On Violence
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2008-09-15 · 1:11:30 · 9,875 words
ideologylanguagerevolution-violencepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturefascism-populismcapitalismdemocracyreligion-theologyeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a lecture based on his book 'Violence', arguing that language itself is a form of violence, not a medium of peaceful reconciliation as Habermas and early Lacan claim, but a 'torture house' (Lacan) that must be actively twisted to yield truth. He supplements Heidegger's notion of the mythic violence of symbolic horizons with a 'divine violence of language' (torturing language against itself) drawn from Benjamin, Jelinek, and Lacan. The second half applies this framework to contemporary ideology: fundamentalism as false carnivalesque liberation, the ideological function of charity and consumer culture, the fetishist split of cynical belief ('it works even if you don't believe'), and the ominous normalization of previously unacceptable practices such as torture and far-right governance.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Benjamin's term for redemptive, state-destroying violence; Žižek maps it onto the torturing of language against itself (sprachzerstörend) as an emancipatory act parallel to staatszerstörend.
as “immanent normativity of speech acts”
Habermas's claim that an ethics is inscribed into the normal functioning of language, which Žižek rejects as ignoring the violent dimension of linguistic horizons.
as “torture house of language”
Žižek uses Lacan's formulation that man is 'caught in and tortured by language' to designate the dark underside of Heidegger's 'house of being', the irreducible gap between subject and the symbolic order, expressed in psychopathology.
Excessive enjoyment tied to the torturing aspect of language and the libidinal dimension Heidegger's edifice cannot accommodate.
Heidegger's meditative letting-be, Žižek contrasts it unfavorably with Jelinek's imperative to torture language, arguing Gelassenheit merely disguises its own violence.
Žižek identifies language as the big Other and insists it is not a reservoir of wisdom but 'a place of cruel indifference and stupidity'.
Benjamin's term, adopted by Žižek for the state-forming, symbolic-order-imposing violence of language, the Heideggerian violence of a 'disclosure of the meaning of being'.
as “sprachzerstörend”
Language-destroying, Žižek's coinage by analogy with Benjamin's staatszerstörend to describe the divine violence that tortures language rather than forming it.
as “false carnivalesque liberation”
Ethnic fundamentalism and totalitarianism function not as escapes from freedom but as offers of transgressive enjoyment, the obscene permission to kill, rape, plunder under the guise of serving nation or God.
as “poetico-military complex”
Žižek's coinage for the Balkan phenomenon in which national poets combined with military killers to produce ethnic cleansing, the Yugoslav counterpart of the Western industrial-military complex.
as “spiritualized hedonism”
Today's dominant ideological address, 'be who you truly are, realize your potential', which replaces the old superego call to sacrifice with a pseudo-authentic consumerism.
The They Live sunglasses as metaphor for ideological critique that reveals the hidden injunctions ('Don't think, consume, obey') beneath apparently neutral messages.
Bill Gates's reformist ideology invoked by Žižek as the contemporary form of depoliticization through charity, uniting capital, philanthropy and state against systemic analysis.
as “fetishist split”
The ideological structure of 'I know very well, but nonetheless I believe/act as if', illustrated by Kung Fu Panda's simultaneous cynicism and sacred belief.
as “cynical belief”
The contemporary ideological mode in which nobody needs to sincerely believe, the system functions as long as everyone presupposes that someone else believes, as in the horseshoe/Santa Claus structure.
as “offers to be rejected”
Symbolic situations in which a choice or offer is extended on the implicit condition that it is declined, a micro-structure of ideology operating in everyday politeness.
Implied in Žižek's account of how proverbs, rules, and customs function independently of individual belief, the social substance that operates behind subjects' backs.
Hegel's concept, invoked by Žižek as the implicit customary substance ('second nature') whose silent transformation is more worrying than explicit rule changes.
Hegel's ethical substance, the thick network of implicit customs and mores that underpin free individuality and that Žižek sees as being dangerously eroded in the present.
Stories he reaches for 13
Bohr had a horseshoe above his door. Asked if he believed in it, he said no. Asked why he had it, he said: 'I was told it works also if you don't believe.' Žižek uses this to illustrate how ideology functions through cynical belief, it is effective independently of sincere conviction.
“Of course I don't believe horseshoe really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told it works also if you don't believe.”
Starbucks charges premium prices and tells customers that with each cup they save a child in Guatemala, embedding ethical meaning into consumption so the buyer feels good and avoids thinking about structural causes of poverty. Žižek returns to this at the lecture's opening as an example of the book presentation he feared.
“With each overpriced cup of cappuccino you save a Guatemala child. The point is that it makes it an experience ethically satisfying, life has meaning, you participate in something meaningful.”
In John Carpenter's They Live, sunglasses reveal hidden ideological injunctions behind innocuous publicity ('Don't think, consume, obey'). Žižek uses this to model ideology operating on two levels: the surface message and the hidden injunction, and also the reverse structure.
“He sees a big publicity poster: Visit Hawaii, Honeymoon, Enjoy Life. He puts the glasses on and sees: Don't think, consume, obey, money is your god.”
The film combines pseudo-Buddhist sacred destiny with cynical Western mockery of all sacred references, then delivers the punchline: 'There is no special ingredient, to make something special you just have to believe it's special.' Žižek reads this as the structure of contemporary ideology: cynicism plus deeper implicit belief.
“There is no special ingredient, it's only you. To make something special you just have to believe it's special.”
Parents pretend to believe in Santa for children; children pretend to believe for parents. Nobody sincerely believes, but the collective pretense maintains the belief-system, illustrating the social/structural nature of ideological belief.
“Nobody has to believe but all together if just everybody pretends for another's innocence to believe the system of belief functions.”
Newly discovered private papers show Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World was a coded attempt to understand Stalinism, the show trials were literal carnival, yesterday's Politburo member today declared an English spy, the king becomes beggar.
“Bakhtin knew it very well, carnival was not liberation. For him Stalinist purges and show trials were a big carnival. Yesterday you were member of the Politburo, today you are an English spy.”
Žižek quotes a poem by Radovan Karadžić calling the crowd to carnival transgression ('nothing is forbidden in my faith') to illustrate how ethnic fundamentalism operates as obscene permissiveness rather than repression.
“Nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want. And this godhead forbids you nothing.”
Heidegger's preaching of passive Gelassenheit is contradicted by his own practice: his reading of Parmenides is one of the most violent torturings of a text, twisting syntax, rewriting propositions, showing that genuine thought always tortures language.
“Can one imagine a torture more violent than what he, Heidegger, does in say his famous reading of Parmenides? You know he twists the proposition, he changes the syntax.”
Asked if she believed in God, Golda Meir answered: 'I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God.' Žižek reads this as the structure of displaced belief, no one needs to believe directly, only to believe that others believe.
“I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God.”
Eisenstein cuts and combines (sadistic torture); Tarkovsky stretches scenes into quarter-hour sequences (the rack). Both practice violence on cinema, not passive letting-be. Žižek imagines them debating like a Latin American communist torturer vs. a KGB torturer.
“Let me imagine Eisenstein and Tarkovsky debating as two torturers. One says cut and squeeze the testicles. The other says no, just stretch them.”
At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman takes the murders of a corrupt district attorney upon himself to preserve public faith in authority, Žižek reads this as pure ideology: the necessity of a founding lie to sustain the social order, echoing Stalinist logic and John Ford.
“Batman decides to take the murders upon himself because it would have been too demoralizing for the public. The necessity of a lie to save the dignity of the public authority system.”
Žižek quotes Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, 'Language should be tortured to tell the truth', as the clearest formulation of the divine violence of language against Heidegger's Gelassenheit.
“Language should be tortured to tell the truth.”
Serbian journalist Aleksandar Tijanić described Milošević's Serbia as a permanent holiday: no work, flourishing black market, right to insult world leaders on state TV, right to carry and use weapons, stolen cars routine, 'nothing but really nothing of what you do can be punishable.'
“Milošević turned the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing but really nothing of what you do can be punishable.”
Works invoked 15
They Live film
John Carpenter's film, 'naive but nice', used as Žižek's central metaphor for ideological critique: the sunglasses that reveal hidden injunctions behind innocuous messages.
Žižek's simultaneous larger Verso book, described as 'much more outspoken politically', intended to be read together with Violence.
Violence book
Žižek's own short book being presented; he supplements and auto-critically extends it in this lecture, particularly adding the dimension of language's divine violence absent from the book.
Kung Fu Panda film
Žižek saw it five times with his small son; finds the film ideologically revealing (fetishist split, cynical belief), a perfect symptom of contemporary ideology at its purest.
The Dark Knight film
Žižek reads its ending, Batman taking the blame for a corrupt DA's murders, as pure ideology of the founding lie, with distaste for the pseudo-complexity of showing the hero's inner weaknesses.
Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, used to illustrate displaced belief; Žižek proposes an improved version where the boy secretly knows the truth and pretends for his father.
Underground film
Kusturica's film, Žižek criticizes it for aestheticizing the permanent carnivalesque orgy that characterized Milošević's Serbia, inadvertently providing ideological cover.
Critique of Violence essay
Benjamin's essay on the distinction between mythic and divine violence, Žižek's central theoretical reference, though he disagrees with its claim that language provides a non-violent sphere.
Bakhtin's carnival theory, Žižek argues it was a coded analysis of Stalinism, making it unexpectedly useful for understanding totalitarian transgression.
Novecento film
Bertolucci's 'a little naive old Stalinist epic', the worker's ear-cutting scene is used to illustrate that emancipatory violence and freedom hurt.
Fort Apache film
John Ford film cited for the founding-lie motif in a more ambiguous form than The Dark Knight's version.
Kangura journal
Hassan Ngeze's Rwandan journal that systematically spread anti-Tutsi hatred and genocide calls, cited as the Rwandan equivalent of the poetico-military complex.
Fredric Jameson's early book on structuralism, cited to set up the contrast: Lacan's 'torture house' is stronger than the 'prison house' metaphor.
John Ford film cited alongside Fort Apache for the founding-lie motif, 'print the legend' as more ambiguous version of necessary social fiction.
Mirror film
Tarkovsky's film, the extended running scene illustrates cinematic torture (the rack) as a form of divine violence producing aesthetic effect.
People invoked 36
Cited sardonically as the advocate of 'the dark side that we should not talk too much about', the obscene underside of state violence.
Analyzed as a ruler who offered Serbs a permanent transgressive holiday, false carnivalesque liberation, rather than functioning through repression alone.
Referenced in context of Republican populism, Žižek says he would ask McCain not about sincerity but 'Who is your Karl Rove?'
Radovan Karadžić positive
Žižek quotes Karadžić's poem as an example of how ethnic fundamentalism presents itself as transgressive carnival liberation; he finds it ideologically revealing even if not great poetry.
Robert Pippin positive
Žižek disagrees with Pippin politically but appreciates him as a philosopher; cites his essay on civility and the Hegelian point that implicit rules of kind behavior are the condition of free individuality.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Žižek cites Adorno's late-1930s text on the psychological structure of fascist propaganda as support for his thesis that Hitler was a figure of permissiveness, not paternal authority.
Aleksandar Tijanić positive
Leading Serb journalist quoted for his description of Milošević's Serbia as a permanent holiday where nothing was punishable.
Listed as example of a great modernist poet who was pro-fascist, illustrating the link between poetic transgression and political violence.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek credits Lacan's 'torture house of language' and theory of the symbolic order as the crucial supplement to Heidegger, providing the Freudian turn that accounts for jouissance and psychopathology.
Cited as precedent for Republican populist 'revolution' rhetoric, Žižek notes the same cycle has happened before.
Mikhail Bakhtin positive
Žižek argues Bakhtin's carnival theory was a coded analysis of Stalinism, his concept of carnival unintentionally reveals the logic of totalitarian transgression.
Richard Rorty negative
Žižek rejects Rorty's postmodern linguistic historicism, letting everyone tell their story, as inadequate, because it ignores that genuine thinking must work against language.
Antonio Negri negative
Briefly invoked as a symptom of the left's abandonment of the working class, today's left prefers 'dynamic managers who are almost communists already' (Negri's immaterial labor thesis).
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for the title 'The Prison House of Language,' his early structuralism book, used to set up Lacan's stronger claim that language is a torture house, not merely a prison.
Listed alongside Pound and Yeats as a great modernist poet with fascist sympathies.
Listed alongside Pound and Eliot as a great modernist poet with fascist sympathies.
Golda Meir positive
Her response to the question of belief in God, 'I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God', is used as a classic formulation of displaced/structural belief.
Analyzed as a structurally new form of feminine political authority that publicizes femininity and deploys sarcastic distrust of phallic authority rather than mimicking masculine authority.
Peter Handke negative
Cited as an example of a serious Western poet fascinated by Milošević's Serbia as a 'poetic counterpoint' to Western commodified asepsis, a dangerous aestheticization of ethnic violence.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Žižek quotes Jelinek's formulation 'Language should be tortured to tell the truth' as the clearest expression of the divine violence of language he is defending.
Martin Heidegger positive
Žižek agrees with Heidegger's notion of language as the house of being and the mythic violence of symbolic horizons, but criticizes him for ignoring the Lacanian torture-house dimension and for the implicit violence in his own poetic readings.
