will even I even claim maybe cultural life. Namely, look, if you remember one of the first photos from Abu Ghraib came out. You remember the famous one, one of the prisoners like in some strange dresses attached to some cords and so on? I did an experiment: I showed that photo to a friend of mine who was at some holiday, didn’t see this photo, and asked him what is this? He told me, “Well, in New York this sounds like some off-off-Broadway avant-garde theater.” And you know, again, our army, Yugoslav army, actually the Swiss army was even worse, but for you know all these military rituals, fragging, the obscenity of songs. This is what always fascinated me. For example, these so-called, I think maybe I’m wrong they are called marching chants. You know these songs that Marines or other soldiers sing while marching or training, and which are very interesting. They combine open vulgarities, brutal obscenities with nonsense rhymes. Like okay an innocent one, I think it’s from that movie *Officer and a Gentleman*. Something like, “I don’t know but I’ve been told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold.” Total nonsense. But again, my point is this is not just something that happens in closed military community. That’s the the point of true identification. When you want to learn to analyze how a certain closed community functions, don’t look at the explicit rules. Look at this, as it were, secret rituals and so on and so on. And again, please don’t accuse me of America-bashing or anything. What happened to me or what I was witnessing in ex-Yugoslav army, it’s too much to say it here, much much further. Okay, so let me go on. The next point I want to make here is that this is why, you know, when you analyze a community, when you witness something that we may call spontaneous transgressive outbursts, like or transgressive behavior when you throw off enough of it and you explode in whatever way, I think we should not take this as a spontaneous outburst in contrast to rules. No, these so-called spontaneous outbursts are absolutely even more maybe also regulated by rules. They are not a matter of spontaneous enjoyment. No, they have to be learned, the more transgressive hedonistic they appear, they have to be learned. Let me just take two, three small extreme cases. Smoking. How, maybe you do remember, I don’t because I am a madman not because because I didn’t I never smoked in my life, but don’t take me for a crazy guy, not because I wanted to remain pure, because I just don’t like it. I don’t know. But all my friends told me and I am in the same thing, you know how it usually happened when you were first seduced if you were into smoking? Usually it’s ahead of a small transgressive initiatic experience. You know, like you are still in elementary school, some friend tells you, “You know this is what adults do, try” and so on. And I mean it’s always the same story. First you start coughing, you didn’t like it, bah, it’s disgusting. Then you literally have to learn to enjoy as part of the initiatic ritual. I claim it’s the same with drinking. Everyone who tries whisky for the first time, the first reaction is always: it’s bitter, it’s disgusting. Then you learn you have to enjoy it. I mean it’s so clear that to enjoy it, if you drink for pleasure, you don’t drink whisky, my god. You drink some stupid fruity juice or... But I claim my my point is the same even for sex. At the deepest level, it’s not pleasure, it’s some kind of a more some kind of a transgressive primordial duty. I mean, if you want pure pleasure, masturbation is much better. So what I’m stating is that, you see, this makes the whole of culture. How you obey the rules and all those transgressive carnival, adults adults whatever and so on and so on. Incidentally, as an amusing remark, I think the same even goes for music love. For example, I love classical music and I have many friends who love love it. And how do you signal that you are really in, part of an elite circle? It’s not by, if you follow the commonly accepted judgments, you appear an idiot. The way to do is to take a great composer but ignore his masterworks. Like if you say with Beethoven, “I like the Ninth Symphony, I like the late string quartets,” you’re a barbarian. You take a lesser known but there is one piano piece nobody knows from the middle age and this is the masterwork. You must play this game of like I don’t know, with my good friend Fred Jameson and some others, we even wanted to do a book we just didn’t get enough collaborators of playing this game with Alfred Hitchcock’s films. The idea was each of us should select an a Hitchcock thriller which is obviously a failure and play the game “Ah, but this is the true masterpiece.” Fred, Fred, some of you don’t know it, Fred’s selection was *Stage Fright*, that failure from with Marlene Dietrich. Mine was even the lowest you can go, *Topaz*, that anti-communist drama whatever from from the ‘60s. So this is that’s complication. So if we return from this short detour to my basic point. So if we take into account these complications, how does ideology function today, especially with regard to the claim that we live in post-ideological era? I claim that and I will try to explain why, ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels. This is how it works in art, in politics. You can be sure you are in ideology when somebody says, “Listen, let’s forget about all the stupid political, religious labels, ultimately are we not ordinary human beings, we all share the same fears, the same passions,” and so on and so on. To give you an example of what this ideology is called, the best example I can think of is a book recently translated into English which was a tremendous bestseller first in France then in Germany now here also, Jonathan Littell, *Les Bienveillantes* [*The Kindly Ones*]. It’s a slightly too long, almost pages, first-person narrative of a Holocaust executioner, a mid-level SS officer who did it all. But of course in a consciously provocative way, the book presents him as a normal, warm human being like all of us. He has his fears, he’s sometimes disgusted, you see all his doubts, fears and so on and so on. And of course the book does not justify him. But the the the insight of the book is a deeper one, I think. It is that, you know, Hannah Arendt already made a similar point as was right: when you are witnessing terrifying acts, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that behind the acts you will encounter some kind of a demonic entity, a superman of evil. Behind there are ordinary beings with all their fears and so on. You know everybody as we put it has a human side. Stalin loved her daughter, Hitler liked to talk with children, giving them chocolates whatever and so on and so on. No, we are all human. And here comes my next conclusion which I think I will try to show immediately why has even political implications. If there is the most basic lesson of psychoanalysis, it is that what we usually refer to as the wealth of our inner lives, there is nothing authentic about it. This is constitutively a priori almost a lie. You know this famous post-modern deconstructionist whatever definition anti-substantialist definition of human identity in the sense of we are nothing but stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. I think it’s not quite true, because we are telling these stories, but these stories are fundamentally lies to obfuscate the reality the reality of what we are doing. What do I mean by it? You remember the a saying an allegedly deep thought which I think was pronounced in a dialogue by a partisan of the Middle East dialogue? It sounds so deep, listen: an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. It sounds very deep, no? Like I stigmatize you as an enemy because I wasn’t able to listen to you, I just reified you as some monster, then if I listen to your side of the story, I see you are human like me, you have your dreams, your fears and so on, and I see you as a human being. This is all very nice. It has a limit. The limit is what? Well, we reach this limit when we simply replace the general term enemy with a concrete name. Would you also say Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story? No, the answer should be his story was just a lie which he made to justify and at the same time avoid the horror of what he was doing. And this is incidentally almost the most difficult thing to do and the most tragic even when you analyze a certain ideological constellation. You know, the for example I recently read a book, I forgot who wrote it, I bought it at some that book fair, *The Nazi Ethic*. No, it wasn’t manual, it’s an obscenity. The book did something which is absolutely crucial to do: it looked at how did the Nazis justify to themselves what they were doing. And of course you find a very beaut— some sometimes very beautiful narrative full of almost I’m tempted to say authentic insights and so on and so on. But again the proof is not there, that’s on what I insist. It’s not that when I want to judge you, the rule is I should look deep into you, I should try to understand what you thought you were doing. Of course I should, but I will not arrive at any fundamental truth in this way. I will rather arrive at something that I am tempted to call the fundamental lie, the screen that you construct to yourself. This is why we have all these horrible examples. Take the architect of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, before he was killed in Prague in You know what’s so shocking reading the biography of this guy? Do you know that in his spare time he was meeting with three other friend officers of SS, he was a very good violin player and they were playing in a string quartet late Beethoven string quartets? Which are maybe one of the top tops in the classical music. Now, what I tragically claim is that you cannot say “Oh, but it must have been non-authentic.” No, that’s very difficult to accept. Maybe he played them with a real authenticity, blah blah, and nonetheless he was able to do it. And okay I will not repeat here my old examples but I have many of them even more tragic. For example, in the West, it’s my old story, maybe you don’t know it, did you read Aldous Huxley, *Grey Eminence*? It’s a wonderful historical research into early 17th century French politician priest Père Joseph, Father Joseph. He was a counselor to Cardinal Richelieu at the time of the Thirty Years' War in Europe which devastated Europe terribly in to between Protestants and Catholics. If there is a guy who can be retroactively isolated as the origin of Nazism, it’s this guy, believe me or not. Because what he did is that he concluded a pact between France and Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire just to prevent the unification of Germany. He he and he succeeded, which is why Germany delayed its constitution as a nation-state which was the ultimate condition of First World War and then Second World War. So again, the meanest politician, ordering tortures, poisoning, treason whatever. But now comes the horrible thing which fascinated Aldous Huxley. In the evening, metaphorically, after doing this dirty work, he wrote the most beautiful mystical meditations, absolutely at the level of who are our the biggest hits, Saint Teresa and so on and so on. And this is what bothered Aldous Huxley. Is it possible? How could a guy who was obviously an authentic mystic, how could he be doing that? Huxley thought it’s not possible, there must be something false not only in his Père Joseph’s mystic but also in Christianity itself. For playing this, so Huxley thought Zen Buddhism, Orientalism is better. I’m not saying it’s worse, but I’m saying it’s not even better. It’s not better. Again, read the book to which I refer always, it’s a guy called Brian Victoria who is himself a Zen Buddhist, *Zen at War*. He looks at how the Zen community in Japan around between thirty forty millions and then more I think, related to Japanese war imperialism in the ‘30s and ‘40s, attack on China and so on. What he noticed is that they were all justifying it. Large majority. Not only this, so not only supporting it but actively justifying it. For example, one a guy whom many of you maybe know because he was popular when we were young in the hippie times, D.T. