Overcoming Mandela without becoming Mugabe
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-11-19 · 1:21:25 · 9,944 words
ideologycapitalismrevolution-violencedemocracyliberalism-political-correctnesscommunism-socialismsexuality-gendergeopolitics-warreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticsrace-antisemitismpsychoanalysisethicseveryday-life
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging political lecture in Hamburg arguing that radical emancipatory politics today requires moving beyond carnival revolt toward identifying the specific 'points of impossibility' within capitalism that can be leveraged for structural change. He critiques both Stalinist and libertarian-communist models, defends a qualified eurocentrism in the context of the refugee crisis, and argues against humanitarian compassion as a substitute for systemic change. The talk weaves together analyses of democracy as fetish, the ideology of self-entrepreneurship, the dangers of idealizing the oppressed, and the need to insist on feminist and gay rights even within progressive anti-imperialist coalitions.
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The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “post-political naturalization of economy”
The contemporary condition in which political decisions are presented as pure economic necessity, depoliticizing governance and foreclosing alternatives.
Contemporary power no longer represses but controls through total permissiveness, allowing everything within the commercial and communicative circuits of the system.
Žižek's paradoxical prescription: given that spontaneous self-expression is captured by the system, genuine emancipatory politics today requires rigorous discipline and self-restraint rather than spontaneity.
The innermost dream-like ideological structure of a society, which radical imagination often merely recycles rather than transcending, presenting old fantasies as new worlds.
Žižek's characterization of Marx's implicit vision of communism as retaining capitalism's dynamic of expansive self-reproduction while merely removing the capitalist form, a failure of imagination that haunts the left.
The object-cause of desire that is simultaneously an obstacle to the ideal and its positive condition, removing the obstacle destroys the very perfection it seemed to impede.
as “false transgression”
Moments of revolt, carnival, or joke-telling that appear subversive but in fact serve as safety valves that allow existing power structures to reproduce themselves.
Implicitly invoked in the discussion of carnival and jokes as releases of excess that stabilize rather than destabilize the social order.
Democracy functions in everyday ideology as a Freudian fetish, the last thing one sees before confronting the radicality of social antagonisms, thereby preventing that confrontation.
In Freud's sense: the last thing seen before registering a disturbing lack; Žižek applies it to democracy as that which prevents recognition of the depth of social antagonism.
The neoliberal ideological figure by which workers, including precarious ones, are recast as self-managing capitalists responsible for their own destiny, obscuring structural exploitation.
as “le point d'impossible”
Following Badiou, the points within a system where even a seemingly modest demand proves traumatically impossible for the ruling ideology, the strategic target for emancipatory action.
In the Judeo-Christian sense Žižek invokes, the neighbor is not a fellow human like you but the point at which you encounter the abyss in the other, irreducible strangeness, not sameness.
The standard liberal critique of the EU's lack of democratic accountability, which Žižek rejects as misidentifying a structural feature as a contingent flaw, analogous to calling the Soviet Union basically okay with just a little democratic deficit.
Stories he reaches for 9
The film ends with a triumphant crowd storming Parliament, but Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see Part 2, what happens the morning after. The film exemplifies false transgression: ecstatic revolt with no structural follow-through.
“i would be ready to sell my mother into slavery to see v for vendetta part 2. what happens then? you know, it's easy for the people to win. what happens then?”
When film producer Sam Goldwyn was told his films had too many clichés, he sent a memo to his scenario department demanding 'urgently new original clichés.' Žižek uses this to illustrate that changing everyday life requires not abolishing forms but inventing new ones, equally habitual but genuinely different.
“you know what was the memo he goldwyn wrote to his scenario department? we urgently need new original clichés. and he was right.”
Boris Groys revealed archival evidence that Bakhtin's theory of carnival liberation was secretly modeled on Stalin's purges and the Gulag, where today's Central Committee member is tomorrow's traitor sent to die. True carnival is not festive liberation but arbitrary violent inversion.
“bakhtin did not simply celebrate carnival as the wonderful moment of liberation... his secret model for carnival were stalin's purges and gulag. that's the true carnival.”
An Israeli soldier raiding a Palestinian home discovers that the crying Palestinian girl has the same name as his daughter, shows the mother a photo and says 'we are all human.' Žižek calls this falsity at its purest, the liberal ideology of shared humanity that erases the reality of structural violence.
“you know, my god, this girl has the same name as my own girl... you see, we are human all and so on. this is falsity at its purest.”
In 18th-century India, the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy was dissolving; the British colonizers deliberately resuscitated the ancient Laws of Manu to prevent Indian modernization and the formation of a politically active proletariat, showing that cultural imperialism prefers, not opposes, traditional diversity.
“the law legal system of manu... was resuscitated in 19th century by the british colonizers.”
Universal healthcare, which exists unremarkably in Canada, was the specific 'point of impossibility' for American ideology, even a modest version brought Obama to the Supreme Court and provoked accusations of communism from Chuck Norris.
“the point of impossibility for united states... was obviously universal healthcare... he was brought to supreme court and so on. it was traumatic.”
A widespread fantasy in all socialist countries held that there was an ultra-secret department within the secret police whose sole function was to produce political jokes against the party leadership, to keep people satisfied with a small opening. Žižek takes the fantasy seriously as revealing a structural truth about jokes as safety valves.
“within the secret police, there was an ultra-secret department. whose function was to produce political jokes, to keep the people satisfied”
Khomeini stated that Iran does not fear Western military superiority or economic imperialism, only the dissolute Western way of life. Illustrates how sexuality/lifestyle becomes the primary site of anti-Western political resistance.
“we do not fear western military superiority... we do not fear western economic imperialism... what we do fear is the dissolute western way of life.”
Palestinian-Israeli rapper Tamer Nafar, after performing a song protesting honor killings, was accused by American anti-Zionist students of promoting the Zionist view of Palestinians as barbaric. His reply: 'When you criticize me, you criticize my own community in English to impress your radical professors. I sing in Arabic to protect the women in my own hood.'
“when you criticize me, you criticize my own community in english to impress your radical professors. i sing in arabic to protect the women in my own hood.”
Works invoked 11
V for Vendetta film
Žižek explicitly says 'a film which I hate'; used as a paradigmatic example of false transgression, ecstatic carnival revolt with no 'morning after,' no structural change.
The Pelican Brief film
Cited alongside All the President's Men as exemplifying Hollywood's ideological reassurance: democracy works, ordinary people can fix corruption, the films make you feel good precisely because they are false.
Cited as a paradigmatic 'big Hollywood leftist blockbuster' whose message, that ordinary people can bring down the president, is ideologically reassuring rather than critical.
Das Kapital book
Called 'still an unsurpassed model' for the analysis of capitalism, though Žižek criticizes what it implies about communism.
The Truman Show film
Used as an analogy for the 'point of impossibility': pressing the wrong button causes the walls of ideological reality to fall, but the intervention itself is modest.
Maurizio Lazzarato's work cited for the concept of self-entrepreneurship as the ideological form masking the indebted worker's exploitation.
Oscar Wilde's text called 'wonderful'; quoted extensively as the best reply to humanitarian compassion toward refugees, remedies that keep the poor alive merely prolong the disease.
Otto Weininger's racist text cited only to invert its formula ('socialism is Aryan, communism is Jewish'), Žižek uses it ironically to maintain the distinction between socialism and communism.