John Ford positive
Cited via Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for the founding-lie motif, presented as more ambiguous than The Dark Knight's version.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Politically opposed to Žižek but credited for an observation about Sarah Palin's structurally new feminine political function, departing from the 'phallic woman' pattern.
Bill Gates negative
Žižek reads Gates's 'creative capitalism' as the hegemonic ideological use of charity discourse to depoliticize class struggle and foreclose systemic critique.
Bernardo Bertolucci positive
Novecento described as 'a little bit naive old Stalinist epic,' but the ear-cutting scene is used positively to illustrate emancipatory violence.
The Rwandan Karadžić, editor of Kangura who spread anti-Tutsi hatred and called for genocide while being regarded as a national poet, confirming Žižek's thesis about the poetico-military complex.
Walter Benjamin positive
Žižek takes Benjamin's distinction between mythic and divine violence as central to his argument, mapping it onto language; he respectfully disagrees with Benjamin's claim that language is non-violent but praises his divine violence thesis.
Boris Groys positive
Personal friend and Russian émigré scholar who informed Žižek of newly discovered Bakhtin papers demonstrating the Stalinism-carnival connection.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote attributed to Bohr is Žižek's key illustration of cynical belief, ideology functioning without sincere conviction.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek rejects Habermas's communicative ethics and the idea of an immanent normativity of speech acts, arguing it ignores the violent asymmetry built into every linguistic horizon.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Cited as exemplar of the active/sadistic form of cinematic torture, violent montage cutting, illustrating divine violence in cinema.
Wilhelm Reich negative
Adorno's argument about Hitler's permissive obscene message is directed against Reich's sexual-revolutionary simplifications, implicitly endorsed by Žižek.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Cited as exemplar of the passive/stretching form of cinematic torture, the rack, whose long-shot aesthetic is equally violent despite appearing passive.
Plato positive
Žižek says he increasingly sympathizes with Plato's idea of expelling poets from the city, after the Yugoslav experience of the poetico-military complex.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek's 'favorite philosopher,' invoked for the thesis that we think in language but against language, and for the concept of Sittlichkeit as the implicit ethical substance of freedom.
Emir Kusturica negative
Žižek says he doesn't like Kusturica 'excessively', his films (Underground, etc.) aestheticize the permanent carnivalesque orgy of Milošević's Serbia, inadvertently serving its ideology.
What it argues
language as violence and torture housemythic vs. divine violence (Benjamin)fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism as false carnivalesque liberationideology functioning through explicit and implicit/obscene layerscynical belief and fetishist splitnormalization of the previously unacceptablecharity and consumer culture as depoliticization
Dialectical moves 11
“The very medium of peaceful reconciliation — language — is already the site of the most fundamental violence.”
What is supposed to overcome violence (symbolic exchange) is itself the primary form of violence, because it imposes an unequal horizon of meaning.
“Man dwells in the house of being (Heidegger), but this house is a torture house (Lacan).”
The benign Heideggerian dwelling in language is reversed: the home is a site of permanent torture producing psychopathology.
“The opposite of the escape-from-freedom thesis: fundamentalism is not a retreat from freedom but an offer of new, transgressive freedom.”
What appears as a return to constraint is actually experienced by participants as liberation, the inversion reverses the standard sociological explanation of totalitarianism.
“The truly radical violence is not the direct fight for the same object but when we see the same object and it means something totally different to us.”
The deeper violence is not empirical confrontation but the incommensurability of symbolic horizons, a more invisible but more foundational antagonism.
“Thinking is not natural to language — we think in language but against language.”
Genuine thought is not language speaking itself (Heidegger's letting-be) but a violent counter-natural forcing of language to yield trans-linguistic truth.
“The end of ideology is ideology at its purest — ideology at its worst.”
The very disappearance of explicit ideological calls to sacrifice marks the completion of ideology's triumph: hedonistic 'be yourself' is the most effective ideological injunction.
“Far from being dangerous to the system, cynicism is today the very form ideology takes — we make fun but this making fun covers up our deeper belief.”
The reversal exposes cynical distance not as subversion of ideology but as its contemporary operating mode.
“The truly shattering experience is not not to believe — it is to assume that there is no Other to believe in your place.”
The real ideological crisis is not personal disbelief but the collapse of the fictional Other-who-believes that sustains the social function of belief.
“It is not the explicit rules that are changing — it is the implicit rules about how to relate to the explicit rules.”
The real political danger lies not in policy changes but in the silent erosion of the ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) that structures how rules are followed.
“The real danger is not that they cynically manipulate — the real danger is that they mean it seriously.”
Sincere ideological commitment is more dangerous than cynical show politics because it actually produces the catastrophic changes the rhetoric promises.
“Heidegger's own reading of Parmenides is the most violent torture of language, even as he preaches Gelassenheit.”
The philosopher who advocates passive listening to language exemplifies, in his own practice, the violent torturing of language he ostensibly opposes.
Claims 19
asserts
Language is not a medium of reconciliation but is itself a form of fundamental violence, because the very horizon of meaning it imposes is never neutral.violence of language
rejects
Benjamin's thesis that language provides a non-violent sphere of understanding is wrong and contradicted by his own doctrine of divine violence.Walter Benjamin on language and non-violence
asserts
Language should be tortured to tell the truth — thinking occurs in language but against language, forcing it to become receptive to trans-linguistic truth.the proper relationship to language
asserts
Heidegger's 'house of being' must be supplemented with Lacan's 'torture house of language' to account for psychopathology, jouissance, and the gap between subject and symbolic order.Heidegger's account of language
asserts
The mythic violence of language is Heidegger's topic; Žižek adds a 'divine violence of language' (sprachzerstörend) parallel to Benjamin's staatszerstörend divine violence.Benjamin's mythic/divine violence distinction extended to language
asserts
Emancipatory political action is always violent — 'freedom hurts' — and the act of liberation necessarily involves a violent rupture.emancipatory violence
rejects
Fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism are not escapes from freedom but offers of transgressive enjoyment — a false carnivalesque liberation that permits what liberal society forbids.standard sociological 'escape from freedom' explanation of fundamentalism
asserts
Bakhtin's theory of carnival was a coded attempt to understand Stalinism, in which the show trials and purges functioned as literal carnival inversions.Bakhtin's carnival and Stalinism
asserts
There is a deep structural link between poetic transgression and ethnic/nationalist violence — poets are not incidental to genocide but often its ideological architects.poetry and political violence
asserts
Ideology today functions on two simultaneous levels: a surface of pseudo-authentic spiritualized hedonism concealing hidden injunctions, and explicit ideological commands whose true obscene message is implicit.contemporary ideology
asserts
Charity is a crucial ideological phenomenon today — it depoliticizes by offering a superstitious substitute action that prevents thought about structural causes of poverty.charity and ideology
reframes
The 'end of ideology' thesis describes a real shift but misidentifies it: ideology has not ended but has absorbed the left's emancipatory rhetoric into hegemonic capitalism via creative capitalism and charity.end of ideology
asserts
Nobody sincerely believes — the social function of belief is maintained by everyone presupposing that someone else believes, making sincere individual belief unnecessary.cynical belief / the social function of ideology
asserts
The most dangerous moment is not when ideology deceives but when previously unacceptable practices (torture, far-right governance) are quietly normalized at the level of implicit ethical substance.normalization and Sittlichkeit
asserts
The American liberal left bears responsibility for the rise of Republican populism through its politically correct dismissal of the working class.liberal left and working-class politics
asserts
The true danger of Republican populism is not that it cynically manipulates but that its leaders may actually mean it — genuine ideological commitment is more dangerous than cynical manipulation.Republican populism and sincerity
rejects
Habermas's communicative ethics is wrong to locate a non-violent normativity in language, because the very field of communication already embodies a violent asymmetry of meaning.Habermasian communicative ethics
rejects
Postmodern linguistic historicism (Rorty's 'let everyone tell their story') is inadequate because it ignores that thinking must occur against language, not passively within it.postmodern linguistic historicism / Rorty
rejects
Stalinism was not a stable new class society oppressing ordinary people — under high Stalinism, nomenklatura members were far more likely to die than ordinary citizens, making it genuinely carnivalesque.Stalinism as new class society
Quotes 18
“Language should be tortured to tell the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · divine violence of language
“In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.”Slavoj Žižek · torture house of language (Lacan)
“We humans cannot ever be at home in our own home, which is language.”Slavoj Žižek · alienation from language / torture house
“Thinking is not natural to our everyday thinking which is passively embedded in language. Thinking is literally counternatural.”Slavoj Žižek · thinking against language
“There is always something like this in redemption, in gaining freedom. Freedom hurts.”Slavoj Žižek · emancipatory violence
“Language as the big Other is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves. It is a place of cruel indifference and stupidity.”Slavoj Žižek · the big Other / language's indifference
“Whatever you do, it can be covered up by a proverb. There is something inherently opportunistic and stupid in proverbs.”Slavoj Žižek · opportunism of wisdom / language's stupidity
“We in the Balkans had a poetico-military complex. Poets with their national dreams combined forces with the military with killers and you have — and it works.”Slavoj Žižek · poetico-military complex
“This is the reality of the end of ideology which is again ideology at its purest — ideology at its worst.”Slavoj Žižek · end of ideology as ideology's triumph
“Of course I don't believe horseshoe really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told it works also if you don't believe.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical belief / ideology without conviction
“The truly shattering experience is not for you not to believe. Nobody believes. But to really assume that there is no other to believe in your place.”Slavoj Žižek · collapse of the big Other / the subject supposed to believe
“I know very well all this Buddhist stuff about faith is shit and so on, I know very well it's shit but nonetheless I believe. And that's our ideology today.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist split / cynical belief
“What worries me is not that they cynically manipulate — the real danger is they mean it seriously.”Slavoj Žižek · danger of sincere ideology over cynical manipulation
“I would like to live in a society where when somebody advocates rape he simply disqualifies himself. I would be very much worried if all of a sudden we would have to argue why women shouldn't be raped. And I would like to be the same with torture.”Slavoj Žižek · normalization of the unacceptable / ethical substance
“Without this substance in the sense of thick network of implicit rules which should be as it were our second nature, we cannot act as free individuals.”Slavoj Žižek · Sittlichkeit as condition of freedom
“Crucial for the functioning of symbolic order is not only the rules but how we relate to the rules.”Slavoj Žižek · implicit rules / meta-rules of ideology
“What if humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they, humans, speak?”Slavoj Žižek · language as the source of distinctly human violence
“I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God.”Slavoj Žižek · displaced belief / no one needs to believe directly
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I think I already was once here, so it's nice to be here again. Thanks also for the nice introduction, only at one point I was in a panic when you started with by buying books here, I was terribly afraid that you will join this totally manipulative racist [unintelligible] you know like of the Starbucks coffee approach, with every book you buy here, you save a child in Africa. No, it was good for us. Okay, so I have many things to say, so let me begin. I will not, of course, read from the book. I always find this tasteless, like as if you treat yourself as a classic and then you read from yourself. I will make some variations, some supplements to the book based on the book. Since the topic of the book is violence, and to make it a little bit more propaganda, this short book on Violence is really to be read together with the big fat Verso book which appeared at the same time, In Defense of Lost Causes, which is much more outspoken politically. What I would like to begin with is the topic of violence and language and speech because I think that here maybe it's easy to discern where I differ from the predominant opinion. Let me begin with Walter Benjamin who in his Critique of Violence raises the question: is any non-violent resolution of conflicts possible? Benjamin's answer is that such a non-violent resolution is indeed possible in what he calls, quote, 'relationships among private persons, courtesy, sympathy and trust. There is a sphere of human agreement which is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence. It's the proper sphere of understanding of language.' End of quote. Here I respectfully disagree with Benjamin and I think he himself implicitly moves into a totally different direction with his theses on divine violence. That is to say, this thesis of Benjamin belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order is that of the medium of reconciliation or mediation, of peaceful coexistence as opposed to a violent medium of raw confrontation. The idea is that in language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum recognition of the other. The entry into language and the renunciation of violence are thus understood as two aspects of one and the same gesture. We find this same underlying hypothesis in philosophers or thinkers as different as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Lacan. The whole basic premise, as you probably know, of Jürgen Habermas's communicative ethics is that there is an ethics which is, as it were, inscribed into the very normal functioning of language. It's the immanent normativity of speech acts as such. So that, as Habermas emphasizes, when we use violence—sorry, language to instigate violence or aggressivity and so on, there is kind of pragmatic if not logical contradiction. We, as it were, use language against its nature. A similar idea although of course in a totally different theoretical context is found in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, at least in the early phase of Jacques Lacan throughout the 1950s, where again the thesis is that we have this imaginary immediate confrontation of subjects where it's always me or you, no mediation, and then the function of language precisely is to enable the resolution of direct confrontation through symbolic mediation. Language is this exchange of symbols, trust and so on. As Lacan puts it, even when language lies, even when we lie, we lie against the background of a dimension of truth. Even okay, we can even paraphrase this and say even when in language we attack, we attack against the background of a recognition. I can humiliate you whatever, but isn't it that at a more elementary level I already presuppose you as a partner of communication who is in a way formally equal to me? What I want to advocate now is that this—the opposite of this thesis. I think that what if humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they, humans, speak? What if there is a dimension of violence in language which is much