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West. Yes, in the late ‘30s he was writing texts very in fact he fully justified Japanese aggression on China. He even tried to provide through Zen Buddhism instructions into how to cope with the act of killing. His idea was that for us ordinary people with the minimum of decency, you know, it’s not so easy to kill. Like we can dream of killing, but to have a concrete person in front of you, it can be difficult to stab a person. So he mobilized the entire Zen machinery. And he said this happens only if you remain caught within the illusion of false reality where you know the story, you think you are the agent, you believe in substantial reality. But he says if you reach the level of the story of Buddhist enlightenment, then things appear in a different way. If you are still caught into the limits of your false self, then you experience it like you are there, I am here, I am now stabbing you. This is horrible. But then he says if I reach enlightenment and see the vanity of substantial reality, then I can experience the same scene in a totally different way. Something like I’m nowhere in it, I’m a pure observer, not even I hold, here is my hand moving around in an impersonal dance and as a part of the same dance your body gets stuck into it. I’m nowhere in it. And please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming Suzuki. He was authentic. The lesson is just I don’t see any continuity, as it were, any necessary link between our inner experience, authentic as it may be, and let’s call it maybe the social consequences, the horror of what we are doing. I claim that fundamentally our inner-most identity in the sense of the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves are not the truth. They are even as a rule a lie. In this sense, I claim this withdrawal from external reality in the sense of “let’s look into the depth of your personality, you as a concrete human being” is false. And so let’s go to give you another example to the very opposite end of the Nazis, and I’m not claiming in any way that they are the same, quite on the contrary. But to see how, of course at much more modest level level but nonetheless, we find something similar, for example in today’s Israel. Let’s look at the movies. Did you see the last two Israeli films which were a big success about the Lebanon war? Ari Folman’s animated documentary *Waltz with Bashir* and Samuel Maoz’s *Lebanon*. *Lebanon* is especially typical here I think. You know it presents the experience of an ordinary Israeli soldier in the Lebanon war when he was in a tank penetrating deep into Lebanon. And almost the entire movie shot from the perspective within inside a tank. All the horrors, the claustrophobia and so on and so on. I think this is ideology at its purest. Because under the pretext of “forget about ideology, war is horrible, we need that horrible experience,” nonsense. You know, all the historical background: what was he doing there? whom was he killing, children and so on? It all disappears. All of a sudden it becomes the story of your inner suffering, fears of your inner experience and so on and so on. So it’s pretty sad to report how Israeli army, I know because I was there, I have there many friends, I am often there, how IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, play this game endlessly. For example, they don’t present themselves as superheroes. Like you know who, one battalion of us can take Cairo in one afternoon if we wanted and so on. No, they always emphasize “war is not in our genes, we are human like you, we are afraid.” I remember long interviews in the movie which I think is ideology at its purest. You know Claude Lanzmann, *Shoah*. But you know he did later another movie called *Tsahal*, which is the name for Israeli Defense Forces. Endless interview along the model of *Shoah* with Israeli soldiers, their memories about the Yom Kippur war. And it’s all about this concrete experience. They they tell how they even urinated, they were totally scared. Like an endless variation on “we are human.” But I claim this precisely allows you to obliterate the political consequences of what you are doing and so on. Let me give you another example which I must say really shocked me. When I was in Israel, they reported of a strange incident. A group of anti-terrorist soldiers entered an apartment where they suspected that an alleged terrorist is hiding. They found only his family there: wife and children. Among the children, a daughter, of course, terrified to see house breaking in, started to cry and the mother to calm her down called her by her name. Her name in... And then one of the Israeli soldiers breaking in discovered that he has a daughter with the same name. And of course he pulled out his wallet and, “You see mother, I have the same daughter, I have the same name, you see.” The message: “Oh, we are human” and so on and so on. But I claim in that situation this was an obscenity. You know, to emphasize in that sense humanity. So again, now so that you will not say that I’m only taking, as it were, Nazis and God forbid to confuse them Israel, I will also give you an interesting example from the opposite side political. You know that in today’s Cuba, they have a certain even relatively at high level quality detective novels. Some the biggest their biggest export name is a writer called Leonardo Padura Fuentes, who writes police procedurals, four of them or even five are translated, you can get them in better bookstores. The hero is Mario Conde, a police commissioner in today’s Habana. The books are so critical, I mean critical at least in the sense of presenting all the misery of today’s Cuba. They are a lost generation, misery, hunger, prostitution, nepotism and so on. So that I thought my god, it would be nice to visit this guy in a nice villa in the suburbs of Miami or what? I was surprised to learn that no, he is he is he is in Cuba, and not even as a half-dissident. He is totally accepted, supported by state media and so on. So I asked myself what’s going on? And I think it it is from the standpoint of their interest Cuban authorities are right in supporting him. Because in spite of all the criticism, the basic message at this human level of of Leonardo Padura is what? It is, “Okay, we screwed it up. It’s a misery. We are a lost generation” and so on. “But the true patriot hero takes this with bitterness but heroism. Don’t dream about Miami, we are from here, we should heroically go on here.” You know this totally without without any apparently in a totally non-ideological way like cut the bullshit about socialism and so on, but nonetheless you know be faithful to you, stay here, don’t escape into dreams and so on and so on. It’s I claim a really really very refined mode of ideology. Where do you find a similar ideology? Now we go to more crazy waters, a little bit on movies. Maybe you know this part then I will go to other examples. My first example would have been did you see the movie, I did it six times because of my small son, *Kung Fu Panda*? That’s ideology quite... I think it’s a perfect almost clinical example of how we function in our societies. If you saw the movie, you know, the big fat Kung Fu panda called Po wants to become a Kung Fu warrior and succeeds. But okay the point is this: the movie moves at two levels. First you have all this Orientalist Western Buddhist element, you know: faith, choice, fidelity, hero and so on. All this, how should I put it, religious-military background. At the same time, you must have noticed it how the movie is full of most common-sensical brutal humor, jokes at its own expense, at the expense of of this ideology. It makes fun continuously of these Buddhist wisdoms and so on and so on. But that’s something extremely interesting which is that in spite of all this, ideology this pseudo-Buddhism mystic survives. You can make fun of it but nonetheless it functions. And this is the mystery. This is I think how beliefs function today. Nobody really believes. If you ask anyone do you believe, everyone will tell you you are machine, are you crazy, why should I believe? But beliefs, how should I put it, they socially function. We have the paradox of beliefs which as it were circulate, nobody believes in them but they function. The one who first provided this formula was and I appreciate her for that was the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. You know when she was asked “do you believe in God?” You know what she said? It’s a nice formula. She she didn’t answer. She just said “Jewish people believe in God and I believe in Jewish people.” You know what’s weird? This is not the usual Stalinist logic where your reasoning is “you know ordinary people need to believe.” No, I claim nobody has to believe. And belief functions. How does this function? Imagine let’s take the most simple example. Imagine Christmas. Of course you don’t believe in Santa Claus, my god, you have to provide yourself the present. But if somebody asks you do you believe in Santa Claus, you will probably say, “No, I just pretend because of my children, not to disappoint them.” Now if I ask alone not in front of you your children, I’m sure they will say, “Of course I don’t believe, I just pretend not to disappoint my parents and get the presents.” And it goes on endlessly I claim. So you can have you see, a belief functions as element of a social network. It functions except although even if nobody effectively in the first person believes. And this message is wonderfully formulated at the end of *Kung Fu Panda* where Po, the panda, looks for the secret ingredient that would make him a hero. In his ordinary life he is just helps his father who runs a restaurant where they make a special soup, noodle soup. And father claims that he there is a special ingredient to that soup. And at the end, the father tells him the secret: there is no special ingredient. It’s only you. To make something special, you just have to believe it’s special. And then he discovers it’s the same for becoming a warrior. This means precisely what I was saying. There is no special belief, no special quality. It functions even if you know that there is nothing. It functions if you as it were follow it as if it functions. This is how our beliefs function today. At the cynical level, you can laugh at everything. But I claim that nonetheless beliefs function, like I’m again sorry if I repeat a story which I’m repeating all around already for twenty years. Niels Bohr, quantum physics, probably you know it, made a wonderful comment. He had a country in the a house in the countryside of Denmark, old wooden farmer’s house, with above the entrance door a horseshoe. I don’t know how it is here, in Europe a horseshoe above the entrance door is a superstitious sign preventing evil spirits to enter the house. So a friend, another scientist, visited him and said, “Wait a minute, are you stupid? I mean why do you have this? Do you believe in it?” Niels Bohr said, “Of course not.” Then the friend asked him, “But why do you have it here?” You know what Niels Bohr answered? “I of course I don’t believe in it that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don’t believe it.” That’s logic! Nobody believes in democracy, blah blah blah, but we somehow accept it at the social level that it works. So again, before we dismiss fundamentalism and all that as crazy people who believe, let’s first set the things straight. I claim that we believe in a way more than ever just in this more impersonal in this more impersonal way. From here one one could have go on in analyzing Hollywood as a part towards our ideological constellation. Like there is another feature which I think is pretty crucial in *Kung Fu Panda*: no lady, no girl, no love interest. All you have in the universe of Panda is this mystical wisdom and then a kind of a how should I call it oral-anal pre-pre-sexual primitivity. The the drive of the hero, the the panda, is not sex, power, it’s eating. He eats like a pig. Instead of an oral-anal economy, it’s so typical I don’t know probably the the authors they are not idiots, were aware of this, that you know he is called Po, P-O. I mean in German, “po” is a common term for ass, no? So what I’m saying is that sexuality is excluded. And I don’t know what this means, but did you notice how in many recent films, and I’m not saying this simply means less sexuality, I don’t know what it means, sexuality Hollywood starts to violate its own old rule of how should I call it, of creating the couple. For example, this was what was so mysterious in *The Da Vinci Code*. You know already years ago a friend of mine, friend, sorry, British psychoanalyst Darian Leader told me something wonderful. He told me, you remember *X-Files*, if you watched some of them? He provided a wonderful formula for *X-Files*. He said why do all these things happen out there, you know the formula “the truth is out there”, here an alien, there an alien? He says to cover up the fact that nothing goes on here between the two of them. You know no sex, so all this has to happen because... and I claim it’s exactly the same formula for *The Da Vinci Code*, at least the movie. Poor Jesus Christ has to screw Mary or what to cover up the fact that they don’t do it. It’s notice, okay, at least between Tom Hanks and who is that French girl that I don’t like, whatever? The chocolate girl, no? No sex here. And then it goes further in movies even more than in the novels. Take the earlier novel, *Angels Demons*. The way it was made into a movie, if you saw it, again no sex. Although the girl is quite, if you allow me a sexist remark, quite nice but nothing happens, no sex. And then if you read, I did, I almost killed myself, his latest novel, and I measure him, Dan Brown by his own standards, it’s so bad, *The Lost Symbol*. But you remember there it’s just another older lady, there is not even a minimal a minimal sexual tension. I find this very strange, what is happening in in Hollywood that they are that they are moving in this direction. Because I even found the same, did you notice that the same happens for the first time in entire James Bond in the last James Bond, *Quantum of Solace*. No sex, just at the end they