On Violence
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2008-09-12 · 1:17:11 · 11,968 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismliberalism-political-correctnessreligion-theologycinema-art-culturedemocracyfascism-populismcommunism-socialismeveryday-lifephilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a talk at Google on ideology, focusing not on explicit violence (the subject of his recent book) but on the invisible 'texture' of everyday ideological life. He develops three interlocking themes: the Rumsfeldian category of 'unknown knowns' (things we don't know we know) as the proper domain of ideology and the unconscious; the cynical functioning of belief through proxies (canned laughter, Santa Claus, God as 'the Big Other'); and the gap between the official ideological message and the obscene 'bribe' concealed beneath it. The talk also touches on liberal multiculturalism, the Sarah Palin phenomenon, intellectual property, and Marxism's continued relevance.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The fourth Rumsfeldian epistemic category Žižek adds: things we don't know that we know, silent prejudices embedded in our practice that constitute ideology and the unconscious.
Implied in the toilet analysis: ideological structures that are materially real and operative even when their carriers are unaware of or would deny their ideological character.
as “cynical ideology”
The contemporary mode where we publicly disavow our beliefs yet continue to act on them, 'I know very well, but…', so that the cynical distance itself becomes ideological.
as “inter-passivity”
Robert Pfaller's concept (adopted by Žižek): outsourcing one's own passive reaction to an other, the TV laughs for you, the prayer wheel prays for you, in contrast to the mere cunning-of-reason delegation of activity.
as “belief without believing”
The social-structural operation whereby belief functions through a chain of proxy believers rather than any individual's sincere conviction; Niels Bohr's horseshoe 'works even if you don't believe in it'.
Implicitly invoked in the Golda Meir / proxy-belief analysis: Jewish people believe in God so I don't have to, belief is attributed to a supposed believing subject.
as “inner life as protective screen”
The psychoanalytic claim that the narrative we construct about our inner life (mystical or otherwise) is a zero-level ideological shield that conceals rather than reveals our truth.
as “the meta-rule”
The unwritten rule about how to apply the rules, knowing not just the rule but when to violate it, acknowledge it silently, or pretend the offer is real (Japanese holiday days, corruption pricing under socialism).
A gesture (like insisting on paying a bill you know the other will cover, or offering an apology that is declared unnecessary) whose falseness is known by all parties yet which is nonetheless sincerely performed and socially necessary.
as “prohibition of stating the prohibition”
In Stalinist and other authoritarian systems, the deepest prohibition is not of a behaviour but of publicly naming the prohibition itself; acknowledging it destroys its functioning.
The post-1968 mode of publicity that addresses not utility nor status but inner authenticity, 'buy this and realise your potentials / feel free / feel green', which Žižek reads as the deepest contemporary ideological form.
as “obscene ideological supplement”
The hidden 'bribe' beneath the official ideological message: e.g. Nazism's official call to sacrifice conceals an invitation to enjoy persecuting Jews; KKK's Christian-values message conceals the invitation to weekend violence.
Žižek's term for earlier female politicians (Thatcher, Indira Gandhi) who gained power by imitating and out-performing male authority rather than asserting femininity on its own terms.
as “global capitalism with a human face”
Žižek's characterisation of the contemporary left's actual horizon: accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the least-bad system and merely trying to humanise it, analogous to 'socialism with a human face'.
Žižek's provocation that knowledge/intellectual achievements are by their nature closer to communism than capitalism because they resist containment within private property, as Bill Gates's disproportionate wealth illustrates.
Not a grand world-view imposed from above but the network of ethical, political, and social prejudices that structure daily life without our conscious awareness.
Lacan's term invoked here as the structural proxy-dimension: the anonymous Other for whom appearances must be maintained, and whose belief or knowledge can substitute for ours (God as paradigm case).
Stories he reaches for 14
Niels Bohr, a scientist, has a horseshoe above his door. When asked if he believes in it, he says no, but he keeps it 'because I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' Žižek uses this to illustrate cynical ideology: belief functioning through practice regardless of subjective conviction.
“Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's how ideology functions today.”
Starbucks-style charity ads ('for the price of a cappuccino you can save a child') tell you between the lines: 'Don't politicise, forget the real causes of poverty, donate a little and buy your calm conscience.' We pay not to help but to feel good and keep suffering at a distance.
“We don't pay really to help them. We pay to feel well and especially to keep them at a distance there.”
In John Carpenter's film, a man finds sunglasses that reveal the hidden orders beneath advertising images: 'Obey, Reproduce, Consume.' Žižek uses this as a parable for how ideology simultaneously hides and displays its imperatives, but notes that contemporary ideology addresses us not with duty but with 'Enjoy, be authentic.'
“Almost a Marxist dream, you know, the glasses which tell you directly the social order.”
When crowds applaud Hitler or fascist leaders, the leader accepts the applause. Communist leaders, by contrast, stand up and join the applause directed at them, performing their own subordination to the people they allegedly serve. Žižek reads this as expressing a totally different logic of power.
“What does a communist do? Stands up and joins the applause. This tells everything. It's totally different logic, Stalinist dictator is not a master, it's a perfect servant of the people.”
Every year on Stalin's birthday, Gulag prisoners were assembled to sign congratulatory telegrams to Comrade Stalin. Žižek contrasts this with the unimaginability of an equivalent in Nazism (gathering Jews in Auschwitz to wish Hitler well), using the difference to show that Stalinist power presents itself as servant of the people, not master, a fundamentally different logic from fascism.
In the 1930s, Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki wrote that Buddhist depersonalisation enables soldiers to kill without trauma (viewing the sword as moving itself, not as one's own action), and that military discipline is the fastest path to enlightenment for those without time to meditate. Žižek uses this alongside Père Joseph to show that authentic spiritual practice can serve atrocity.
“When you learn that when the officer says 'shoot,' you shoot without moment's reflection, you are above your false self.”
Žižek takes Rumsfeld's famous epistemological grid (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns) and reveals a missing fourth category, unknown knowns, things we don't know we know, which he identifies with ideology and the Freudian unconscious.
“Something is missing, the most interesting category… Not things we know that we don't know, but things we don't know that we know. That's the unconscious, that's ideology.”
Parents pretend to believe in Santa not to disappoint children; children pretend to believe not to disappoint parents and to get presents. Nobody actually believes, yet the collective belief functions perfectly through mutual presupposition of the other's belief.
“Nobody has to believe. Only if every individual actually existing presupposes another agency to believe then belief functions.”
After insulting Judith Butler with vulgar language, Žižek apologises by phone. Butler says 'no apology is needed', but this waiver only became possible because the apology was made. If no apology had come, she would have been offended; if she'd said 'you deserved to apologise,' he'd have been offended.
“She was able to say 'no apology is needed' only after I did apologize. That's the normal logic.”
Gore Vidal, asked in a TV interview whether his first sexual experience was with a man or a woman, answers 'I was too polite to ask.' Žižek holds this up as the ideal formula of proper discretion.
“"I was too polite to ask." That attitude is for me the proper one.”
Father Joseph, Richelieu's foreign-policy operative in the Thirty Years' War, spent evenings writing authentic mystical meditations while by day he poisoned and plotted. Aldous Huxley found this combination impossible to dismiss as hypocrisy. Žižek uses it to argue that inner spiritual authenticity is no guarantee of moral or political decency.
“The mystery is that no way to avoid the conclusion: this is gold, authentic stuff… it's the real thing. But this doesn't prevent you from legitimizing quite horrible things.”
In gonzo porn (embedded-journalism style, camera visible, performers smile at camera), the pretence of narrative is abandoned entirely and mocked, Žižek reads this not as freedom from censorship but as its apotheosis: so afraid of even a minimum of narrative that meta-irony replaces it.
“I think this is the high point of censorship. They're afraid of even a minimum of narrative.”
At a Harvard academic dinner, participants are asked to state their sexual orientation alongside name and field. Žižek contrasts this with his European (specifically Slovenian beach) norm of toplessness unremarked upon, illustrating how the bar of public/private discretion is culturally variable.
“State your name position, state your work, field of interest, and your sexual orientation. Now, this shocked me a little bit.”
In Edith Wharton's novel (rendered through the film cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Michelle Pfeiffer), the most devastating revelation is not the affair itself but that the wife always knew and pretended not to, the destruction of the innocent Big Other proxy.
“When he learns it, everything is ruined. That's I think our much more fundamental need than directly to believe. To have another one as protected innocence.”
Works invoked 11
They Live film
John Carpenter's 1988 film; praised as 'the best of the Hollywood left,' its sunglasses-reveal-ideology conceit is Žižek's central visual metaphor for ideology's hidden orders.
Žižek's own book; he refers audiences to its final chapter for his argument about where global capitalism will fail and his residual Marxism.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's exposé of Japanese Zen's support for wartime militarism; called 'my favourite book on that topic' and recommended to the audience.
Violence book
Žižek's own recent book; he deliberately does the opposite of it in this talk, focusing on everyday ideology rather than violence per se.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's biography of Père Joseph; described as 'a very interesting book, shattering' and recommended for its puzzle about authentic mysticism coexisting with political ruthlessness.
The Age of Innocence film
Discussed in film-cast terms (Day-Lewis, Ryder, Pfeiffer) as an illustration of the devastating discovery that the innocent Big Other proxy (the wife who 'didn't know') actually always knew.
Gender Trouble book
Judith Butler's book mentioned only as an identifier tag alongside Butler's name in the apology anecdote.
Romance film
Catherine Breillat's film, cited as an example of the attempt to combine serious emotional engagement with explicit sex, which cannot penetrate the mainstream market, illustrating the narrative-censorship thesis.
The Brave New World book
Mentioned only to identify Aldous Huxley as 'the guy of The Brave New World' before discussing Grey Eminence.
Fear of Flying book
Erica Jong's novel, cited for its comment on the German toilet ('a nation which had such toilets, no wonder they imagined Auschwitz'), used approvingly in the toilet typology.
Persian Letters book
Montesquieu's work cited as a model for Žižek's own pose as an estranged 'Persian' observer analysing the United States from outside.
People invoked 26
Cardinal Richelieu's ruthless diplomat during the Thirty Years' War and simultaneously an authentic mystic, used to show that inner spiritual life is no barrier to political evil.
John Carpenter positive
Director of They Live (1988), praised as 'the best of the Hollywood left', its paranoid conceit (sunglasses revealing hidden ideological orders) serves Žižek's analysis of ideology.
Cited alongside Thatcher as a 'phallic woman' archetype, a woman politician who succeeded by playing a more-male-than-male game.
Jimmy Swaggart positive
Used as the paradigm of religious inauthenticity: his televangelist delivery is a massive ego trip that undermines the anti-hedonist Christian message he preaches.
Montesquieu positive
Cited as a model of the external observer who analyses a culture from an estranged vantage, Žižek positions himself similarly as a 'Persian view' on the US.
Gore Vidal positive
Cited for his formula of proper discretion: when asked whether his first sexual experience was with a man or a woman, he answered 'I was too polite to ask.' Žižek presents this as the ideal attitude.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited as originator of the concept of the Big Other, invoked to explain God as the structural locus of proxy belief.
Brian Victoria positive
A Zen Buddhist priest whose book Zen at War documented the Japanese Zen community's support for wartime expansion, Žižek recommends it as 'my favourite book on that topic.'
Donald Rumsfeld positive
Žižek mocks Rumsfeld's motives but seizes his epistemological grid as genuinely useful, adding the missing fourth category (unknown knowns) to expose ideology.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek sees most of today's left as covert Fukuyamaists, accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the ultimate horizon; he rejects this but notes even Fukuyama himself conceded biogenetics undermines his thesis.
Marshall McLuhan positive
Invoked via the phrase 'the medium is the message' (paraphrased as what is 'embodied in the enunciation') to explain how Sarah Palin's performative style carries a message independent of explicit content.
Richard Rorty negative
Cited as articulator of the liberal view that basic freedom is the freedom to tell your story, a position Žižek rejects as ideological and psychoanalytically naive.
Robert Pfaller positive
Austrian philosopher and friend credited with the concept of 'inter-passivity' (others are passive for you), which Žižek adopts and deploys.
Judith Butler negative
Called 'my theoretical enemy, personally good friend'; the apology anecdote illustrates sincere-fake social rituals. Her work (Gender Trouble) is mentioned but not used intellectually here.
Anne Applebaum positive
Her book on the Gulag is the source for the Stalin birthday telegram detail used in the Stalinism vs. fascism comparison.
Erica Jong positive
Her comment in Fear of Flying on the German toilet, 'a nation which had such toilets, no wonder they imagined Auschwitz', is quoted approvingly in the toilet typology setpiece.
Catherine Breillat positive
Cited as the French director (Romance) who attempts to combine emotionally engaging drama with explicit sex, but cannot penetrate the mainstream market, illustrating the censorship-by-narrative-sabotage thesis.
Cited as the paradigm of the backstage 'backroom boys' who actually run Republican politics while the public face performs populism.
Golda Meir positive
The first political figure to consciously exploit the proxy-belief structure: 'I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God', Žižek says he likes Israel 'for that.'
Sarah Palin positive
Analysed as a genuinely new ideological phenomenon: a woman who combines mother/teacher/sex-object with sarcastic assertiveness, not playing the phallic-woman game, and who beat the Democrats at their own feminist terrain, though Žižek concedes she doesn't know what she's talking about on Russia.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Praised in the West during the 1960s as a Zen ambassador, but Žižek highlights his 1930s texts celebrating Japanese military expansion as a 'work of love' and offering Buddhist depersonalisation as a technique for trauma-free killing.
Bill Gates negative
Used as an example of how market mechanisms cannot properly reflect intellectual achievement, Gates's wealth from garage to richest man in twenty years shows market failure as measure of value.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote, keeping a superstitious charm 'because it works even if you don't believe in it', is Žižek's canonical illustration of how ideology functions through cynical distance.
Cited alongside Indira Gandhi as an example of the older 'phallic woman' type, women who gained power by imitating and out-performing men rather than asserting femininity.
Aldous Huxley positive
Praised for Grey Eminence, the biography of Père Joseph, which puzzles over the coexistence of mystical authenticity and political ruthlessness, a key text for Žižek's argument about inner life as ideological screen.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced in passing as the philosopher around whose time the European Trinity (France/Germany/Anglo-Saxon) discourse developed, providing the framework Žižek maps onto toilet design.
What it argues
unknown knowns as the structure of ideology and the unconsciouscynical belief: rituals that work even without subjective convictioninter-passivity and the proxy-subject (canned laughter, God as Big Other)the gap between official message and obscene ideological bribetoilet design as crystallisation of national civilisational attitudesliberal multiculturalism and the limits of 'understanding the Other'Sarah Palin and the new feminine assertiveness as Republican ideological coup
Dialectical moves 10
“Ideology is not in what we explicitly believe but in what we don't know that we know — the unknown knowns.”