Junction 48 film
Udi Aloni's film praised for exemplifying the genuine double struggle of Israeli Palestinians; cited as the best illustration of the need to maintain feminist/gay struggles alongside anti-imperialist ones.
Opfergang film
Veit Harlan's film set in Hamburg, praised as 'a very good film', used to argue that Hamburg's spirit could redeem even the worst Nazi filmmaker.
Ruth Klüger's memoirs; quoted for the crucial claim that Auschwitz was no educational institution, nothing good came from the camps, there is no catharsis, a lesson against idealizing suffering.
People invoked 27
Ruth Klüger positive
Holocaust survivor and author of 'Still Alive'; quoted at length for her crucial refusal of the redemptive narrative of suffering, Auschwitz taught nothing, produced no humanity or tolerance.
Udi Aloni positive
Called 'my friend'; described as 'the Jewish anti-Zionist pro-Palestinian filmmaker'; his film Junction 48 is praised for exemplifying the genuine double struggle against Israeli oppression and internal fundamentalism.
Narendra Modi negative
Cited as the ideal type of contemporary authoritarian capitalism: simultaneously a radical neoliberal in economics and a Hindu nationalist, illustrating that global capitalism no longer needs democracy.
Robert Mugabe negative
Used as the paradigmatic example of false liberation, anti-colonial language deployed to justify homophobia; also named in the title as a limit Mandela-style liberation should not become.
Cited as the paradigmatic example of how ethnic cleansing requires poets and mythologists to transform horror into perceived ethical sacrifice, every ethnic cleansing has its own Karadžić.
Jacques Lacan positive
Called 'my teacher'; Žižek invokes the Lacanian paradox of objet petit a as the key theoretical frame for the obstacle-as-condition-of-desire argument.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek uses Groys's archival revelation to undermine the Bakhtinian celebration of carnival as liberation, arguing that Bakhtin's secret model was Stalinist violence.
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens negative
Cited (as 'Anthony Gons') alongside Ulrich Beck for presenting new forms of precarity as new forms of freedom, a 'masterful ideological trick' Žižek critiques.
Chuck Norris negative
Described as 'a total idiot like that actor' who accused Obama of introducing communism via universal healthcare, used to illustrate ideological hysteria.
Oscar Wilde positive
Žižek reads at length from 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' as the best reply to the humanitarian approach to refugees: remedies that merely keep the poor alive prolong the disease rather than solving it.
Antonio Negri negative
Cited as having 'fallen for' V for Vendetta's false vision of multitude rebellion, used to illustrate the failure of the multitude/horizontal politics framework.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my friend'; Žižek cites his passage on contemporary power's control through permissiveness rather than censorship, and follows his concept of 'le point d'impossible' as strategic guide.
Mentioned as co-participant in a recent London debate with Varoufakis.
Quoted from a passage stating Iran fears Western dissolute way of life more than Western military or economic power, used to illustrate how sexuality becomes the primary site of anti-Western politics.
Yanis Varoufakis negative
Called 'my very good friend' but criticized for naivety: his position that Europe needs more transparency and democratization is challenged by Žižek who argues the democratic deficit is structural, and that majority opinion may be anti-immigrant.
Bill Gates negative
Cited for claiming to be a 'socialist' in the sense of caring about community, illustrating how the word 'socialism' has been emptied of content in mainstream ideology.
Mentioned in the context of the democratic question about who authorized her to invite hundreds of thousands of refugees, Žižek uses this to illustrate the limits of democracy.
Called 'the great, unfortunately, Nazi movie director'; his film Opfergang is cited as evidence that even Hamburg's spirit could not be entirely ruined even by the worst Nazis.
Boris Groys positive
Called 'my friend'; provided the revelation from Bakhtin's archives that Bakhtin's secret model for carnival was Stalinist purges.
Tamer Nafar positive
Palestinian-Israeli rapper praised for his dignified reply to pseudo-radical students and for his non-patronizing stance on honor killings.
Ulrich Beck negative
Cited as somewhat better than Giddens ('a little bit better') but part of the ideological project of presenting second modernity's exploitations as freedoms.
Otto Weininger negative
Cited ironically ('Geschlecht und Charakter') for the formula 'socialism is Aryan and communism is Jewish,' which Žižek explicitly means in the opposite sense, using it to distinguish reformist socialism from the more disruptive communist universalism.
Named in the talk's title ('how to go beyond Mandela'); represents the ANC's tragic acceptance of global capitalist coordinates as the price of political victory, a cautionary case, not a personal criticism.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek affirms Marx's analysis of capitalism in Capital as 'still an unsurpassed model' but criticizes his implicit vision of communism as 'capitalism without capitalism', a limitation requiring return to Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek advocates a 'paradoxical return from Marx to Hegel', calling the current post-revolutionary situation 'a very Hegelian one'; Hegel provides the framework for understanding the aftermath of failed communism.
Maurizio Lazzarato positive
Cited for 'The Rise of the Indebted Man' and the concept of self-entrepreneurship, which Žižek uses to illustrate how ideology presents exploitation as freedom.
Personal friend, not present at the talk; Žižek expresses gratitude to him.
What it argues
points of impossibility within capitalism as sites of radical interventioncritique of carnival transgression and false liberationdemocracy as ideological fetisheurocentrism and refugee crisisrefusal to idealize the oppressed or sufferingmultitude of struggles and the tension between anti-imperialism and feminism/gay rightsself-entrepreneurship as ideological mystification of precarity
Dialectical moves 14
“Everything is possible — going to space, three penises, immortality — but you cannot raise taxes for culture by 1%. That's impossible.”
The ideological distribution of possibility inverts genuine priorities: infinite personal/technological possibility coexists with the declared impossibility of minimal social redistribution.
“You take away the obstacle — two or three kilos — and you lose the very perfection that only arose because of the obstacle.”
The apparent obstacle is in fact the positive condition of the desired object; removing it destroys the object itself, the Lacanian paradox of objet petit a.
“The father was not really an obstacle. He thought just to have full access to the girl, but when the obstacle was removed, the desire itself vanished.”
Desire is constituted through its mediating obstacle; the obstacle is not external to the object but its very condition of existence.
“What we present to ourselves as a radically new world is just some phantasmatic core of the old world.”
Radical imagination typically reproduces the deep fantasy structure of the existing order rather than genuinely transcending it.
“The true carnival is not festive liberation — Bakhtin's secret model for carnival were Stalin's purges and the Gulag.”
Carnival, properly understood, is not emancipatory inversion but the most brutal exercise of arbitrary power, today you are in the Central Committee, tomorrow you are in the Gulag.
“Capitalism is already a carnival of its own — the old logic of repression is left behind; non-alienated spontaneity directly serves the system.”
The 1968 logic of liberated self-expression has been absorbed by capitalism, so spontaneity no longer opposes the system but reproduces it.
“Actual unfreedom is presented to you as growth in your freedom — precarious work as the wonderful freedom to reinvent yourself every two years.”
Ideology operates by inverting the sign of exploitation: the removal of stable employment is rebranded as expanded autonomy.
“Big radical demands — claiming Yugoslav communism was worse than Stalinism — were tolerated; modest concrete demands for a specific legal change got you arrested.”
In authoritarian systems, abstract radicalism functions as a safety valve while concrete modest demands are genuinely dangerous, the true point of impossibility is the specific, not the general.