discover they are both too shattered or whatever. So why am I saying this? Because one of the standard formulas of Hollywood which I developed in depth from *Titanic* onwards is that whenever you have a big dramatic story, can be about the end of the world or whatever, it’s always enframed by the logic of creating a couple. Like it goes up up to The subtitle of could have been how a young what is he, failed writer, John Cusack, lost and regains his wife and so on. To to to make him to go further, even two couples are created. The daughter, Thandiwe Newton also gets a good cool guy so that... But so this formula how it gradually disappears. And it plays a a crucial role this formula. What I’m saying is not that simply we should obliterate all the historical background, fighting the Nazis and so on. But it’s that what makes the film, as it were, attractive, the cause of our desire, is this apparently marginal feature that all the official topic of the movie, which is in the foreground, you know how to break the Nazi code, is generating our interest because it’s always with this kind of a dialogue constant dialogue which is framed, which is the enigma of sexual relationship, the enigma of a woman and so on and so on. Okay, let me now go on to my final or slowly approaching the the end element which is what if we live in this so-called post-ideological era where you say forget about big ideological phrases, be authentically who you are, enjoy life and so on. Or as they put it today because I think our predominant ideology today is more some kind of an enlightened hedonism, which is decaffeinated Dalai Lama, how should I put it, Dalai Lama popularized. You know, be truly yourself, realize your potentials and so on. I think what is problematic here. The reason for it is that we find ourselves in a stage which can be called cultural capitalism. Capitalism I think something did change with capitalism. After capitalism somehow integrated all the critique, critique of consumerism, alienation and so on, and functions in a new functions in a new way now. The two dimensions which were till now opposed, on the one hand, the dimension of pure consumerism: I want this product to enjoy it and so on, and the dimension of caring for society, let’s call it the the the altruistic, humanitarian, ideological dimension, they are more and more combined. How? Well, if you visit Starbucks, you will immediately notice it. Because Starbucks is maybe the company which most directly exploits this, they are masters in it. You know what they are doing. All the time they are bombarding you by something like when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don’t buy just a cappuccino, you buy much more. And they enumerate it: A, you buy an authentic community. They know, they openly manipulate Starbucks this ideological cliché that in our societies we no longer town commons or public places, they are no longer here, we are just isolated individuals. The idea is we will provide an ersatz community for you. Then they go on: we only grow our coffee beans from organic farm, we only buy it from organic farms, we give money there to educate, to bring water to them and so on. So you know, the idea being all this, I cannot but call it semantic density. Like you don’t just buy a coffee, you are made aware that you buy a whole ideological experience of caring for others and so on and so on. I claim that then that this is absolutely crucial for today’s capitalism. This is where consumerism tries to recuperate its own opposite. You know, it’s no longer I do this, I consume, but I have to do something else to do something good. No, it’s they offer you a much better choice. Our consume and you will at the same time act as a humanitarian, caring for mother nature, caring for others and so on and so on. This formula reached recently almost its climax with two cases. First, maybe you’ve heard about Toms Shoes. A company founded in for shoes. Their formula is 1-for-1 as they call it. They claim for every pair of shoes you buy with them, another pair of shoes will be given to again some starving children, I don’t know where and so on and so on. It’s a wonderful formula. It gives you, at it is, you may engage in consumerism because the more you do it, the more also those who are excluded profit by it. Or another absurd, Coca-Cola, sorry, Pepsi, recently started a publicity with the formula I quote it: Pepsi was always about refreshment, but what if instead of just refreshing people, Pepsi helps to refresh the world? So the idea is that when you buy a Coke, you get the right to vote, to send your ideas about what to do to help people. And then when these ideas will be gathered, they will be again put to vote and you will be able to choose which idea, helping starving people here, preserving nature there, will be will be put to will be put to you. So even have you even have the, as it were, the element of democracy here. What are the further consequences of it? Here with Pepsi, of course, Pepsi plays to the end the logic of what what one cannot but call the the logic of freedom of choice. And with this I would like to conclude because I think that the fight that you have now in United States, this ideological fight about healthcare reform, is an important fight because what it focuses on is precisely the freedom of choice. And things are complex here. Okay, do not misunderstand me, I’m totally on the side of those who are for the reform. But I just wanted to say is that effectively, in a way in what sense things are getting complex today. In the good old days, the main argument against the ideology of free choice was this vulgarized Marxist one: “Yes, we are given choices but only the unimportant choices, Pepsi or Coke or whatever, we are not given the real choices.” This is up to a point true, but I think that some sociologists like the German one Ulrich Beck in his well-known book on the *Risk Society*, they I don’t agree wholly with them, but they nonetheless pointed out something at how the status of choice, risk, catastrophes change today. It changed in what way? In the sense that today we perceive as risks in our era of new uncertainties, not only not simply something which will hit us from outside, like a gigantic asteroid or whatever. We are more and more aware that there may be risks which we are generated or triggered by our own activity. So you see, the problem is not so much that we don’t have a choice, but that we have a choice but and I don’t think here I’m critical of the big companies that we can simply put all the blame on the big companies. But the situation is simply not transparent. Okay, basically of course I accept the big global warming argument, but things are so com— you know, we are it’s not that we have too much too much power, okay, humanity as such. We the consequences of our own activity are impenetrable to ourselves. We effectively we are so strong that we can even change nature but we are not aware of how are we doing it. For example, I read I got a message recently from a friend from China who told me that even this big earthquakes, you remember a year and a half ago or when they had in that Sichuan province outside the big earthquakes, and they now more and more, they don’t make it public, but nonetheless more and more admit that these earthquakes were probably the product of human activity. You know how? You remember China is building those gigantic Three Gorges dams or what. The idea is that the gigantic lakes they created have changed so much the pressure, pressure on different strata there that they if not caused the earthquakes, at least contributed to it. So again, that’s the first element of radical insecurity today. And the second point I want to emphasize here is how and this is again ideology at its purest, how the very uncertainties caused by the gradual dismantling of welfare state are then sold to us as new freedoms. For example, we all know that more and more we are forced to make just one, two, three years contracts. It’s more and more difficult to get a long-term job. But instead of this then we are told, “Why don’t instead of being afraid of it, why don’t you take this as a new opportunity to reinvent yourself every two three years, to make a choice” and so on and so on. Or with healthcare, at least in Europe where they are also slowly, we already had it, dismantling. Well, healthcare, the reasoning is again: this gives you new choices, this give you a choice to choose, you know, do you want to spend more and take a risk or do you want to be absolutely sure, spend less whatever and so on and so on. This I think is ideology at its purest. Why? Because two three points, only almost old-fashioned Marxist points I want to make here. As it is clear not only to Marxists but even to old-fashioned communitarians and so on. You know, freedom, actual freedom of choice, personal freedoms that we all cherish is something which works only, more and more in our complex society, only against the background of the very complex network of state guarantees, rules, customs, civility and so on and so on. Do you know how many things has to function in the background so that you have your freedom? And I think that if you approach it in this way, then universal healthcare, if anything, provides for people much more freedom. In what sense? The comparison I’m tempted to make is with water and electricity. I mean you probably noticed that all of us, maybe in some states or cities it’s different, but I think practically everywhere everywhere, you are brutally deprived of the freedom of choice there, no? Where you live you simply connect to water, to electricity, but most of you would have said, “Okay, if they rip me off too much I will protest,” but you don’t want to say, “Oh, I want a choice here.” I mean, your life would become a nightmare. Certain things should simply function in the background so that where it really matters, you have choices. Of course water and electricity really matter. But you prefer having them back there, not to deal with them. I claim it would immensely raise the level of actual choices, freedoms and so on, if at least a basic healthcare acquires a little bit of this status, that you know what I mean, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s in the background. This doesn’t mean in any way in what way should be done and so on and so on. So now really to conclude. You know I’m not saying “let’s conclude” and so on, no? Once I started a talk with “Let me conclude.” Longer story, never mind. What happens when this invisible background disintegrates, of institutional guarantees, of customs and so on and so on? Well, something very sad happens. Something the first preview of what we can get in a movie which some people whom I know recently made, there is not yet the premiere even so I’m not even supposed to talk about this movie because some of the people who helped who help made this movie are threatened. You will see immediately why. It’s a Danish documentary, *Free Men When Killers Make Movies* [Working title for *The Act of Killing*], made by a small Copenhagen in Denmark house. It’s about a group of ex-killers from Medan, Indonesia. It was shot in In this film, they take it shows a group led by a guy called Anwar Congo. They were you maybe don’t know but in in communists tried a coup d'état there and then the right-wing generals counteracted and then in the aftermath there was, people estimated between one and two and a half million of suspected communists, most of them of Chinese origins, were killed. Now, this movie tells the story of one of the group of this murderers. What is so shocking about the movie is that it tells the story in an open way. You know what I mean? Like the murderers don’t tell it secretly and so on. They publicly boast about it. Like with pride they say, they and it’s shattering. Like you see them, who are now rich businessmen, senators, journalists and so on. They answer all the questions. For example, they are asked how did you usually rape women? And they describe it: that it took them some time to discover the most pleasurable way, that usually the girl should be on a table back and then you ask a friend with the wire around her neck to hold her down and strangle her slowly and so on. Then they ask how did they torture men, they describe what’s the most practical way, cut off the balls, maybe the guy swallowed his own balls, all this nice stuff. And and they do this publicly and openly. There is even at the end a TV show really took place in Indonesia on one of the big state TV channels, which is the ultimate of obscenity that I’ve seen. In this TV show, the these criminals are in front of a large audience, ask answer questions and so on, and then the moderator celebrates them, you like they ask a guy “how did you torture blah blah” and the guy says “oh in this way, it’s the most practical way to torture women” and the moderator says “a big applause for the gentleman here for this nice insight” and so on and so on. It’s like a caricature. You know usually this happens in these bad taste leftist dystopias where they imagine some future totalitarian society. It happens there. And the question is again: how is something like this possible? Because the movie up to a point answers me. Because all these