Inversion of the common view that ideology is explicit belief; the truly ideological is the unconscious, practiced layer.
“Far from the cynical distance from ideology liberating us, it IS the ideological form of late capitalism.”
Cynicism is not a critique of ideology but its contemporary mode; disbelief is itself the belief.
“The TV doesn't trigger your laughter — it laughs for you. You feel relieved as if you had laughed.”
Reversal of the Pavlovian stimulus model: the function of canned laughter is to outsource, not stimulate, the emotion.
“Truth is not in your story — it is out there (X-Files insight). What you tell yourself about yourself is basically a lie.”
Inversion of the liberal-humanist view that self-narration is the seat of truth; inner life is the screen, not the substance.
“Under Stalinism it was not only prohibited to criticise Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly state this prohibition.”
The deepest prohibition is the prohibition on naming the prohibition; power sustains itself precisely by not being avowed.
“God is not primarily a determinate proxy but the very formal structure of having a proxy — God is the original proxy.”
Reversal of theology: God is not the content of belief but the formal structure (Big Other) that makes proxy-belief possible.
“In order to say 'Don't be evil,' you must already dwell in that space of evil — and I congratulate you for it.”
Google's anti-evil motto is a negative index of its genuinely radical (evil-in-the-sense-of-rupturing) character.
“Only the right can do what the left should do: only Nixon could go to China — Republicans beat Democrats at their own feminist terrain with Palin.”
The party structurally expected to oppose a position is paradoxically the only one that can enact it without losing credibility.
“The freedom to use holiday days is given on the condition that you don't use it — freedom offered only to be refused.”
Certain permissions function as binding obligations in reverse: they create social debt precisely by remaining unexercised.
“She was able to say 'no apology is needed' only after I did apologise — if I hadn't, she would have been offended.”
The symbolic gesture (apology) is necessary not to convey information but to create the conditions under which it can be officially waived.
Claims 19
asserts
Ideology today is not a grand world-view but the network of silent prejudices — 'unknown knowns' — that structure practice without being consciously held.ideology
asserts
The proper Lacanian/ideological reading of Rumsfeld's epistemology reveals a missing fourth term — unknown knowns — which is the domain of the unconscious.unknown knowns / the unconscious
rejects
Cynicism does not liberate us from ideology; the cynical distance itself is the ideological form proper to late capitalism.cynicism as ideology-critique
asserts
Canned laughter is not a Pavlovian trigger but an inter-passive proxy: the TV literally laughs for you, relieving you without your having laughed.inter-passivity / canned laughter
asserts
Belief functions socially without requiring any individual believer — each participant presupposes an Other who believes, so collective belief operates through a chain of proxies.structure of belief / religion
rejects
Our truth is not in our inner life, stories, or mystical experiences, which are always a zero-level ideology — a protective screen.liberal-humanist and psychologistic notions of the self
rejects
The liberal multiculturalist injunction to 'understand each other' presupposes that subjects fully know themselves, which is false; we need a code of polite mutual distance instead.liberal multiculturalism / tolerance discourse
rejects
The motto 'an enemy is somebody whose story we haven't yet heard' is ideology at its purest because it assumes inner truth resides in self-narration, which psychoanalysis denies.Richard Rorty / narrative-based tolerance
asserts
D.T. Suzuki's pro-war Buddhist writings and Père Joseph's mystical meditations are both authentic — there is no contradiction between spiritual depth and moral horror.religion, spirituality, and political atrocity
asserts
The toilet's concrete structure encodes a nation's deepest civilisational attitude and cannot be explained on purely utilitarian grounds.ideology materialised in everyday objects
asserts
Beneath every official ideological message of sacrifice and duty lies an obscene supplement — a 'bribe' of enjoyment — that sustains it.structure of ideology / fascism / populism
asserts
Global capitalism faces ominous long-term antagonisms — biogenetics, ecology, intellectual property — that it cannot resolve within its own logic, vindicating a residual Marxist horizon.limits of liberal-democratic capitalism / Fukuyama
asserts
Intellectual property is by nature closer to communism than capitalism because knowledge resists containment within the logic of private property.intellectual property / capitalism
asserts
Sarah Palin represents something genuinely new: a woman who wields sarcastic assertiveness without renouncing femininity, combining mother/teacher/sex-object — something the democratic left had dreamed of but Republicans achieved first.Sarah Palin / gender politics / Republican ideology
asserts
God is not a determinate proxy but the very formal structure of having a proxy — the original Big Other — and cannot be overcome simply by atheism because it is embedded in the structure of language.God / religion / the Big Other
reframes
Google's 'Don't be evil' motto is a negative recognition that what Google does is genuinely 'evil' in the sense of a radical cut that shakes the existing order of things.Google's corporate motto / notion of evil
asserts
Religious fundamentalists are not truly fundamentalist — their performative style undermines and contradicts their explicit message, making them fake.religious fundamentalism / Jimmy Swaggart
asserts
Hardcore pornography is subject to censorship precisely in the mandatory narrative frame, which is made ridiculously self-mocking to sabotage emotional involvement as the price of visual permissiveness.censorship / pornography
reframes
The Republican 'change' message is a meta-message that change will guarantee things basically stay the same ('plus ça change…').Republican Party / populism / ideology of change
Quotes 15
“Something is missing, the most interesting category. Not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things we know that we don't know, but things we don't know that we know. That's the unconscious, that's ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns as ideology and the unconscious
“Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's how ideology functions today.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical belief / ideology functioning without subjective conviction
“Nobody has to believe. Only if every individual actually existing presupposes another agency to believe then belief functions. The whole system of belief functions.”Slavoj Žižek · collective belief through proxy / inter-passivity
“Admit it, at the end of the show, you feel relieved as if you have laughed. That's the mystery.”Slavoj Žižek · inter-passivity / canned laughter
“Truth is not in your story in what you are telling yourself about yourself. What you are telling yourself about yourself is basically a lie that you construct in order to cope with some horrible dimension.”Slavoj Žižek · inner life as protective screen / X-Files insight
“"An enemy is somebody whose story we didn't yet hear." It sounds so deep, you know… This is ideology at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of liberal tolerance motto
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to announce this prohibition publicly.”Slavoj Žižek · prohibition of stating the prohibition / Stalinism
“What does a communist do? Stands up and joins the applause. This tells everything. It's totally different logic, Stalinist dictator is not a master, it's a perfect servant of the people.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist vs. fascist logic of power
“God is not so much a determinate proxy but the very structure of having a proxy. God is the original proxy.”Slavoj Žižek · God as formal structure of the Big Other
“In order to say 'Don't be evil,' you must already dwell in that space of evil. And I congratulate you for it.”Slavoj Žižek · Google's radical character as 'evil' cut in the good sense
“Even to account for the most elementary vulgar object, how it is structured… you get the whole basic attitude towards civilization. It's not just a utilitarian object. This is what interests me, this type of ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology crystallised in everyday material objects
“Maybe even more than eating, shitting is a measure of civilization.”Slavoj Žižek · material culture as civilisational index
“What the left today basically offers is global capitalism with a human face. Make it a little bit better, as Bill Gates would have put it, 'creative capitalism.'”Slavoj Žižek · critique of left-liberal horizon as Fukuyamaism
“Intellectual property if you pardon me the expression is in its nature closer to communism than to capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual property and the communist horizon
“"I was too polite to ask." That attitude is for me the proper one.”Slavoj Žižek · discretion / proper distance / Gore Vidal formula
Transcript 15 turns
unknown
Again, welcome. We're very honored to have with us today a noted sociologist, philosopher, cultural critic, Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, a professor in the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including the University of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, many others. And he's currently the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College in the University of London. The Wikipedian horde has deemed him an intellectual outsider and a confrontational maverick, and he comes to us today to discuss his recent book "Violence," a book which challenges us to look deeper into the topic of violence to see beyond the ephemeral manifestations of violence—a gunshot, an explosion, the clash of metal on metal, bloodstains—and to discuss systemic violence, the violence inherent in our systems of living, our way of life. In a sense, our age is an age—the age of technological and biological exploration is an age of philosophical exploration as well. I know that many of us at Google are familiar with this. And to quote Slavoj himself, which I found on the internet, of course: "The age of philosophy is in a sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems on an everyday level. It is not just that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation; on the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is in a way forced to be some kind of philosopher." So let's take this opportunity, please, for everyday philosophy and welcome Slavoj Žižek to Google.
Again, welcome. We're very honored to have with us today a noted sociologist, philosopher, cultural critic, Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, a professor in the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including the University of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, many others. And he's currently the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College in the University of London. The Wikipedian horde has deemed him an intellectual outsider and a confrontational maverick, and he comes to us today to discuss his recent book "Violence," a book which challenges us to look deeper into the topic of violence to see beyond the ephemeral manifestations of violence—a gunshot, an explosion, the clash of metal on metal, bloodstains—and to discuss systemic violence, the violence inherent in our systems of living, our way of life. In a sense, our age is an age—the age of technological and biological exploration is an age of philosophical exploration as well. I know that many of us at Google are familiar with this. And to quote Slavoj himself, which I found on the internet, of course: "The age of philosophy is in a sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems on an everyday level. It is not just that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation; on the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is in a way forced to be some kind of philosopher." So let's take this opportunity, please, for everyday philosophy and welcome Slavoj Žižek to Google.
Slavoj Žižek
I hope this works. Yeah. Thanks very much, I'm really glad of being here, you know why, because let me begin with a funny association which came on my mind now. You know of what, from my communist youth, this scene here now reminds me. Under communism when I was young, you not only had to work in factories and so on, but you had so-called hours of ideological education, you know, like exactly like now, like during lunchtime, workers had to listen to some boring short talk which ruined your lunch about, I don't know, great results of our construction of socialism and so on and so on. I feel like back in old times, we're sorry for ruining your lunch, so in contrast to the kindness of the good guy who introduced me, I would say, please, don't let me terrorize you, if your mind is with your computer, go on, go on, I would feel I would feel better about it. What I was thinking about what to do here. Of course, I don't want to give the résumé of a book. I never was able to be so arrogant like I know some guys, poets and so on, who treat themselves as classics, you know, like they open their own book, read a paragraph and say, let's now look at what the thinker wanted to say. No. I will, the proper dialectical way to approach this book is I think to do the opposite of the book, to focus not on violence but on what violence reacts to usually, on the everyday texture of our lives, everyday ideology. Now, your first reaction probably would have been here, but aren't we beyond ideology? I mean, am I an old Marxist from, you know, like the species which basically died around who still believed in big causes and so on? No. I will try to convince you that ideology is, of course, not in the sense of big world-view vision to impose on society, but ideology in the sense of whole complicated network of ethical, political, social, whatever prejudices which, even if we are unaware of them, still determines the way we function, is still something which structures our lives. What is ideology? Maybe some of you know this but I cannot resist repeating this story because it's it works perfectly, namely do you remember, you must, my god, it was endlessly reproduced on Google, that unfortunate interview of Donald Rumsfeld some five years ago, just before the Gulf War, when he wanted to explain why, where is the danger of Saddam, and he used his famous parallel, he basically developed a whole theory of knowledge, claiming that there are, you remember, known knowns, things we know that we know, then like we know that Saddam is the boss of Iraq, then he went on, there are known unknowns, there are things we know that we don't know, like for example, I don't know, I know there are some cars in front of this building, but I don't know how many they are, but I know that I don't know this, no? Then he went on, there are unknown unknowns, in the sense of things that we even don't know that we don't know them. Like his idea was we, the known unknown was how many and where Saddam has his weapons of mass destruction, like we don't know but we know that we don't know. But then his paranoia was, what if there are unknown unknowns, some secret weapons that we don't even know what they are. Get it? They're more radically unknown. Now, my claim is that okay, that was his idea. My claim, my joke here is that if you have a little bit of a sense for structural analysis thinking, you see immediately that something is missing here, a fourth term. Known knowns, we know what we know. Known unknowns, we know what we don't know. Or then unknown unknowns, the totally other, like we don't even know what we don't know. Something is missing, the most interesting category. Not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things we know that we don't know, but things we don't know that we know. That's the unconscious, that's ideology. All those silent prejudices which determine how we act, how we react, and we, in a way, they are so much the texture into which we are embedded that we literally don't even know that we know them. And I think this was why you were in such a trouble in Iraq. Not so much that you there was some mystery that you didn't know. The US Army and administration basically didn't know what they already know. All the unconscious political military prejudices, as it were, which determined their activity. Which is why, I don't know if some of you know it or not, to give you another example, I'm sorry of repeating myself, I hope you are a new public here, the analysis because of which and again it was mocked endlessly in Google, it brought me some negative fame, but I still think it works perfectly, of this unknown knowns is the structure of toilets in our Western civilization. Is ideology at its purest. Now you will say, am I crazy, where is ideology? Did you notice something? I simplify the analysis, but I know I simplify it, but basically it holds, I claim. What do we get? We have in we get three basic types of toilets. The French one, where sorry for relative vulgarity, where the hole is in the back of the toilet so that shit falls directly into the hole and disappears, I mean not the hole I mean not just the bowl but the hole where then you know get it. Then we have the German type where the hole where the shit disappears is in front, so that the shit is somehow displayed there. You know Germans have all this ritual of, I'm not kidding, around of toilets in Germany are still structured like this. That the shit is displayed there and they have this old ritual, every morning you should smell your shit, check it for traces of I mean Erica Jong in her "Fear of Flying" makes a wonderful comment, she writes a nation which had such toilets, they no wonder they they they imagined Auschwitz and all the horrors. Okay, then you have the Anglo-Saxon, American and so on toilets, which are mix, it's not doesn't matter where the hole is because it's all full of water, so that the shit floats freely there. Now I was always intrigued by this. I asked my friends architects in one of the other country, why this? And they try to give me utilitarian answers, like Germans said isn't it natural to inspect your shit? French said shit smells, let's get rid of it. Americans and Englishmen said let's be practical, it should float in water so that it doesn't smell and so on. But obviously it's not purely a utilitarian level. Then I asked myself a simple question, where did I already hear this trinity, the let's call it a French, German, English Anglo-Saxon civilization? Do you know that already years ago, there was around Hegel's and French Revolution time, there was this popular idea among philosophers and so on about so-called European Trinity, claiming that the spiritual backbone or fundamental structure of Europe is composed of these three nations, each of the three stands for a certain political principle and for a certain sphere of society. Germans are politically conservative and sphere of society privileged there is Germans are the nation of poets, thinkers and so on, culture. France is revolutionary and the preferred political sphere is politics. Anglo-Saxon universe is more how do you call it, liberal centrist utilitarian, the political sphere is economy. And then I got it. That's it. That's the key. French revolutionary, shit disappear, liquidate it as soon as possible. You Anglo-Saxon more