“Even capitalism can be used against capitalism — use its own universalist rules against its particularist exceptions.”
Capitalism's structural inconsistency means its own professed principles can be weaponized against its actual practices.
“Enlightened self-critical eurocentrism is the only way to really break out of eurocentrism.”
The paradox that only by being faithful to Europe's own emancipatory tradition, rather than abandoning it through anti-eurocentric gesture, can one genuinely overcome European cultural imperialism.
“The true danger to Europe are not Muslim terrorists or invasions — the true danger to Europe are the fundamentalist anti-immigrant defenders of Europe.”
The apparent external threat is less dangerous than the internal one; Europe destroys itself through its own anti-immigrant reaction more than through any external enemy.
“The worst thing you can say about someone whose story you have not heard is that they are your enemy — but Hitler was our enemy whether we heard his story or not.”
Liberal empathy's formula that enemies are only misunderstood strangers collapses when applied: the truth of what someone does is not in the story they tell about it.
“Auschwitz was no educational institution — you learned nothing there, least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps.”
The redemptive narrative of suffering as ennobling or educational is a false consolation; suffering ruins from the inside and produces no ethical catharsis.
“Socialism is aryan and communism is jewish — I mean it in the opposite sense to Weininger, which is why I have a problem with 'democratic socialism'.”
By ironically citing Weininger's racist formula in reverse, Žižek marks the distinction between reformist socialism (rooted in existing culture) and the more universalist, disruptive communist project.
Claims 20
asserts
The distribution of the possible and impossible today is ideological: personal and technological possibilities are unlimited while socio-economic transformation is declared impossible.ideology of possibility under capitalism
asserts
Contemporary power reproduces itself not through censorship but through unconstrained permissiveness, making pitiless self-censorship a sine qua non of emancipatory politics.mechanisms of ideological control
asserts
Marx's implicit vision of communism was 'capitalism without capitalism' — retaining capitalist dynamics of expansion while removing capitalist form, a fundamental limitation.Marx's vision of communism
rejects
The libertarian-communist ideal of direct democracy, free association, and permanent citizen engagement should be abandoned alongside Stalinist and social-democratic models.horizontal/multitude model of emancipatory politics
asserts
Carnival transgression — including political jokes under communism — functions as a safety valve that stabilizes existing power rather than subverting it.transgression and carnival as political strategy
asserts
Democracy in its everyday ideological use functions as a Freudian fetish that prevents us from seeing the radicality of social antagonisms.democracy
asserts
The strategic task today is to identify 'points of impossibility' — modest, legal, concrete demands that nonetheless reveal systemic pressure points — rather than waiting for total revolution.emancipatory political strategy
asserts
Precarious work presented as freedom of reinvention is a masterful ideological trick that presents actual unfreedom as its opposite.precarity and self-entrepreneurship ideology
asserts
Capitalism can and must be used against itself, since it is necessarily inconsistent and breaks its own rules.capitalism's internal contradictions as political opportunity
asserts
Feminist and gay rights struggles must not be subordinated to anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist struggle; the multiculturalist defense of different ways of life covers up antagonisms within those communities.intersectionality of feminist/queer and anti-imperialist struggles
asserts
A certain degree of eurocentrism is worth defending today because Western emancipatory values — equality, individual rights — can serve as weapons against capitalist globalization.eurocentrism and cultural imperialism
asserts
The true danger to Europe is not Muslim terrorists or immigrants but the fundamentalist anti-immigrant defenders of Europe.threat to European values
reframes
Humanitarian compassion toward refugees, while necessary, is not a solution — the proper aim is to reconstruct the economic system that generates the crisis.humanitarian approach to the refugee crisis
asserts
Idealizing the other — refugees, the poor — is the worst form of racism; one should respect their otherness, not pretend to a false universalism of shared humanity.liberal idealization of the Other
rejects
Suffering does not ennoble; Auschwitz was not an educational institution that produced wisdom or humanity — it ruined people from the inside.redemptive or educational narrative of suffering
reframes
The democratic deficit of the European Union is not a contingent flaw but a structural feature of the system.EU democratic deficit
asserts
The majority can be wrong and democracy in itself does not necessarily change things for the better.limits of democratic majoritarianism
asserts
World capitalism can less and less afford even the formal ideology of universal freedom and equality, turning instead to new forms of apartheid and authoritarian structures.late capitalism and formal democracy
asserts
Enlightened, self-critical eurocentrism is the only way to really break out of eurocentrism.eurocentrism and its critique
rejects
The idea that an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard is one of the greatest stupidities imaginable — the truth of what you do is not in the story you tell about it.liberal empathy and narrative understanding of the enemy
Quotes 18
“Everything is possible. maybe we will be able to live eternally... But you cannot raise the taxes to finance culture for 1%. That's impossible.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological distribution of possibility under capitalism
“The exercise of power no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporary ideology operates through permissiveness not repression
“Pitiless self-censorship is today a sine qua non, a necessary condition of emancipatory politics.”Slavoj Žižek · self-discipline as condition of liberation
“What we present to ourselves as a radically new world is just some phantasmatic core of the old world.”Slavoj Žižek · limits of radical political imagination
“We urgently need new original clichés.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of genuinely new everyday forms
“I would be ready to sell my mother into slavery to see V for Vendetta Part 2. What happens then? It's easy for the people to win. What happens then?”Slavoj Žižek · the morning-after problem of revolt
“When you criticize me, you criticize my own community in English to impress your radical professors. I sing in Arabic to protect the women in my own hood.”Tamer Nafar · authentic versus performative radicalism
“An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard — this sounds so deep... but brutally, this is one of the greatest stupidities that you can imagine.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of liberal empathy as political strategy
“We are not the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. No, we are the horror which we are doing and we reconstruct stories to obfuscate the true horror.”Slavoj Žižek · truth is in deeds not self-narratives
“Auschwitz was no educational, instructional institution. You learned nothing there. And least of all, humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps.”Slavoj Žižek · suffering does not produce wisdom or humanity
“The worst thing you can do is dealing with refugees or with poor among us is to idealize them. They are poor but they have a certain nobility — no, the problem is to accept that they don't have this nobility.”Slavoj Žižek · against idealization of the oppressed
“It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.”Slavoj Žižek · Oscar Wilde on humanitarian sentimentalism
“The true danger to Europe are not Muslim terrorists or Muslim invasions. The true danger to Europe are the fundamentalist anti-immigrant defenders of Europe.”Slavoj Žižek · internal threat greater than external
“Enlightened self-critical eurocentrism is the only way to really break out of eurocentrism.”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of immanent critique of eurocentrism
“I want to live in a nice alienated society where all this is done by an anonymous institution and I read my books, watch my films and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · alienation as preferable to permanent communal engagement
“Majority can be wrong and most of the time maybe even it is wrong... democracy in itself doesn't necessarily change things for the better.”Slavoj Žižek · limits of democratic majoritarianism
“My god, even the nazis didn't succeed in ruining the spirit of the city [of Hamburg].”Slavoj Žižek · Hamburg's resilient spirit
“It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this... but their remedies do not cure the disease they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”Slavoj Žižek · Oscar Wilde: humanitarian remedies perpetuate poverty
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