guys loved Hollywood when they were young. But I’m not blaming Hollywood for that. And the way they were able to do it, they imagined themselves, as they said, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were their true heroes. They imagined themselves as imitating Hollywood heroes, tough guys, gangsters and so on. Again, I’m not blaming here Hollywood, but I’m also not blaming here the primitive Indonesian culture like you know those videos there and so on. No, I’m saying that it has more something to do with how the ongoing capitalist globalization undermines our standard traditional ethical ethical system and creates a certain moral vacuum. And my point is that this is the first battle to be won as it were. Don’t think that ideology doesn’t matter today. Precisely today in our upmost cynical era and so on, we are more deeper in ideology than we ever were. Ideology again, as I pointed out, is not only the explicit rules, it’s all beliefs that we obey without believing in them, all the obscene implicit rules and so on and so on. And it is very difficult to withdraw from it. Because you pay the price for it. It hurts, as it were. Which is why what if you really want to do something today, you should not succumb too quickly to this idea “Oh, children are starving, let’s do something.” Yeah, of course we should. But how should I put it, first we should change ourselves, first we should put in order our dreams. How should I put it, we should start here. Otherwise this is for me to put it in very naive terms, the reason of the failure of the 20th century revolutions. I have no mercy for Soviet Union and so on. They won, but they didn’t win in the dreams they were dreaming, how should I say no? And then you end up with what you end up with what you end up here. Because do not, just a concluding variation, do not forget how important dreams are. Let’s take the ultimate ideological dream: anti-Semitism. Of course we all know, and today I claim we live in so that let me make it okay first nonetheless I want to make it clear where I stand here. I still think that anti-Semitism is ideology par excellence and cannot cannot ever be justified. But I nonetheless, not in spite of this but because of this, I think one should absolutely also be critical of what goes on in today’s Israel too. For example, my thesis is a crazy one here but I presented it in Israel. That today’s Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism. In what sense? Very quickly. This idea came to me when there was a big public debate in I think Jerusalem where I was defending a friend of mine, anti-Zionist Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen. And then people in the public attacked me claiming, “But listen, you are a famous philosopher, this guy is nobody. Are you aware that this guy just wants to exploit you for money? That this guy really doesn’t care?” Then others accused this guy of not being really one of them too, that he is just floating around without soul. Then I told them, “Are you aware that you are describing this guy in exactly the same terms the late 19th century anti-Semites, nation-state partisans, were describing the Jew? They are only for money, they don’t really have roots in their community,” and so on and so on. But okay, nonetheless, back to this anti-Semitic image. You know, it’s not enough to say but Jews are not like that. You should fight anti-Semitism not only at the level of facts as every racism, but also at the level of dreams, fantasies and so on. You know, because if you accept the debate at the level of facts, “are Jews really like that?” and so on, it’s over, I claim. You will achieve nothing. Imagine debating with somebody in Germany in if there the anti-Semitic Nazi image of Jews is true or not. The result will be somewhere in the middle. Like the anti-Semite, anti-Semites abuse Jews what of exploiting the Germans. Well, my god, some Jews were exploiters. So in a certain sense they were exploiting Germans. So all you can say at this level is it’s not as bad as the Nazis claim, but there is some truth in it. Okay, they claim Jews corrupt, seduce sexually our German girls. Well, I claim probably it was totally true, why not, of course, everyone. So you see my point: the true question is not are Jews really like that. The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew. And here I am tempted to repeat Jacques Lacan’s wonderful ironic statement when he says that when a husband is jealous of his wife that she sleeps around with other men, that his jealousy is pathological even if it’s true that his wife is doing this. Because what makes it pathological, it’s not is it true or not, but why does he in order to maintain as it were his the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need that husband, a wife who is cheating him, or an anti-Semitic German, why does he need in order to maintain the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need such a figure of the Jew? So to to conclude with this wonderful formula of Jacques Lacan in Seminar where he says, “The picture that I see is my eye, it’s my fantasy, but I, I am also in the picture.” So of course the anti- the the the racist anti-Semitic picture of the Jew is a fantasy in the eye of the anti-Semitic subject. But anti-Semitic subject is also in his own picture in the sense of his very identity is constructed by this, relies on this fantasy. You take his fantasy, his dream away, he in a way loses everything and becomes this universe which needs totally to reconstruct himself. Which is why I think all good radical movements start with this first act of violence which is a spiritual violence aimed at yourself. This is how at least I read the scene in one of my favorite Hollywood movies and I don’t think it’s proto-fascist propaganda, *Fight Club*. You remember when Ed Norton in a wonderful scene confronting his boss beats himself? That’s how you should begin: change your dreams. I’m sorry if I was too long. On the other hand, I’m not sorry. What?
university is a nice place without students. Sorry for this surprise, that’s how it is. Okay, let’s nonetheless do some serious work. What I want to provide today is simply a couple of examples of practicing the old half-forgotten art of the critique of ideology. The shortest definition of what critique of ideology is was I think perhaps provided by Paul, the one from the Bible, who in Ephesians wrote, listen: this is quite a short but great text. This is Paul speaking. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers [cosmocratores in Greek] of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens.” End of quote. Or, to translate it into today’s language, our struggle is not primarily against concrete corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it. What then is ideology? When are we in ideology? Let me give you an example from my own public life. During a debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library a year or so ago, Henri Lévy made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance, something like would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they like and so on, while I made a similarly pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? So what happened? The irony of the situation was that when we both stated our case in such abstract terms, we both couldn’t but agree with each other. What should I say? No, I want women to be oppressed, not to marry the... And even Bernard-Henri Lévy, a hardline liberal anti-communist, ironically remarked that if this is communism what I said, even he is a communist. Now, this mutual understanding was the proof that we were both deeply in ideology. Ideology is precisely such a reduction to the simplified essence which conveniently forgets what comes up within as the price to be paid, the let’s call it background noise which provides the density of the actual meaning of a statement. This is why, for example, I claim you get now in our media, newspapers, TV, all those charity ads, you remember, some usually a black child or a native child from Guatemala, from Africa, with I don’t know, crippled, twisted limbs and so on, and then comes the message: something like, something like you can make a difference for the price of a couple of cappuccinos or whatever, you can change that child’s life for the better. Why is this ideology? Because again, in abstract, of course, my god, we should all be doing it, what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with it with it with it, I claim, is a concrete message in it, which is, if we read it a little bit cynically: you who are lucky to lead relatively safe lives and so on and so on, I know you feel bad because of the hunger, horrors and so on in which you even in a not direct way but indirectly participate. We offer you a simple way out: for the price of a couple of cappuccinos, you can even feel well for it and you can forget about it. Like the message is that you, I claim, we pay charity, charities not so much to help those out there but to make sure that they remain there, no? That they don’t come. Or another example of ideology. Most of us probably are buying organic food. Now, in itself, this is of course okay. But ask yourself deeply: why are you really buying it? I don’t think you really believe that all those half-rotten apples which cost twice the normal and which we all love, normally genetically manipulated apples and so on, that they are really any less poisonous. Maybe they are. But I don’t think this is why we buy them. There’s a certain reflexivity in it. We buy organic apples because it makes you feel good: “I am doing something, mother earth is in danger, I feel I’m part of a wonderful movement to do something.” It’s this sense of pseudo-activity, I think, my god, doing something without paying any serious price and so on and so on. So the first conclusion here is, you know every, not only ideological, every field of meaning or more specifically, every space of rules which regulate interaction within a certain community, from large national communities up to families and so on, I claim that the rules in such a space are always, how should I call them, two-level rules. You have the explicit rules: do this, don’t do that, you may do this and so on, and this is for me crucial, you always get rules which I call the second-level rules, rules which tell you how to deal with the explicit rules. This is why, give you a popular example, okay, today it is no longer popular, when ordinary people still thought that those from the upper classes have true manners and they tried to learn these manners, you had you know all those courses: we can teach you how to behave among the elite and so on. Why you always fail when you follow only learning those rules? Because you do learn the rules, but you do not learn the unwritten rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules. If you are member of any community with regulated with such rules, you know that to truly be in, you must not only follow the rules but there is a very codified way, nothing contingent about it, of how to softly here and there violate violate the explicit rules. In both directions: A, there are rules, prohibitions which are literally meant not to be respected, like you are simply an idiot if you follow the rules. Now, this differs from different cultures. In some cultures, like pay the taxes and so on, if you don’t try to avoid paying taxes you are considered an idiot and so on. Or especially in sexuality, for example, most of the prohibitions, the standard prohibitions, at least the conservative patriarchal ones, are basically half-hidden injunctions to do it but do it discreetly. And it would be wonderful another time, which I don’t have time to do it, to show you how ideology functions at this level, how official ideology is not only the explicit rules which then you are allowed a space for for for playing a little bit within resisting undermining it. Official ideology is the entire space of what is explicitly said and the implicit. So before I give you a couple of examples, just also the opposite case which I find even more interesting. Especially at universities, I don’t know how it is here, maybe you are an a bit a big exception, but everywhere where I was, I encounter much more interesting the opposite example: things that you are not only allowed to do but even solicited to do on condition that you don’t do them too much, no? You know, to cut a long story short, you are given a certain freedom, but god help you if you take that too literally and you actually do it. The mystery is here, we don’t have time to go into it, the mystery of appearance. Why don’t those in power simply directly tell you you should do it? Why do they play this game of maintaining the appearances? For example, let’s take a harsh totalitarian regime, Soviet Union in the 1930s. I don’t know if you know that in the Soviet Constitution of or when Stalin won, not only was there guaranteed, it says bombastically, Soviet Union guarantees it says citizenship, the right to organize a political party. It even says that the state has the duty to provide any group of citizens who want a political party with means to do it, with offices, with newspaper and so on and so on. Of course, if you just tried to do