pragmatic, float it there, let's see how it's utilitarian approach. Germans metaphysical and poets reflect it and so on, you know, conserve it. And then I spoke with architects and they admitted it, crazy as it may sound. That's the only way to ultimately account for a totally vulgar object like the concrete structure of a toilet. You see now my point, which is slightly more serious not only a tasteless joke, that even to account for the most elementary vulgar object, how it is structured, the whole I wouldn't say world-view but basic attitude towards civilization and so on, it's not just an utilitarian object. This is what interests me, this type of ideology. Ideology which is all this set of cultural and so on prejudices which structure our daily lives. And you don't even have to be fully aware of them, especially today in our so-called cynical era where very interesting things are happening. How do we deal with ideology today? Maybe you know it, it's also endlessly in Google, the wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr, you know, Copenhagen, the quantum physics guy. The story is a wonderful one. The story is that once a friend visited him in Denmark in the countryside where he had a house for go there to weekend whatever, and the friend, also a scientist, saw above the entrance a horseshoe. I don't know I don't know how it is here but in Europe, horseshoe above the entrance door is a sign of is a superstitious item destined to prevent evil spirits to enter the house. So the shocked friend asked him, wait a minute, are you crazy? Why do you have this here? Do you believe in it? Aren't you a scientist? Niels Bohr answered him, my god, I'm not crazy, I'm a scientist, of course I don't believe in this shit. Then the friend asked him, if you don't believe in it, why do you have it there? Ah, he gave wonderful answer, Niels Bohr, he said, of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's how ideology functions today. We are we are all cynics, who believes what and so on, but we somehow rely on it that it will work even if you don't believe in it, how should I put it. We in this sense we live in a cynical era, not cynical in the usual sense, bad people manipulating, but in much more refined way. We practice beliefs without believing in them as it were. And this is what fascinates me in ideology. Especially today. The old image of ideology was you have some explicit beliefs and then privately you let it know oh I'm not crazy as that and so on. Today it's the opposite. What was once private is now public and vice versa. Privately we like to play that we are not crazy to believe in some stupid ideology, we just what is ideology today explicitly? I think some kind of a vaguely Dalai Lama spiritualized hedonism, no? It's no longer do this sacrifice yourself in spite of what Republicans are saying. They just react to it. Basically ideology today is some kind of a vague injunction "be truly yourself," "realize your potentials" or whatever and so on and so on. But I claim we believe much more than we than we appear to believe. We obey or whichever way you put it, much more than we much more than we appear to do. And this again is what all this tension between let me call it explicit beliefs or absence of beliefs and this cobweb of, to put it in the terms of your great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, of the unknown knowns, this is the crucial dimension. At the end I hope I will have time I would really like to mention briefly even the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon, I think is you cannot understand it without not toilets, let's forget that but it will because sorry okay let me go a little bit further here. Did you notice another extremely interesting phenomenon about which I've written and which points in the same direction? What my friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, you can Google him to be tasteless, you know, I will endlessly repeat this joke being here, at least on the German Google you find him, he proposed a wonderful category of inter-passivity. The idea is that it's not only that we like in what we philosophers call cunning of reason, that we like manipulate others so you sit back, others are active for you. Robert Pfaller drew attention to a much more mysterious phenomenon, opposite one, of what he calls inter-passivity where we transpose onto the other our passive reaction. Others are passive for you. The most elementary phenomenon and I love it, this I think this is arguably the greatest contribution of American civilization to world cultural heritage, canned laughter on TV, you know, when the just think about it, it's a much more mysterious phenomenon than it may appear. It's not, as some wrong Pavlovian psychologists think, the function of you hearing the laughter there as part of the soundtrack is not automatically to trigger your laughter. No, it works so that literally the TV set laughs for you. At least that's how it works with me. I look it's really the same thing as you remember those I always like them in Tibetan Buddhism those praying wheels or mills and so on where you write down a prayer, you turn it around or even better, you let the wind turn it around and then you can masturbate whatever, it doesn't matter, objectively you pray. You pray through it here it's the same, it laughs for you. My that's my experience, you know, in the evening you arrive home that tired, you put on some stupid show with canned laughter on TV, Cheers, Friends, whatever, and you don't even laugh. The mystery is, admit it, at the end of the show, you feel relieved as if you have laughed. That's the mystery. How it works. And my thesis back to Donald Rumsfeld topic is that it's the same with beliefs. It's not so much that we believe. We need as it were another one to believe for us. From this is how our rituals function. For example, take Santa Claus. I mean, of course nobody believes. I mean parents, if you ask parents they said no, we are not crazy, we pretend to believe not to disappoint our children. But I can guarantee you if you ask then the children, they said no, I'm not crazy, we pretend to believe not to disappoint our parents and to get presents and so on. You got the point. Nobody has to believe. Only if every individual actually existing presupposes another agency to believe then belief functions. The whole system of belief functions. The first to use this structure consciously politically, it's you know the old Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who when asked, do you believe in God? Of course she didn't, I mean that's the irony, Israel who makes his claim on the West Bank like God gave us this land is, and I like it for that, a word to misunderstand, is the most atheist country in the world. According to statistic that I read there, about between and of the Israeli Jews don't believe in God. And the irony is that so Golda Meir was asked this. Her answer was no, I don't believe in no, she didn't answer, she just answered, I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God. But the point is that there are no individual Jews who have really to believe in God. Everybody just has to evoke this spectre. And so the most terrifying experience is when you learn not that you don't believe, but that the other, which was in a way the guarantor of your belief doesn't believe. If you know a little bit of literature, that's the so shocking, you remember "Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton. At the end the guy, okay I speak in cinema terms, Daniel Day-Lewis, no? Is told by his son that Winona Ryder, his dead wife, knew all the time about his affair with Michelle Pfeiffer, but pretended not to know. When he learns it, everything is ruined. That's I think our much more fundamental need than directly to believe. To have another one as protected innocence. So let me go on a little bit here after we return to ideology, to explicit ideology. How do these prejudices function? They are something much more complex than it may appear. Recently, three months two ago, I gave a talk at Harvard. At the end of the talk, we were invited, you know this is the most boring part of academic meetings, where we had an official dinner where you know people who are really bored by each other you have to pretend and so on. So the older professor who was coordinating dinner, of us, said, okay since we don't know each other well, please can everybody here present him or herself? State your name position, state your work, field of interest, and your sexual orientation. Now, this shocked me a little bit. For my European sensitivity like, my idea was almost, you know, like what's none of your business, no? But now I don't want to play the vulgar anti-America, American bashing, because you know this bar of discretion is just different in Europe. At immediately I remembered how a friend of mine visited me not the previous summer in Europe, and we went to the Slovene coast where Slovenia, you know, we were already under communism, sexually, culturally a very liberal country. So as in most of Europe in the last years, most of the women were simply with naked breasts, no bra on the beach. It's considered totally normal, nobody even notices it. Here I'm told it's not so normal, like I was told you can even get arrested or what. And typically that friend of mine, leftist, liberal, whatever you want, felt oppressed, almost harassed, aggressed, totally traumatized. So you see here we have a nice difference. And again, I think that the formula which is closer to me, I don't think discretion means oppression is the proper attitude is the one, maybe you know the anecdote, Gore Vidal, your writer, gave the best formula of discretion. He was his a well-known bisexual. He was asked in a TV interview some years ago, was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman? You know what was his answer? "I was too polite to ask." That attitude is for me the proper one. Let me go on a little bit to show to show why I am hated in some not only rightists but even more maybe leftist circles. Because I think that today when different cultures are thrown together in what we call globalization, I think we should break the spell of this liberal multiculturalist injunction, understand each other. We should understand more each other and so on. First it's impossible to fully understand each other because I claim we don't even understand ourselves like, you know, it's not that we are separate entities who fully know what we are and then we should open. No liberals always like this endless task oh there is still something that eludes me in that culture and so on. I think quite the opposite. I don't want to understand all other stupid cultures, I can be stupid for them. I think we need precisely a code of discretion. We need a code which tells us how to politely, politely, sincerely politely ignore each other. I don't want if I live in a building here in a big condominium where for example where you know all races are there, I don't want to understand everybody. I want to be treated nicely in a non-racist way by others and I want to treat others like that. I think this sense of proper distance is very important. And I don't think we miss, now I go even a step further, I don't think we miss anything deep in this way. Let's say do I really understand you? Well, my first as a psychoanalyst counter-question would be, but do you really understand yourself? I claim that another postmodern multicultural myth is that we are the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. That that's the moment of truth. Which is why the great liberal motto articulated among others by philosopher the philosopher Richard Rorty, the basic freedom is the freedom to tell your story, your side of the story. The best expression of this attitude is the well-known motto which sounds very deep, I hate it, I think it's wrong. The motto of tolerance which is: "An enemy is somebody whose story we didn't yet hear." It sounds so deep, you know, like if you are just a foreigner for me, I see you as evil, impenetrable enemy, then I hear all your boring details which I don't care about, your dreams, your fears, and all of a sudden I see, oh you are a human person like me and so on and so on. This is getting as boring as, and this is ideology at its purest, as Batman and all these movies. Did you notice how in the last installments of these heroic sagas, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, what everybody emphasizes is how they're no longer flat cartoon heroes. We see also the anxieties, fears of that as if this makes them somehow deeper these films. No this is ideology at its purest. Why? Now it sounds very nice this. And even in Europe we can be worse in political correctness than you, we practice so-called living libraries. Maybe it's going on, that is to say, in some countries, I know about Iceland, Ísland up there, Reykjavík, and United Kingdom where some local communities do again this living libraries, which means the authorities pay members of sexual, religious, race minorities just to visit the majority families, spend an evening with them and tell them about their lives, their fears and so on. The idea is precisely this one, when you get to know a guy his inner life, you no longer can you no longer can be your enemy. Of course at a certain level this works and I'm fully for it. But there is a limit. The limit is let's just do something. Let's replace this generality with a concrete name. Would you also say, oh my god, Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his side of the story or whatever? No Hitler really and others really was an enemy and he was telling him a story about himself and that story was a lie. And that's my point. That's an very interesting and tragic, difficult to accept insight of psychoanalysis. It's basically what I ironically refer to as the X-Files insight: "Truth is out there." Truth is not in your story in what you are telling yourself about yourself. What you are telling yourself about yourself is basically a lie that you construct in order to cope with usually some horrible dimension and so on and so on. It's wonderful to look at all these worst nations, worst in the sense of maybe in an unjust way identified with horrible crimes and to look what stories they were telling ourselves to justify their position, attitude. So this is again a very radical conclusion. Let me give you two extreme examples here. One so that I will be balanced. One from Europe, one from Far East. Europe: If there is a book that you should read I think it's a very interesting book, shattering, it's Aldous Huxley, yes the guy of "The Brave New World," who wrote a book called "L'Éminence Grise," "The Grey Eminence." It's a biography of a guy, a priest called Père Joseph, Father Joseph, who was basically the State Department foreign ministry guy of Cardinal Richelieu during the Thirty Years' War in Europe. Now this guy in his politics was monster, the worst you can imagine. He saved France by ruining Europe, in what sense? He in this Thirty Years' War between Protestant and Catholics, he concluded a pact with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Habsburg Austria, to prevent unification of Germany. With ruthless torturing, poisoning, whatever you want. And so even if we play this stupid game of who was ultimately responsible for the rise of Hitler, this guy's may be the best candidate because we all know that the what laid the foundation for for Nazism, the ultimate cause was the so-called delay of Germany in becoming a united nation-state, and this delay was decided again at the end of the Thirty Years' War. So a bad guy. Now what intrigued Huxley is that every evening after finishing his dirty job of poisoning, plotting and so on, this same guy, Père Joseph, wrote wonderful mystical meditations. He had regular correspondence with some feminine convent and exchanged mystical notes with sisters there. The mystery is that no way to avoid the conclusion: this is gold, authentic stuff. You know you cannot dismiss it as oh the guy was cheating and so on and so on. Sorry it's at the level of who would be the top guys, Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, it's the real thing. So that's what bothered so terribly Huxley, how is it possible to have both in the same person. A ruthless manipulator and an undoubtedly authentic mystic with the deepest imaginable spiritual experience. Huxley's answer was to blame Christianity in the sense of there is something in our Christian fixation on the way of the cross, Christ suffering which opens up a door for this kind of political manipulation, so he turned towards the East. Ah is there any better there? My favorite book on that topic, I advise you to read it: Brian Victoria, himself a Zen Buddhist priest, "Zen at War." This guy did something very simple. He simply made a research into how did the Japanese Zen community relate to the Japanese military expansion, invasion of China and all that stuff in the late throughout the 30s and early 40s. And the discovery was shocking. Except with the exception of literally three four five dissidents, they not only fully supported it, they even provided justification for it. The true horror is to read the works from that time of a guy who some of you and I see there are who are like me unfortunately old enough to be around, who was very popular here in hippie times, 60s early 70s, D.T. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. You know the big model of introducing Buddhist tradition here. Well in the 30s he was writing slightly different texts. For example he wrote a text where he celebrated Chinese Japanese invasion of China as, as he put it, a work of love, and the Chinese people should learn that the sword which is killing them is really a sword of love. But what's more important is that the same Suzuki provided a wonderful argumentation on how an ordinary soldier should train himself psychologically to be able to kill without having traumas. And he gives a wonderful description of how this Buddhist attitude of overcoming your false self helps you. He said when you are still identified with your false self and think you are the substantial agent, then of course it's a traumatic. The only way to put it is "I have a sword and I stuck it into you." But he says if you go through Buddhist enlightenment then the whole perspective changes. You are just an observer, you see your sword moving in the air and you see the enemy somehow getting stuck on it and so on. It's depersonalized. He even went so far Suzuki as to say that for ordinary people who don't have time to do meditation, total military discipline is the easiest way to achieve enlightenment, in the sense of overcoming your false self. He says when you learn that when the officer says "shoot," you shoot without moment's reflection, you are above your false self and so on and so on. Now what's the conclusion here? Let me be very clear again to avoid a misunderstanding. I am not saying oh you see all this Japanese Buddhist stuff is just a mask of militarism. No. The truly difficult thing is to accept that like Père Joseph, that Suzuki's meditations are absolutely authentic. It's the real gem, the real stuff. But this doesn't prevent you from legitimizing we did or doing quite quite horrible things and so on and so on. So you see my point here. My point is that our truth is not the inner life, mystical stories we are telling or whatever. I'm even tempted to claim in a more radical psychoanalytic way that what we build as our inner life, stories we are telling ourselves, the narrative we construct to face what we are doing is always a zero-level ideology, a kind of a protective screen. So now let me go a step further. All these rules of discretion, unwritten rules, how do they function? Here we are in for some surprises considering for example censorship. Let me take the genre which you will maybe agree it's the most popular, I think your only competition. More people than Google more people probably look for hardcore porn, that's your only competitor. So if you had the misfortune of looking some of the hardcore porn, but especially full-feature films, did you where is censorship there? You will say but there is no censorship, my god, you can see everything, what can be more uncensored than penetration. There is, you know where? If you get a full feature one hour one hour and a half hardcore film, of course you cannot show just sex. There must be a minimal narrative which somehow justifies it, narratively I mean, no? And did you notice how absolutely ridiculously stupid and self-mocking these narratives always are? Like I remember one, it's embarrassing even now for me to think when I was young, you know the usual story, housewife is alone at home, a plumber comes, fixes a hole in the kitchen, then the housewife said, "But I have another hole to fix, can you all maybe..." I mean you are embarrassed. I claim this is not that they are so stupid. There is a precise function of censorship here which is: you cannot have it both ways. You can see it all, but the price you pay is to sabotage emotional involvement. In the sense of having an engaging story and so on and so on. No wonder that the French cinema director Catherine Breillat, "Romance," who tries to do precisely this, both emotionally engaging serious drama plus full sex, cannot somehow really penetrate the big market. Now you will tell me as many critics made fun of me, they told me but you are crazy, where do you live? This kind of plumber housewife stories they're years old. Then I asked them okay what's in today? And what they told me I think it's even worse, it's so-called gonzo sex, which is what? It's like embedded journalism, it's that the camera is part of the action in the sense that they don't even pretend that it's a story. They make fun of it, you know in gonzo sex you see the cameraman, the cameraman tells to the actors "move like that," a woman who is being screwed smiles to the camera "am I okay like this," they make fun. I think this is the high point of censorship. They're afraid of even a minimum of narrative. At this level we find rules of discretion and all that all that. Okay, so that I time is unfortunately there are many other things nonetheless. What's the basic constellation that I want to develop here? That whenever we are dealing with if you give me another minutes, what always fascinated me in ideology is the following thing. It's this tension which is always here between what is explicitly said and what is understood—you are supposed to know it but it's prohibited to publicly state it. This is the mystery of customs and it's crucial for our social coexistence. And it's here that ideology inscribes itself. What do I mean by this? Did you notice that whenever you want to penetrate a certain social circle, you have to know the rules from nation to company like Google to a class or whatever. But did you notice that there is always something mysterious with the rules? It's not enough to know the rules. You must know as it were meta-rules which tells us how to deal with the rules. That is to say, isn't it that always, I claim, there are rules which prohibit you something but if you follow them you are an idiot. Between the lines they call you to like do it silently and so on and so on. Like I claim, I don't know, in my own country, ex-socialist, I'm not saying that you are any better, but it was more open there and in all communist systems like how do you call it corruption and all that was like that. Corruption was prohibited officially which meant you just had to know and it was exactly codified. You know for example, I remember for a doctor to have a quick quick examination so that you didn't have to wait two three months, so much we at that point made the prices for bribery in German marks, it was German marks and so on. But again, so we have especially sexual prohibitions such like this: don't do it means if you are a man do it but discreetly and so on, no? So we have prohibitions which are effectively function as something to be violated. And even much more interesting, this is my favorite point. We have statements which allow you, even solicit you to use a freedom, to do, they give you freedom on condition that you don't choose it. They they are much more around than we think. For example, I remember when I was in Japan, friends told me that usually in their work contracts you have a guaranteed days per year holiday. But they told me it's considered very impolite, you are not basically allowed to use more than days. Then I asked them, then why don't you write days? They told me, and they were quite justified, you're a total idiot, you don't understand it. And they were right. In what sense? Because in this way by giving you an offer which then is supposed to be rejected, like I give you on condition that you use only this is the basic link. In this way a link is created between people through this politeness and debt. Don't we have many daily rituals like this? Like for example, I don't know how it is with you but in my country, let's say, which is not true, I am rich, one of you is poor, I invite you to lunch. Isn't it clear that I will pay? But even in this country, I think, you have this ritual that when the bill arrives, you have to insist just a little bit not too much that "I will pay, I will pay," and we both know it's a fake. But it's in a way a sincere fake. Or I don't know with apologies. With my maybe you know it, you can Google her is not, my theoretical enemy, personally good friend Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble" and so on. Once I behaved very rude towards her, in a friendly way but I used vulgar words like I wanted to ask her if a friend of hers is also a lesbian like her and I put it in, I'm ashamed, I said something like is she also a degenerate stinking bitch like you? Okay, it wasn't a nice way. So I wonder why she felt hurt, no? So afterwards I called her by phone and told her listen, Judith, my god, I don't know what it was, it's my extremely bad taste, I really apologized. She was very nice to and she told me, listen Slavoj, I know you, no problem, we are friends, let's be serious, no apology is needed. But did you get the paradox of this situation? She was able to say "no apology is needed" only after I did apologize. That's the normal logic. If I were not to apologize, she would have been offended. And I would have been probably a little bit offended if she were to say, good I deserve the apology, don't do this again. You you see the paradox. I made an offer, apology. She said it's not necessary. But in this way, that's how it functions normally. This level of ideology fascinated me. This where how should I put it, it's not only to put it in ultimate terms, it's not only that something is prohibited. It's that prohibition itself is prohibited to state to be stated publicly. That's the mystery why in so many of my books I deal extensively with Stalinism. Stalinism is a very mysterious phenomenon. On the one hand it's very ruthless regime, killing millions. On the other hand, it's extremely sensitive to maintaining appearances. What do I mean by this? Let let's imagine a crazy scene, my dream, at least retro: We are Moscow '37, Central Committee, I am Stalin. I give a speech, you applaud, we know, that's life, okay. Then one of you does a crazy thing. Stands up and says, "Comrade Stalin, I don't agree with you, I think you are totally wrong," blah blah blah. Okay, we know, no mystery here. If you would be the guy, next day the big question would be who has seen you last alive, no? Okay. But let's imagine something else. That after sorry to personalize it, somebody has to be blamed, that's life. After you, you stand up and tell to him, "Are you crazy? We don't talk to Comrade Stalin like this in our country, we don't attack him," and so on. My thesis is you would have disappeared even earlier. Sorry don't take it personally. That's like no, what I meant to say you know it wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to announce this prohibition publicly. It was a prohibition which worked only on condition that it's not publicly proclaimed or whatever. Now slowly to draw to the end if you allow me. At least I talk too much. At least you will learn why friends call me Fidel. Not for my communist leanings, but you know like Fidel Castro, you know, comrades like ten minutes and then seven hours, if not more. Okay. Did you see a good naive but I like it naively Hollywood film, the best of the Hollywood left, "They Live" by John Carpenter from With that wonderful totally naive paranoiac idea. It's a story of an ordinary guy who stumbles upon some mysterious sunglasses and when he puts them on, what he sees is what? What he sees is as it were the true ideological message. Like the guy walks along the street, sees a big publicity poster "Visit Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime," blah blah blah, honeymoon. Then he puts the glasses on, the wonderful color picture disappears, all he sees is the order: "Reproduce, obey, enjoy, don't think, consume," or something like this. Like almost a Marxist dream, you know, the glasses which tell you directly the social order. What's I think that what is maybe even more interesting than this functioning which is actual today. Because today as we all know, we are addressed not only by publicity but even by ideology at the level of not "do your duty," but "enjoy, have a full spiritual life" and so on and so on. You must have noticed this how to put it in very simple terms there were three big stages of publicity. The original one is let's call it naive utilitarian publicity. You are solicited to buy something because you need it and because of its qualities. Like you need a Land Rover. Okay, publicity says it's the best car, it's the strongest, greatest space, doesn't spend a lot of gasoline, whatever. Then we get this more consumerist publicity which is keeping up with the Joneses, status symbol. There they refer to what status will give to you owning a Land Rover. It's not you don't buy it because you really need it, you buy it to signal your social status. But that's not all. I claim today precisely after '68, we have a different mode of publicity which is neither utilitarian, these are good qualities, nor symbolic status, but this typical me-generation. They refer to your to your to your to your inner self, to your potentials. The idea is "buy Land Rover and you will realize your potentials, you will feel free, you will feel authentic" and so on. It's the as we all know, the experience. And unfortunately, although I'm very much for green topic, unfortunately I claim that even that even with organic food and so on, let's be frank, is mostly that. Why do you buy those rotten two times more expensive so-called organic apples than the normal chemically produced perfectly red or whatever apples? I don't think you really believe that that it's so much better for your health. I also don't think that it's a big like you don't boast around "you see I have these apples." I think basically it's to make you feel good, you know, "I'm not just a stupid consumer, earth is in danger, I do something, I'm more authentic" and so on and so on. So again, in these conditions, the ideological injunction is hidden. But often we have the opposite. And this I'm sorry I don't have time I will conclude don't be afraid who is the boss I don't know in three minutes. We have the opposite where what you see is the explicit order and then what you what you are able to see if you were to put these glasses on is as it were the bribery. Like what the ideological text offers you between the lines, the obscene enjoyment and so on. For example, let's imagine Nazi Germany. You look at it without glasses, the message is sacrifice yourself for your country, enough of decadence, of promiscuity, of Jewish immorality, do something for your country or to use your terms, "My country first" and all that stuff. What do you get when you put the glasses on? It says: "Do this, pretend to do this and we can have some fun, we can beat the Jews, we can blah blah blah." You know all the dirty obscene side. Wouldn't it be the same let's say in the American in some nice small nice ironically of course town in the American South in the 1920s-30s? The official message is Christian values and so on, our country. Then you put the glasses on and you see "do this and we in Ku Klux Klan you know on weekend evening we can have some fun, raping some black girls, lynching some guys" and so on and so on. That's what always fascinated me. How beneath the official message of sacrifice, duty for your nation or whatever, ideology always offers you how should I put it some bribery in this sense some obscene exercise. I don't have time to go into how this affects today's nationalism since I do have to slowly come to the end now. I would also say that another procedure of these two levels is let me be frank what were to happen if upon seeing this on TV advertisement or in a newspaper an ad saying you know this disgusting manipulation like in Starbucks coffee you know like you see a child starved or with twisted lips and then this message of "Are you aware with the cup of one cappuccino with the price of one cappuccino or whatever you can save this kid's life" and so on and so on. What's the message if you put the glasses on? If you ask me something like "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, contribute a little bit money and you can buy your calm conscience." I think it's the reason we do it is to make us feel good. You know we know people are starving there but F three points off. I did my duty, I sent my five dollars per month there, I can live. So basically we I claim we don't pay really to help them. We pay to feel well and especially to keep them at a distance there. A lot can be said here even about charity, why is charity such a big thing today. But let me conclude now very very briefly with Sarah Palin and generally what I can say as a naive external observer you know like Montesquieu who in order to analyze France wrote his famous Persian letters, no? I am now okay not an envoy from Ahmadinejad but let's say Persian view upon United States. A couple of things, I think that it's crucial not in any kind of deep psychological analysis, I claim it's already in the message. What is the true message of Republican country that's how party that's how I read it message to their voters? This "change, change, change." But then of course it's easy to say what Obama and his campaign repeating all the time. What change? Let's look at your politics. What you are basically saying is less taxes, less state power against Washington, stronger foreign policy and so on and so on. But wait a minute, Republican party is saying this for the last years. So where is the change? But I think that's the message. The message is, you know that French proverb: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." The message is let's do some changes which will guarantee that things basically stay the same, how should I put it. Or another much more ominous duality that I think. You know they play Republicans on this populist motive: look Sarah Palin ordinary girl from there, I mean like this giving voice to the rage of the ordinary people. We don't know what goes on Washington corrupted and so on and so on just. The message is what? It's I think it's a much more refined message between the lines. The true message would be to put it in complicated terms I think something like that. You are furious, we are also, but we all know very well that I mean you cannot run a country with this populist less money here more there. The message is I think we guarantee to you that how should I put it, let's pretend that we guarantee that discreetly we will have our experts who will do it and so on. They're basically the message is I think: "We're playing a game here, we will have backroom boys who will know how to do it." And it's the same as with for example you know when people tell me Bush. I claim okay Karl Rove interests me, this backroom boys who do the manipulation. So my question to McCain would have been okay I don't care if you are sincere or not just tell me who is your Karl Rove, how should I put it, no? Who will be the backroom boys who will be doing the job. Another thing where Democrats are paying, so again my point is that we shouldn't be naive to get the Republican message, and maybe with Democrats it's similar, I'm not entering into that. To get the Republican message you should definitely not take it literally and I'm not engaged here in any dark plot like what dark. No, it's in the message itself, it's it's redoubled by another much more pragmatic message and so on and so on. Okay I will not go into details now just another thing where I feel Republicans succeeded. Did you notice that Sarah Palin, there is something new about her from what I can judge. When till now we had feminine women politicians who really made it, they and I am now using now not using the terms in a precise way but very vaguely metaphorically. They were phallic women. They tried to imitate and be stronger than men you know like Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and so on. Here we have something I think maybe new. Here we have a woman who can be sarcastic, aggressive, even if I may use this horrible term which is not quite appropriate in the strict psychoanalytic sense, maybe even castrating, castrating, no, in the sense of revealing your fake, your impotence, without in any way renouncing femininity. Sarah Palin does not play the game of "as a woman I am more man than men." No, she even in a magical way unites three dimensions of femininity. What's her image? A: Mother, B: Teacher, it's clear that with these glasses and her hair and C: it's obvious sex object, because that's the dream, you know, prim teacher and so on but wait a minute after she in the evening puts the glasses off and unwraps her hair what happens and so on. And she combines this in a masterful way with this sarcastic assertiveness, like I think it was really masterful the way it functioned not at the level of argument but as a discursive strategy, that making fun of community organizer and so on and so on. It was feminine sarcasm, feminine making fun at at at at masculine phallic authority at its best. And I don't think Democrats had found a way how truly to answer this because okay now this is cheap psychology I know but things unfortunately function at this level. It brings I think they gently subtly evoke something which I'm afraid ashamed to say publicly but it's clear. The way Barack Obama is skinny and big ears and so on, there is something of a slightly emaciated weak guy in him. And I think all this is subtly referring to that. But again this is a problem for feminists I claim today how and that's the sad thing because the democratic left is so much caught in this politically correct feminism and so on and so on they didn't even notice that what they were dreaming of, to have a woman who wants power but not by playing a victim, not by renouncing her femininity, but by violently asserting it, that as it were Republicans beat Democrats at their own terrain. There it's almost paradox it's a very interesting paradox. You know it would be wonderful to go into this logic of how there are certain things which the left should have done but only a conservative can do it. Starting with you know only Nixon could have recognized China and so on