ich danke ihnen sehr froh dass ich hier bin leider meine deutscheache nichtug um den ganzen vortrag deutsch zu. but nonetheless, i want to say how grateful i am that i can be here. my gratitude of course, not only to those who are here, but to the one who is not here, my good friend karl-heinz dellwo. then i must say that i like the city of hamburg. because you know many people outside germany identify germany with a certain image of, you know, j lederhoseneln and, well, you don't find that here. no. and i claim that even... my god, even the nazis didn't succeed in ruining the spirit of the city. for example, let's go to the lowest of the lowest. the great, unfortunately, nazi movie director, veit harlan. but when he did a film which takes place in hamburg. at the term of the last century, opfergang. it's a very good film, i claim. so you know, even the worst nat hamburg head. capacity to bring out something which was not totally. totally bad in them so let me go to it okay i should make the usual joke to which you are used probably, i mean, it's nice to be in the fuck room and so on, but i will not dwell on that too much because i have... in view of the difficult situation in which we all in europe are now, i have quite many things to say. say, so let me begin. today, the very idea of a radical social transformation appears as an impossible dream. but this term impossible should make us think. impossible and possible are distributed in strange ways. today. on the one hand in the domain of personal freedoms. and. scientific technology. we are told again and again how nothing is impossible. we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions. entire archives of music, films are available for downloading. going to space is available to everyone, okay, everyone with money. there is even the prospect of enhancing our physical, psychic abilities, of manipulating our genetic. up to the gnostic dream of achieving immortality by way of transforming our identity into a software and then we just download ourselves into. a new hardware so again, everything is possible. on the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations. our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of communist states, humanity finally. has abandoned the old millenarian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality, which means of course capitalist reality with all its impossibilities. you cannot engage in large collective acts which we are told always end in totalitarian terror cling to the old welfare state it makes you non-competitive and so on and so on. so this is for me the basic paradox. everything is possible. maybe, i don't know, we will be able to live eternally. you will be able, they are already making experiments. i'm not kidding in new york. i met some surgeons for a man to get three penises so that you can do it with three. all this is possible. but you cannot raise the taxes to finance culture for 1%. that's impossible. everything and so on. it. again, our first task is to be always aware that when we are told this is possible, this is not possible, and so on. uh. we are talking about ideology. not about cult. effect. uh but the crucial. point. to always bear in mind here is that. uh we live in what i'm tempted to call the post-political era of the naturalization of economy. political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity when austerity measures are imposed we are repeatedly told that this is simply how things have to be done. in c conditions the exercise of power, and that's crucial, no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness. i would like to quote here my friend alain badiu who wrote. passage since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible. via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication in power. today's global society no longer censors anything. all art and all thought is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. we should become pitiless censors of ourselves. and effectively, today, we seem to be at the opposite point of the ideology of the glorious 60s. the motto of spontaneity, creative self-expression and so on. are all taken over by the system. the old logic of the system of power reproducing itself through. repression. true rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetuses is left behind. non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why... pitiless self-censorship. is today a sine qua non, a necessary condition of emancipatory politics and i mean this quite seriously today more than ever. we... can clearly see how? difficult. it is really to imagine another world. how? when we think that our imagination exploded. into another dimension it's really just the what i like to call the phantasmatic core the innermost dream-like structure of our own uh. society. i think that the lesson that we have to assume today. in our post-revolutionary era. by this i mean the following, and that's why i... i advocate a paradoxical return from marx to hegel. our situation is a very hegelian one, i claim. the revolution happened, not all around, but 20th century was the century of communism, of reactions to communism. basically the communist project. failed. and our problem is how to avoid the cynical conclusion, okay, it failed, let's play the game. there is no alternative. how to remain faithful? two. the radical emancipatory project. without of course, repeating its mistakes. and here i claim we have to go to the end, which means to the beginning. although the analysis of capitalism elaborated by marx in his capital is still an unsurpassed model. it has it. failures, it's... limitations. i think. it can be demonstrated, which i will not do here, of course, that... the implicit vision of post-capitalist, communist, however you call it, society that you find in marx is still a capitalism without capitalism. marx correctly identified the core of capitalism is this. it permanent push towards self-reproduction, self-expansion and so on and so on. and his idea was that. even if you take away. the form of the capital. this expansive self-reproduction would explode. explode explode in an even more free way. so i think that in a way for marx, literally, his vision of communism was capitalism without capitalism. that is to say, this capitalist dynamic of exploding productive power of humanity without the capitalist form. to go very quickly through it, just a metaphor to hint this at you, to give you a hint. what just an indication. this is of course not an analysis. what marx didn't he is. the paradox which jacques lacan, my teacher, identified as the paradox of what he calls object, object, the object cause of desire, which is an... obstacle, but at the same time a positive condition of what it is the obstacle to. let me give you a crazy example, which i think makes perfectly this point. once. it happened in latin america. i will not tell you where. er. a voluptuous elder lady, i don't know, maybe she was flirting with me, she told me that... basically, her point was, i'm still beautiful and sexually attractive in spite of. and she told me how her last lover, when she saw her naked, told her that if she just were to lose two or three kilos, her body would have been perfect. and i told her, just don't lose two or three kilos. because, you know, you often find this paradox that like... two or three kilos less and you would be perfect. but this ideal of perfection only arises when you do have two or three kilos too much. you see my point? you take away the obstacle, that small element which seems to disturb the perfection, and you lose this potential virtual perfection itself. this is the paradox lacon is aiming at. debt. you have, let's put it in abstract terms, an ideal, but some small element. disturb it. but what appears as a disturbing mediator is really the condition of an object. and it can happen at all levels in eroticism especially. for example, a good friend of mine when i was young was in love with a girl. and these were still a little bit more patriarchal times, so he was... in order to gain the access to the girls, he visited her family and talked with her father often. he thought that the whole point is that he has to talk with her father. just to. have full access to the girl. but then... when the father went on a long trip. it no longer functioned. with the girl. you see, what he thought is just an obstacle. oh my god, i have to go through this ritual talking with the father. was not really an obstacle. it was the girl as the object of his desire. entered tisch! fantasy of desire only mediated through the father. you take the father, the obstacle away, you lose the object. okay, i will not go more into it now. i just want to say that how at this level how difficult it is to really imagine a new werk. how often? what we present to ourselves as a radically new world is just some phantasmatic core of the old world. which means we have to abandon, break many taboos here. now comes a little bit more problematic part of my talk. first, i claim. we should abandon not only the two main forms of the 20th century state socialism, the social democratic welfare state and of course the stalinist party dictatorship. but we should also abandon, i think so, the very standard by means of which radical left usually measures the failure of the first two. this libertarian vision of communism as free association, multitude. cs rete. the anti-rerepresent. t nicht anti-rerepresent. d nicht direct democracy based on citizens permanent. engagement. i think that the critique of political representation. as passivizing alienation. rit! here it limit. the idea to organize society in its entirety as a network of associations, councils and so on. is... . ignores a triple impossibility. first there are numerous cases in which representing, speaking for others is a necessity. it is cynical to say that victims of mass violence from auschwitz to rwanda or the mentally ill, not to mention suffering animals, should organize themselves and speak for themselves. no some somebody has to speak for them. second point. when we effectively get a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people self-organizing themselves horizontally, tahrir square, gazi square, whatever. or syntagma square in athens, we