it, you were arrested. Why, why this rule of appearances? And are we aware to what extent even our daily lives are penetrated with this paradox with this paradoxical condition? What is politeness? Politeness is precisely a complex network of making offers that you know they will be rejected. The example I use all the time: let’s say an older guy who has money, I don’t mean a predator, but just invites you to dinner. It’s clear absolutely to both of you that he will pay, or she, I should say. But it’s the usual ritual, at least in my country, I don’t know how it is here, that you know when the bill gets arrives, for a little bit you have to resist. Now yes, I know what you will say and yes, it did happen to me: once I resisted a little bit too long. Okay, give me this and so on. But you know, what’s the mystery? You see the mystery, the mystery is that you both know that that he will pay, but you both know that your offer, or mine in this case, to pay is in a way hypocritical. But we must go through this ritual. Or, I mean, there are one cannot even cover all the examples. And then we come to more mysterious examples of this soliciting pleasure, prohibitions which solicit. For example, let me just give an obvious example, one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization, I hope you saw the movie *The Sound of Music*. Hope I don’t have to engage in the boring exercise of telling... Okay, if you know the movie, you know probably which scene, at least I even now shock at what kind of obscenity this scene really is. You remember a little bit less than half into the movie, Sister Maria, who gets a crush to the Baron von Trapp, escapes back to the monastery because she is in love with the Baron and cannot stand it and so on. There she still desires the Baron whose children she was serving, and goes to the Mother Superior and tells her, like, “What should I do? I have sinful desires.” Like she goes there with a plea to be properly punished so that she will control her desires. No, like I don’t know, put me on fasting, whatever. And then comes the obscene moment, I hope you remember it, when instead of admonishing her, the, I really didn’t believe it, the Mother Superior starts to sing a song, you remember which one? “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and so on, which means almost literally, “Go back, seduce and screw the guy.” And I think this shows you, if you really read a certain type of church ideology between the lines, they are not telling you “no sex.” They’re telling you effectively: “Accept our superficial rules, play, pay lip service to them, and your sex life done discreetly will be even better.” I think they know how they are doing it. Entire culture constructed in this way. Maybe this is, but I doubt, more difficult, I doubt effectively for Catholics than for Protestants. You know, this idea of do it discreetly and and everything is pardoned and so on and so on. So another example, I repeat it but it’s from a small unknown book of mine, so I hope you don’t know it, which I find perfect for this. I go again another movie which I most sincerely like, I hope you saw it, *Casablanca*, of course. You remember two-thirds into the movie, just a small scene, Ingrid Bergman in the middle of the night comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick’s Café, and of course to get to ask for those famous visas for Portugal whatever. And then something happens: they start to talk remembering their love affair in Paris a year or two ago, then they embrace, then a fade out. We see for two or three seconds the tower of the Casablanca airport, just the light turning around, then we jump back into the room where they are no longer embraced but they just continue the same conversation. What’s important here? Well, the important thing is of course the stupid vulgar question: did they do it or not? That is to say, those two seconds and a half, are they only, are they only here to mark the passage of real time or are they here to signal the whole, I don’t know, half an hour whatever? But what is so interesting in the movie is that it’s not so much that it’s not clear what happens. The movie rather gives you signals, a whole series of signals which point first in the direction they did do it, then in the direction they didn’t do it. It’s consciously contradictory. First, notice that notice that afterwards they are smoking. I hope you know this, that Hays Code Hollywood rules in the ‘30s and ‘40s, because explicit sex was prohibited, after a couple of embraces if you have a fade out and afterwards if you return to smoking, it was a quite quite unambiguous signal that there was sex. And a whole series of other obvious, like even that phallic primitive statue of the tower of the airport whatever. But then you have the whole series of signs that they didn’t do it. Like the same conversation seems to go on, there is no bed, no ruffled surface, everything clean and so on and so on. So I think the movie consciously plays a double game. The message is, I know you have dirty desires, but I will allow you, as if the movie talks to you, addresses you, I will allow you this to play this hypocritical game. On the one hand, I will make you safe from any reproaches from the moral ideological agency. If, imagine ideology as an agent asking you, “How how do you dare to watch such a dirty movie?” You say, “Well, nothing happens, we just talk and so on.” But at the same time, I will give you very specifically all the series of signals so that you can do all your dirty imagination and so on and so on. I don’t know if you know but there is a short story by an author I forgot who he was, who wrote a short story again called “As Time Goes By”, which focuses precisely on the paradox of this scene. It’s a twenty pages short story where first it’s the beginning of the scene, Ingrid Bergman arrives, the last half a page is the conversation we hear, and in between fifteen pages extremely open hardcore of what they were doing. But what is nice is that the short story does even something really nasty. It reinterprets in the terms of hardcore pornography some of the sayings, you know, these legendary sayings from the movie. You know we all know, we all know this famous Humphrey Bogart phrase to his lady, “Here’s to you, kid.” You know how it is interpreted? In the middle of lovemaking, he gives her her his his his penis to her mouth and says, “Here’s to you, kid.” Okay, but now you know what I am now saying. Now I’m arriving at my point. Your laughter now and okay my laughter too, no? This is what makes us such subjects of power. There’s absolutely nothing subversive. No, we didn’t screw them, we didn’t squeeze their balls so to speak. We played their games. Ideology is not just the explicit story. It’s not just nothing happens and then you think you play some subversive games whatever by imagining. Ideology needs both level: the explicit and the unspoken obscenity. This is how, this is how I read, not in any America-bashing way, in in any way I claim in Europe we were even worse at what happened in Abu Ghraib. I claim that what those guys in prison there by annoying, torturing, those being cruel to the prisoners, they were effectively staging there this obscene underground other side of not only military I will even I even claim maybe cultural life. Namely, look, if you remember one of the first photos from Abu Ghraib came out. You remember the famous one, one of the prisoners like in some strange dresses attached to some cords and so on? I did an experiment: I showed that photo to a friend of mine who was at some holiday, didn’t see this photo, and asked him what is this? He told me, “Well, in New York this sounds like some off-off-Broadway avant-garde theater.” And you know, again, our army, Yugoslav army, actually the Swiss army was even worse, but for you know all these military rituals, fragging, the obscenity of songs. This is what always fascinated me. For example, these so-called, I think maybe I’m wrong they are called marching chants. You know these songs that Marines or other soldiers sing while marching or training, and which are very interesting. They combine open vulgarities, brutal obscenities with nonsense rhymes. Like okay an innocent one, I think it’s from that movie *Officer and a Gentleman*. Something like, “I don’t know but I’ve been told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold.” Total nonsense. But again, my point is this is not just something that happens in closed military community. That’s the the point of true identification. When you want to learn to analyze how a certain closed community functions, don’t look at the explicit rules. Look at this, as it were, secret rituals and so on and so on. And again, please don’t accuse me of America-bashing or anything. What happened to me or what I was witnessing in ex-Yugoslav army, it’s too much to say it here, much much further. Okay, so let me go on. The next point I want to make here is that this is why, you know, when you analyze a community, when you witness something that we may call spontaneous transgressive outbursts, like or transgressive behavior when you throw off enough of it and you explode in whatever way, I think we should not take this as a spontaneous outburst in contrast to rules. No, these so-called spontaneous outbursts are absolutely even more maybe also regulated by rules. They are not a matter of spontaneous enjoyment. No, they have to be learned, the more transgressive hedonistic they appear, they have to be learned. Let me just take two, three small extreme cases. Smoking. How, maybe you do remember, I don’t because I am a madman not because because I didn’t I never smoked in my life, but don’t take me for a crazy guy, not because I wanted to remain pure, because I just don’t like it. I don’t know. But all my friends told me and I am in the same thing, you know how it usually happened when you were first seduced if you were into smoking? Usually it’s ahead of a small transgressive initiatic experience. You know, like you are still in elementary school, some friend tells you, “You know this is what adults do, try” and so on. And I mean it’s always the same story. First you start coughing, you didn’t like it, bah, it’s disgusting. Then you literally have to learn to enjoy as part of the initiatic ritual. I claim it’s the same with drinking. Everyone who tries whisky for the first time, the first reaction is always: it’s bitter, it’s disgusting. Then you learn you have to enjoy it. I mean it’s so clear that to enjoy it, if you drink for pleasure, you don’t drink whisky, my god. You drink some stupid fruity juice or... But I claim my my point is the same even for sex. At the deepest level, it’s not pleasure, it’s some kind of a more some kind of a transgressive primordial duty. I mean, if you want pure pleasure, masturbation is much better. So what I’m stating is that, you see, this makes the whole of culture. How you obey the rules and all those transgressive carnival, adults adults whatever and so on and so on. Incidentally, as an amusing remark, I think the same even goes for music love. For example, I love classical music and I have many friends who love love it. And how do you signal that you are really in, part of an elite circle? It’s not by, if you follow the commonly accepted judgments, you appear an idiot. The way to do is to take a great composer but ignore his masterworks. Like if you say with Beethoven, “I like the Ninth Symphony, I like the late string quartets,” you’re a barbarian. You take a lesser known but there is one piano piece nobody knows from the middle age and this is the masterwork. You must play this game of like I don’t know, with my good friend Fred Jameson and some others, we even wanted to do a book we just didn’t get enough collaborators of playing this game with Alfred Hitchcock’s films. The idea was each of us should select an a Hitchcock thriller which is obviously a failure and play the game “Ah, but this is the true masterpiece.” Fred, Fred, some of you don’t know it, Fred’s selection was *Stage Fright*, that failure from with Marlene Dietrich. Mine was even the lowest you can go, *Topaz*, that anti-communist drama whatever from from the ‘60s. So this is that’s complication. So if we return from this short detour to my basic point. So if we take into account these complications, how does ideology function today, especially with regard to the claim that we live in post-ideological era? I claim that and I will try to explain why, ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels. This is how it works in art, in politics. You can be sure you are in ideology when somebody says, “Listen, let’s forget about all the stupid political, religious labels, ultimately are we not ordinary human beings, we all share the same fears, the same passions,” and so on and so on. To give you an example of what this ideology is called, the best example I can think of is a book recently translated into English which was a tremendous bestseller first in France then in Germany now here also, Jonathan Littell, *Les Bienveillantes* [*The Kindly Ones*]. It’s a slightly too long, almost pages, first-person narrative of a Holocaust executioner, a mid-level SS officer who did it all. But of course in a consciously provocative