all that stuff all that stuff. So again of course this all is a fake, fake in the sense that no I don't believe she really is all that, like yesterday I also saw her interview where she was talking about that war with Russia problem and there you could have seen for a brief moment, I mean the girl doesn't know what she's talking about okay. But it doesn't it doesn't matter we should not underestimate this again is ideology you know. This is where maybe Democrats are a little bit too naive when they repeat this mantra, let's talk about real causes and real issues and so on and so on. So you should see not again my point is not a cheap psychoanalysis in the sense of let's look into some deep Oedipal complex, but just let's look into the message which is to use old McLuhan phrase which is embodied in the embodied in the in the in the in the in the in the enunciation, in the statement itself. You never say only what you say. The mystery is that what you say, the way you say, the style and so on can give a different message can undermine that message and so on. That's for example for me the problem with so-called religious fundamentalists. Not that they are too fundamentalist. They are fake, they are not fundamentalist at all. My most beloved one for example beloved in the sense of woah when I see him you remember the good old Jimmy Swaggart? The southern who was I I had the misfortune of seeing one of his shows. My god the official guy's message is you know Christianity repent for your sins against ego hedonism. But his show is one big ego trip. The way he delivers his message undermines the message. But it doesn't necessarily undermine it. It can also sustain it. I was too long I know. Thanks very much for your patience. I'm just sad we don't have more time. Thanks very much. Is this a limit? Do we still have time for democracy or no democracy? Okay. Um yeah we have the good fortune of having the room for an extra half hour so I think we can take two or three questions. So please use the mics for the questions. Thanks for coming today and speaking to us. Um I have a question, I guess from from my perspective I grew up in America. I went through public school system in America and I really didn't get any background or even introduction to philosophy until I went to college and um I'm I don't know if it's similar in Europe but I'm just kind of curious why you think there are certain subjects that are stressed more to younger individuals as they're growing up and um you know something like philosophy that which seems very important to me um isn't and what do you think if anything can be done about that. Uh oh my god this is a big question because my first reaction is that you know that in the last years unfortunately because I think this is a good thing in Europe, the key I think is one good thing about Europe. You in United States you have elementary school how much is it nine years and then you have just this college two years or whatever and you go to university. But in Europe these two years expand into four, we call it lycée, gymnasium, high school. High school is not just a short passage. High school is where you get serious education. All sciences are covered and there we get philosophy. Unfortunately Europe is now becoming more like United States. But the reason I'm an optimist here is that I think that what when I was introduced it was kindly pointed out, I really think that now we need more and more philosophy in the sense of dealing with problems which if you want it or not are philosophical even to solve problems that everybody of us confronts. For example problems like abortion, brain, biogenetics and so on. My god to get an opinion on that, it's not just an abstract question of ethics. You have implicitly to decide are we free beings? Are we free at all? Are we not and here again the analysis that I made through that glasses brings out some very funny results. For example I was always perplexed by this standard Catholic answer which is don't mess biogenetically with brain because if you do it you diminish man to a biological animal but we have immortal soul blah blah blah. My god my problem here was wait a minute if you believe we have an immortal soul what's then problem with messing with brain? I mean I cannot touch the soul. So I think the true message in between lines of this Catholic anti- anti- biogenetic brain sciences experiments is a different one. It's let's it's better not to know some things. Let's let's avoid knowing that because knowing too much there may deprive us of our dignity, may diminish our freedom and so on and so on. So again it's not only this it's other where I think effectively that we are at such a crucial moment now, truly not in the religious sense of a catastrophe, but in a sense apocalyptic moment, that we have to make a decisions which are much more radical. Um, thank you for coming today. Um I had a question about how you normally respond to claims that Marxism and radicalism is dead. Oh I mean no mystery here and the mystery is rather this one to put I will be very short. Why do I consider myself still some kind of a Marxist without any illusions and so on? Look the question we have today is the only serious question is this one. Is Fukuyama Francis right or not? Even most of today's left isn't it they are Fukuyamaists as it were. They basically accept liberal democracy some kind of capitalism as if not the best at least the least worst the least bad system. And the idea is just you know when I was young we were saying we want socialism with a human face. What even the left today basically offers is global capitalism with a human face. Make it a little bit better, as Bill Gates would have put it, "creative capitalism." You can have your cake and eat it, you can have profit and help the poor whatever make it more. So my question is is this all? Is this our
I hope this works. Yeah. Thanks very much, I'm really glad of being here, you know why, because let me begin with a funny association which came on my mind now. You know of what, from my communist youth, this scene here now reminds me. Under communism when I was young, you not only had to work in factories and so on, but you had so-called hours of ideological education, you know, like exactly like now, like during lunchtime, workers had to listen to some boring short talk which ruined your lunch about, I don't know, great results of our construction of socialism and so on and so on. I feel like back in old times, we're sorry for ruining your lunch, so in contrast to the kindness of the good guy who introduced me, I would say, please, don't let me terrorize you, if your mind is with your computer, go on, go on, I would feel I would feel better about it. What I was thinking about what to do here. Of course, I don't want to give the résumé of a book. I never was able to be so arrogant like I know some guys, poets and so on, who treat themselves as classics, you know, like they open their own book, read a paragraph and say, let's now look at what the thinker wanted to say. No. I will, the proper dialectical way to approach this book is I think to do the opposite of the book, to focus not on violence but on what violence reacts to usually, on the everyday texture of our lives, everyday ideology. Now, your first reaction probably would have been here, but aren't we beyond ideology? I mean, am I an old Marxist from, you know, like the species which basically died around who still believed in big causes and so on? No. I will try to convince you that ideology is, of course, not in the sense of big world-view vision to impose on society, but ideology in the sense of whole complicated network of ethical, political, social, whatever prejudices which, even if we are unaware of them, still determines the way we function, is still something which structures our lives. What is ideology? Maybe some of you know this but I cannot resist repeating this story because it's it works perfectly, namely do you remember, you must, my god, it was endlessly reproduced on Google, that unfortunate interview of Donald Rumsfeld some five years ago, just before the Gulf War, when he wanted to explain why, where is the danger of Saddam, and he used his famous parallel, he basically developed a whole theory of knowledge, claiming that there are, you remember, known knowns, things we know that we know, then like we know that Saddam is the boss of Iraq, then he went on, there are known unknowns, there are things we know that we don't know, like for example, I don't know, I know there are some cars in front of this building, but I don't know how many they are, but I know that I don't know this, no? Then he went on, there are unknown unknowns, in the sense of things that we even don't know that we don't know them. Like his idea was we, the known unknown was how many and where Saddam has his weapons of mass destruction, like we don't know but we know that we don't know. But then his paranoia was, what if there are unknown unknowns, some secret weapons that we don't even know what they are. Get it? They're more radically unknown. Now, my claim is that okay, that was his idea. My claim, my joke here is that if you have a little bit of a sense for structural analysis thinking, you see immediately that something is missing here, a fourth term. Known knowns, we know what we know. Known unknowns, we know what we don't know. Or then unknown unknowns, the totally other, like we don't even know what we don't know. Something is missing, the most interesting category. Not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things we know that we don't know, but things we don't know that we know. That's the unconscious, that's ideology. All those silent prejudices which determine how we act, how we react, and we, in a way, they are so much the texture into which we are embedded that we literally don't even know that we know them. And I think this was why you were in such a trouble in Iraq. Not so much that you there was some mystery that you didn't know. The US Army and administration basically didn't know what they already know. All the unconscious political military prejudices, as it were, which determined their activity. Which is why, I don't know if some of you know it or not, to give you another example, I'm sorry of repeating myself, I hope you are a new public here, the analysis because of which and again it was mocked endlessly in Google, it brought me some negative fame, but I still think it works perfectly, of this unknown knowns is the structure of toilets in our Western civilization. Is ideology at its purest. Now you will say, am I crazy, where is ideology? Did you notice something? I simplify the analysis, but I know I simplify it, but basically it holds, I claim. What do we get? We have in we get three basic types of toilets. The French one, where sorry for relative vulgarity, where the hole is in the back of the toilet so that shit falls directly into the hole and disappears, I mean not the hole I mean not just the bowl but the hole where then you know get it. Then we have the German type where the hole where the shit disappears is in front, so that the shit is somehow displayed there. You know Germans have all this ritual of, I'm not kidding, around of toilets in Germany are still structured like this. That the shit is displayed there and they have this old ritual, every morning you should smell your shit, check it for traces of I mean Erica Jong in her "Fear of Flying" makes a wonderful comment, she writes a nation which had such toilets, they no wonder they they they imagined Auschwitz and all the horrors. Okay, then you have the Anglo-Saxon, American and so on toilets, which are mix, it's not doesn't matter where the hole is because it's all full of water, so that the shit floats freely there. Now I was always intrigued by this. I asked my friends architects in one of the other country, why this? And they try to give me utilitarian answers, like Germans said isn't it natural to inspect your shit? French said shit smells, let's get rid of it. Americans and Englishmen said let's be practical, it should float in water so that it doesn't smell and so on. But obviously it's not purely a utilitarian level. Then I asked myself a simple question, where did I already hear this trinity, the let's call it a French, German, English Anglo-Saxon civilization? Do you know that already years ago, there was around Hegel's and French Revolution time, there was this popular idea among philosophers and so on about so-called European Trinity, claiming that the spiritual backbone or fundamental structure of Europe is composed of these three nations, each of the three stands for a certain political principle and for a certain sphere of society. Germans are politically conservative and sphere of society privileged there is Germans are the nation of poets, thinkers and so on, culture. France is revolutionary and the preferred political sphere is politics. Anglo-Saxon universe is more how do you call it, liberal centrist utilitarian, the political sphere is economy. And then I got it. That's it. That's the key. French revolutionary, shit disappear, liquidate it as soon as possible. You Anglo-Saxon more pragmatic, float it there, let's see how it's utilitarian approach. Germans metaphysical and poets reflect it and so on, you know, conserve it. And then I spoke with architects and they admitted it, crazy as it may sound. That's the only way to ultimately account for a totally vulgar object like the concrete structure of a toilet. You see now my point, which is slightly more serious not only a tasteless joke, that even to account for the most elementary vulgar object, how it is structured, the whole I wouldn't say world-view but basic attitude towards civilization and so on, it's not just an utilitarian object. This is what interests me, this type of ideology. Ideology which is all this set of cultural and so on prejudices which structure our daily lives. And you don't even have to be fully aware of them, especially today in our so-called cynical era where very interesting things are happening. How do we deal with ideology today? Maybe you know it, it's also endlessly in Google, the wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr, you know, Copenhagen, the quantum physics guy. The story is a wonderful one. The story is that once a friend visited him in Denmark in the countryside where he had a house for go there to weekend whatever, and the friend, also a scientist, saw above the entrance a horseshoe. I don't know I don't know how it is here but in Europe, horseshoe above the entrance door is a sign of is a superstitious item destined to prevent evil spirits to enter the house. So the shocked friend asked him, wait a minute, are you crazy? Why do you have this here? Do you believe in it? Aren't you a scientist? Niels Bohr answered him, my god, I'm not crazy, I'm a scientist, of course I don't believe in this shit. Then the friend asked him, if you don't believe in it, why do you have it there? Ah, he gave wonderful answer, Niels Bohr, he said, of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's how ideology functions today. We are we are all cynics, who believes what and so on, but we somehow rely on it that it will work even if you don't believe in it, how should I put it. We in this sense we live in a cynical era, not cynical in the usual sense, bad people manipulating, but in much more refined way. We practice beliefs without believing in them as it were. And this is what fascinates me in ideology. Especially today. The old image of ideology was you have some explicit beliefs and then privately you let it know oh I'm not crazy as that and so on. Today it's the opposite. What was once private is now public and vice versa. Privately we like to play that we are not crazy to believe in some stupid ideology, we just what is ideology today explicitly? I think some kind of a vaguely Dalai Lama spiritualized hedonism, no? It's no longer do this sacrifice yourself in spite of what Republicans are saying. They just react to it. Basically ideology today is some kind of a vague injunction "be truly yourself," "realize your potentials" or whatever and so on and so on. But I claim we believe much more than we than we appear to believe. We obey or whichever way you put it, much more than we much more than we appear to do. And this again is what all this tension between let me call it explicit beliefs or absence of beliefs and this cobweb of, to put it in the terms of your great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, of the unknown knowns, this is the crucial dimension. At the end I hope I will have time I would really like to mention briefly even the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon, I think is you cannot understand it without not toilets, let's forget that but it will because sorry okay let me go a little bit further here. Did you notice another extremely interesting phenomenon about which I've written and which points in the same direction? What my friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, you can Google him to be tasteless, you know, I will endlessly repeat this joke being here, at least on the German Google you find him, he proposed a wonderful category of inter-passivity. The idea is that it's not only that we like in what we philosophers call cunning of reason, that we like manipulate others so you sit back, others are active for you. Robert Pfaller drew attention to a much more mysterious phenomenon, opposite one, of what he calls inter-passivity where we transpose onto the other our passive reaction. Others are passive for you. The most elementary phenomenon and I love it, this I think this is arguably the greatest contribution of American civilization to world cultural heritage, canned laughter on TV, you know, when the just think about it, it's a much more mysterious phenomenon than it may appear. It's not, as some wrong Pavlovian psychologists think, the function of you hearing the laughter there as part of the soundtrack is not automatically to trigger your laughter. No, it works so that literally the TV set laughs for you. At least that's how it works with me. I look it's really the same thing as you remember those I always like them in Tibetan Buddhism those praying wheels or mills and so on where you write down a prayer, you turn it around or even better, you let the wind turn it around and then you can masturbate whatever, it doesn't matter, objectively you pray. You pray through it here it's the same, it laughs for you. My that's my experience, you know, in the evening you arrive home that tired, you put on some stupid show with canned laughter on TV, Cheers, Friends, whatever, and you don't even laugh. The mystery is, admit it, at the end of the show, you feel relieved as if you have laughed. That's the mystery. How it works. And my thesis back to Donald Rumsfeld topic is that it's the same with beliefs. It's not so much that we believe. We need as it were another one to believe for us. From this is how our rituals function. For example, take Santa Claus. I mean, of course nobody believes. I mean parents, if you ask parents they said no, we are not crazy, we pretend to believe not to disappoint our children. But I can guarantee you if you ask then the children, they said no, I'm not crazy, we pretend to believe not to disappoint our parents and to get presents and so on. You got the point. Nobody has to believe. Only if every individual actually existing presupposes another agency to believe then belief functions. The whole system of belief functions. The first to use this structure consciously politically, it's you know the old Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who when asked, do you believe in God? Of course she didn't, I mean that's the