should never forget that they remain a minority. that the silent majority remains outside non-re. i'm much more of a pessimist. i think that most you can get from majority, from the majority is a kind of a silent acceptance but political activity is by definition always constrained. and the third point the permanent political engagement. of people has a limited time span. after a couple of weeks or maybe months the majority disengages and the problem is how to safeguard the results of the uprising at this point in time when things return to normal. so i think that this is why i never was.. too enthusiastic about this great moment, you know, oh my god, we all cry, one million people on square, whatever, sintintag square, tahrir square, we were all one and so on. now, what interests me is the morning after. that is to say, the measure of a successful, whatever we call it, revolution, rebellion, revolt, social change, is... how will ordinary people feel the change the morning after when things return to normal? and here. out. fantasies, rich. i limit i hope some of you saw the film which i hate. v for vendetta. i mean, even tony negri fell for it. wonderful multitude, rebellion. but do you remember the final scene? thousands of unarmed londoners, they all wear the famous guy fawkes masks, march towards parliament. and without orders, the military allows the crowd to pass. the people takes over. okay, a nice ecstatic moment, but... to put it in brutal terms, i and then the film ends, but i would be ready to sell my mother into slavery to see v for vendetta part 2. what happens then? you know, it's easy for the people to win. what happens then? this is why, because, you know, you can see this precisely, at least it was like this when i was younger in france. every honest conservative from sarkozy or whoever, they are proud to say, yeah but of course, i was on the barricades in 68 and so on, you know. how to break out of this cycle where revolt or whatever we call it, rebellion, is just this momentary transgression, happy moment, carnival, and then things return to normal. all conservatives like this revolt, like, you know, people let off their steam and so on. and i think a whole list can be made of this, what i call them false in. transgressions like coming from an ex-communist country. i think that political jokes played this role also, although people were arrested for telling them. but i think... they political jokes, jokes against nomenclatura itself, ruling nomenclatura, played a very constructive role. it simply allowed. people a small opening telling the jokes and so on. so that then you are ready to... go on in your miserable life and it's typical. there was a total fantasy. which was, i learned operative in all socialist countries. it's wrong. for theoretical reasons and also empirically it's wrong, but it's a beautiful fantasy. it has a correct insight. namely, the fantasy is that. within the secret police, there was an ultra-secret department. whose function was to produce political jokes, to keep the people satisfied, not jokes against the west, but jokes against their own party leaders and so on. and you know where this idea came to me in yugoslavia, which was a little bit a special case, throughout the 80s, when everybody saw the writing on the wall. the system is approaching its end. some still communist politicians tried to play this game directly. there were a couple of politicians who tried to become more popular with the people by telling at official meetings jokes about themselves. like i remember, i will not name him, one croat politician who made such a fun of his visit to germany. you must know this joke. it's the most brutal one. he was telling, you know what happened to me when i went to germany? i was on a train passing baden-baden and i asked my begleiter, what's this for a city, he said, baden-baden, you know the joke. and i and my reply was, well, i'm not stupid. you don't have to tell me two times and so on. there is even another version of this joke. he simply thought that in germany, when you are asked where you are from, you have to tell the name twice. so when the begleiter asked him, and where are you from, he said, i'm from zagreb, zagreb, you know. he thought that. but again, my point is the absolutely constructive nature of this. uh gke. uh... uh. two points to conclude this part. first, we have absolutely to abandon, i claim, this vision of we live stiff, bureaucratic, totally controlled lives, and then carnival, freedom, you know, those who are are now beggars, beggars are kings, social hierarchy dissolves. i think no, capitalism is already a carnival of its own. and from my friend boris groys, i learned something wonderful. if some of you know literary theory, you know that the great theorist of social carnival is michael bakhtin. the... one of the the compagnon de route of russian formalists within his book on françois rabelais. but now, groys told me they found some archives of bakhtin where you learn something quite unexpected, that bakhtin did not simply celebrate carnival as the wonderful moment of liberation and so on. no, his secret model for carnival were stalin's purges and gulag. that's the true carnival. today you are a member of the central committee, tomorrow you are a traitor, nobody in gulag and so on. and even in racism or fascism, there is definitely a carnivist aspect even to nazism and so on and so on. that's my first point. the true problem is daily life. that's really difficult to change. the ordinary daily light. how things really changed there. the american film producer sam goldwyn, he's an interesting guy. he was always making stupid mistakes or nonsense, but now we know they were all planned. he had a nice irony. that's one of his legends. once some journals attacked his films produced by him that there are too many old clichés in them. you know what was the memo he goldwin wrote to his scenario department? we urgently need new original clichés. and he was right. that's the most difficult thing to do. new clichliche. new. forms which are precisely cliches for everyday life. and i'm even ready to go here further. i think all this dream about local grassroots permanent engagement. i even personally don't like it. would you really like to live in a local community where every afternoon you would have a meeting, how to organize kindergarten, how to organize electricity, this, that. no thanks. i want to live in a nice alienated society where all this is done by an anonymous institution and i read my books, watch my films and so on and so on. at this point we have to confront the question of democracy i'm not against democracy the problem for me is only that democracy well, it's not a word which, put it, divides. i claim, and i agree here again with my friend alain badieu, a true idea or concept divides in the sense that you use it in order to draw a distinction between naively ideology and truth or whatever. democracy... doesn't work like that. it can designate something very authentic, i know, but we all know what other things can be covered, legitimized with the appeal to democracy. i claim that democracy in a certain ideological sense often functions in a literal freudian sense as a fetish. you know, for freud, fetish is basically the last thing you see before you see the concentration in the naive sense that a woman doesn't have a penis and so on and so on. and i think that in our societies in its everyday use, democracy. ich also. a fetish in the sense of it's that which prevents us to see the radicality of our social antagonisms. let me give you an example from cinema. you know all those big hollywood leftist blockbusters, all the president's men, pelican brief and so on and so on. the story is always the same. a couple of ordinary people, lawyers, journalists, discover a mega scandal which reaches up to the president of the united states. so corruption is shown to reach the very top. so we will say, my god, wonderful. it shows the truth about american democracy. why then do we feel so good after these films? because we are satisfied because the message of the film is what a great democratic country is our country where a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on earth. that's what's false about these films. that's why, but i don't have time for this, although politically, of course, i'm very sympathetic towards the linkke, but i have a problem, theoretical, for practical strategic reasons. i have nothing against it, with a term like democratic socialism. i think that both words are suspicious for me. democratic again. blurring like what democracy it's not everybody is for democracy today it means nothing socialism it's the same. my god, i read an interview with bill gates where he says in some deeper sense i'm a socialist socialism basically means in everyday. ideological, in its everyday ideological, only something like, yeah, yeah, not just personal egotism, we should also care about community and so on. no, so i agree with otto weininger, geschlecht und charakter, that guy, who said, but of course, i mean it in the opposite sense, that socialism is aryan and communism is jewish. that's why i have problem with democratic socialism. so what do all these... confusions. indicate. the basic problem is the following one. the eternal story of contemporary left is that of a leader or party elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a new world, mandela, syriza and so on. but then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma. does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms or does one decide to play the game? if one disturbs the capitalist mechanisms, one is swiftly punished by market perturbations, economic chaos, and so on. today's protests and revolts are usually sustained by the combination or even overlapping of different levels. we