more fundamental than direct confrontation between me and another human being? It's easy to say language brings a medium of symmetric understanding of reciprocal recognition, but isn't it that the very medium, field, if you want to put it naively, categories, horizon of understanding of this mutual recognition is never neutral? There is already, as it were, it's already twisted out of balance and this is the fundamental violence. The violence which we can experience at its purest in so-called multicultural misunderstandings. For example, I can live in the same apartment with members of other cultures, but nonetheless, in a way—and we all understand what I mean by this—we live in different worlds. Where by 'world' of course I don't understand reality, the totality of real objects, but the horizon of understanding of this totality. How is this totality, that is to say, the structure of meaning, the way I understand reality, how is it articulated? What meanings are hegemonic, predominant and so on and so on? And isn't this in a way, that's the thesis of Martin Heidegger with whom here at least I agree, isn't this in a way a much more radical violence? The violence of the two of us not fighting for the same object, for example gold. That's elementary violence. Isn't there a more elementary violence if we see the same object in its immediate stupid reality, gold, but it means something totally different to us? Like for example, as we all know, for a medieval person gold was an incorruptible metal which is why it was considered divine, kind of a representative standing of the divine indestructible dimension among the our within the field of our reality. Or whatever let's take another dimension from the history of singing, the castrato voice. For medieval and early modernity it was the voice of angels prior to sexualization, prior to the Fall. To us the same voice is some abominable monstrosity. So you see my point. This is violence, this violence of imposing a totally different horizon of misunderstanding. This violence is covered by Heidegger. But I claim there is another dimension of violence—this and this you find in my book Violence. Now I want to auto-critically, self-critically supplement my book. There is another dimension of violence of language which is missing in Heidegger and which is the focus of Jacques Lacan's theory of the symbolic order. Throughout his work, Lacan provides variations on Heidegger's motive of language as the house of being. Language is not man's creation or instrument; it is man who dwells in language. A quote from Lacan: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject.' End of quote. Lacan's paranoic twist however, his additional Freudian turn of the screw, comes from his characterization of this house of being, language, as a torture house. Quote: 'In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.' End of quote. So not only does man dwell in the prison house of language—you remember the title of Fredric Jameson's early book on structuralism—man dwells in a torture house of language. The entire psychopathology deployed by Freud from conversion symptoms inscribed onto the body up to total psychotic breakdowns are scars of this permanent torture. So many signs of an original and irreducible gap between subject and language. So many signs that we humans cannot ever be at home in our own home, which is language. This is what Heidegger ignores, this dark torturing other side of our dwelling in language. And this is why there is also no place for the Real of jouissance, excessive enjoyment, in Heidegger's edifices, since the torturing aspect of language concerns primarily the vicissitudes of libido. This is also why in order to get the truth to speak, it is not enough to suspend our active intervention and to let language itself speak. That's the usual attitude of wisdom which is also Heidegger's. Let's not be active subjects in the Cartesian sense of manipulating language as object. Let's adopt the passive—not the right word but the listening attitude of allowing Gelassenheit, letting it be. The dimension of wisdom, the message which is already implicit in language itself. As Heidegger likes to put it, the proper speaking is at the same time hearing, listening to language. In contrast to this thesis, I prefer to follow Elfriede Jelinek, you know the Austrian writer, who put it with extraordinary clarity. I quote: 'Language should be tortured to tell the truth.' End of quote. It should be twisted, denaturalized, extended, condensed, cut and reunited, in short, made to work against itself. Language as the big Other is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves. It is a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. What do I mean by this? Just think about proverbs which are language at its purest. I think let's admit there is something inherently opportunistic and stupid in proverbs. Whatever you do, it can be covered up by a proverb. For example, I risk an act and then what can happen? I succeed. There will always be a wise guy who will say yes, only those who risk profit, you know some kind of wisdom. Then let's say that I do exactly the same thing but I fail. Again, there will be a wise guy who will say—I don't know what you have, we in Slovene have a vulgar saying which has something like you cannot urinate against the wind or whatever, no? That's the disgusting opportunism of wisdom. Anything that happens, you're always the wise guy. The most elementary form of torturing one's language is called poetry. What a complex form like a sonnet does to language. It forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of a fixed shape of rhythm and rhymes. So what about Heidegger's own procedure of listening to the soundless speech of language itself? No wonder late Heidegger's thinking is poetic. Recall the means he uses in interpreting poetry. Can one imagine a torture more violent than what he, Heidegger, does in say his famous reading of Parmenides? You know he twists the proposition, he changes the syntax and so on and so on. It's an extremely violent reading. And it doesn't go only—it doesn't refer only to language. Cinema is the same, I think. Let's look briefly at two opposite directors who the second really hated the first—the two Russian classics. First Sergei Eisenstein. You remember when he develops his early notion of montage, cutting, montage of attractions? The metaphoric he relies on is extremely violent. It's the natural flow of images and then the point of a director is to cut, combine, always the language of brutal intervention. Tarkovsky, the great opponent of—Andrei Tarkovsky of Eisenstein, as you probably know he was opposed to this. His idea was no, no violent cutting interventions, true cinematic art must be more impassive like with long shots and so on. You allow the event or the presence to come into its own passively. But I claim it's merely a different form of torture. If Eisenstein can be called the poet of this more active sadistic torture—cut, you combine—Tarkovsky practices a cinematic equivalent of what I think—correct me if I'm wrong—in English you call that medieval torture instrument a rack, where they stretch you. No? I mean that's what Tarkovsky is doing and it has wonderful effects. Tarkovsky was wonder—he said if you just shot a normal event like in his maybe masterpiece Mirror, a girl in panic running to—running to the newspaper printing house because in Soviet times she maybe overlooked a mistake—misspelling Stalin's name maybe in an obscene way, this would cost her her life. If you shoot this normally, it's just nothing, just a girl running there. But what Tarkovsky does in his Mirror is he protracts this scene into a quarter of an hour endless running, puts it on a rack and you have the so-called aesthetic effect. So I can well imagine Eisenstein and Tarkovsky if they were to meet, debating as two torturers. Let's say a Latino-American communist torturer and a KGB torturer. One says no, it's better to cut prisoners. The other says cut and squeeze the testicles. The other says no, just stretch them and so on. But you see my point. My point is that I like this line of thought which also goes against the so-called postmodern historicism which is the linguistic historicism. There is an irreducible plurality of beings, all we can do is tell stories about it from our irreducible specific, historically specific horizons of meaning and again as so-called postmodernists like to emphasize, there is no a priori universal medium of communication. All we can do—the ultimate, the only appropriate universal ethics is to allow the space for this very plurality. As Richard Rorty liked to emphasize, everyone should be allowed to tell freely his or her story, the story of his or her happening. What I think is that on the contrary, one in a very traditional way even, I like to follow Hegel here who claimed that when we think, we think in language—of course there is no thinking outside language—we think in language but against language. This is the if you want torturing aspect. Thinking is not natural to our—well, everyday thinking which is passively embedded in language. Thinking is literally counternatural and as such we can, with great effort, torturing effort, we can force language to formulate some—no, we can make it receptive to some trans-linguistic truth through this procedure of torture. So let me again refer to Benjamin. You probably know all Benjamin's classical opposition between mythic violence and divine violence. Mythic violence as the staatsbildende, as the state-forming violence, the obscene dark background of state power—what your noble Vice President Dick Cheney likes to call the dark side that we should not talk too much about—and on the opposite the redemptive emancipatory violence, the so-called divine violence. And I think this covers the two violences the dimension till now. The violence about which Heidegger talks, this violence inherent to the very imposition, to put it simply of a symbolic universe, or to put it in Heidegger's terms, a certain disclosure of the meaning of being. This would have been mythic violence, mythic violence of language. And Heidegger himself talk about mythos. Mythos as a certain articulation of the meaning of being, to put it in very simplistic terms—let me now violate Heidegger's strict terminology—the way reality appears to us as meaningful, how we experience it. This is the mythic violence of language. But what we don't find in Heidegger and I think we should supplement here Heidegger would have been the divine violence of language which is precisely this torturing of language, not sprachbildend, that is to say not language-forming but sprachzerstörend, destroying of language, in the same way that Heidegger talks about—talks about sorry that Benjamin talks about divine violence as staatszerstörend, as destroying the state. So I think this is why if you read my book on Violence, even if you looked at it, I hope you got the point which is that it's a defense of violence. We need violence. Emancipatory violence, the act of liberation is always a violent act. What do I—what do I mean by this? I recently saw after years Bernardo Bertolucci's—okay it's a little bit naive old Stalinist epic—Novecento, The 20th Century. And I was nicely surprised by a beautiful scene about half an hour into the film where the workers in that large estate in northern Italy protest to their master who because of phylloxera, who because of economic crisis wants to lower radically their wages. And he tries to explain to them it's market, it's this, it's that. They said but we are starving, we cannot pay and then he explodes and says but do you have ears? Don't you understand, are you so stupid? You cannot even hear me, what I am telling you, economic necessity and so on and so on. And then it's quite a nice shocking scene. One of the workers takes out a knife, this kind of a crooked knife for special uses, and cuts off his ear and gives it to him. Like here you have an ear if you want. There is always something like this in redemption, in gaining freedom. Freedom hurts. So now let me go on a little bit. How do these two modes of violence function in art? Ah, let me begin with a poem. Now okay this was the difficult part. Now we move into more obscene matters. Let me quote you a short poem, listen carefully: 'Convert to my new faith, O crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want. And this godhead forbids you nothing. O obey my call, brothers, people, crowd.' and so on. I don't think it's a great poem but it's a correct poem. Its author is of course, I have to drop the joke, Radovan Karadžić, the Serb war criminal who is now in Hague. And I think it's—he got it correctly. I mean what he describes is a carnival. It's an obscene divinity which calls you through him who is the spokesperson of this divinity to—to an eternal orgy of transgression. You know, you will be fed by the light of my sun, wine, loving, drinking, nothing is forbidden in my faith, this godhead forbids you nothing and so on and so on. What am I trying to—to say here? Two things. First that this provides an important key to the functioning of so-called ethnic religious, however we call it, fundamentalism. It's not as some stupid sociologists try to convince us that today's fundamentalism is a so-called escape from freedom. Like you know, as they—that's how the story goes. we live in postmodern times which are no longer in advance permissive times, no longer over-determined structure by a firm set of values. We are free with an overload of freedom, we have to choose everything from—up to our sexual orientation, religion, ethnic belonging and so on. And the idea is that this radical uncertainty, this lack of the daily coordinates, firm ethical and so on coordinates, causes anxiety. So people who cannot endure it escape backwards into a real or invented tradition which provides a kind of a sense of certainty. I claim this is at best one side of it. What is much more important is exactly the opposite side. I learned it with a rather nasty personal experience when over ten years ago in early 90s I visited Belgrade and in a cafe there—by total mistake once—met some people who probably were so-called ethnic slaughterers, whatever we call them. And I got the lesson of a lifetime from them. What they basically told me is what fear of freedom? For them, they told me, it's modern liberal society which is oppressive and over-regulated. As they told me, what kind of liberal freedom is this? I cannot rape the woman I like, I cannot beat my wife, I cannot smoke, I cannot kill the person I hate and so on and so on. For—the way they experienced ethnic fundamentalism was that it's a—a movement to apparently you go back but in this way you are free. You proclaim yourself, I don't know, servant of your nation and off we go. We can go to Bosnia, we kill, we rape, we are free. For them it was new freedom. And it's not only they who said this. Already Adorno—I advise you to read Adorno's of the Frankfurt School text from late 30s already—very interesting one on the—I think that's the title of the text—the psychological structure of fascist propaganda. Where he wonderfully in a—in a wonderfully perceptive way—and directed probably against the—the simplifications of Wilhelm Reich and other sexual revolutionaries—Adorno emphasized how Hitler is—Hitler is not a figure of paternal authority. Hitler is an—a kind of a fake permissive figure that we shouldn't be seduced by Hitler's explicit language which says something like enough of Weimar Germany decadence, immorality, corruption, time of discipline, our country, our country first, you know our country needs us, sacrifice for your country. That's only the superficial message. If you know to read between the lines, the true message is pay lip service to this, obey me and we can have some fun. Like we kill the Jews, we can have our own carnivals and so on. It's the same I claim with whatever, for example with Ku Klux Klan here and so on. This is how it functions, you know. Pay lip service to Western civilization, Christian values and if you live in the small town in the South of United States in the 1930s and every weekend we can have a little bit of fun, rape some black girls, lynch some [unintelligible]. But this is absolutely crucial, this moment of false carnivalesque opening, of false liberation which is absolutely crucial for every so-called totalitarianism up to Stalinism. You will say ask me where is this in Stalinism? My god, you know who is the greatest theoretician of carnival, very popular even today, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian fellow traveler of formalism. A friend of mine who now teaches I think in in New York, the Russian emigrant who at once was working in Germany, Boris Groys, told me that now recently they discovered some private papers, notes of Bakhtin from I think the city of Kazan where he survived the Stalinism, he died there at the to work in a library. And they demonstrate clearly that Bakhtin's big work on carnival—the title is Rabelais and His World, the work of the creativity of François Rabelais—was really a coded attempt to understand Stalinism. For Bakhtin he knew it very well, carnival was not, you know this what leftists, fake leftists I claim like—'Oh, the rules are suspended at least momentarily, the king is beggar, the beggar is king, we have liberation.' No, for him Stalinist purges and show trials were a big carnival. It's exactly like the king is a beggar. Today you are—yesterday you were member of the Politburo, today you are an English spy or traitor or whatever, no? I mean it was effectively carnival at the high point of Stalinism from to Just look at the data. In two years and a half percent of the Central Committee were shot, percent of the army headquarters were shot and so on and so on. So you cannot even say, as they usually say this I think totally false thesis of Stalinism as a new class society. No, it wasn't that the new nomenklatura oppressed ordinary people. Under high Stalinism the most dangerous place to be was nomenklatura. I mean if you're an ordinary guy you had like to be cynical to percent chance to die. If you are top nomenklatura, it raised to to percent to die. So you see what I'm saying. What I'm saying is let me give you another quote and then we move on. A wonderful description, I quoted it in one of my early books so I dare to repeat it, of how Aleksandar Tijanić, a leading Serb journalist, of how he described the Milošević rule in Serbia in late 90s of the last century. Quote: 'Milošević generally suited the Serbs. In the time of his rule Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. He allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton or anyone else of the world dignities.' My footnote in brackets: this is literally true. When NATO was bombing Yugoslavia I remember clearly watching on satellite TV some talk show on Serb state TV where in the background there was a big poster—you will understand it if you just remember that this was the time immediately after the Monica Lewinsky scandal where they everyone had that fellatio scene fresh in mind—it was on state TV big letters 'Bill, are you crazy, did Monica also suck out your brain?' On state TV. Let me go on. Furthermore: 'Milošević gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars.' I mean the stealing of cars and smuggling from West Germany especially was so popular at that point that some West German tourist agency which tried to revitalize tourism in Serbia proposed of course as a comic attempt a wonderful publicity slogan: 'Enjoy our Serb hospitality, visit us and your car will already be waiting for you.' Let's go on. 