irony, Israel who makes his claim on the West Bank like God gave us this land is, and I like it for that, a word to misunderstand, is the most atheist country in the world. According to statistic that I read there, about between and of the Israeli Jews don't believe in God. And the irony is that so Golda Meir was asked this. Her answer was no, I don't believe in no, she didn't answer, she just answered, I believe in Jewish people and Jewish people believe in God. But the point is that there are no individual Jews who have really to believe in God. Everybody just has to evoke this spectre. And so the most terrifying experience is when you learn not that you don't believe, but that the other, which was in a way the guarantor of your belief doesn't believe. If you know a little bit of literature, that's the so shocking, you remember "Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton. At the end the guy, okay I speak in cinema terms, Daniel Day-Lewis, no? Is told by his son that Winona Ryder, his dead wife, knew all the time about his affair with Michelle Pfeiffer, but pretended not to know. When he learns it, everything is ruined. That's I think our much more fundamental need than directly to believe. To have another one as protected innocence. So let me go on a little bit here after we return to ideology, to explicit ideology. How do these prejudices function? They are something much more complex than it may appear. Recently, three months two ago, I gave a talk at Harvard. At the end of the talk, we were invited, you know this is the most boring part of academic meetings, where we had an official dinner where you know people who are really bored by each other you have to pretend and so on. So the older professor who was coordinating dinner, of us, said, okay since we don't know each other well, please can everybody here present him or herself? State your name position, state your work, field of interest, and your sexual orientation. Now, this shocked me a little bit. For my European sensitivity like, my idea was almost, you know, like what's none of your business, no? But now I don't want to play the vulgar anti-America, American bashing, because you know this bar of discretion is just different in Europe. At immediately I remembered how a friend of mine visited me not the previous summer in Europe, and we went to the Slovene coast where Slovenia, you know, we were already under communism, sexually, culturally a very liberal country. So as in most of Europe in the last years, most of the women were simply with naked breasts, no bra on the beach. It's considered totally normal, nobody even notices it. Here I'm told it's not so normal, like I was told you can even get arrested or what. And typically that friend of mine, leftist, liberal, whatever you want, felt oppressed, almost harassed, aggressed, totally traumatized. So you see here we have a nice difference. And again, I think that the formula which is closer to me, I don't think discretion means oppression is the proper attitude is the one, maybe you know the anecdote, Gore Vidal, your writer, gave the best formula of discretion. He was his a well-known bisexual. He was asked in a TV interview some years ago, was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman? You know what was his answer? "I was too polite to ask." That attitude is for me the proper one. Let me go on a little bit to show to show why I am hated in some not only rightists but even more maybe leftist circles. Because I think that today when different cultures are thrown together in what we call globalization, I think we should break the spell of this liberal multiculturalist injunction, understand each other. We should understand more each other and so on. First it's impossible to fully understand each other because I claim we don't even understand ourselves like, you know, it's not that we are separate entities who fully know what we are and then we should open. No liberals always like this endless task oh there is still something that eludes me in that culture and so on. I think quite the opposite. I don't want to understand all other stupid cultures, I can be stupid for them. I think we need precisely a code of discretion. We need a code which tells us how to politely, politely, sincerely politely ignore each other. I don't want if I live in a building here in a big condominium where for example where you know all races are there, I don't want to understand everybody. I want to be treated nicely in a non-racist way by others and I want to treat others like that. I think this sense of proper distance is very important. And I don't think we miss, now I go even a step further, I don't think we miss anything deep in this way. Let's say do I really understand you? Well, my first as a psychoanalyst counter-question would be, but do you really understand yourself? I claim that another postmodern multicultural myth is that we are the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. That that's the moment of truth. Which is why the great liberal motto articulated among others by philosopher the philosopher Richard Rorty, the basic freedom is the freedom to tell your story, your side of the story. The best expression of this attitude is the well-known motto which sounds very deep, I hate it, I think it's wrong. The motto of tolerance which is: "An enemy is somebody whose story we didn't yet hear." It sounds so deep, you know, like if you are just a foreigner for me, I see you as evil, impenetrable enemy, then I hear all your boring details which I don't care about, your dreams, your fears, and all of a sudden I see, oh you are a human person like me and so on and so on. This is getting as boring as, and this is ideology at its purest, as Batman and all these movies. Did you notice how in the last installments of these heroic sagas, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, what everybody emphasizes is how they're no longer flat cartoon heroes. We see also the anxieties, fears of that as if this makes them somehow deeper these films. No this is ideology at its purest. Why? Now it sounds very nice this. And even in Europe we can be worse in political correctness than you, we practice so-called living libraries. Maybe it's going on, that is to say, in some countries, I know about Iceland, Ísland up there, Reykjavík, and United Kingdom where some local communities do again this living libraries, which means the authorities pay members of sexual, religious, race minorities just to visit the majority families, spend an evening with them and tell them about their lives, their fears and so on. The idea is precisely this one, when you get to know a guy his inner life, you no longer can you no longer can be your enemy. Of course at a certain level this works and I'm fully for it. But there is a limit. The limit is let's just do something. Let's replace this generality with a concrete name. Would you also say, oh my god, Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his side of the story or whatever? No Hitler really and others really was an enemy and he was telling him a story about himself and that story was a lie. And that's my point. That's an very interesting and tragic, difficult to accept insight of psychoanalysis. It's basically what I ironically refer to as the X-Files insight: "Truth is out there." Truth is not in your story in what you are telling yourself about yourself. What you are telling yourself about yourself is basically a lie that you construct in order to cope with usually some horrible dimension and so on and so on. It's wonderful to look at all these worst nations, worst in the sense of maybe in an unjust way identified with horrible crimes and to look what stories they were telling ourselves to justify their position, attitude. So this is again a very radical conclusion. Let me give you two extreme examples here. One so that I will be balanced. One from Europe, one from Far East. Europe: If there is a book that you should read I think it's a very interesting book, shattering, it's Aldous Huxley, yes the guy of "The Brave New World," who wrote a book called "L'Éminence Grise," "The Grey Eminence." It's a biography of a guy, a priest called Père Joseph, Father Joseph, who was basically the State Department foreign ministry guy of Cardinal Richelieu during the Thirty Years' War in Europe. Now this guy in his politics was monster, the worst you can imagine. He saved France by ruining Europe, in what sense? He in this Thirty Years' War between Protestant and Catholics, he concluded a pact with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Habsburg Austria, to prevent unification of Germany. With ruthless torturing, poisoning, whatever you want. And so even if we play this stupid game of who was ultimately responsible for the rise of Hitler, this guy's may be the best candidate because we all know that the what laid the foundation for for Nazism, the ultimate cause was the so-called delay of Germany in becoming a united nation-state, and this delay was decided again at the end of the Thirty Years' War. So a bad guy. Now what intrigued Huxley is that every evening after finishing his dirty job of poisoning, plotting and so on, this same guy, Père Joseph, wrote wonderful mystical meditations. He had regular correspondence with some feminine convent and exchanged mystical notes with sisters there. The mystery is that no way to avoid the conclusion: this is gold, authentic stuff. You know you cannot dismiss it as oh the guy was cheating and so on and so on. Sorry it's at the level of who would be the top guys, Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, it's the real thing. So that's what bothered so terribly Huxley, how is it possible to have both in the same person. A ruthless manipulator and an undoubtedly authentic mystic with the deepest imaginable spiritual experience. Huxley's answer was to blame Christianity in the sense of there is something in our Christian fixation on the way of the cross, Christ suffering which opens up a door for this kind of political manipulation, so he turned towards the East. Ah is there any better there? My favorite book on that topic, I advise you to read it: Brian Victoria, himself a Zen Buddhist priest, "Zen at War." This guy did something very simple. He simply made a research into how did the Japanese Zen community relate to the Japanese military expansion, invasion of China and all that stuff in the late throughout the 30s and early 40s. And the discovery was shocking. Except with the exception of literally three four five dissidents, they not only fully supported it, they even provided justification for it. The true horror is to read the works from that time of a guy who some of you and I see there are who are like me unfortunately old enough to be around, who was very popular here in hippie times, 60s early 70s, D.T. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. You know the big model of introducing Buddhist tradition here. Well in the 30s he was writing slightly different texts. For example he wrote a text where he celebrated Chinese Japanese invasion of China as, as he put it, a work of love, and the Chinese people should learn that the sword which is killing them is really a sword of love. But what's more important is that the same Suzuki provided a wonderful argumentation on how an ordinary soldier should train himself psychologically to be able to kill without having traumas. And he gives a wonderful description of how this Buddhist attitude of overcoming your false self helps you. He said when you are still identified with your false self and think you are the substantial agent, then of course it's a traumatic. The only way to put it is "I have a sword and I stuck it into you." But he says if you go through Buddhist enlightenment then the whole perspective changes. You are just an observer, you see your sword moving in the air and you see the enemy somehow getting stuck on it and so on. It's depersonalized. He even went so far Suzuki as to say that for ordinary people who don't have time to do meditation, total military discipline is the easiest way to achieve enlightenment, in the sense of overcoming your false self. He says when you learn that when the officer says "shoot," you shoot without moment's reflection, you are above your false self and so on and so on. Now what's the conclusion here? Let me be very clear again to avoid a misunderstanding. I am not saying oh you see all this Japanese Buddhist stuff is just a mask of militarism. No. The truly difficult thing is to accept that like Père Joseph, that Suzuki's meditations are absolutely authentic. It's the real gem, the real stuff. But this doesn't prevent you from legitimizing we did or doing quite quite horrible things and so on and so on. So you see my point here. My point is that our truth is not the inner life, mystical stories we are telling or whatever. I'm even tempted to claim in a more radical psychoanalytic way that what we build as our inner life, stories we are telling ourselves, the narrative we construct to face what we are doing is always a zero-level ideology, a kind of a protective screen. So now let me go a step further. All these rules of discretion, unwritten rules, how do they function? Here we are in for some surprises considering for example censorship. Let me take the genre which you will maybe agree it's the most popular, I think your only competition. More people than Google more people probably look for hardcore porn, that's your only competitor. So if you had the misfortune of looking some of the hardcore porn, but especially full-feature films, did you where is censorship there? You will say but there is no censorship, my god, you can see everything, what can be more uncensored than penetration. There is, you know where? If you get a full feature one hour one hour and a half hardcore film, of course you cannot show just sex. There must be a minimal narrative which somehow justifies it, narratively I mean, no? And did you notice how absolutely ridiculously stupid and self-mocking these narratives always are? Like I remember one, it's embarrassing even now for me to think when I was young, you know the usual story, housewife is alone at home, a plumber comes, fixes a hole in the kitchen, then the housewife said, "But I have another hole to fix, can you all maybe..." I mean you are embarrassed. I claim this is not that they are so stupid. There is a precise function of censorship here which is: you cannot have it both ways. You can see it all, but the price you pay is to sabotage emotional involvement. In the sense of having an engaging story and so on and so on. No wonder that the French cinema director Catherine Breillat, "Romance," who tries to do precisely this, both emotionally engaging serious drama plus full sex, cannot somehow really penetrate the big market. Now you will tell me as many critics made fun of me, they told me but you are crazy, where do you live? This kind of plumber housewife stories they're years old. Then I asked them okay what's in today? And what they told me I think it's even worse, it's so-called gonzo sex, which is what? It's like embedded journalism, it's that the camera is part of the action in the sense that they don't even pretend that it's a story. They make fun of it, you know in gonzo sex you see the cameraman, the cameraman tells to the actors "move like that," a woman who is being screwed smiles to the camera "am I okay like this," they make fun. I think this is the high point of censorship. They're afraid of even a minimum of narrative. At this level we find rules of discretion and all that all that. Okay, so that I time is unfortunately there are many other things nonetheless. What's the basic constellation that I want to develop here? That whenever we are dealing with if you give me another minutes, what always fascinated me in ideology is the following thing. It's this tension which is always here between what is explicitly said and what is understood—you are supposed to know it but it's prohibited to publicly state it. This is the mystery of customs and it's crucial for our social coexistence. And it's here that ideology inscribes itself. What do I mean by this? Did you notice that whenever you want to penetrate a certain social circle, you have to know the rules from nation to company like Google to a class or whatever. But did you notice that there is always something mysterious with the rules? It's not enough to know the rules. You must know as it were meta-rules which tells us how to deal with the rules. That is to say, isn't it that always, I claim, there are rules which prohibit you something but if you follow them you are an idiot. Between the lines they call you to like do it silently and so on and so on. Like I claim, I don't know, in my own country, ex-socialist, I'm not saying that you are any better, but it was more open there and in all communist systems like how do you call it corruption and all that was like that. Corruption was prohibited officially which meant you just had to know and it was exactly codified. You know for example, I remember for a doctor to have a quick quick examination so that you didn't have to wait two three months, so much we at that point made the prices for bribery in German marks, it was German marks and so on. But again, so we have especially sexual prohibitions such like this: don't do it means if you are a man do it but discreetly and so on, no? So we have prohibitions which are effectively function as something to be violated. And even much more interesting, this is my favorite point. We have statements which allow you, even solicit you to use a freedom, to do, they give you freedom on condition that you don't choose it. They they are much more around than we think. For example, I remember when I was in Japan, friends told me that usually in their work contracts you have a guaranteed days per year holiday. But they told me it's considered very impolite, you are not basically allowed to use more than days. Then I asked them, then why don't you write days? They told me, and they were quite justified, you're a total idiot, you don't understand it. And they were right. In what sense? Because in this way by giving you an offer which then is supposed to be rejected, like I give you on condition that you use only this is the basic link. In this way a link is created between people through this politeness and debt. Don't we have many daily rituals like this? Like for example, I don't know how it is with you but in my country, let's say, which is not true, I am rich, one of you is poor, I invite you to lunch. Isn't it clear that I will pay? But even in this country, I think, you have this ritual that when the bill arrives, you have to insist just a little bit not too much that "I will pay, I will pay," and we both know it's a fake. But it's in a way a sincere fake. Or I don't know with apologies. With my maybe you know it, you can Google her is not, my theoretical enemy, personally good friend Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble" and so on. Once I behaved very rude towards her, in a friendly way but I used vulgar words like I wanted to ask her if a friend of hers is also a lesbian like her and I put it in, I'm ashamed, I said something like is she also a degenerate stinking bitch like you? Okay, it wasn't a nice way. So I wonder why she felt hurt, no? So afterwards I called her by phone and told her listen, Judith, my god, I don't know what it was, it's my extremely bad taste, I really apologized. She was very nice to and she told me, listen Slavoj, I know you, no problem, we are friends, let's be serious, no apology is needed. But did you get the paradox of this situation? She was able to say "no apology is needed" only after I did apologize. That's the normal