fight for. if the country is authoritarian. for normal parliamentary democracy we fight against racism and sexism especially the hatred directed at immigrants and refugees we fight for the welfare state against neoliberalism we fight against corruption in politics and economy we fight for new forms of democracy and finally, questioning the global capitalist system as such. now i claim we have to avoid here both extremes. on the one hand, the abstract radical leftist position, which basically means nothing, which is what really matters is the abolition of liberal parliamentary capitalism. all other fights are secondary. but we should also avoid false gradualism. now we fight for simple democracy, forget your socialist dreams, they come later, and so on and so on. the problem is nonetheless dichwan. let's take the big revolts of the last years, like tahrir square. in egypt. it's easy to mobilize the people against corruption, unfreedom, humiliation and so on and so on. but then the entire strategy of global capitalist system is that. you get literally what you wanted, but at a deeper level, things do not really change. you know, and that's then the crucial moment of disappointment that i designated in the title of my talk today as how to go beyond mandela, because anc in south africa won the price was to accept global capitalist coordinates. how to go further than that without falling into, without becoming mugabe, this ridiculous excess of false liberation, of perversion. lib liberation strag. the tragedy is that the ruling ideology. today uses all ich. instruments to block to prevent this radicalization they tell us that, i mean, the latest theory, my preferred one is is developed by maurizio lazzarato in his the rise of the indebted man, this idea of self- entrepreneurshippreneurship, that in a modern democratic society, the difference between capitalists and workers is basically only a quantitative one. the idea is, let's say you're a poor worker and then you. get. get indebted, take a credit for 20,000 euros, and then you are free to do whatever you want with it. you can invest it into your health, into a big holiday, into better healthcare care for your children, into universities for your children. so the idea is even a modest worker is today a self-entrepreneur, a small capitalist. we are all capitalists, responsible through our freedom. choices for our destiny and so on and so on. uh and this is where ideology is operative. today. for example, take the so-called theory of not ulrich beck, he was a little bit better, j zweite moderne, but the english version. with anthony gens. he. point, and it's a masterful ideological trick, is to present you the very new forms of oppression, exploitation as forms of freedom. for example, it's very difficult as we know, it's less and less possible today to get a permanent job. the tendency of capitalism is to move towards the predominance of so-called precarious work. you get one, two years contract, you are never sure and so on and so on. this then is presented to you as a new freedom. anthony gons developed this like, isn't it wonderful? you are not like a clichliche reduced to a permanent role. every two years you can reinvent yourself, you can... or for example, you don't get universal health care. isn't this wonderful? you can make a free decision. do you prefer health or do you prefer a good holiday or whatever? you see the trick. the trick is that actual unfreedom is presented to you as the growth in your is growth in your freedom. so what should we do? here comes my point, especially in times like today. what works for us is that nonetheless. capitalism is inconsistent. it it is necessarily inconsistent. it breaks its own rules all the time. you have democracy, but there are places where there is no democracy and so on and so on. so i claim that what we should be doing today mostly. is's not wait for the big revolution, but thank! what i would like to call, again following baudieu, le point d'impossible, the points of impossibility of the system. which means... apparently small specific demands which appear totally realistic. but for a concrete society, they are the sensitive points. even here i even have a soft spot for obama, the president. i mean, some of the leftist critics of obama are a little bit stupid. they behave as if, what did they think? that he will introduce communism into the united states? no, remember or if you followed it. for example, the point of impossibility for united states, already not for canada, point of impossibility in the sense of something which is unbearably traumatic for the predominant ideology was obviously universal healthcare care. you know what happened to obama by insisting on at least some form of universal health care? he was brought to supreme court and so on. it was traumatic. and nobody can accuse him of socialism or whatever, although a total idiot like that actor chuck norris did accuse him. introducing communism. but what i want to say is that i want to refer here to the wonderful scene of science fiction films. the idea is this truman show. you live in an artificial reality and then if you touch a wrong object, all of reality, like you are in a room and there is a button. you press that button and walls start to fall down, the whole reality disintegrates. but it's a modest point. and that works and of course different countries have situations have different points of impossibility this is where we should begin because it a demand which is totally legal. not prohibited. like there is nothing illegal in demanding universal health service in the united states. and again, each situation has its own point of impossibility. like in a country like turkey, ordinary multiculturalism, the rights for kurds and other minorities is obviously another point of impossibility and so on and so on. but what i want to tell you is and this is also my memory from, i wasn't a great dissident, but some kind of dissident, smaller in ex-yugoslavia. i remember there, at least in the last decade, this may shock you. communists easily tolerated big demands. like if you wrote, i'm not kidding, this literally happened. if you wrote a treatise claiming yugoslav communism is worse than stalinism, it's oppressive in more refined way, communist project is the greatest catastrophe in humanity, whatever. they basically you gave you the plane ticket to go to the west to some anti-communist congress. nobody cared about that. but if you said naively like, as a communist, i don't like that specific law, change that specific law or that specific element, a totally modest demand. totally justifiable by the ruling ideology, even you risk to be arrested and so on. so we had, that was a big lesson for me, we have a whole small class, dozens but nonetheless of, let's call them official dissidents. they make a pact with nomenclatura like yes, you do. you know all that open society popuper from plato, rousseau, marx, bedgeist, catastrophe. you do all this, we don't care just don't be too concrete here with small concrete demands and so on and so on. uh... here because of this inconsistency of capitalism. it's worth... but we should be very careful which fights we select. it's worth fighting these apparently modest fights. sometimes, that would be my ultimate hegelian zeltbeziehung, self-referential irony. even capitalism can be used against capitalism. i remember. one of my most depressing experiences is when 15 years ago, i think i watched on cnn, cnn was a little bit better than it's now at that point. a report on mali where the minister of agriculture of mali said listen, we don't want any state intervention help from you. just follow your own rules. because he said mali in the african republic produces excellent cotton. and it's difficult for them to export it. why? because americans subsidize their cotton producers. they give to them as financial aid more money than the entire state budget of mali. so his message was, just follow your own market rules. you know, everything can be used here or another topic, slavery. we know the paradox of capitalism, how slavery, which more or less, have to be careful here, disappeared in western world around 15th century, we know how from early capitalism onwards, slavery exploded. and i claim that now, in a way, it's returning. in a slightly different form, but it's returning. i saw this when i visited as a tourist, of course, not officially, dubai, qatar and those places. these are de facto slave societies. the majority of people there are. legal but apartheid excluded. workers from nepal to indonesia and so on who are totally deprived of all rights and so on, passports taken from them, they can be arrested, deported, whatever, total exploitation. then not to mention other forms, not even only in third world arabia, africa, like massive slavery, de facto slavery in congo and so on. but do you remember? in december of 2013, when seven people died in a chinese-owned clothing factory in an industrial zone close to firenze. why did they die? because they were de facto slaves. they lived in a small house made out of remainders of wood and so on. and then shocking shock, they discovered that they have the whole slave camp. in the suburb of firenze so i think that we shouldn't be too. peche nicht. again, the big art is to find that button. to insist on small, well-chosen small points where everyone has to agree with you like today, for example with the refugees. of course i am for refugees. they're right and i'm glad to be here. i was told what this theater is doing for them, allowing them to sleep here, helping them and so on. but isn't the enigma for example, refugees escaping syria and iraq. okay, i will not go through the usual story. you know it, how the west is co-responsible for that crisis. but what i wanted to say is, but what about, do