'Milošević turned the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing but really nothing of what you do can be punishable.' and I guarantee you end of quote that this is of course only in some sense but nonetheless in some sense true. You to visit for example—and it's not the only case to make it very clear I'm in no way anti-Serb if anything of all ex-Yugoslav nations the Serbs have I claim the greatest democratic potential historically. I think the reason Milošević succeeded there it's difficult to explain but has a lot to do with specific situation of Yugoslavia of its disintegration and so on and so on. So it effectively to understand Milošević it effectively you should bear in mind that it effectively worked like that, like a kind of false eternal holiday. It's precisely the atmosphere you find that's why I don't like him excessively in the films of Emir Kusturica, you know Underground and so on, this permanent orgy drinking copulating and so on. The second thing I want to draw attention to which is a little bit more problematic but I think crucial is that how nicely a certain notion of poetic transgression of poeticization aestheticization aestheticization of daily life fitted into it. No wonder many poets cinematic poets like Kusturica serious literary poets like the German Peter Handke were absolutely fascinated by Milošević rule and saw in the Serbia of Milošević a kind of poetic counterpoint to our aseptic commodified and so on Western societies. And I claim it's all too simple to claim 'Oh what am I talking Karadžić was a ridiculous poet.' First, okay I'm not a specialist in poetry but I doubt if he you know in there is a—how do you call it—a corpse in the closet which is people who today make fun, I know this as ex-Yugoslav of Karadžić as a poet, forget how in the early 80s like in Slovenia there was a nice scandal where the very guy who today dismisses Karadžić as a blasphemy, it was discovered that this same guy put together in Slovene language an anthology of recent Bosnian and Serb poetry where he gave quite a prominent role to Karadžić, absolutely no? And again there are many others in Yugoslav republics who are undoubtedly serious poets the greatest who also how to put it laid the foundation for ethnic cleansing and so on. I claim that if you look at countries around the world where ethnic cleansing went on you always discover I claim some Karadžić like Rwanda. I checked it up there is it's called Hassan Ngeze. He is the Karadžić of Rwanda. The journal Kangura where he systematically was systematically spreading anti-Tutsi hatred calling for their genocide and again he is a big national poet. So you see my point which is that how to put it this link between the suspension of ethical rules this violent fundamentalist violence whatever and poetry, it's not—one cannot dismiss it simply so simply. There is a deep link here. No wonder so many modernist poets were pro-fascist or at least deeply sympathetic to fascism. Just the great English guys of course Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and so on and so on. So if I may put it in this way maybe Plato who is in such bad—who is investment value is low today no, bad reputation as originator of metaphysics, I tend after my political experience I tend to sympathize more and more with his idea that poets should be thrown out of the city and so on. Like in Yugoslavia it would certainly have helped. I think that what happened in Yugoslavia is what is that you in the West you have so-called industrial-military complex we in the Balkans we had a I call it poetico-military complex. That is to say poets with their national dreams combined forces with the military with killers and you have—and it works. And again my point is it's all too simply to dismiss this as bad poetry and so on and so on. It's not as simple as that. But now let's move a little bit further into theory. So this obscene side of language this transgression side which is only indicated in between the lines like in the case of Hitler I told you the explicit message sacrifice country, ethics, German spirit the implicit message obscenity carnivalesque murder and so on and so on. This is crucial for how ideology functions. This is crucial for the violence to discern violence which is part of our language. There is a one of the masterpieces of Hollywood left, John Carpenter's film—maybe you saw it, it's worth hitting it, it's naive but nice—They Live from which I think stages this scene of ideology in a naive but very nice way. It's a story of a homeless worker who stumbles in a hopefully abandoned church on a box of sunglasses and when he puts them on he discovers that he is able there like to be ideological critique sunglasses then he puts these sunglasses on he sees the real ideological message. For example, he goes out on a street and sees a big publicity poster: Visit Hawaii, Honeymoon, Enjoy Life and so on. Okay all in color, naked couples swimming, he puts the glasses on and sees the message: Don't think, consume, obey, money is your god or something like that. It's a very naive idea but I think it's basically right. Especially if we supplement it with its opposite. I think that ideology today functions on both levels. One level is this where the explicit ideological injunction is apparently non-ideological. That is to say it's just a reference to our spiritualized hedonism. I think that today when people talk about the end of ideology, of course it's nonsense, but they are describing a real change which is that today how to put it society does not address us in its superego dimension with a some in the old-fashioned sense ideological call to sacrifice to your duty. It's more generally something like again spiritualized hedonism like 'Be who you truly are', like kind of a somewhere between Dalai Lama and Jack Daniel's, like be who you truly are, realize yourself, realize your potential, don't waste your life, be fully who you are all that stuff. But then you need the ideological glasses to see the real message. On the other hand a more traditional functioning of ideology which is I claim still operative is on the contrary that you get the ideological injunction directly like as I already said apropos of Hitler, 'sacrifice yourself, do your duty' and then you get between the lines implicitly the obscene message. And again all always when we confront ideology and we confront it all the time I think one has to take into account these two levels. For example let me take you one example which is today present all around. This permanent calls to—to give charity, to sympathize with the plight of the poor. Of course poor in third world countries are really starving suffering and so on and it's good to do something about it. What worries me is again the the ideological burden you buy with it that comes with it when you participate in the practices of charity. Like what okay let's imagine you watch a TV and you see a publicity, you know this usual disgusting manipulation like I don't know you see a starved African child with distorted limbs and so on near death, then the words say something like 'Are you aware that for the price of one or two cappuccinos you would save the life of that kid' and so on and so on something like that. Okay let's ask ourselves what would have been the message you would have seen if you were to put on these from They Live ideological glasses? I claim something like 'Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the causes of their poverty, just contribute a little bit of money so you will feel good and you will not have to think.' I think that's the blackmail message which is hidden. The idea is that it's a—it's this depoliticization, this you know like it's like a superstitious item, give a little and you will feel good and you don't have to think about it. Which is why I claim charity is so important today. I claim charity is a crucial ideological phenomenon today. It's no longer as and more years ago in the times of Carnegie you remember when charity was kind of idiosyncrasy of some of them. Today it's as it were part of the part of the part of the system. Did you notice how the leftist rhetoric of years ago where all leftists liked to say to us who live relatively comfortable lives in the developed West 'We live in a'—I mean that was the critical points—'We live in an ivory tower, are we aware that outside our secluded sphere there are millions who are starving' and so on and so on? But today guys like Bill Gates say this. I claim that today this reference to those poor people outside our ivory tower are central to the functioning of hegemonic ideology. Because what's the message again? The message is as it is clear if you read for example Bill Gates' treatises on creative capitalism and so on, the message is again, 'forget about all these old ideological fights, socialism, capitalism, people are struggling fighting, people are starving there, let's do something, let's come all together—capital, private benefactors, state, let's just do something' and so on. I think it's precisely a blackmail not to do, not I mean to do something so that you don't have to think how should I put it. And I claim that this is then also connected with a great shift of capitalism in the logic of capitalism especially the logic in how we consume after '68. The way capitalism in the last years triumphantly integrated in its own way the message of '68. What do I mean by this? There are three ways we are solicited by publicity by the media to buy and consume products—products to simplify it. The first one is the simple utilitarian one referring to real properties of the object. No like a—you want a Land Rover, the publicity will tell you it is very strong car you can really climb up mountains, it a good machine, a large space for—large space for—large space for—for all the—for all the travel bags and so on, whatever. It refers to like some kind of properties of the object car. Then the next level could have been the one characteristic of the 50s 60s 70s of the consumerist society the level of—keeping up with the Joneses status symbol, competition. The idea there the more subtle propaganda would have been 'buy a Land Rover' they would why to assert your social status. They gently softly appeal to Land Rover as a status symbol in different modes. But I claim today something different is happening. Maybe it's not crucial but it's more and more in foreground. It's neither the actual properties nor status symbol competition and so on but it's something like how should I call it again in these new age terms 'your authentic experience', the reference to your true true self. Today's publicity would have emphasized 'Do you want to break out of the constraints of alienated city life and feel authentically connected with the earth? Do you want to realize your creative adventure potential? Buy Land Rover.' You know what I mean it's like a way everything is a way to be authentically yourself. The clear example of this logic I think is for example amongst other things is organic food. I'm deeply suspicious. Do you really think—don't tell me that you why are you buying it. Do you really believe that when you buy those usually they are more rotten apples which cost twice the price of the normal chemically genetically manipulated—do you really think that you are avoiding some great risk and so on? I don't think. I also don't think that it's a big status symbol or whatever. I think it's more to render your life meaningful like you know, isn't it nice you consume but you have this big disgusting narcissistic satisfaction there that you participate in something great you know. How Starbucks manipulates this nicely. I hate it whenever you enter it usually you have there some message where basically is with each overpriced cup of cappuccino you save a Guatemala child or whatever no. The point is that it makes it an experience ethically satisfying, life has meaning, you participate in something meaningful, it's not just stupid consumption and so on and so on. This is the reality of the end of ideology which is again ideology at its purest ideology at its worst. And this I think works at different levels. Now to cut it short—too long—I would like now to give you another example of this everyday presence of ideology along these lines. To give you a kind of a very short diagnosis what is typical functioning of ideology today. My starting point would have been Hollywood films. I mean I love them because they are I think the best tools which enable you to grasp directly in a shortcut where we stand. For example what are two of the latest hits? Dark Knight, the last Batman. Did you notice what's basically the final message of this film? It's the necessity of a lie to save the dignity of the public authority system. You remember what happens at the end? The district attorney who is supposed to be first an ethical hero is discovered that he really was the murderer and then at the film's end Batman decides to take the murders upon himself because it would have been too demoralizing for the public, the trust to render it public that this guy who was leading the fight against crime was himself a murderer and so on and so on. And then my god we ask ourselves how did it function in Stalinism? This was precisely how to Stalinism you were addressed as a victim. The idea was we know between the lines message again: we know you are not really guilty, but the party needs sacrifices because there were difficulties and if you do not admit that you was sabotaging, you were sabotaging then people will blame the party and that and so on and so on. So it's interesting that again the film which is after Titanic next mega hit focuses precisely on the necessity of a lie. It's basically in the line of the old John Ford two masterpieces—you must know it—Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, no? Where it's the message is also the necessity of a lie to ground a civilized system. But with John Ford it's more ambiguous. Here I think in—another thing which is pure ideology in Dark Knight is this which I hate it because it's even—it's even done with some pretension as if to make it more how should I put it artistic. Did you notice how—that's how the story goes. They tell us that in the last film Batman—and the same goes for Spider—Spider-Man blah blah—is no longer just a flat cartoon hero. We see the hero with his weaknesses, anxieties, fears and so on. As if this rendering it complex somehow makes it more artistic or whatever. I think that precisely this reference to personality, this reference to we are not just ideological categories, we are real warm people, this is ideology at its purest. This is what avoids you to confront the consequences precisely of your public acts. But another film where we get today's diagnosis at its purest would have been—I really liked him, I saw it five times because of my son who is small—it's Kung Fu Panda. Total ideology at its purest. Why? Did you notice how the film's symbolic universe is structured? That it combines in a very enigmatic way if you noticed it, two opposite attitudes. On the one hand it's fully part of this new pseudo-Buddhist whatever orientalism, no? Kung Fu Panda, sacred prophecy, the new master and so on, it's all this pseudo-orientalist stuff of fate chooses a hero and so on and so on. But at the same time did you notice that the film is full full of cynical dismissing jokes? Like they make at the same time they make fun of the time of all sacred references