logic. If I were not to apologize, she would have been offended. And I would have been probably a little bit offended if she were to say, good I deserve the apology, don't do this again. You you see the paradox. I made an offer, apology. She said it's not necessary. But in this way, that's how it functions normally. This level of ideology fascinated me. This where how should I put it, it's not only to put it in ultimate terms, it's not only that something is prohibited. It's that prohibition itself is prohibited to state to be stated publicly. That's the mystery why in so many of my books I deal extensively with Stalinism. Stalinism is a very mysterious phenomenon. On the one hand it's very ruthless regime, killing millions. On the other hand, it's extremely sensitive to maintaining appearances. What do I mean by this? Let let's imagine a crazy scene, my dream, at least retro: We are Moscow '37, Central Committee, I am Stalin. I give a speech, you applaud, we know, that's life, okay. Then one of you does a crazy thing. Stands up and says, "Comrade Stalin, I don't agree with you, I think you are totally wrong," blah blah blah. Okay, we know, no mystery here. If you would be the guy, next day the big question would be who has seen you last alive, no? Okay. But let's imagine something else. That after sorry to personalize it, somebody has to be blamed, that's life. After you, you stand up and tell to him, "Are you crazy? We don't talk to Comrade Stalin like this in our country, we don't attack him," and so on. My thesis is you would have disappeared even earlier. Sorry don't take it personally. That's like no, what I meant to say you know it wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was even more prohibited to announce this prohibition publicly. It was a prohibition which worked only on condition that it's not publicly proclaimed or whatever. Now slowly to draw to the end if you allow me. At least I talk too much. At least you will learn why friends call me Fidel. Not for my communist leanings, but you know like Fidel Castro, you know, comrades like ten minutes and then seven hours, if not more. Okay. Did you see a good naive but I like it naively Hollywood film, the best of the Hollywood left, "They Live" by John Carpenter from With that wonderful totally naive paranoiac idea. It's a story of an ordinary guy who stumbles upon some mysterious sunglasses and when he puts them on, what he sees is what? What he sees is as it were the true ideological message. Like the guy walks along the street, sees a big publicity poster "Visit Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime," blah blah blah, honeymoon. Then he puts the glasses on, the wonderful color picture disappears, all he sees is the order: "Reproduce, obey, enjoy, don't think, consume," or something like this. Like almost a Marxist dream, you know, the glasses which tell you directly the social order. What's I think that what is maybe even more interesting than this functioning which is actual today. Because today as we all know, we are addressed not only by publicity but even by ideology at the level of not "do your duty," but "enjoy, have a full spiritual life" and so on and so on. You must have noticed this how to put it in very simple terms there were three big stages of publicity. The original one is let's call it naive utilitarian publicity. You are solicited to buy something because you need it and because of its qualities. Like you need a Land Rover. Okay, publicity says it's the best car, it's the strongest, greatest space, doesn't spend a lot of gasoline, whatever. Then we get this more consumerist publicity which is keeping up with the Joneses, status symbol. There they refer to what status will give to you owning a Land Rover. It's not you don't buy it because you really need it, you buy it to signal your social status. But that's not all. I claim today precisely after '68, we have a different mode of publicity which is neither utilitarian, these are good qualities, nor symbolic status, but this typical me-generation. They refer to your to your to your to your inner self, to your potentials. The idea is "buy Land Rover and you will realize your potentials, you will feel free, you will feel authentic" and so on. It's the as we all know, the experience. And unfortunately, although I'm very much for green topic, unfortunately I claim that even that even with organic food and so on, let's be frank, is mostly that. Why do you buy those rotten two times more expensive so-called organic apples than the normal chemically produced perfectly red or whatever apples? I don't think you really believe that that it's so much better for your health. I also don't think that it's a big like you don't boast around "you see I have these apples." I think basically it's to make you feel good, you know, "I'm not just a stupid consumer, earth is in danger, I do something, I'm more authentic" and so on and so on. So again, in these conditions, the ideological injunction is hidden. But often we have the opposite. And this I'm sorry I don't have time I will conclude don't be afraid who is the boss I don't know in three minutes. We have the opposite where what you see is the explicit order and then what you what you are able to see if you were to put these glasses on is as it were the bribery. Like what the ideological text offers you between the lines, the obscene enjoyment and so on. For example, let's imagine Nazi Germany. You look at it without glasses, the message is sacrifice yourself for your country, enough of decadence, of promiscuity, of Jewish immorality, do something for your country or to use your terms, "My country first" and all that stuff. What do you get when you put the glasses on? It says: "Do this, pretend to do this and we can have some fun, we can beat the Jews, we can blah blah blah." You know all the dirty obscene side. Wouldn't it be the same let's say in the American in some nice small nice ironically of course town in the American South in the 1920s-30s? The official message is Christian values and so on, our country. Then you put the glasses on and you see "do this and we in Ku Klux Klan you know on weekend evening we can have some fun, raping some black girls, lynching some guys" and so on and so on. That's what always fascinated me. How beneath the official message of sacrifice, duty for your nation or whatever, ideology always offers you how should I put it some bribery in this sense some obscene exercise. I don't have time to go into how this affects today's nationalism since I do have to slowly come to the end now. I would also say that another procedure of these two levels is let me be frank what were to happen if upon seeing this on TV advertisement or in a newspaper an ad saying you know this disgusting manipulation like in Starbucks coffee you know like you see a child starved or with twisted lips and then this message of "Are you aware with the cup of one cappuccino with the price of one cappuccino or whatever you can save this kid's life" and so on and so on. What's the message if you put the glasses on? If you ask me something like "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, contribute a little bit money and you can buy your calm conscience." I think it's the reason we do it is to make us feel good. You know we know people are starving there but F three points off. I did my duty, I sent my five dollars per month there, I can live. So basically we I claim we don't pay really to help them. We pay to feel well and especially to keep them at a distance there. A lot can be said here even about charity, why is charity such a big thing today. But let me conclude now very very briefly with Sarah Palin and generally what I can say as a naive external observer you know like Montesquieu who in order to analyze France wrote his famous Persian letters, no? I am now okay not an envoy from Ahmadinejad but let's say Persian view upon United States. A couple of things, I think that it's crucial not in any kind of deep psychological analysis, I claim it's already in the message. What is the true message of Republican country that's how party that's how I read it message to their voters? This "change, change, change." But then of course it's easy to say what Obama and his campaign repeating all the time. What change? Let's look at your politics. What you are basically saying is less taxes, less state power against Washington, stronger foreign policy and so on and so on. But wait a minute, Republican party is saying this for the last years. So where is the change? But I think that's the message. The message is, you know that French proverb: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." The message is let's do some changes which will guarantee that things basically stay the same, how should I put it. Or another much more ominous duality that I think. You know they play Republicans on this populist motive: look Sarah Palin ordinary girl from there, I mean like this giving voice to the rage of the ordinary people. We don't know what goes on Washington corrupted and so on and so on just. The message is what? It's I think it's a much more refined message between the lines. The true message would be to put it in complicated terms I think something like that. You are furious, we are also, but we all know very well that I mean you cannot run a country with this populist less money here more there. The message is I think we guarantee to you that how should I put it, let's pretend that we guarantee that discreetly we will have our experts who will do it and so on. They're basically the message is I think: "We're playing a game here, we will have backroom boys who will know how to do it." And it's the same as with for example you know when people tell me Bush. I claim okay Karl Rove interests me, this backroom boys who do the manipulation. So my question to McCain would have been okay I don't care if you are sincere or not just tell me who is your Karl Rove, how should I put it, no? Who will be the backroom boys who will be doing the job. Another thing where Democrats are paying, so again my point is that we shouldn't be naive to get the Republican message, and maybe with Democrats it's similar, I'm not entering into that. To get the Republican message you should definitely not take it literally and I'm not engaged here in any dark plot like what dark. No, it's in the message itself, it's it's redoubled by another much more pragmatic message and so on and so on. Okay I will not go into details now just another thing where I feel Republicans succeeded. Did you notice that Sarah Palin, there is something new about her from what I can judge. When till now we had feminine women politicians who really made it, they and I am now using now not using the terms in a precise way but very vaguely metaphorically. They were phallic women. They tried to imitate and be stronger than men you know like Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and so on. Here we have something I think maybe new. Here we have a woman who can be sarcastic, aggressive, even if I may use this horrible term which is not quite appropriate in the strict psychoanalytic sense, maybe even castrating, castrating, no, in the sense of revealing your fake, your impotence, without in any way renouncing femininity. Sarah Palin does not play the game of "as a woman I am more man than men." No, she even in a magical way unites three dimensions of femininity. What's her image? A: Mother, B: Teacher, it's clear that with these glasses and her hair and C: it's obvious sex object, because that's the dream, you know, prim teacher and so on but wait a minute after she in the evening puts the glasses off and unwraps her hair what happens and so on. And she combines this in a masterful way with this sarcastic assertiveness, like I think it was really masterful the way it functioned not at the level of argument but as a discursive strategy, that making fun of community organizer and so on and so on. It was feminine sarcasm, feminine making fun at at at at masculine phallic authority at its best. And I don't think Democrats had found a way how truly to answer this because okay now this is cheap psychology I know but things unfortunately function at this level. It brings I think they gently subtly evoke something which I'm afraid ashamed to say publicly but it's clear. The way Barack Obama is skinny and big ears and so on, there is something of a slightly emaciated weak guy in him. And I think all this is subtly referring to that. But again this is a problem for feminists I claim today how and that's the sad thing because the democratic left is so much caught in this politically correct feminism and so on and so on they didn't even notice that what they were dreaming of, to have a woman who wants power but not by playing a victim, not by renouncing her femininity, but by violently asserting it, that as it were Republicans beat Democrats at their own terrain. There it's almost paradox it's a very interesting paradox. You know it would be wonderful to go into this logic of how there are certain things which the left should have done but only a conservative can do it. Starting with you know only Nixon could have recognized China and so on all that stuff all that stuff. So again of course this all is a fake, fake in the sense that no I don't believe she really is all that, like yesterday I also saw her interview where she was talking about that war with Russia problem and there you could have seen for a brief moment, I mean the girl doesn't know what she's talking about okay. But it doesn't it doesn't matter we should not underestimate this again is ideology you know. This is where maybe Democrats are a little bit too naive when they repeat this mantra, let's talk about real causes and real issues and so on and so on. So you should see not again my point is not a cheap psychoanalysis in the sense of let's look into some deep Oedipal complex, but just let's look into the message which is to use old McLuhan phrase which is embodied in the embodied in the in the in the in the in the in the enunciation, in the statement itself. You never say only what you say. The mystery is that what you say, the way you say, the style and so on can give a different message can undermine that message and so on. That's for example for me the problem with so-called religious fundamentalists. Not that they are too fundamentalist. They are fake, they are not fundamentalist at all. My most beloved one for example beloved in the sense of woah when I see him you remember the good old Jimmy Swaggart? The southern who was I I had the misfortune of seeing one of his shows. My god the official guy's message is you know Christianity repent for your sins against ego hedonism. But his show is one big ego trip. The way he delivers his message undermines the message. But it doesn't necessarily undermine it. It can also sustain it. I was too long I know. Thanks very much for your patience. I'm just sad we don't have more time. Thanks very much. Is this a limit? Do we still have time for democracy or no democracy? Okay. Um yeah we have the good fortune of having the room for an extra half hour so I think we can take two or three questions. So please use the mics for the questions. Thanks for coming today and speaking to us. Um I have a question, I guess from from my perspective I grew up in America. I went through public school system in America and I really didn't get any background or even introduction to philosophy until I went to college and um I'm I don't know if it's similar in Europe but I'm just kind of curious why you think there are certain subjects that are stressed more to younger individuals as they're growing up and um you know something like philosophy that which seems very important to me um isn't and what do you think if anything can be done about that. Uh oh my god this is a big question because my first reaction is that you know that in the last years unfortunately because I think this is a good thing in Europe, the key I think is one good thing about Europe. You in United States you have elementary school how much is it nine years and then you have just this college two years or whatever and you go to university. But in Europe these two years expand into four, we call it lycée, gymnasium, high school. High school is not just a short passage. High school is where you get serious education. All sciences are covered and there we get philosophy. Unfortunately Europe is now becoming more like United States. But the reason I'm an optimist here is that I think that what when I was introduced it was kindly pointed out, I really think that now we need more and more philosophy in the sense of dealing with problems which if you want it or not are philosophical even to solve problems that everybody of us confronts. For example problems like abortion, brain, biogenetics and so on. My god to get an opinion on that, it's not just an abstract question of ethics. You have implicitly to decide are we free beings? Are we free at all? Are we not and here again the analysis that I made through that glasses brings out some very funny results. For example I was always perplexed by this standard Catholic answer which is don't mess biogenetically with brain because if you do it you diminish man to a biological animal but we have immortal soul blah blah blah. My god my problem here was wait a minute if you believe we have an immortal soul what's then problem with messing with brain? I mean I cannot touch the soul. So I think the true message in between lines of this Catholic anti- anti- biogenetic brain sciences experiments is a different one. It's let's it's better not to know some things. Let's let's avoid knowing that because knowing too much there may deprive us of our dignity, may diminish our freedom and so on and so on. So again it's not only this it's other where I think effectively that we are at such a crucial moment now, truly not in the religious sense of a catastrophe, but in a sense apocalyptic moment, that we have to make a decisions which are much more radical. Um, thank you for coming today. Um I had a question about how you normally respond to claims that Marxism and radicalism is dead. Oh I mean no mystery here and the mystery is rather this one to put I will be very short. Why do I consider myself still some kind of a Marxist without any illusions and so on? Look the question we have today is the only serious question is this one. Is Fukuyama Francis right or not? Even most of today's left isn't it they are Fukuyamaists as it were. They basically accept liberal democracy some kind of capitalism as if not the best at least the least worst the least bad system. And the idea is just you know when I was young we were saying we want socialism with a human face. What even the left today basically offers is global capitalism with a human face. Make it a little bit better, as Bill Gates would have put it, "creative capitalism." You can have your cake and eat it, you can have profit and help the poor whatever make it more. So my question is is this all? Is this our
unknown
ultimate horizon? Or are there crises, antagonisms on the horizon which for which in
ultimate horizon? Or are there crises, antagonisms on the horizon which for which in
unknown
the long term, and by long term I don't mean this years but years, global capitalism will not be enough to solve them. I think there are. From biogenetics, even Francis Fukuyama, you know his next book on human freedom or whatever, he explicitly says that this biogenetic possibilities undermine his vision of global capitalism. That one then ecology I claim and so on. So I think if you want to know my argument in detail, now I will do an unfair thing, refer to an another