way, the book presents him as a normal, warm human being like all of us. He has his fears, he’s sometimes disgusted, you see all his doubts, fears and so on and so on. And of course the book does not justify him. But the the the insight of the book is a deeper one, I think. It is that, you know, Hannah Arendt already made a similar point as was right: when you are witnessing terrifying acts, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that behind the acts you will encounter some kind of a demonic entity, a superman of evil. Behind there are ordinary beings with all their fears and so on. You know everybody as we put it has a human side. Stalin loved her daughter, Hitler liked to talk with children, giving them chocolates whatever and so on and so on. No, we are all human. And here comes my next conclusion which I think I will try to show immediately why has even political implications. If there is the most basic lesson of psychoanalysis, it is that what we usually refer to as the wealth of our inner lives, there is nothing authentic about it. This is constitutively a priori almost a lie. You know this famous post-modern deconstructionist whatever definition anti-substantialist definition of human identity in the sense of we are nothing but stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. I think it’s not quite true, because we are telling these stories, but these stories are fundamentally lies to obfuscate the reality the reality of what we are doing. What do I mean by it? You remember the a saying an allegedly deep thought which I think was pronounced in a dialogue by a partisan of the Middle East dialogue? It sounds so deep, listen: an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. It sounds very deep, no? Like I stigmatize you as an enemy because I wasn’t able to listen to you, I just reified you as some monster, then if I listen to your side of the story, I see you are human like me, you have your dreams, your fears and so on, and I see you as a human being. This is all very nice. It has a limit. The limit is what? Well, we reach this limit when we simply replace the general term enemy with a concrete name. Would you also say Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story? No, the answer should be his story was just a lie which he made to justify and at the same time avoid the horror of what he was doing. And this is incidentally almost the most difficult thing to do and the most tragic even when you analyze a certain ideological constellation. You know, the for example I recently read a book, I forgot who wrote it, I bought it at some that book fair, *The Nazi Ethic*. No, it wasn’t manual, it’s an obscenity. The book did something which is absolutely crucial to do: it looked at how did the Nazis justify to themselves what they were doing. And of course you find a very beaut— some sometimes very beautiful narrative full of almost I’m tempted to say authentic insights and so on and so on. But again the proof is not there, that’s on what I insist. It’s not that when I want to judge you, the rule is I should look deep into you, I should try to understand what you thought you were doing. Of course I should, but I will not arrive at any fundamental truth in this way. I will rather arrive at something that I am tempted to call the fundamental lie, the screen that you construct to yourself. This is why we have all these horrible examples. Take the architect of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, before he was killed in Prague in You know what’s so shocking reading the biography of this guy? Do you know that in his spare time he was meeting with three other friend officers of SS, he was a very good violin player and they were playing in a string quartet late Beethoven string quartets? Which are maybe one of the top tops in the classical music. Now, what I tragically claim is that you cannot say “Oh, but it must have been non-authentic.” No, that’s very difficult to accept. Maybe he played them with a real authenticity, blah blah, and nonetheless he was able to do it. And okay I will not repeat here my old examples but I have many of them even more tragic. For example, in the West, it’s my old story, maybe you don’t know it, did you read Aldous Huxley, *Grey Eminence*? It’s a wonderful historical research into early 17th century French politician priest Père Joseph, Father Joseph. He was a counselor to Cardinal Richelieu at the time of the Thirty Years' War in Europe which devastated Europe terribly in to between Protestants and Catholics. If there is a guy who can be retroactively isolated as the origin of Nazism, it’s this guy, believe me or not. Because what he did is that he concluded a pact between France and Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire just to prevent the unification of Germany. He he and he succeeded, which is why Germany delayed its constitution as a nation-state which was the ultimate condition of First World War and then Second World War. So again, the meanest politician, ordering tortures, poisoning, treason whatever. But now comes the horrible thing which fascinated Aldous Huxley. In the evening, metaphorically, after doing this dirty work, he wrote the most beautiful mystical meditations, absolutely at the level of who are our the biggest hits, Saint Teresa and so on and so on. And this is what bothered Aldous Huxley. Is it possible? How could a guy who was obviously an authentic mystic, how could he be doing that? Huxley thought it’s not possible, there must be something false not only in his Père Joseph’s mystic but also in Christianity itself. For playing this, so Huxley thought Zen Buddhism, Orientalism is better. I’m not saying it’s worse, but I’m saying it’s not even better. It’s not better. Again, read the book to which I refer always, it’s a guy called Brian Victoria who is himself a Zen Buddhist, *Zen at War*. He looks at how the Zen community in Japan around between thirty forty millions and then more I think, related to Japanese war imperialism in the ‘30s and ‘40s, attack on China and so on. What he noticed is that they were all justifying it. Large majority. Not only this, so not only supporting it but actively justifying it. For example, one a guy whom many of you maybe know because he was popular when we were young in the hippie times, D.T. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West. Yes, in the late ‘30s he was writing texts very in fact he fully justified Japanese aggression on China. He even tried to provide through Zen Buddhism instructions into how to cope with the act of killing. His idea was that for us ordinary people with the minimum of decency, you know, it’s not so easy to kill. Like we can dream of killing, but to have a concrete person in front of you, it can be difficult to stab a person. So he mobilized the entire Zen machinery. And he said this happens only if you remain caught within the illusion of false reality where you know the story, you think you are the agent, you believe in substantial reality. But he says if you reach the level of the story of Buddhist enlightenment, then things appear in a different way. If you are still caught into the limits of your false self, then you experience it like you are there, I am here, I am now stabbing you. This is horrible. But then he says if I reach enlightenment and see the vanity of substantial reality, then I can experience the same scene in a totally different way. Something like I’m nowhere in it, I’m a pure observer, not even I hold, here is my hand moving around in an impersonal dance and as a part of the same dance your body gets stuck into it. I’m nowhere in it. And please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming Suzuki. He was authentic. The lesson is just I don’t see any continuity, as it were, any necessary link between our inner experience, authentic as it may be, and let’s call it maybe the social consequences, the horror of what we are doing. I claim that fundamentally our inner-most identity in the sense of the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves are not the truth. They are even as a rule a lie. In this sense, I claim this withdrawal from external reality in the sense of “let’s look into the depth of your personality, you as a concrete human being” is false. And so let’s go to give you another example to the very opposite end of the Nazis, and I’m not claiming in any way that they are the same, quite on the contrary. But to see how, of course at much more modest level level but nonetheless, we find something similar, for example in today’s Israel. Let’s look at the movies. Did you see the last two Israeli films which were a big success about the Lebanon war? Ari Folman’s animated documentary *Waltz with Bashir* and Samuel Maoz’s *Lebanon*. *Lebanon* is especially typical here I think. You know it presents the experience of an ordinary Israeli soldier in the Lebanon war when he was in a tank penetrating deep into Lebanon. And almost the entire movie shot from the perspective within inside a tank. All the horrors, the claustrophobia and so on and so on. I think this is ideology at its purest. Because under the pretext of “forget about ideology, war is horrible, we need that horrible experience,” nonsense. You know, all the historical background: what was he doing there? whom was he killing, children and so on? It all disappears. All of a sudden it becomes the story of your inner suffering, fears of your inner experience and so on and so on. So it’s pretty sad to report how Israeli army, I know because I was there, I have there many friends, I am often there, how IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, play this game endlessly. For example, they don’t present themselves as superheroes. Like you know who, one battalion of us can take Cairo in one afternoon if we wanted and so on. No, they always emphasize “war is not in our genes, we are human like you, we are afraid.” I remember long interviews in the movie which I think is ideology at its purest. You know Claude Lanzmann, *Shoah*. But you know he did later another movie called *Tsahal*, which is the name for Israeli Defense Forces. Endless interview along the model of *Shoah* with Israeli soldiers, their memories about the Yom Kippur war. And it’s all about this concrete experience. They they tell how they even urinated, they were totally scared. Like an endless variation on “we are human.” But I claim this precisely allows you to obliterate the political consequences of what you are doing and so on. Let me give you another example which I must say really shocked me. When I was in Israel, they reported of a strange incident. A group of anti-terrorist soldiers entered an apartment where they suspected that an alleged terrorist is hiding. They found only his family there: wife and children. Among the children, a daughter, of course, terrified to see house breaking in, started to cry and the mother to calm her down called her by her name. Her name in... And then one of the Israeli soldiers breaking in discovered that he has a daughter with the same name. And of course he pulled out his wallet and, “You see mother, I have the same daughter, I have the same name, you see.” The message: “Oh, we are human” and so on and so on. But I claim in that situation this was an obscenity. You know, to emphasize in that sense humanity. So again, now so that you will not say that I’m only taking, as it were, Nazis and God forbid to confuse them Israel, I will also give you an interesting example from the opposite side political. You know that in today’s Cuba, they have a certain even relatively at high level quality detective novels. Some the biggest their biggest export name is a writer called Leonardo Padura Fuentes, who writes police procedurals, four of them or even five are translated, you can get them in better bookstores. The hero is Mario Conde, a police commissioner in today’s Habana. The books are so critical, I mean critical at least in the sense of presenting all the misery of today’s Cuba. They are a lost generation, misery, hunger, prostitution, nepotism and so on. So that I thought my god, it would be nice to visit this guy in a nice villa in the suburbs of Miami or what? I was surprised to learn that no, he is he is he is in Cuba, and not even as a half-dissident. He is totally accepted, supported by state media and so on. So I asked myself what’s going on? And I think it it is from the standpoint of their interest Cuban authorities are right in supporting him. Because in spite of all the criticism, the basic message at this human level of of Leonardo Padura is what? It is, “Okay, we screwed it up. It’s a misery. We are a lost generation” and so on. “But the true patriot hero takes this with bitterness but heroism. Don’t dream about Miami, we are from here, we should heroically go on here.” You know this totally without without any apparently in a totally non-ideological way like cut the bullshit about socialism and so on, but nonetheless you know be faithful to you, stay here, don’t escape into dreams and so on and so on. It’s I claim a really really very refined mode of ideology. Where do you find a similar ideology? Now we go to more crazy waters, a little bit on movies. Maybe you know this part then I will go to other examples. My first example