and so on. Sometimes I must I must I must admit even in a rather intelligent Platonic way like when the hero penetrates the big temple with all those sacred objects he sees a painting of some I don't know mysterious and he says in a very nice Platonic way I have only seen a—a picture of pictures of this picture till now and so on it's elegant. But what I'm saying is that crucial is this apparently inconsistent combination of two opposite attitudes. On the one hand all this sacred stuff fate decided this religious ethics of—sacred rather ethics of Kung Fu warrior chosen by fate, all the pseudo-Buddhist stuff and on the other hand this typically Western brutally realistic cynicism, systematic making fun of everything sacred. But are the two of them really so exclusive? Remember if you've seen the film the central message, I quote it. It refers to the search for special ingredient in the film—which is the special ingredient which makes you a Kung Fu Panda warrior, which is the special ingredient which makes the soup such a good soup or whatever. That's the lesson, I quote: 'There is no special ingredient, it's only you. To make something special you just have to believe it's special.' End of quote. I think this is the fetishist split ethics at its purest. The message is, I know very well all this Buddhist stuff about faith is shit and so on, I know very well it's shit but nonetheless I believe. And that's our ideology today I claim. We live in cynical times but cynical times not in the sense we don't believe in anything. No we make fun, but this making fun covers up our deeper belief which is not explicit belief but we act as if we believe. Permit me to quote an old, maybe you know it story, anecdote about Niels Bohr which makes this point perfectly. Niels Bohr, you know the Copenhagen guy, quantum physics, he was once visited by his friend in a country—country house in Denmark where Niels Bohr had above the entrance to this house a horseshoe. Horseshoe, I don't know if it's here the same, in Europe it's a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And then the surprised friend asked Niels Bohr, 'But wait a minute, do you really believe in this? Are you a scientist?' Niels Bohr answered of course I'm not crazy, I'm not superstitious, I don't believe that this works. Then the friend asked him, 'But why do you have it?' Niels Bohr provided the perfect answer. It was, 'Of course I don't believe horseshoe really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told it works also if you don't believe.' That's our ideology. We don't believe in democracy whatever, but we believe that it works even if we don't believe. And this is that old formula. It was already—I don't have time to go into it now—which was already long ago formulated very nicely by I think in the 60s by Golda Meir, at that point the Prime Minister of Israel who was once asked 'Do you believe in God?' and she gave a very nice answer. She said without answering it directly, 'I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God.' But you get the point here. The point is that she wasn't a believer but she pretended to believe because of these ordinary stupid people who naively believe. Nobody has to believe. Everybody has just to suppose that presuppose that another one believes and belief—a belief functions socially. Like for example I don't know, our old stories you must know about Santa Claus. Who believes in Santa Claus? Nobody. If you ask the parents they say of course we don't believe we pretend to believe just for our children not to disappoint them. Then of course you ask the children they say I'm not crazy but I believe in it not to disappoint the parents and get better presents or whatever. You see the point. Nobody has to believe but all together if just everybody pretends for another's innocence to believe the system of belief functions. And the truly shattering experience is not for you not to believe. That's not the problem for us. Nobody believes and so on but to how should I put it to—to—really assume that there is no other to believe in your place. Like let me give you an example from cinema which—did you see—I hope you did so that I don't have to spend time telling you the story, I hope you saw—how should I call it—La vita bella. Yeah, Roberto Benigni. You noticed what happens there? The story of La vita bella—the guy father in order to survive the concentration camps where he is with his son, father pretends for the son—for the small boy—that it's not a concentration camp but just a big competition where if you where you are free to leave any moment you want but to show—to survive it and so on then you get a prize. I claim the film would have been much better and more shattering psychologically if we were to learn at the end that the small boy didn't believe in it but just pretended to believe to make it easier for his father. That would make it a much—a much more complex film. Now okay, time is running. Along these lines I wanted to go a little bit into how I claim our democracy functions more or less in precisely the same way. As a social network you must know the rules, but that's not enough. If you just know the rules you are an idiot. You know like those when upper classes still had manners years ago, you remember you had all those institutions which taught you like you know good manners, like 'come to us we'll teach you how to behave'. Ah then you do it, you go mixed with upper classes you are an idiot. Why? Because you learned the rules but you don't learn the way you have to violate the rules. That is to say crucial for symbolic space—and this is the space—this gap is the space of ideology—crucial for the functioning of symbolic order is not only the rules but how we relate to the rules. There are rules which we take literally which prohibit something but the message between the lines is 'you are idiot if you follow it'. Like the prohibition is a call between—especially sexual rules. Something is prohibited which means do it but discreetly or whatever. There are even much more interesting counter-rules which are opposite rules, which are rules which allow you something on condition that you don't use the freedom. You are given a choice on condition that you don't use the choice. This is in some of my books—offers to be rejected. You know all these strange situations like I don't know let's say I do something horrible to you and I apologize. What's the proper thing for you to do? To tell me 'Of course listen, you don't have to apologize, it's not necessary'. But that's the proper way to accept my apology. Or you know all those proverbial situations like I don't know, let's say I'm rich you are poor—which is not true but let's say—then I invite you to dinner. Of course when the bill arrives you have to insist a little bit that you will pay, no? But we both know that I will pay at the end, it's just politeness. All this stuff where again there is an apparent choice which has to be rejected. At this level again ideology functions. So very briefly if you allow me yes to conclude why do I think our present situation now is ominous? Because I think what is changing now are not so much the explicit rules as the implicit rules which tell us how to relate to the explicit rules. This—this thick network of implicit customs that Hegel, my favorite philosopher, would have called Sittlichkeit or objective spirit. The substance of customs, of mores. Not morality in this abstract sense but just this network of presuppositions which are the basis of our freedom. We should never forget a point made by a guy with whom I disagree politically but I appreciate him very much as a philosopher, Robert Pippin, the great Chicago Hegelian, of—on—in a wonderful essay on civility. He emphasized how these elementary rules of kind behavior, how we address each other and so on, this is an absolute condition of free individuality. Without this substance in the sense of thick network of implicit rules which should be as it were our second nature, we obey them spontaneously, we cannot act as free individuals. So what worries me is if things change at this level. And to conclude just two points. First, did you notice for example how suddenly things changed at the level of this implicit rule with regard to global warming? Did you notice how up to I would say around a year ago, even less, the predominant reaction to those who warn that there may be a catastrophe ahead was 'Ah this are exaggerations, we don't really know it, it's a paranoia of ex-communist apocalyptic people' and so on. All of a sudden a year or less ago the tone shifted. All of a sudden global warming is accepted like 'What's the problem, of course it will happen'. But the message is now 'We should also look at the good side of it'. Like you had obscenities like a report announced on CNN on the greening of Greenland. Like wait a minute they already grow grow grow salad and whatever on Greenland and corn, and if the ice melts on the Arctic how it will be much cheaper to bring all the cheap stuff from Chinese gulags to Western markets through the North Pole and so on. This is I think a terrible moment when something which at the level of this gut sense of ethical substance was unacceptable is all of a sudden normalized as if nothing happened. And the same I claim is happening at different levels. Let me give you an example from the United States, an example from Europe. In the United States okay it's the obvious example: torture. And again I repeat it always, I'm not naive when people tell me 'But how can you criticize United States for torture when aren't you aware that in China or whatever they practice torture much more'. I know, but what worries me is the surface. What worries me is that all of a sudden it became acceptable to talk about—even if you don't accept it, but nonetheless the topic is acceptable with publicly debated. I consider this a regression. Why ethical? Let me give you a parallel. Imagine rape. Would you if you are woman or man, would you like to live in a society where you would have to debate all the time 'Should the women be raped or not?' No, I would like to live in a society where when somebody advocates rape he simply disqualifies himself, you know like it's a joke, don't take it seriously. I would be very much worried if all of a sudden we would have to argue why women shouldn't be raped. And I would like to be the same with torture. Or in Europe we have something like for example I remember till five years approximately ago there was a silent pact that radical right-wing, right-wing neo-fascist parties are should not be considered as—should not be allowed to participate in power. This was a kind of an absolute pact they are out. All of a sudden the prohibition was suspended. First Austria then Italy and so on and so on. These changes which are not the big visible changes is what—is what effectively worries me. And to conclude, if you read the Republican National Convention at this level with the glasses of They Live, how should I put it no? Like 'Okay okay they are talking this but what are they really... what's the message?' I think we should be also a little bit worried. I will not go into obvious things that we all know but I think it's a pretty tragic event. First I claim the American liberal left is paying the price for first its politically correct stupidity, the way feminism was squeezed into politically correct jacket and the also the ignorance of working class. In the sense of you know working class are the stupid rednecks anti-feminists and so on and so on. All today's leftists in Europe even more than here—I'm not practicing America bashing now—they feel very much ill at ease with the working class. No no they are the old-fashioned they—today's left likes you know new dynamic managers who are as Toni Negri put it almost communists already and so on. So what I'm saying is that that's the revenge there. Something important happened at the level of these implicit rules. As Jacques-Alain Miller—to whom I'm again politically opposed but he made a nice observation apropos Sarah Palin—it's that something nonetheless happened here which is what... that's his thesis. I think it's problematic but basically correct. That till Sarah Palin to cut a long story short feminine politicians played a role of like phallic women in the sense of more men than men themselves as women. You know like Margaret Thatcher my god husband... Indira Gandhi, up to Hillary Clinton there was something of that. Sarah Palin functions in a different way. She fully—she fully publicizes her femininity and at the same time she practices this feature of femininity which is the so-called distrust of male phallic authority. This very sarcastic undermining I think effectively something new emerged here. Even more important if we put again yeah yeah yeah I mean if we put the glasses on don't we get—and that's where things get complicated for me—at a certain level I don't have time to do a more detailed analysis now but I think it's clear that all this talk about change change no? If you put the glasses on the message is of course change means we will change things so that they will basically remain the same. I mean it's absolutely clear ah no? But here things get more complicated. First here I think the pact that Republicans are proposing to ordinary Americans is a pretty obscene one. And I—I claim this is not—that's the point—this is not a dark plot a secret. That's the part which is if I put it in these terms explicitly proposed between the lines to the people. It's 'Okay they appear to refer to your populism'—like their basic reference 'enough of' you know all these stupidities 'enough of Washington enough of great corrupted central administration' and so on and so on 'less taxes less government' and so on and so on. I claim that the message between the lines is 'don't take it seriously let's have a nice explosion but nonetheless we have the backroom boys who will do the proper job'. The message is the opposite one: 'Trust us we will do discreetly the proper job'. Which is why I were to be able to talk with John McCain I wouldn't ask him these stupidities like 'Do you... are you sincere or not?' but 'Who is your Karl Rove?' You know like whenever you play this populist role there must be a manipulator behind no? That's what it is. But the second thing more important is that nonetheless things are not as easy as that. What I suspect is you know whenever we have this kind of cynical manipulation—not cynical in the sense of tricking people but cynical in the sense of 'you can trust us'—that's the basic message of Republicans. Like 'we play with working-class mother the first dude hockey mom whatever but' like the basic message between the lines is 'don't worry we will do the same as before everything will remain the same'. But you know words are never just words. What worries me really is that they will really change—change something for much worse. What worries me is that they sincerely cynically think that it will be just the same show going on. You know because this kind of a Republican revolution it repeats itself every I don't know seven eight years. I remember when Newt Gingrich became speaker. It was the same. It was on the cover of Newsweek time Revolution enough of. But what if they will really change something? Like I don't—I hope they just manipulate. That's the sad thing. If they don't just manipulate if they really want to change things in the direction into which they point that's the real danger. The real danger is they mean it seriously. I'm sorry if I was too long. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I think I already was once here, so it's nice to be here again. Thanks also for the nice introduction, only at one point I was in a panic when you started with by buying books here, I was terribly afraid that you will join this totally manipulative racist [unintelligible] you know like of the Starbucks coffee approach, with every book you buy here, you save a child in Africa. No, it was good for us. Okay, so I have many things to say, so let me begin. I will not, of course, read from the book. I always find this tasteless, like as if you treat yourself as a classic and then you read from yourself. I will make some variations, some supplements to the book based on the book. Since the topic of the book is violence, and to make it a little bit more propaganda, this short book on Violence is really to be read together with the big fat Verso book which appeared at the same time, In Defense of Lost Causes, which is much more outspoken politically. What I would like to begin with is the topic of violence and language and speech because I think that here maybe it's easy to discern where I differ from the predominant opinion. Let me begin with Walter Benjamin who in his Critique of Violence raises the question: is any non-violent resolution of conflicts possible? Benjamin's answer is that such a non-violent resolution is indeed possible in what he calls, quote, 'relationships among private persons, courtesy, sympathy and trust. There is a sphere of human agreement which is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence. It's the proper sphere of understanding of language.' End of quote. Here I respectfully disagree with Benjamin and I think he himself implicitly moves into a totally different direction with his theses on divine violence. That is to say, this thesis of Benjamin belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order is that of the medium of reconciliation or mediation, of peaceful coexistence as opposed to a violent medium of raw confrontation. The idea is that in language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum recognition of the other. The entry into language and the renunciation of violence are thus understood as two aspects of one and the same gesture. We find this same underlying hypothesis in philosophers or thinkers as different as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Lacan. The whole basic premise, as you probably know, of Jürgen Habermas's communicative ethics is that there is an ethics which is, as it were, inscribed into the very normal functioning of language. It's the immanent normativity of speech acts as such. So that, as Habermas emphasizes, when we use violence—sorry, language to instigate violence or aggressivity and so on, there is kind of pragmatic if not logical contradiction. We, as it were, use language against its nature. A similar idea although of course in a totally different theoretical context is found in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, at least in the early phase of Jacques Lacan throughout the 1950s, where again the thesis is that we have this imaginary immediate confrontation of subjects where it's always me or you, no mediation, and then the function of language precisely is to enable the resolution of direct confrontation through symbolic mediation. Language is this exchange of symbols, trust and so on. As Lacan puts it, even when language lies, even when we lie, we lie against the background of a dimension of truth. Even okay, we can even paraphrase this and say even when in language we attack, we attack against the background of a recognition. I can humiliate you whatever, but isn't it that at a more elementary level I already presuppose you as a partner of communication who is in a way formally equal to me? What I want to advocate now is that this—the opposite of this thesis. I think that what if humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they, humans, speak? What if there is a dimension of violence in language which is much more fundamental than direct confrontation between me and another human being? It's easy to say language brings a medium of symmetric understanding of reciprocal recognition, but isn't it that the very medium, field, if you want to put it naively, categories, horizon of understanding of this mutual recognition is never neutral? There is already, as it were, it's already twisted out of balance and this is the fundamental violence. The violence which we can experience at its purest in so-called multicultural misunderstandings. For example, I can live in the same apartment with members of other cultures, but nonetheless, in a way—and we all understand what I mean by this—we live in different worlds. Where by 'world' of course I don't understand reality, the totality of real objects, but the horizon of understanding of this totality. How is this totality, that is to say, the structure of meaning, the way I understand reality, how is it articulated? What meanings are hegemonic, predominant and so on and so on? And isn't this in a way, that's the thesis of Martin Heidegger with whom here at least I agree, isn't this in a way a much more radical violence? The violence of the two of us not fighting for the same object, for example gold. That's elementary violence. Isn't there a more elementary violence if we see the same object in its immediate stupid reality, gold, but it means something totally different to us? Like for example, as we all know, for a medieval person gold was an incorruptible metal which is why it was considered divine, kind of a representative standing of the divine indestructible dimension among the our within the field of our reality. Or whatever let's take another dimension from the history of singing, the castrato voice. For medieval and early modernity it was the voice of angels prior to sexualization, prior to the Fall. To us the same voice is some abominable monstrosity. So you see my point. This is violence, this violence of imposing a totally different horizon of misunderstanding. This violence is covered by Heidegger. But I claim there is another dimension of violence—this and this you find in my book Violence. Now I want to auto-critically, self-critically supplement my book. There is another dimension of violence of language which is missing in Heidegger and which is the focus of Jacques Lacan's theory of the symbolic order. Throughout his work, Lacan provides variations on Heidegger's motive of language as the house of being. Language is not man's creation or instrument; it is man who dwells in language. A quote from Lacan: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject.' End of quote. Lacan's paranoic twist however, his additional Freudian turn of the screw, comes from his characterization of this house of being, language, as a torture house. Quote: 'In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.' End of quote. So not only does man dwell in the prison house of language—you remember the title of Fredric Jameson's early book on structuralism—man dwells in a torture house of language. The entire psychopathology deployed by Freud from conversion symptoms inscribed onto the body up to total psychotic breakdowns are scars of this permanent torture. So many signs of an original and irreducible gap between subject and language. So many signs that we humans cannot ever be at home in our own home, which is language. This is what Heidegger ignores, this dark torturing other side of our dwelling in language. And this is why there is also no place for the Real of jouissance, excessive enjoyment, in Heidegger's edifices, since the torturing aspect of language concerns primarily the vicissitudes of libido. This is also why in order to get the truth to speak, it is not enough to suspend our active intervention and to let language itself speak. That's the usual attitude of wisdom which is also Heidegger's. Let's not be active subjects in the Cartesian sense of manipulating language as object. Let's adopt the passive—not the right word but the listening attitude of allowing Gelassenheit, letting it be. The dimension of wisdom, the message which is already implicit in language itself. As Heidegger likes to put it, the proper speaking is at the same time hearing, listening to language. In contrast to this thesis, I prefer to follow Elfriede Jelinek, you know the Austrian writer, who put it with extraordinary clarity. I quote: 'Language should be tortured to tell the truth.' End of quote. It should be twisted, denaturalized, extended, condensed, cut and reunited, in short, made to work against itself. Language as the big Other is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves. It is a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. What do I mean by this? Just think about proverbs which are language at its purest. I think let's admit there is something inherently opportunistic and stupid in proverbs. Whatever you do, it can be covered up by a proverb. For example, I risk an act and then what can happen? I succeed. There will always be a wise guy who will say yes, only those who risk profit, you know some kind of wisdom. Then let's say that I do exactly the same thing but I fail. Again, there will be a wise guy who will say—I don't know what you have, we in Slovene have a vulgar saying which has something like you cannot urinate against the wind or whatever, no? That's the disgusting opportunism of wisdom. Anything that happens, you're always the wise guy. The most elementary form of torturing one's language is called poetry. What a complex form like a sonnet does to language. It forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of a fixed shape of rhythm and rhymes. So what about Heidegger's own procedure of listening to the soundless speech of language itself? No wonder late Heidegger's thinking is poetic. Recall the means he uses in interpreting poetry. Can one imagine a torture more violent than what he, Heidegger, does in say his famous reading of Parmenides? You know he twists the proposition, he changes the syntax and so on and so on. It's an extremely violent reading. And it doesn't go only—it doesn't refer only to language. Cinema is the same, I think. Let's look briefly at two opposite directors who the second really hated the first—the two Russian classics. First Sergei Eisenstein. You remember when he develops his early notion of montage, cutting, montage of attractions? The metaphoric he relies on is extremely violent. It's the natural flow of images and then the point of a director is to cut, combine, always the language of brutal intervention. Tarkovsky, the great opponent of—Andrei Tarkovsky of Eisenstein, as you probably know he was opposed to this. His idea was no, no violent cutting interventions, true cinematic art must be more impassive like with long shots and so on. You allow the event or the presence to come into its own passively. But I claim it's merely a different form of torture. If Eisenstein can be called the poet of this more active sadistic torture—cut, you combine—Tarkovsky practices a cinematic equivalent of what I think—correct me if I'm wrong—in English you call that medieval torture instrument a rack, where they stretch you. No? I mean that's what Tarkovsky is doing and it has wonderful effects. Tarkovsky was wonder—he said if you just shot a normal event like in his maybe masterpiece Mirror, a girl in panic running to—running to the newspaper printing house because in Soviet times she maybe overlooked a mistake—misspelling Stalin's name maybe in an obscene way, this would cost her her life. If you shoot this normally, it's just nothing, just a girl running there. But what Tarkovsky does in his Mirror is he protracts this scene into a quarter of an hour endless running, puts it on a rack and you have the so-called aesthetic effect. So I can well imagine Eisenstein and Tarkovsky if they were to meet, debating as two torturers. Let's say a Latino-American communist torturer and a KGB torturer. One says no, it's better to cut prisoners. The other says cut and squeeze the testicles. The other says no, just stretch them and so on. But you see my point. My point is that I like this line of thought which also goes against the so-called postmodern historicism which is the linguistic historicism. There is an irreducible plurality of beings, all we can do is tell stories about it from our irreducible specific, historically specific horizons of meaning and again as so-called postmodernists like to emphasize, there is no a priori universal medium of communication. All we can do—the ultimate, the only appropriate universal ethics is to allow the space for this very plurality. As Richard Rorty liked to emphasize, everyone should be allowed to tell freely his or her story, the story of his or her happening. What I think is that on the contrary, one in a very traditional way even, I like to follow Hegel here who claimed that when we think, we think in language—of course there is no thinking outside language—we think in language but against language. This is the if you want torturing aspect. Thinking is not natural to our—well, everyday thinking which is passively embedded in language. Thinking is literally counternatural and as such we can, with great effort, torturing effort, we can force language to formulate some—no, we can make it receptive to some trans-linguistic truth through this procedure of torture. So let me again refer to Benjamin. You probably know all Benjamin's classical opposition between mythic violence and divine violence. Mythic violence as the staatsbildende, as the state-forming violence, the obscene dark background of state power—what your noble Vice President Dick Cheney likes to call the dark side that we should not talk too much about—and on the opposite the redemptive emancipatory violence, the so-called divine violence. And I think this covers the two violences the dimension till now. The violence about which Heidegger talks, this violence inherent to the very imposition, to put it simply of a symbolic universe, or to put it in Heidegger's terms, a certain disclosure of the meaning of being. This would have been mythic violence, mythic violence of language. And Heidegger himself talk about mythos. Mythos as a certain articulation of the meaning of being, to put it in very simplistic terms—let me now violate Heidegger's strict terminology—the way reality appears to us as meaningful, how we experience it. This is the mythic violence of language. But what we don't find in Heidegger and I think we should supplement here Heidegger would have been the divine violence of language which is precisely this torturing of language, not sprachbildend, that is to say not language-forming but sprachzerstörend, destroying of language, in the same way that Heidegger talks about—talks about sorry that Benjamin talks about divine violence as staatszerstörend, as destroying the state. So I think this is why if you read my book on Violence, even if you looked at it, I hope you got the point which is that it's a defense of violence. We need violence. Emancipatory violence, the act of liberation is always a violent act. What do I—what do I mean by this? I recently saw after years Bernardo Bertolucci's—okay it's a little bit naive old Stalinist epic—Novecento, The 20th Century. And I was nicely surprised by a beautiful scene about half an hour into the film where the workers in that large estate in northern Italy protest to their master who because of phylloxera, who because of economic crisis wants to lower radically their wages. And he tries to explain to them it's market, it's this, it's that. They said but we are starving, we cannot pay and then he explodes and says but do you have ears? Don't you understand, are you so stupid? You cannot even hear me, what I am telling you, economic necessity and so on and so on. And then it's quite a nice shocking scene. One of the workers takes out a knife, this kind of a crooked knife for special uses, and cuts off his ear and gives it to him. Like here you have an ear if you want. There is always something like this in redemption, in gaining freedom. Freedom hurts. So now let me go on a little bit. How do these two modes of violence function in art? Ah, let me begin with a poem. Now okay this was the difficult part. Now we move into more obscene matters. Let me quote you a short poem, listen carefully: 'Convert to my new faith, O crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want. And this godhead forbids you nothing. O obey my call, brothers, people, crowd.' and so on. I don't think it's a great poem but it's a correct poem. Its author is of course, I have to drop the joke, Radovan Karadžić, the Serb war criminal who is now in Hague. And I think it's—he got it correctly. I mean what he describes is a carnival. It's an obscene divinity which calls you through him who is the spokesperson of this divinity to—to an eternal orgy of transgression. You know, you will be fed by the light of my sun, wine, loving, drinking, nothing is forbidden in my faith, this godhead forbids you nothing and so on and so on. What am I trying to—to say here? Two things. First that this provides an important key to the functioning of so-called ethnic religious, however we call it, fundamentalism. It's not as some stupid sociologists try to convince us that today's fundamentalism is a so-called escape from freedom. Like you know, as they—that's how the story goes. we live in postmodern times which are no longer in advance permissive times, no longer over-determined structure by a firm set of values. We are free with an overload of freedom, we have to choose everything from—up to our sexual orientation, religion, ethnic belonging and so on. And the idea is that this radical uncertainty, this lack of the daily coordinates, firm ethical and so on coordinates, causes anxiety. So people who cannot endure it escape backwards into a real or invented tradition which provides a kind of a sense of certainty. I claim this is at best one side of it. What is much more important is exactly the opposite side. I learned it with a rather nasty personal experience when over ten years ago in early 90s I visited Belgrade and in a cafe there—by total mistake once—met some people who probably were so-called ethnic slaughterers, whatever we call them. And I got the lesson of a lifetime from them. What they basically told me is what fear of freedom? For them, they told me, it's modern liberal society which is oppressive and over-regulated. As they told me, what kind of liberal freedom is this? I cannot rape the woman I like, I cannot beat my wife, I cannot smoke, I cannot kill the person I hate and so on and so on. For—the way they experienced ethnic fundamentalism was that it's a—a movement to apparently you go back but in this way you are free. You proclaim yourself, I don't know, servant of your nation and off we go. We can go to Bosnia, we kill, we rape, we are free. For them it was new freedom. And it's not only they who said this. Already Adorno—I advise you to read Adorno's of the Frankfurt School text from late 30s already—very interesting one on the—I think that's the title of the text—the psychological structure of fascist propaganda. Where he wonderfully in a—in a wonderfully perceptive way—and directed probably against the—the simplifications of Wilhelm Reich and other sexual revolutionaries—Adorno emphasized how Hitler is—Hitler is not a figure of paternal authority. Hitler is an—a kind of a fake permissive figure that we shouldn't be seduced by Hitler's explicit language which says something like enough of Weimar Germany decadence, immorality, corruption, time