the long term, and by long term I don't mean this years but years, global capitalism will not be enough to solve them. I think there are. From biogenetics, even Francis Fukuyama, you know his next book on human freedom or whatever, he explicitly says that this biogenetic possibilities undermine his vision of global capitalism. That one then ecology I claim and so on. So I think if you want to know my argument in detail, now I will do an unfair thing, refer to an another
Slavoj Žižek
book of mine "In Defense of Lost Causes." In the last chapter I try precisely to argue where I see and only in this sense I am a Marxist, I claim let's not be so sure this liberal democratic capitalism maybe it's not the ultimate horizon. We should just keep our mind open. I'm not now saying of course oh will there be that there will be a new Leninist party or whatever. No, that is over. But we should that's the limit of my Marxism. I even don't see a solution, because you know old Marxists always had this satisfaction the train of history is on my side how should I put it, no? Like we are just realizing historical necessity. No I don't think. I'm only saying I see ominous signs here and there and I wonder if global capitalism will be able to cope with it in the long term. One of the problems I see purely economic is the one with which you are dealing a lot, you again as Google. Namely the problem of intellectual property. I think that more and more it's exploding as a problem because I think that intellectual property if you pardon me the expression is in its nature closer to communism than to capitalism. You have to force it, it's very difficult to contain it within the limits of private property. Which is why you get all these paradoxes. Bill if you allow too strong logic of private property to determine the domain of of knowledge intellectual achievements then you get somebody like Bill Gates, I have nothing against him, I'm just saying that if you have a guy who in years becomes from a nobody tinkering in his garage to the richest man on the earth, doesn't this show that market mechanism you cannot in any way say that his wealth reflects his achievements how should I put it. You know it's just market cannot reflect it properly. So that would be my answer but read the book I talk too much. Now ah you wanted a balance, left, right, left, right okay. Right again okay so. I enjoyed your talk very much. I came a little bit late so I didn't hear whether you said
book of mine "In Defense of Lost Causes." In the last chapter I try precisely to argue where I see and only in this sense I am a Marxist, I claim let's not be so sure this liberal democratic capitalism maybe it's not the ultimate horizon. We should just keep our mind open. I'm not now saying of course oh will there be that there will be a new Leninist party or whatever. No, that is over. But we should that's the limit of my Marxism. I even don't see a solution, because you know old Marxists always had this satisfaction the train of history is on my side how should I put it, no? Like we are just realizing historical necessity. No I don't think. I'm only saying I see ominous signs here and there and I wonder if global capitalism will be able to cope with it in the long term. One of the problems I see purely economic is the one with which you are dealing a lot, you again as Google. Namely the problem of intellectual property. I think that more and more it's exploding as a problem because I think that intellectual property if you pardon me the expression is in its nature closer to communism than to capitalism. You have to force it, it's very difficult to contain it within the limits of private property. Which is why you get all these paradoxes. Bill if you allow too strong logic of private property to determine the domain of of knowledge intellectual achievements then you get somebody like Bill Gates, I have nothing against him, I'm just saying that if you have a guy who in years becomes from a nobody tinkering in his garage to the richest man on the earth, doesn't this show that market mechanism you cannot in any way say that his wealth reflects his achievements how should I put it. You know it's just market cannot reflect it properly. So that would be my answer but read the book I talk too much. Now ah you wanted a balance, left, right, left, right okay. Right again okay so. I enjoyed your talk very much. I came a little bit late so I didn't hear whether you said
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anything about it but I was wondering if
anything about it but I was wondering if
Slavoj Žižek
you used the toilets here at Google. We have an optical sensor in our toilets. What do they does it do? Well when you stand up it flushes. Ah yeah yeah I'm used to them from the airports yeah. You don't have to touch anything and I was wondering if you to me it seems that we have some sort of ideology here that technology will address even the most fundamental human problems and will sort of transform us and I was wondering. No no my answer here would just have been now maybe I'm too naive utilitarian, but my I always thought that they come up with this because people care about bacteria you know and the point is rather I think how to prevent you touching something. Wasn't this the origin, was to keep you so it's but but on the other hand I agree with you and I've seen even now this is I mean there is to go on and on. For example in Japan I was told no that it's also a nice cultural detail that in many public toilets so I was told the there is music while you are sitting on the toilet. Why? Because people are so sensitive embarrassed by potential sounds you make while you are sitting and so on so the idea is the only way to make it tolerable is to have background of music enough and so on and so on. So I totally how should I put it maybe even more than eating, shitting is a measure of civilization. In the sense of if you want to see the basic of a civilization, it's not look at how people eat, look look at how people shit. The true horror for me would have been and I read somewhere there are already the plans which are even worse, that sorry for vulgarity, you will not even have to do that that sorry obscene gestures to press the shit out, that there will be some kind of a vacuum stuck you know and so it will just be done for you totally how should I put it no. That will be pretty terrible I mean no. But but again yes I again I love details like this because I think that through them you get at ideology. Which is why for example in my books I love another detail. Did you notice for example if you know a little bit about history of totalitarianism how if you look at Hitler when he speaks or fascist leader, people applaud, Hitler accepts the applause. Look at the communist leaders speaking, people applause. What does a communist do? Stands up and joins the applause. This tells everything. It's totally different logic, Stalinist dictator is not a master, it's a perfect servant of the people. It's always I'm nothing in myself I'm only you. It points out a totally different logic which can be substantiated by other claims. For example I read in a book on Anne Applebaum on Gulag that every year on
you used the toilets here at Google. We have an optical sensor in our toilets. What do they does it do? Well when you stand up it flushes. Ah yeah yeah I'm used to them from the airports yeah. You don't have to touch anything and I was wondering if you to me it seems that we have some sort of ideology here that technology will address even the most fundamental human problems and will sort of transform us and I was wondering. No no my answer here would just have been now maybe I'm too naive utilitarian, but my I always thought that they come up with this because people care about bacteria you know and the point is rather I think how to prevent you touching something. Wasn't this the origin, was to keep you so it's but but on the other hand I agree with you and I've seen even now this is I mean there is to go on and on. For example in Japan I was told no that it's also a nice cultural detail that in many public toilets so I was told the there is music while you are sitting on the toilet. Why? Because people are so sensitive embarrassed by potential sounds you make while you are sitting and so on so the idea is the only way to make it tolerable is to have background of music enough and so on and so on. So I totally how should I put it maybe even more than eating, shitting is a measure of civilization. In the sense of if you want to see the basic of a civilization, it's not look at how people eat, look look at how people shit. The true horror for me would have been and I read somewhere there are already the plans which are even worse, that sorry for vulgarity, you will not even have to do that that sorry obscene gestures to press the shit out, that there will be some kind of a vacuum stuck you know and so it will just be done for you totally how should I put it no. That will be pretty terrible I mean no. But but again yes I again I love details like this because I think that through them you get at ideology. Which is why for example in my books I love another detail. Did you notice for example if you know a little bit about history of totalitarianism how if you look at Hitler when he speaks or fascist leader, people applaud, Hitler accepts the applause. Look at the communist leaders speaking, people applause. What does a communist do? Stands up and joins the applause. This tells everything. It's totally different logic, Stalinist dictator is not a master, it's a perfect servant of the people. It's always I'm nothing in myself I'm only you. It points out a totally different logic which can be substantiated by other claims. For example I read in a book on Anne Applebaum on Gulag that every year on
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Stalin's birthday all the arrested in Gulag, all the people in prison there were collect even in the darkest years of Stalinism were assembled and had to sign
Stalin's birthday all the arrested in Gulag, all the people in prison there were collect even in the darkest years of Stalinism were assembled and had to sign
Slavoj Žižek
telegram wishing Comrade Stalin all the best
telegram wishing Comrade Stalin all the best
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for birthday and wishing him greater even success in building socialism and so on. Now think about it, you cannot even imagine the same thing in fascism. What to gather all the Jews in Auschwitz
for birthday and wishing him greater even success in building socialism and so on. Now think about it, you cannot even imagine the same thing in fascism. What to gather all the Jews in Auschwitz
Slavoj Žižek
and make them all the best wishes telegram to Hitler and so on. You see I love these details like your electronic toilet or whatever which you know a small meaningless feature but like crystal it shows it condenses a fundamental difference no? Sorry too. So um you gave a great example about how the TV is a proxy for our laughter. Um so I'm going to ask the obvious question, what do you what is God essentially a proxy for? What do you use him or her for? God? Yes. It all depends on what we on what first I don't think there is one God. I mean I'm an atheist so sorry so if we talk about God of course it's about how God functions as an idea, representation and so on and so on. I think God is many thing but I think what God is it's a very nice question that you asked because I think that God is at its most fundamental and radical not so much a determinate proxy but the very structure of having a proxy. God is the original proxy. I don't know but he knows for me. I don't but he does. In Christ I'm not compassionate but he is compassionate for me. No God is this very formal structure. Which is why although an atheist, I don't think we can get over God as simple as that. There is in the very structure of language not that shit about is there a gene for emotions of God but more in a purely semantic way. The moment we are in language there is a divine dimension that we presuppose it that we practice it in a way. So again I would say God is originally this very dimension of having a proxy how should I put it. And it's original this dimension. I don't think there ever was originally a humanity which fully was itself. No the gap is from the very beginning here. Others others believe for you, others feel for you and God would have been God is this very other dimension. There has to be what Jacques Lacan calls Jacques Lacan precisely calls this dimension the Big Other. The one for whom we have to maintain appearances and so on and so on. So yes it's a very nice question and I I love to dwell on this moment on this. Thanks very much yeah. Thank you so much for coming it's been fascinating.
and make them all the best wishes telegram to Hitler and so on. You see I love these details like your electronic toilet or whatever which you know a small meaningless feature but like crystal it shows it condenses a fundamental difference no? Sorry too. So um you gave a great example about how the TV is a proxy for our laughter. Um so I'm going to ask the obvious question, what do you what is God essentially a proxy for? What do you use him or her for? God? Yes. It all depends on what we on what first I don't think there is one God. I mean I'm an atheist so sorry so if we talk about God of course it's about how God functions as an idea, representation and so on and so on. I think God is many thing but I think what God is it's a very nice question that you asked because I think that God is at its most fundamental and radical not so much a determinate proxy but the very structure of having a proxy. God is the original proxy. I don't know but he knows for me. I don't but he does. In Christ I'm not compassionate but he is compassionate for me. No God is this very formal structure. Which is why although an atheist, I don't think we can get over God as simple as that. There is in the very structure of language not that shit about is there a gene for emotions of God but more in a purely semantic way. The moment we are in language there is a divine dimension that we presuppose it that we practice it in a way. So again I would say God is originally this very dimension of having a proxy how should I put it. And it's original this dimension. I don't think there ever was originally a humanity which fully was itself. No the gap is from the very beginning here. Others others believe for you, others feel for you and God would have been God is this very other dimension. There has to be what Jacques Lacan calls Jacques Lacan precisely calls this dimension the Big Other. The one for whom we have to maintain appearances and so on and so on. So yes it's a very nice question and I I love to dwell on this moment on this. Thanks very much yeah. Thank you so much for coming it's been fascinating.
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Google famously has an informal motto "Don't be evil." As an external observer what do you think are unknown
Google famously has an informal motto "Don't be evil." As an external observer what do you think are unknown
Slavoj Žižek
knowns are? No I'm not saying that the the true message is it's not simply like oh in a Freudian way you know when you say this woman is not my mother then Freud said ha ha then negation blah blah. So I'm not saying that you are fundamental evil but what does interest me is uh what is the model of evil which is presupposed in it? Nonetheless the inherent logic is that you know because why warn precisely against this? What is the model of evil here? What why why the need to react against this? I think it's not it's this kind of injunctions are never general injunctions. Like of course nobody should be evil no? But which evil is there? It is I don't know is it the perception that you being the most powerful search machine and so on are open to the temptation of manipulating I don't know. The question to be asked would have been what dimension of evil? On the other hand generally I think that in a way evil is good. No no I'm not part of some crazy pseudo-dialectic. What I'm saying is that what is evil? Evil is something which as it were brutally interrupts the normal run of things. Evil is a cut and so on. Which is why for example for traditional pagan religions, Jesus Christ is evil embodied. And in a way they are right. Because the message of Christianity is "it's over with that karma, everything circulates and so on, it's a cut." So I I claim that this "Don't be evil" it's more like we are doing something terribly great let's not do it too fast or whatever. And I totally accept this I think. I totally accept this. What you are doing is evil which means it shakes
knowns are? No I'm not saying that the the true message is it's not simply like oh in a Freudian way you know when you say this woman is not my mother then Freud said ha ha then negation blah blah. So I'm not saying that you are fundamental evil but what does interest me is uh what is the model of evil which is presupposed in it? Nonetheless the inherent logic is that you know because why warn precisely against this? What is the model of evil here? What why why the need to react against this? I think it's not it's this kind of injunctions are never general injunctions. Like of course nobody should be evil no? But which evil is there? It is I don't know is it the perception that you being the most powerful search machine and so on are open to the temptation of manipulating I don't know. The question to be asked would have been what dimension of evil? On the other hand generally I think that in a way evil is good. No no I'm not part of some crazy pseudo-dialectic. What I'm saying is that what is evil? Evil is something which as it were brutally interrupts the normal run of things. Evil is a cut and so on. Which is why for example for traditional pagan religions, Jesus Christ is evil embodied. And in a way they are right. Because the message of Christianity is "it's over with that karma, everything circulates and so on, it's a cut." So I I claim that this "Don't be evil" it's more like we are doing something terribly great let's not do it too fast or whatever. And I totally accept this I think. I totally accept this. What you are doing is evil which means it shakes
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things the way they were. I mean something you are doing something which is in a way crazy. You also are
things the way they were. I mean something you are doing something which is in a way crazy. You also are
Slavoj Žižek
changing what means being human. I mean you know how it changes our perception that basically if you are not a total idiot I am close to it but hope not totally totally like you know it's no longer that bibliography whatever you get everything this life in a permanent presence as it were no? So I would say that it's a negative recognition that there is a radical dimension to what you are doing. It affects the normal community life and so on and so on. And my conclusion is that in order to say "don't be evil," you must already dwell in that space of evil. And I congratulate you for it. Thanks very much.
changing what means being human. I mean you know how it changes our perception that basically if you are not a total idiot I am close to it but hope not totally totally like you know it's no longer that bibliography whatever you get everything this life in a permanent presence as it were no? So I would say that it's a negative recognition that there is a radical dimension to what you are doing. It affects the normal community life and so on and so on. And my conclusion is that in order to say "don't be evil," you must already dwell in that space of evil. And I congratulate you for it. Thanks very much.