would have been did you see the movie, I did it six times because of my small son, *Kung Fu Panda*? That’s ideology quite... I think it’s a perfect almost clinical example of how we function in our societies. If you saw the movie, you know, the big fat Kung Fu panda called Po wants to become a Kung Fu warrior and succeeds. But okay the point is this: the movie moves at two levels. First you have all this Orientalist Western Buddhist element, you know: faith, choice, fidelity, hero and so on. All this, how should I put it, religious-military background. At the same time, you must have noticed it how the movie is full of most common-sensical brutal humor, jokes at its own expense, at the expense of of this ideology. It makes fun continuously of these Buddhist wisdoms and so on and so on. But that’s something extremely interesting which is that in spite of all this, ideology this pseudo-Buddhism mystic survives. You can make fun of it but nonetheless it functions. And this is the mystery. This is I think how beliefs function today. Nobody really believes. If you ask anyone do you believe, everyone will tell you you are machine, are you crazy, why should I believe? But beliefs, how should I put it, they socially function. We have the paradox of beliefs which as it were circulate, nobody believes in them but they function. The one who first provided this formula was and I appreciate her for that was the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. You know when she was asked “do you believe in God?” You know what she said? It’s a nice formula. She she didn’t answer. She just said “Jewish people believe in God and I believe in Jewish people.” You know what’s weird? This is not the usual Stalinist logic where your reasoning is “you know ordinary people need to believe.” No, I claim nobody has to believe. And belief functions. How does this function? Imagine let’s take the most simple example. Imagine Christmas. Of course you don’t believe in Santa Claus, my god, you have to provide yourself the present. But if somebody asks you do you believe in Santa Claus, you will probably say, “No, I just pretend because of my children, not to disappoint them.” Now if I ask alone not in front of you your children, I’m sure they will say, “Of course I don’t believe, I just pretend not to disappoint my parents and get the presents.” And it goes on endlessly I claim. So you can have you see, a belief functions as element of a social network. It functions except although even if nobody effectively in the first person believes. And this message is wonderfully formulated at the end of *Kung Fu Panda* where Po, the panda, looks for the secret ingredient that would make him a hero. In his ordinary life he is just helps his father who runs a restaurant where they make a special soup, noodle soup. And father claims that he there is a special ingredient to that soup. And at the end, the father tells him the secret: there is no special ingredient. It’s only you. To make something special, you just have to believe it’s special. And then he discovers it’s the same for becoming a warrior. This means precisely what I was saying. There is no special belief, no special quality. It functions even if you know that there is nothing. It functions if you as it were follow it as if it functions. This is how our beliefs function today. At the cynical level, you can laugh at everything. But I claim that nonetheless beliefs function, like I’m again sorry if I repeat a story which I’m repeating all around already for twenty years. Niels Bohr, quantum physics, probably you know it, made a wonderful comment. He had a country in the a house in the countryside of Denmark, old wooden farmer’s house, with above the entrance door a horseshoe. I don’t know how it is here, in Europe a horseshoe above the entrance door is a superstitious sign preventing evil spirits to enter the house. So a friend, another scientist, visited him and said, “Wait a minute, are you stupid? I mean why do you have this? Do you believe in it?” Niels Bohr said, “Of course not.” Then the friend asked him, “But why do you have it here?” You know what Niels Bohr answered? “I of course I don’t believe in it that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don’t believe it.” That’s logic! Nobody believes in democracy, blah blah blah, but we somehow accept it at the social level that it works. So again, before we dismiss fundamentalism and all that as crazy people who believe, let’s first set the things straight. I claim that we believe in a way more than ever just in this more impersonal in this more impersonal way. From here one one could have go on in analyzing Hollywood as a part towards our ideological constellation. Like there is another feature which I think is pretty crucial in *Kung Fu Panda*: no lady, no girl, no love interest. All you have in the universe of Panda is this mystical wisdom and then a kind of a how should I call it oral-anal pre-pre-sexual primitivity. The the drive of the hero, the the panda, is not sex, power, it’s eating. He eats like a pig. Instead of an oral-anal economy, it’s so typical I don’t know probably the the authors they are not idiots, were aware of this, that you know he is called Po, P-O. I mean in German, “po” is a common term for ass, no? So what I’m saying is that sexuality is excluded. And I don’t know what this means, but did you notice how in many recent films, and I’m not saying this simply means less sexuality, I don’t know what it means, sexuality Hollywood starts to violate its own old rule of how should I call it, of creating the couple. For example, this was what was so mysterious in *The Da Vinci Code*. You know already years ago a friend of mine, friend, sorry, British psychoanalyst Darian Leader told me something wonderful. He told me, you remember *X-Files*, if you watched some of them? He provided a wonderful formula for *X-Files*. He said why do all these things happen out there, you know the formula “the truth is out there”, here an alien, there an alien? He says to cover up the fact that nothing goes on here between the two of them. You know no sex, so all this has to happen because... and I claim it’s exactly the same formula for *The Da Vinci Code*, at least the movie. Poor Jesus Christ has to screw Mary or what to cover up the fact that they don’t do it. It’s notice, okay, at least between Tom Hanks and who is that French girl that I don’t like, whatever? The chocolate girl, no? No sex here. And then it goes further in movies even more than in the novels. Take the earlier novel, *Angels Demons*. The way it was made into a movie, if you saw it, again no sex. Although the girl is quite, if you allow me a sexist remark, quite nice but nothing happens, no sex. And then if you read, I did, I almost killed myself, his latest novel, and I measure him, Dan Brown by his own standards, it’s so bad, *The Lost Symbol*. But you remember there it’s just another older lady, there is not even a minimal a minimal sexual tension. I find this very strange, what is happening in in Hollywood that they are that they are moving in this direction. Because I even found the same, did you notice that the same happens for the first time in entire James Bond in the last James Bond, *Quantum of Solace*. No sex, just at the end they discover they are both too shattered or whatever. So why am I saying this? Because one of the standard formulas of Hollywood which I developed in depth from *Titanic* onwards is that whenever you have a big dramatic story, can be about the end of the world or whatever, it’s always enframed by the logic of creating a couple. Like it goes up up to The subtitle of could have been how a young what is he, failed writer, John Cusack, lost and regains his wife and so on. To to to make him to go further, even two couples are created. The daughter, Thandiwe Newton also gets a good cool guy so that... But so this formula how it gradually disappears. And it plays a a crucial role this formula. What I’m saying is not that simply we should obliterate all the historical background, fighting the Nazis and so on. But it’s that what makes the film, as it were, attractive, the cause of our desire, is this apparently marginal feature that all the official topic of the movie, which is in the foreground, you know how to break the Nazi code, is generating our interest because it’s always with this kind of a dialogue constant dialogue which is framed, which is the enigma of sexual relationship, the enigma of a woman and so on and so on. Okay, let me now go on to my final or slowly approaching the the end element which is what if we live in this so-called post-ideological era where you say forget about big ideological phrases, be authentically who you are, enjoy life and so on. Or as they put it today because I think our predominant ideology today is more some kind of an enlightened hedonism, which is decaffeinated Dalai Lama, how should I put it, Dalai Lama popularized. You know, be truly yourself, realize your potentials and so on. I think what is problematic here. The reason for it is that we find ourselves in a stage which can be called cultural capitalism. Capitalism I think something did change with capitalism. After capitalism somehow integrated all the critique, critique of consumerism, alienation and so on, and functions in a new functions in a new way now. The two dimensions which were till now opposed, on the one hand, the dimension of pure consumerism: I want this product to enjoy it and so on, and the dimension of caring for society, let’s call it the the the altruistic, humanitarian, ideological dimension, they are more and more combined. How? Well, if you visit Starbucks, you will immediately notice it. Because Starbucks is maybe the company which most directly exploits this, they are masters in it. You know what they are doing. All the time they are bombarding you by something like when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don’t buy just a cappuccino, you buy much more. And they enumerate it: A, you buy an authentic community. They know, they openly manipulate Starbucks this ideological cliché that in our societies we no longer town commons or public places, they are no longer here, we are just isolated individuals. The idea is we will provide an ersatz community for you. Then they go on: we only grow our coffee beans from organic farm, we only buy it from organic farms, we give money there to educate, to bring water to them and so on. So you know, the idea being all this, I cannot but call it semantic density. Like you don’t just buy a coffee, you are made aware that you buy a whole ideological experience of caring for others and so on and so on. I claim that then that this is absolutely crucial for today’s capitalism. This is where consumerism tries to recuperate its own opposite. You know, it’s no longer I do this, I consume, but I have to do something else to do something good. No, it’s they offer you a much better choice. Our consume and you will at the same time act as a humanitarian, caring for mother nature, caring for others and so on and so on. This formula reached recently almost its climax with two cases. First, maybe you’ve heard about Toms Shoes. A company founded in for shoes. Their formula is 1-for-1 as they call it. They claim for every pair of shoes you buy with them, another pair of shoes will be given to again some starving children, I don’t know where and so on and so on. It’s a wonderful formula. It gives you, at it is, you may engage in consumerism because the more you do it, the more also those who are excluded profit by it. Or another absurd, Coca-Cola, sorry, Pepsi, recently started a publicity with the formula I quote it: Pepsi was always about refreshment, but what if instead of just refreshing people, Pepsi helps to refresh the world? So the idea is that when you buy a Coke, you get the right to vote, to send your ideas about what to do to help people. And then when these ideas will be gathered, they will be again put to vote and you will be able to choose which idea, helping starving people here, preserving nature there, will be will be put to will be put to you. So even have you even have the, as it were, the element of democracy here. What are the further consequences of it? Here with Pepsi, of course, Pepsi plays to the end the logic of what what one cannot but call the the logic of freedom of choice. And with this I would like to conclude because I think that the fight that you have now in United States, this ideological fight about healthcare reform, is an important fight because what it focuses on is precisely the freedom of choice. And things are complex here. Okay, do not misunderstand me, I’m totally on the side of those who are for the reform. But I just wanted to say is that effectively, in a way in what sense things are getting complex today. In the good old days, the main argument against the ideology of free choice was this vulgarized Marxist one: “Yes, we are given choices but only the unimportant choices, Pepsi or Coke or whatever, we are not given the real choices.” This is up to a point true, but I think that some sociologists like the German one Ulrich Beck in his well-known book on the *Risk Society*, they I don’t agree wholly with them, but they nonetheless pointed out something at how