of discipline, our country, our country first, you know our country needs us, sacrifice for your country. That's only the superficial message. If you know to read between the lines, the true message is pay lip service to this, obey me and we can have some fun. Like we kill the Jews, we can have our own carnivals and so on. It's the same I claim with whatever, for example with Ku Klux Klan here and so on. This is how it functions, you know. Pay lip service to Western civilization, Christian values and if you live in the small town in the South of United States in the 1930s and every weekend we can have a little bit of fun, rape some black girls, lynch some [unintelligible]. But this is absolutely crucial, this moment of false carnivalesque opening, of false liberation which is absolutely crucial for every so-called totalitarianism up to Stalinism. You will say ask me where is this in Stalinism? My god, you know who is the greatest theoretician of carnival, very popular even today, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian fellow traveler of formalism. A friend of mine who now teaches I think in in New York, the Russian emigrant who at once was working in Germany, Boris Groys, told me that now recently they discovered some private papers, notes of Bakhtin from I think the city of Kazan where he survived the Stalinism, he died there at the to work in a library. And they demonstrate clearly that Bakhtin's big work on carnival—the title is Rabelais and His World, the work of the creativity of François Rabelais—was really a coded attempt to understand Stalinism. For Bakhtin he knew it very well, carnival was not, you know this what leftists, fake leftists I claim like—'Oh, the rules are suspended at least momentarily, the king is beggar, the beggar is king, we have liberation.' No, for him Stalinist purges and show trials were a big carnival. It's exactly like the king is a beggar. Today you are—yesterday you were member of the Politburo, today you are an English spy or traitor or whatever, no? I mean it was effectively carnival at the high point of Stalinism from to Just look at the data. In two years and a half percent of the Central Committee were shot, percent of the army headquarters were shot and so on and so on. So you cannot even say, as they usually say this I think totally false thesis of Stalinism as a new class society. No, it wasn't that the new nomenklatura oppressed ordinary people. Under high Stalinism the most dangerous place to be was nomenklatura. I mean if you're an ordinary guy you had like to be cynical to percent chance to die. If you are top nomenklatura, it raised to to percent to die. So you see what I'm saying. What I'm saying is let me give you another quote and then we move on. A wonderful description, I quoted it in one of my early books so I dare to repeat it, of how Aleksandar Tijanić, a leading Serb journalist, of how he described the Milošević rule in Serbia in late 90s of the last century. Quote: 'Milošević generally suited the Serbs. In the time of his rule Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. He allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton or anyone else of the world dignities.' My footnote in brackets: this is literally true. When NATO was bombing Yugoslavia I remember clearly watching on satellite TV some talk show on Serb state TV where in the background there was a big poster—you will understand it if you just remember that this was the time immediately after the Monica Lewinsky scandal where they everyone had that fellatio scene fresh in mind—it was on state TV big letters 'Bill, are you crazy, did Monica also suck out your brain?' On state TV. Let me go on. Furthermore: 'Milošević gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars.' I mean the stealing of cars and smuggling from West Germany especially was so popular at that point that some West German tourist agency which tried to revitalize tourism in Serbia proposed of course as a comic attempt a wonderful publicity slogan: 'Enjoy our Serb hospitality, visit us and your car will already be waiting for you.' Let's go on. 'Milošević turned the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing but really nothing of what you do can be punishable.' and I guarantee you end of quote that this is of course only in some sense but nonetheless in some sense true. You to visit for example—and it's not the only case to make it very clear I'm in no way anti-Serb if anything of all ex-Yugoslav nations the Serbs have I claim the greatest democratic potential historically. I think the reason Milošević succeeded there it's difficult to explain but has a lot to do with specific situation of Yugoslavia of its disintegration and so on and so on. So it effectively to understand Milošević it effectively you should bear in mind that it effectively worked like that, like a kind of false eternal holiday. It's precisely the atmosphere you find that's why I don't like him excessively in the films of Emir Kusturica, you know Underground and so on, this permanent orgy drinking copulating and so on. The second thing I want to draw attention to which is a little bit more problematic but I think crucial is that how nicely a certain notion of poetic transgression of poeticization aestheticization aestheticization of daily life fitted into it. No wonder many poets cinematic poets like Kusturica serious literary poets like the German Peter Handke were absolutely fascinated by Milošević rule and saw in the Serbia of Milošević a kind of poetic counterpoint to our aseptic commodified and so on Western societies. And I claim it's all too simple to claim 'Oh what am I talking Karadžić was a ridiculous poet.' First, okay I'm not a specialist in poetry but I doubt if he you know in there is a—how do you call it—a corpse in the closet which is people who today make fun, I know this as ex-Yugoslav of Karadžić as a poet, forget how in the early 80s like in Slovenia there was a nice scandal where the very guy who today dismisses Karadžić as a blasphemy, it was discovered that this same guy put together in Slovene language an anthology of recent Bosnian and Serb poetry where he gave quite a prominent role to Karadžić, absolutely no? And again there are many others in Yugoslav republics who are undoubtedly serious poets the greatest who also how to put it laid the foundation for ethnic cleansing and so on. I claim that if you look at countries around the world where ethnic cleansing went on you always discover I claim some Karadžić like Rwanda. I checked it up there is it's called Hassan Ngeze. He is the Karadžić of Rwanda. The journal Kangura where he systematically was systematically spreading anti-Tutsi hatred calling for their genocide and again he is a big national poet. So you see my point which is that how to put it this link between the suspension of ethical rules this violent fundamentalist violence whatever and poetry, it's not—one cannot dismiss it simply so simply. There is a deep link here. No wonder so many modernist poets were pro-fascist or at least deeply sympathetic to fascism. Just the great English guys of course Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and so on and so on. So if I may put it in this way maybe Plato who is in such bad—who is investment value is low today no, bad reputation as originator of metaphysics, I tend after my political experience I tend to sympathize more and more with his idea that poets should be thrown out of the city and so on. Like in Yugoslavia it would certainly have helped. I think that what happened in Yugoslavia is what is that you in the West you have so-called industrial-military complex we in the Balkans we had a I call it poetico-military complex. That is to say poets with their national dreams combined forces with the military with killers and you have—and it works. And again my point is it's all too simply to dismiss this as bad poetry and so on and so on. It's not as simple as that. But now let's move a little bit further into theory. So this obscene side of language this transgression side which is only indicated in between the lines like in the case of Hitler I told you the explicit message sacrifice country, ethics, German spirit the implicit message obscenity carnivalesque murder and so on and so on. This is crucial for how ideology functions. This is crucial for the violence to discern violence which is part of our language. There is a one of the masterpieces of Hollywood left, John Carpenter's film—maybe you saw it, it's worth hitting it, it's naive but nice—They Live from which I think stages this scene of ideology in a naive but very nice way. It's a story of a homeless worker who stumbles in a hopefully abandoned church on a box of sunglasses and when he puts them on he discovers that he is able there like to be ideological critique sunglasses then he puts these sunglasses on he sees the real ideological message. For example, he goes out on a street and sees a big publicity poster: Visit Hawaii, Honeymoon, Enjoy Life and so on. Okay all in color, naked couples swimming, he puts the glasses on and sees the message: Don't think, consume, obey, money is your god or something like that. It's a very naive idea but I think it's basically right. Especially if we supplement it with its opposite. I think that ideology today functions on both levels. One level is this where the explicit ideological injunction is apparently non-ideological. That is to say it's just a reference to our spiritualized hedonism. I think that today when people talk about the end of ideology, of course it's nonsense, but they are describing a real change which is that today how to put it society does not address us in its superego dimension with a some in the old-fashioned sense ideological call to sacrifice to your duty. It's more generally something like again spiritualized hedonism like 'Be who you truly are', like kind of a somewhere between Dalai Lama and Jack Daniel's, like be who you truly are, realize yourself, realize your potential, don't waste your life, be fully who you are all that stuff. But then you need the ideological glasses to see the real message. On the other hand a more traditional functioning of ideology which is I claim still operative is on the contrary that you get the ideological injunction directly like as I already said apropos of Hitler, 'sacrifice yourself, do your duty' and then you get between the lines implicitly the obscene message. And again all always when we confront ideology and we confront it all the time I think one has to take into account these two levels. For example let me take you one example which is today present all around. This permanent calls to—to give charity, to sympathize with the plight of the poor. Of course poor in third world countries are really starving suffering and so on and it's good to do something about it. What worries me is again the the ideological burden you buy with it that comes with it when you participate in the practices of charity. Like what okay let's imagine you watch a TV and you see a publicity, you know this usual disgusting manipulation like I don't know you see a starved African child with distorted limbs and so on near death, then the words say something like 'Are you aware that for the price of one or two cappuccinos you would save the life of that kid' and so on and so on something like that. Okay let's ask ourselves what would have been the message you would have seen if you were to put on these from They Live ideological glasses? I claim something like 'Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the causes of their poverty, just contribute a little bit of money so you will feel good and you will not have to think.' I think that's the blackmail message which is hidden. The idea is that it's a—it's this depoliticization, this you know like it's like a superstitious item, give a little and you will feel good and you don't have to think about it. Which is why I claim charity is so important today. I claim charity is a crucial ideological phenomenon today. It's no longer as and more years ago in the times of Carnegie you remember when charity was kind of idiosyncrasy of some of them. Today it's as it were part of the part of the part of the system. Did you notice how the leftist rhetoric of years ago where all leftists liked to say to us who live relatively comfortable lives in the developed West 'We live in a'—I mean that was the critical points—'We live in an ivory tower, are we aware that outside our secluded sphere there are millions who are starving' and so on and so on? But today guys like Bill Gates say this. I claim that today this reference to those poor people outside our ivory tower are central to the functioning of hegemonic ideology. Because what's the message again? The message is as it is clear if you read for example Bill Gates' treatises on creative capitalism and so on, the message is again, 'forget about all these old ideological fights, socialism, capitalism, people are struggling fighting, people are starving there, let's do something, let's come all together—capital, private benefactors, state, let's just do something' and so on. I think it's precisely a blackmail not to do, not I mean to do something so that you don't have to think how should I put it. And I claim that this is then also connected with a great shift of capitalism in the logic of capitalism especially the logic in how we consume after '68. The way capitalism in the last years triumphantly integrated in its own way the message of '68. What do I mean by this? There are three ways we are solicited by publicity by the media to buy and consume products—products to simplify it. The first one is the simple utilitarian one referring to real properties of the object. No like a—you want a Land Rover, the publicity will tell you it is very strong car you can really climb up mountains, it a good machine, a large space for—large space for—large space for—for all the—for all the travel bags and so on, whatever. It refers to like some kind of properties of the object car. Then the next level could have been the one characteristic of the 50s 60s 70s of the consumerist society the level of—keeping up with the Joneses status symbol, competition. The idea there the more subtle propaganda would have been 'buy a Land Rover' they would why to assert your social status. They gently softly appeal to Land Rover as a status symbol in different modes. But I claim today something different is happening. Maybe it's not crucial but it's more and more in foreground. It's neither the actual properties nor status symbol competition and so on but it's something like how should I call it again in these new age terms 'your authentic experience', the reference to your true true self. Today's publicity would have emphasized 'Do you want to break out of the constraints of alienated city life and feel authentically connected with the earth? Do you want to realize your creative adventure potential? Buy Land Rover.' You know what I mean it's like a way everything is a way to be authentically yourself. The clear example of this logic I think is for example amongst other things is organic food. I'm deeply suspicious. Do you really think—don't tell me that you why are you buying it. Do you really believe that when you buy those usually they are more rotten apples which cost twice the price of the normal chemically genetically manipulated—do you really think that you are avoiding some great risk and so on? I don't think. I also don't think that it's a big status symbol or whatever. I think it's more to render your life meaningful like you know, isn't it nice you consume but you have this big disgusting narcissistic satisfaction there that you participate in something great you know. How Starbucks manipulates this nicely. I hate it whenever you enter it usually you have there some message where basically is with each overpriced cup of cappuccino you save a Guatemala child or whatever no. The point is that it makes it an experience ethically satisfying, life has meaning, you participate in something meaningful, it's not just stupid consumption and so on and so on. This is the reality of the end of ideology which is again ideology at its purest ideology at its worst. And this I think works at different levels. Now to cut it short—too long—I would like now to give you another example of this everyday presence of ideology along these lines. To give you a kind of a very short diagnosis what is typical functioning of ideology today. My starting point would have been Hollywood films. I mean I love them because they are I think the best tools which enable you to grasp directly in a shortcut where we stand. For example what are two of the latest hits? Dark Knight, the last Batman. Did you notice what's basically the final message of this film? It's the necessity of a lie to save the dignity of the public authority system. You remember what happens at the end? The district attorney who is supposed to be first an ethical hero is discovered that he really was the murderer and then at the film's end Batman decides to take the murders upon himself because it would have been too demoralizing for the public, the trust to render it public that this guy who was leading the fight against crime was himself a murderer and so on and so on. And then my god we ask ourselves how did it function in Stalinism? This was precisely how to Stalinism you were addressed as a victim. The idea was we know between the lines message again: we know you are not really guilty, but the party needs sacrifices because there were difficulties and if you