you know what happens? why don't they go? do you know that the countries which have the same religion as most of the refugees, sunni muslims. extremely wealthy country. let's enumerate them. saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, emirates. they practically accept no refugees. and they are deeply involved in the crisis which generated refugees. like we know the role saudi arabia plays in financing some opposition to assad in syria and so on and so on. so what about focusing on this point? for me, saudi arabia is... almost a kind of ontological abomination today. a country which is a kind of a political equivalent, you know, those monsters which are sometimes born, like a cow with two heads and three legs or whatever. why? because on the one hand, it is... it presents itself as a traditional muslim country, orthodox. sunni. islam and so on. but at the same time, it's a country which is basically an outpost of western banks. i mean, investing money. it's a country which is financial capitalism at its purest. know that saudi arabia owns almost 10% of the entire value, all factories and so on, of the united states. what about intervening a little bit more strongly there? i mean, when people criticize iran today, i am critical of iran for curtailing women's rights and so on, but i can tell you that iran is a feminist paradise compared with saudi arabia and so on. you see? of course! what i'm aiming at here we approach theory. we i don't have the time to go into it, is how what opens up? the space for radical political interventions today is the fact that capitalism can less and less stick to its own universality. for example, the ideal capitalism, even for marx, was we are all formally free workers, we are only, the slavery enters, we have the same political rights, everyone, slavery enters through wage labor and so on and so on. isn't it clear with all these new forms of apartheid, special economic zones and so on and so on, that world capitalism can less and less afford even this ideology? form of democracy. we are getting new and new forms of apartheid and so on and so on. so now i come to the crucial point of my talk. how to coordinate this multitude of struggles? i would like to refer here to a wonderful new film which you haven't yet seen. i saw a rough version. it's not yet finished of my friend, the aewish anti-zionist. pro-palestinian movieaker udi aloni, he's just finishing a film junction 48. it will be officially shown at the next, in february now berlin film festival. it deals with the difficult predicament of young israeli palestinians palestinians who art. settled within israel. in the borders of '49, pre-'67, and whose everyday life involves a continuous struggle at two fronts, against israeli state oppression as well as against the fundamentalist pressures from within their own community. the main role is played by tamer nafar, a well-known israeli-palestinian rapper who in his music not only deals with israeli oppression, but also attacks mocks the tradition of honor killings of palestinian girls by their families. then, and that's why i'm telling you this story. a strange thing happened to nar during a recent visit to the united states. at some college, i think it's ucla, i'm not sure, after nar performed his song protesting honor killings, some anti-zionist students reproached him for promoting the zionist view of palestinians as barbaric primitives. der line was dead. uh if there are any honor killings among palestinians, israel is responsible for them since the israeli occupation keeps palestinians in primitive conditions and so on and so on. you know, this was typical pseudo-radicalism of, of course, white, wealthy students in r. american university. and nafar gave them a dignified, wonderful reply. i quote it literally. when you criticize me, you criticize my own community in english to impress your radical professors. i sing in arabic to protect the women in my own hood. end of quote. so an important aspect of navar's position is that he is not just protecting palestinian girls from family terror. he's allowing them to fight for themselves, to take the risk. it's not a patronizing position. and again, the film deals with all of it. so... that's the problem. this tension between you know, that's my problem. on the one hand, we have, of course struggle with the oppressed people and so on and so on. on the other hand, we have our own struggles. feminist struggle, struggle against religious fundamentalism and so on and so on. what are you... absolutely! don't accept. is this idea that on behalf of a greater struggle anti-imperialist struggle we should somehow uh abstain from advocating our feminist, gay rights and so on struggles. as my now you will say nobody advocates this. no, maybe not publicly, but i... practically, the majority of my leftist friends tell me privately, you know, i know they have honor killings, religious oppression, but you know, it's not the moment to emphasize this too much. you know, it happens to me all the time and i... i we should break this taboo i think the multiculturalist defence of different ways of life covers up. the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life. uh let me give you an example. now we come to mugabe. mugabe recently gave a talk at the united nations general assembly. uh and basically his talk was a justification for brutal homophobia, but formulated in anti-colonial struggle terms. a quote from mugabe. respecting and upholding human rights is the obligation of all states and it's enshrined in the united nations charter. nowhere does the charter arrogate the right to some to sit in judgment over others in carrying out this universal obligation. in that regard, we reject the politicization of this important issue, homosexuality. uh. and the application of double standards to victimize those who dare to think and act independently of the self-anointed prefects of our time. we reject the attempts to prescribe new rights, he means gay rights, that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions, and beliefs. then he emphasized, we are not gays. cooperation and respect for each other will advance the cause of human rights worldwide. confrontation, vilification, and double standards will not. end of quote. what can mugabe's emphatic claim, we are not gays, mean with regard to the fact that for certain there are many gays, also in zimbabwe? it means, of course, that gays are reduced to an oppressed minority whose acts are often directly criminalized. but one can understand the underlying logic. the gay movement is perceived as the cultural impact of globalization. end if a way globalization undermines traditional social and cultural forms. so the conclusion is the struggle against gays is an aspect of the anti-colonialist struggle. and the same even holds for boko haram. for certain... radical muslims, the liberation of women appears as the most visible feature of the destructive cultural impact of capitalist modernization. therefore, boko haram, which i hope you know what the name means, it can roughly be translated as western education of women specifically is forbidden. boko haram can perceive itself as a way of fighting the destructive aspect of capitalist modernization. but the idea is that. hierarchical regulation of the relations between the two sexes is how you fight capitalism. and... this paradox, i think, at least should give us to think. namely, the paradox debt. uh we have movement today. not only in muslim countries up to a point even in putin's russia where what date really find unbearable. in the west. is not. military interventions is not global capitalist economy, but what they call this liberal, dissolute, immoral, whatever way of life. for example, in the short book on islam that i published with ulstein, i quote it there, komeini said, it's a very important passage. he said, we do not fear western military superiority. we can fight that. we have martyrs. we do not fear western economic imperialism. we can organize ourselves. what we do fear is the dissolute western way of life. and the third thing is that, and you can detect this even in how putin and russian establishment reacted to the victory of that ridiculous singer, you remember, konchita wurst, eurovision and so on. i have no sympathy for him here. i am here a conservative. but nonetheless, i know that how all of a sudden, and boko haram is the extreme example of this. sexual became political, but not in the sense of the late 60s, but in a very paradoxical way that. the basic political program of escaping capitalism decadence is to reintroduce. proper hierarchy in relations between sex. here, now i will go to the edge of what is problematic in what i'm saying. here i remain a little bit of a eurocentrist. in what sense? of course i totally agree with this refugees should enjoy the same rights as the members of other diverse communities that make up europe so i up i admire what you are doing i'm engaged in doing this i i am even ready to adopt the radical leftist view and to claim that it's even wrong to treat them as foreign refugees. no they are part of us. we are co-responsible for their situation. it's not this der topic of hospitality a foreigner comes you have to be kind to him. no they are part of our world. we do not even have the right to treat them as coming from another world. but the catch for me is this one. yes, they have to enjoy the same rights as all of us, but which exactly are these same rights? while europe is now fighting for full gay and women's rights, the right to abortion, same-sex marriages and so on. uh uh should this right also be extended to gays and women among the refugees even if they are in conflict with the customs they bring with themselves and this again this aspect should in no way be dismissed as marginal. i am here again for a