the status of choice, risk, catastrophes change today. It changed in what way? In the sense that today we perceive as risks in our era of new uncertainties, not only not simply something which will hit us from outside, like a gigantic asteroid or whatever. We are more and more aware that there may be risks which we are generated or triggered by our own activity. So you see, the problem is not so much that we don’t have a choice, but that we have a choice but and I don’t think here I’m critical of the big companies that we can simply put all the blame on the big companies. But the situation is simply not transparent. Okay, basically of course I accept the big global warming argument, but things are so com— you know, we are it’s not that we have too much too much power, okay, humanity as such. We the consequences of our own activity are impenetrable to ourselves. We effectively we are so strong that we can even change nature but we are not aware of how are we doing it. For example, I read I got a message recently from a friend from China who told me that even this big earthquakes, you remember a year and a half ago or when they had in that Sichuan province outside the big earthquakes, and they now more and more, they don’t make it public, but nonetheless more and more admit that these earthquakes were probably the product of human activity. You know how? You remember China is building those gigantic Three Gorges dams or what. The idea is that the gigantic lakes they created have changed so much the pressure, pressure on different strata there that they if not caused the earthquakes, at least contributed to it. So again, that’s the first element of radical insecurity today. And the second point I want to emphasize here is how and this is again ideology at its purest, how the very uncertainties caused by the gradual dismantling of welfare state are then sold to us as new freedoms. For example, we all know that more and more we are forced to make just one, two, three years contracts. It’s more and more difficult to get a long-term job. But instead of this then we are told, “Why don’t instead of being afraid of it, why don’t you take this as a new opportunity to reinvent yourself every two three years, to make a choice” and so on and so on. Or with healthcare, at least in Europe where they are also slowly, we already had it, dismantling. Well, healthcare, the reasoning is again: this gives you new choices, this give you a choice to choose, you know, do you want to spend more and take a risk or do you want to be absolutely sure, spend less whatever and so on and so on. This I think is ideology at its purest. Why? Because two three points, only almost old-fashioned Marxist points I want to make here. As it is clear not only to Marxists but even to old-fashioned communitarians and so on. You know, freedom, actual freedom of choice, personal freedoms that we all cherish is something which works only, more and more in our complex society, only against the background of the very complex network of state guarantees, rules, customs, civility and so on and so on. Do you know how many things has to function in the background so that you have your freedom? And I think that if you approach it in this way, then universal healthcare, if anything, provides for people much more freedom. In what sense? The comparison I’m tempted to make is with water and electricity. I mean you probably noticed that all of us, maybe in some states or cities it’s different, but I think practically everywhere everywhere, you are brutally deprived of the freedom of choice there, no? Where you live you simply connect to water, to electricity, but most of you would have said, “Okay, if they rip me off too much I will protest,” but you don’t want to say, “Oh, I want a choice here.” I mean, your life would become a nightmare. Certain things should simply function in the background so that where it really matters, you have choices. Of course water and electricity really matter. But you prefer having them back there, not to deal with them. I claim it would immensely raise the level of actual choices, freedoms and so on, if at least a basic healthcare acquires a little bit of this status, that you know what I mean, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s in the background. This doesn’t mean in any way in what way should be done and so on and so on. So now really to conclude. You know I’m not saying “let’s conclude” and so on, no? Once I started a talk with “Let me conclude.” Longer story, never mind. What happens when this invisible background disintegrates, of institutional guarantees, of customs and so on and so on? Well, something very sad happens. Something the first preview of what we can get in a movie which some people whom I know recently made, there is not yet the premiere even so I’m not even supposed to talk about this movie because some of the people who helped who help made this movie are threatened. You will see immediately why. It’s a Danish documentary, *Free Men When Killers Make Movies* [Working title for *The Act of Killing*], made by a small Copenhagen in Denmark house. It’s about a group of ex-killers from Medan, Indonesia. It was shot in In this film, they take it shows a group led by a guy called Anwar Congo. They were you maybe don’t know but in in communists tried a coup d'état there and then the right-wing generals counteracted and then in the aftermath there was, people estimated between one and two and a half million of suspected communists, most of them of Chinese origins, were killed. Now, this movie tells the story of one of the group of this murderers. What is so shocking about the movie is that it tells the story in an open way. You know what I mean? Like the murderers don’t tell it secretly and so on. They publicly boast about it. Like with pride they say, they and it’s shattering. Like you see them, who are now rich businessmen, senators, journalists and so on. They answer all the questions. For example, they are asked how did you usually rape women? And they describe it: that it took them some time to discover the most pleasurable way, that usually the girl should be on a table back and then you ask a friend with the wire around her neck to hold her down and strangle her slowly and so on. Then they ask how did they torture men, they describe what’s the most practical way, cut off the balls, maybe the guy swallowed his own balls, all this nice stuff. And and they do this publicly and openly. There is even at the end a TV show really took place in Indonesia on one of the big state TV channels, which is the ultimate of obscenity that I’ve seen. In this TV show, the these criminals are in front of a large audience, ask answer questions and so on, and then the moderator celebrates them, you like they ask a guy “how did you torture blah blah” and the guy says “oh in this way, it’s the most practical way to torture women” and the moderator says “a big applause for the gentleman here for this nice insight” and so on and so on. It’s like a caricature. You know usually this happens in these bad taste leftist dystopias where they imagine some future totalitarian society. It happens there. And the question is again: how is something like this possible? Because the movie up to a point answers me. Because all these guys loved Hollywood when they were young. But I’m not blaming Hollywood for that. And the way they were able to do it, they imagined themselves, as they said, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were their true heroes. They imagined themselves as imitating Hollywood heroes, tough guys, gangsters and so on. Again, I’m not blaming here Hollywood, but I’m also not blaming here the primitive Indonesian culture like you know those videos there and so on. No, I’m saying that it has more something to do with how the ongoing capitalist globalization undermines our standard traditional ethical ethical system and creates a certain moral vacuum. And my point is that this is the first battle to be won as it were. Don’t think that ideology doesn’t matter today. Precisely today in our upmost cynical era and so on, we are more deeper in ideology than we ever were. Ideology again, as I pointed out, is not only the explicit rules, it’s all beliefs that we obey without believing in them, all the obscene implicit rules and so on and so on. And it is very difficult to withdraw from it. Because you pay the price for it. It hurts, as it were. Which is why what if you really want to do something today, you should not succumb too quickly to this idea “Oh, children are starving, let’s do something.” Yeah, of course we should. But how should I put it, first we should change ourselves, first we should put in order our dreams. How should I put it, we should start here. Otherwise this is for me to put it in very naive terms, the reason of the failure of the 20th century revolutions. I have no mercy for Soviet Union and so on. They won, but they didn’t win in the dreams they were dreaming, how should I say no? And then you end up with what you end up with what you end up here. Because do not, just a concluding variation, do not forget how important dreams are. Let’s take the ultimate ideological dream: anti-Semitism. Of course we all know, and today I claim we live in so that let me make it okay first nonetheless I want to make it clear where I stand here. I still think that anti-Semitism is ideology par excellence and cannot cannot ever be justified. But I nonetheless, not in spite of this but because of this, I think one should absolutely also be critical of what goes on in today’s Israel too. For example, my thesis is a crazy one here but I presented it in Israel. That today’s Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism. In what sense? Very quickly. This idea came to me when there was a big public debate in I think Jerusalem where I was defending a friend of mine, anti-Zionist Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen. And then people in the public attacked me claiming, “But listen, you are a famous philosopher, this guy is nobody. Are you aware that this guy just wants to exploit you for money? That this guy really doesn’t care?” Then others accused this guy of not being really one of them too, that he is just floating around without soul. Then I told them, “Are you aware that you are describing this guy in exactly the same terms the late 19th century anti-Semites, nation-state partisans, were describing the Jew? They are only for money, they don’t really have roots in their community,” and so on and so on. But okay, nonetheless, back to this anti-Semitic image. You know, it’s not enough to say but Jews are not like that. You should fight anti-Semitism not only at the level of facts as every racism, but also at the level of dreams, fantasies and so on. You know, because if you accept the debate at the level of facts, “are Jews really like that?” and so on, it’s over, I claim. You will achieve nothing. Imagine debating with somebody in Germany in if there the anti-Semitic Nazi image of Jews is true or not. The result will be somewhere in the middle. Like the anti-Semite, anti-Semites abuse Jews what of exploiting the Germans. Well, my god, some Jews were exploiters. So in a certain sense they were exploiting Germans. So all you can say at this level is it’s not as bad as the Nazis claim, but there is some truth in it. Okay, they claim Jews corrupt, seduce sexually our German girls. Well, I claim probably it was totally true, why not, of course, everyone. So you see my point: the true question is not are Jews really like that. The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew. And here I am tempted to repeat Jacques Lacan’s wonderful ironic statement when he says that when a husband is jealous of his wife that she sleeps around with other men, that his jealousy is pathological even if it’s true that his wife is doing this. Because what makes it pathological, it’s not is it true or not, but why does he in order to maintain as it were his the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need that husband, a wife who is cheating him, or an anti-Semitic German, why does he need in order to maintain the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need such a figure of the Jew? So to to conclude with this wonderful formula of Jacques Lacan in Seminar where he says, “The picture that I see is my eye, it’s my fantasy, but I, I am also in the picture.” So of course the anti- the the the racist anti-Semitic picture of the Jew is a fantasy in the eye of the anti-Semitic subject. But anti-Semitic subject is also in his own picture in the sense of his very identity is constructed by this, relies on this fantasy. You take his fantasy, his dream away, he in a way loses everything and becomes this universe which needs totally to reconstruct himself. Which is why I think all good radical movements start with this first act of violence which is a spiritual violence aimed at yourself. This is how at least I read the scene in one of my favorite Hollywood movies and I don’t think it’s proto-fascist propaganda, *Fight Club*. You remember when Ed Norton in a wonderful scene confronting his boss beats himself? That’s how you should begin: change your dreams. I’m sorry if I was too long. On the other hand, I’m not sorry. What?