do not admit that you was sabotaging, you were sabotaging then people will blame the party and that and so on and so on. So it's interesting that again the film which is after Titanic next mega hit focuses precisely on the necessity of a lie. It's basically in the line of the old John Ford two masterpieces—you must know it—Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, no? Where it's the message is also the necessity of a lie to ground a civilized system. But with John Ford it's more ambiguous. Here I think in—another thing which is pure ideology in Dark Knight is this which I hate it because it's even—it's even done with some pretension as if to make it more how should I put it artistic. Did you notice how—that's how the story goes. They tell us that in the last film Batman—and the same goes for Spider—Spider-Man blah blah—is no longer just a flat cartoon hero. We see the hero with his weaknesses, anxieties, fears and so on. As if this rendering it complex somehow makes it more artistic or whatever. I think that precisely this reference to personality, this reference to we are not just ideological categories, we are real warm people, this is ideology at its purest. This is what avoids you to confront the consequences precisely of your public acts. But another film where we get today's diagnosis at its purest would have been—I really liked him, I saw it five times because of my son who is small—it's Kung Fu Panda. Total ideology at its purest. Why? Did you notice how the film's symbolic universe is structured? That it combines in a very enigmatic way if you noticed it, two opposite attitudes. On the one hand it's fully part of this new pseudo-Buddhist whatever orientalism, no? Kung Fu Panda, sacred prophecy, the new master and so on, it's all this pseudo-orientalist stuff of fate chooses a hero and so on and so on. But at the same time did you notice that the film is full full of cynical dismissing jokes? Like they make at the same time they make fun of the time of all sacred references and so on. Sometimes I must I must I must admit even in a rather intelligent Platonic way like when the hero penetrates the big temple with all those sacred objects he sees a painting of some I don't know mysterious and he says in a very nice Platonic way I have only seen a—a picture of pictures of this picture till now and so on it's elegant. But what I'm saying is that crucial is this apparently inconsistent combination of two opposite attitudes. On the one hand all this sacred stuff fate decided this religious ethics of—sacred rather ethics of Kung Fu warrior chosen by fate, all the pseudo-Buddhist stuff and on the other hand this typically Western brutally realistic cynicism, systematic making fun of everything sacred. But are the two of them really so exclusive? Remember if you've seen the film the central message, I quote it. It refers to the search for special ingredient in the film—which is the special ingredient which makes you a Kung Fu Panda warrior, which is the special ingredient which makes the soup such a good soup or whatever. That's the lesson, I quote: 'There is no special ingredient, it's only you. To make something special you just have to believe it's special.' End of quote. I think this is the fetishist split ethics at its purest. The message is, I know very well all this Buddhist stuff about faith is shit and so on, I know very well it's shit but nonetheless I believe. And that's our ideology today I claim. We live in cynical times but cynical times not in the sense we don't believe in anything. No we make fun, but this making fun covers up our deeper belief which is not explicit belief but we act as if we believe. Permit me to quote an old, maybe you know it story, anecdote about Niels Bohr which makes this point perfectly. Niels Bohr, you know the Copenhagen guy, quantum physics, he was once visited by his friend in a country—country house in Denmark where Niels Bohr had above the entrance to this house a horseshoe. Horseshoe, I don't know if it's here the same, in Europe it's a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And then the surprised friend asked Niels Bohr, 'But wait a minute, do you really believe in this? Are you a scientist?' Niels Bohr answered of course I'm not crazy, I'm not superstitious, I don't believe that this works. Then the friend asked him, 'But why do you have it?' Niels Bohr provided the perfect answer. It was, 'Of course I don't believe horseshoe really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told it works also if you don't believe.' That's our ideology. We don't believe in democracy whatever, but we believe that it works even if we don't believe. And this is that old formula. It was already—I don't have time to go into it now—which was already long ago formulated very nicely by I think in the 60s by Golda Meir, at that point the Prime Minister of Israel who was once asked 'Do you believe in God?' and she gave a very nice answer. She said without answering it directly, 'I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God.' But you get the point here. The point is that she wasn't a believer but she pretended to believe because of these ordinary stupid people who naively believe. Nobody has to believe. Everybody has just to suppose that presuppose that another one believes and belief—a belief functions socially. Like for example I don't know, our old stories you must know about Santa Claus. Who believes in Santa Claus? Nobody. If you ask the parents they say of course we don't believe we pretend to believe just for our children not to disappoint them. Then of course you ask the children they say I'm not crazy but I believe in it not to disappoint the parents and get better presents or whatever. You see the point. Nobody has to believe but all together if just everybody pretends for another's innocence to believe the system of belief functions. And the truly shattering experience is not for you not to believe. That's not the problem for us. Nobody believes and so on but to how should I put it to—to—really assume that there is no other to believe in your place. Like let me give you an example from cinema which—did you see—I hope you did so that I don't have to spend time telling you the story, I hope you saw—how should I call it—La vita bella. Yeah, Roberto Benigni. You noticed what happens there? The story of La vita bella—the guy father in order to survive the concentration camps where he is with his son, father pretends for the son—for the small boy—that it's not a concentration camp but just a big competition where if you where you are free to leave any moment you want but to show—to survive it and so on then you get a prize. I claim the film would have been much better and more shattering psychologically if we were to learn at the end that the small boy didn't believe in it but just pretended to believe to make it easier for his father. That would make it a much—a much more complex film. Now okay, time is running. Along these lines I wanted to go a little bit into how I claim our democracy functions more or less in precisely the same way. As a social network you must know the rules, but that's not enough. If you just know the rules you are an idiot. You know like those when upper classes still had manners years ago, you remember you had all those institutions which taught you like you know good manners, like 'come to us we'll teach you how to behave'. Ah then you do it, you go mixed with upper classes you are an idiot. Why? Because you learned the rules but you don't learn the way you have to violate the rules. That is to say crucial for symbolic space—and this is the space—this gap is the space of ideology—crucial for the functioning of symbolic order is not only the rules but how we relate to the rules. There are rules which we take literally which prohibit something but the message between the lines is 'you are idiot if you follow it'. Like the prohibition is a call between—especially sexual rules. Something is prohibited which means do it but discreetly or whatever. There are even much more interesting counter-rules which are opposite rules, which are rules which allow you something on condition that you don't use the freedom. You are given a choice on condition that you don't use the choice. This is in some of my books—offers to be rejected. You know all these strange situations like I don't know let's say I do something horrible to you and I apologize. What's the proper thing for you to do? To tell me 'Of course listen, you don't have to apologize, it's not necessary'. But that's the proper way to accept my apology. Or you know all those proverbial situations like I don't know, let's say I'm rich you are poor—which is not true but let's say—then I invite you to dinner. Of course when the bill arrives you have to insist a little bit that you will pay, no? But we both know that I will pay at the end, it's just politeness. All this stuff where again there is an apparent choice which has to be rejected. At this level again ideology functions. So very briefly if you allow me yes to conclude why do I think our present situation now is ominous? Because I think what is changing now are not so much the explicit rules as the implicit rules which tell us how to relate to the explicit rules. This—this thick network of implicit customs that Hegel, my favorite philosopher, would have called Sittlichkeit or objective spirit. The substance of customs, of mores. Not morality in this abstract sense but just this network of presuppositions which are the basis of our freedom. We should never forget a point made by a guy with whom I disagree politically but I appreciate him very much as a philosopher, Robert Pippin, the great Chicago Hegelian, of—on—in a wonderful essay on civility. He emphasized how these elementary rules of kind behavior, how we address each other and so on, this is an absolute condition of free individuality. Without this substance in the sense of thick network of implicit rules which should be as it were our second nature, we obey them spontaneously, we cannot act as free individuals. So what worries me is if things change at this level. And to conclude just two points. First, did you notice for example how suddenly things changed at the level of this implicit rule with regard to global warming? Did you notice how up to I would say around a year ago, even less, the predominant reaction to those who warn that there may be a catastrophe ahead was 'Ah this are exaggerations, we don't really know it, it's a paranoia of ex-communist apocalyptic people' and so on. All of a sudden a year or less ago the tone shifted. All of a sudden global warming is accepted like 'What's the problem, of course it will happen'. But the message is now 'We should also look at the good side of it'. Like you had obscenities like a report announced on CNN on the greening of Greenland. Like wait a minute they already grow grow grow salad and whatever on Greenland and corn, and if the ice melts on the Arctic how it will be much cheaper to bring all the cheap stuff from Chinese gulags to Western markets through the North Pole and so on. This is I think a terrible moment when something which at the level of this gut sense of ethical substance was unacceptable is all of a sudden normalized as if nothing happened. And the same I claim is happening at different levels. Let me give you an example from the United States, an example from Europe. In the United States okay it's the obvious example: torture. And again I repeat it always, I'm not naive when people tell me 'But how can you criticize United States for torture when aren't you aware that in China or whatever they practice torture much more'. I know, but what worries me is the surface. What worries me is that all of a sudden it became acceptable to talk about—even if you don't accept it, but nonetheless the topic is acceptable with publicly debated. I consider this a regression. Why ethical? Let me give you a parallel. Imagine rape. Would you if you are woman or man, would you like to live in a society where you would have to debate all the time 'Should the women be raped or not?' No, I would like to live in a society where when somebody advocates rape he simply disqualifies himself, you know like it's a joke, don't take it seriously. I would be very much worried if all of a sudden we would have to argue why women shouldn't be raped. And I would like to be the same with torture. Or in Europe we have something like for example I remember till five years approximately ago there was a silent pact that radical right-wing, right-wing neo-fascist parties are should not be considered as—should not be allowed to participate in power. This was a kind of an absolute pact they are out. All of a sudden the prohibition was suspended. First Austria then Italy and so on and so on. These changes which are not the big visible changes is what—is what effectively worries me. And to conclude, if you read the Republican National Convention at this level with the glasses of They Live, how should I put it no? Like 'Okay okay they are talking this but what are they really... what's the message?' I think we should be also a little bit worried. I will not go into obvious things that we all know but I think it's a pretty tragic event. First I claim the American liberal left is paying the price for first its politically correct stupidity, the way feminism was squeezed into politically correct jacket and the also the ignorance of working class. In the sense of you know working class are the stupid rednecks anti-feminists and so on and so on. All today's leftists in Europe even more than here—I'm not practicing America bashing now—they feel very much ill at ease with the working class. No no they are the old-fashioned they—today's left likes you know new dynamic managers who are as Toni Negri put it almost communists already and so on. So what I'm saying is that that's the revenge there. Something important happened at the level of these implicit rules. As Jacques-Alain Miller—to whom I'm again politically opposed but he made a nice observation apropos Sarah Palin—it's that something nonetheless happened here which is what... that's his thesis. I think it's problematic but basically correct. That till Sarah Palin to cut a long story short feminine politicians played a role of like phallic women in the sense of more men than men themselves as women. You know like Margaret Thatcher my god husband... Indira Gandhi, up to Hillary Clinton there was something of that. Sarah Palin functions in a different way. She fully—she fully publicizes her femininity and at the same time she practices this feature of femininity which is the so-called distrust of male phallic authority. This very sarcastic undermining I think effectively something new emerged here. Even more important if we put again yeah yeah yeah I mean if we put the glasses on don't we get—and that's where things get complicated for me—at a certain level I don't have time to do a more detailed analysis now but I think it's clear that all this talk about change change no? If you put the glasses on the message is of course change means we will change things so that they will basically remain the same. I mean it's absolutely clear ah no? But here things get more complicated. First here I think the pact that Republicans are proposing to ordinary Americans is a pretty obscene one. And I—I claim this is not—that's the point—this is not a dark plot a secret. That's the part which is if I put it in these terms explicitly proposed between the lines to the people. It's 'Okay they appear to refer to your populism'—like their basic reference 'enough of' you know all these stupidities 'enough of Washington enough of great corrupted central administration' and so on and so on 'less taxes less government' and so on and so on. I claim that the message between the lines is 'don't take it seriously let's have a nice explosion but nonetheless we have the backroom boys who will do the proper job'. The message is the opposite one: 'Trust us we will do discreetly the proper job'. Which is why I were to be able to talk with John McCain I wouldn't ask him these stupidities like 'Do you... are you sincere or not?' but 'Who is your Karl Rove?' You know like whenever you play this populist role there must be a manipulator behind no? That's what it is. But the second thing more important is that nonetheless things are not as easy as that. What I suspect is you know whenever we have this kind of cynical manipulation—not cynical in the sense of tricking people but cynical in the sense of 'you can trust us'—that's the basic message of Republicans. Like 'we play with working-class mother the first dude hockey mom whatever but' like the basic message between the lines is 'don't worry we will do the same as before everything will remain the same'. But you know words are never just words. What worries me really is that they will really change—change something for much worse. What worries me is that they sincerely cynically think that it will be just the same show going on. You know because this kind of a Republican revolution it repeats itself every I don't know seven eight years. I remember when Newt Gingrich became speaker. It was the same. It was on the cover of Newsweek time Revolution enough of. But what if they will really change something? Like I don't—I hope they just manipulate. That's the sad thing. If they don't just manipulate if they really want to change things in the direction into which they point that's the real danger. The real danger is they mean it seriously. I'm sorry if I was too long. Thank you very much.