certain level of eurocentrism. yes, you should have the same rights, but also your women should have the same rights. also your... gays among you should have the same rights and so on and so on. now of course they are quite justified in saying but this is eurocentrism because they will say in our traditional universe collective rights play a stronger role than individual rights. by allowing so much freedom to individuals, you already undermine our culture. no, i think here we should insist on our own. i'm not afraid to say this, even if some idiots already proclaimed me. being that i'm passing over to pegida. oh my god. another taboo. that must be overcome involves the equation of any reference to european emancipatory legacy as cultural imperialism and racism. i know, i've written about it, in what way western liberalism justifies colonialism and so on and so on. but i wonder why is it exactly now that it's so fashionable to be a critique of eurocentrism. my claim is that in this situation today a certain degree of eurocentrism is worth defending why? because i see this globalization almost of anti. eurocentrism is an indication of a very sad fact, that today's global capitalism no longer needs democracy, equality and so on, but functions quite well with an authoritarian structure. today, for me, the ideal capitalists would have been who like the indian prime minister modi, who is at the same time in economy, a radical neoliberal, he openly said the chance for india is to have even a cheaper labor force than china to sell. them to western companies, millions of indians and so on and so on. at the same time, he is clearly a hindu nationalist and so on. so uh... isn't it it for me? so symptomatic that one tends to reject western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of those values, egalitarianism and so on, can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalization. did we already forget that the entire idea of communist emancipation esh envisaged by marx is a radically eurocentric one. i claim paradoxically, and i'm ready to defend to death this paradox, that it enlightened self-critical. eurocentrism is the only way to really break out of eurocentrism. but i agree with the basic point i repeated it endlessly that the true danger to europe are not muslim terrorists or muslim invasions. the true danger to europe are the fundamentalist anti-immigrant defenders of europe. let's be clear here. that's what i fear. no doubt about it. but precisely because of this, i'm not afraid to claim, no, sorry. it's not enough to just play this endless game of self-humiliation. yes, we europeans are guilty for everything. all our values are fake values. the more we think we are free, the more we are enslaving others and so on and so on. don't we see that the very way we criticize ourselves is... rooted in european tradition. i think that the best way to criticize actual cultural imperialism and so on, it is true. being faithful to the. emancipatory core of european enlightened earth. tradition because you know cultural imperialism never had any problem with cultural diversity. i discovered in india that you know that in 18th century, traditional hindu hierarchy was already disappearing. and then when the british colonized india, they had a very intelligent idea that the only way to control indians is not to allow indian society to disintegrate into modernization. in this way you would have proletarians. you would have western politicization, but... to take care that the majority of indians will remain faithful to their caste society and so on. so one of the most horrible books of ideology of all time, the law legal system of manu, the total manual of with all sub differences of caste society, with all the rules. was resuscitated in 19th century by the british colonizers. so now to conclude, if you allow me a little bit more time, and this will be a little bit more amusing, but also i hope so problematic for you, i want to move at a deeper level. of... let's say anthropological. yeah level. i find so when precisely we are dealing with refugees and other foreigners, what makes me absolutely tired, and i think although it sounds nice, it's politically catastrophic, i claim, is this accent on humanitarian... on humanitarian compassion and so on and so on. no. you know, this idea of let me give you the formula which condensenses the evil for me. it sounds as a very deep formula. it is. the formula ich. that immediately an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. it sounds so deep, you know. other people are foreigners for us, but listen to their story. and you will see, no, and brutally, this is one of the greatest stupidities that you can imagine. how? just applied to a guy, a well-known german politician who i was told by karl-heinz, the myth is that he stayed in the same hotel that i stay here, reichshof, hitler. are you ready to say hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story? no, sorry, there are enemies. real enemies. what does this mean? that the truth of what you do is not in the story.'re too much the construction this idiot. it's not that we are the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. no, we are the horror which we are doing and we reconstruct stories to make, to obfuscate the true horror of what we are doing. the truth is in what you are doing, not there is always a story about it's wonderful to read how... i've written a text on it. how behind every ethnic cleansing, there are some poets. why? because, you know, basically... i hope so. we are not totally bad like if someone were to tell me now go there and pick out that guy's eyes and eat them? well, i would find it a little bit difficult. so what i need is a strong poetic or religious myth. weeks makes me perceive the horror that i will do as the ultimate ethical sacrifice and so on. and for this you need mythologists, you need poets. it's not only karadic of bosnia. everyone had its own karadic. so my point is what? that we don't need more understanding and so on. this is again this liberal trick of, oh we never understand enough the other and so on and so on. i am here for a return to in all provocative. content of this. uh judeo-christian notion of ne ne. in judeo-christian tradition is's not a fellow man. he's not a guy who is like you. you encounter a neighbor when you see the abyss in the other. you know, let's say i have a friend. i think i know him. then all of a sudden that friend does something either horrible. or maybe sublime, but she appears as a stranger to me, like, my god, i didn't know he is like that. at that point, you see the neighbor. in this sense, that stupid postmodern phrase has some truth in it, that we are not only strangers to others, but strangers to ourselves. this is why whenever you hear about universal love, comprehension, and so on, there is something false about it. i think that i wouldn't like to live in a society where i would like to live, and i often did, in a big apartment house where there is an indian here, an arab there, a jew there, a latino- american there. but i don't want to understand them. i want polite distance, respect. maybe from time to time i get close to someone, but it's a miracle. how can we understand each other fully when we even don't understand ourselves? that would be my first one. i mean, it's wrong to think that... like you see what i mean? i don't think a foreign culture, ours included. that we should. focus on some hidden core that we should fully understand and so on and so on. no, the whole point is to learn to maintain maintain a proper distance and especially i think this holds for refugees, you know, this idea of, but refugees are not so bad. listen to them, they are people like us. oh i'm so afraid of this. no, no, precisely because i'm for refugees. because, you know, then you always discover, of course, that. my god, refugees are shitty people like us. some are good, many are bad. of course, if you get hundreds of thousands of them, there will be rapists and so on among them. so the worst thing, you respect their otherness, not their sameness. don't play this game, which is always ideological game of we are all humans. i learned this lesson. when i was in israel, a weird thing happened reported in all the media there. israeli anti-terrorist unit brutally entered the palestinian home because they suspected the father of the family is a... terrorist and he was not at home the father but there was mother with some children of course, when soldiers brutally enter your apartment, you are in a panic, so the girl starts to cry. starts to shout, cry, and mother called her, i don't know what by name. oh byalam, come to me, everything okay and then came the kick. you know, like an israeli soldier discovered that, my god, this girl has the same name as my own girl. and he showed the mother the photo, you know, you see, we are human all and so on and so on. this is falsity at its purest. the true ideology is not we are not just figures of ideology. we are all humans. no. no differences matter. we are not all humans in the same sense. that's the respect to the others, where you don't accept this simple universalization and so on and so on. the most again, the most dangerous thing is to idealize the other. that's true actual racism for me. like open yourself to them and so on. no, treat them respectfully, absolutely admit them. in der other and so on and so on. just now, really to conclude with two problematic points concerning the refugees. another way of idealizing refugees is, and many of my radical leftist friends play this game, i'm horrified at this, the idea is this one. i will not name them. it would be embarrassing. but many of my radical leftist friends, they tell you this secretly, privately, very well-known names, but i will not mention them, is that you know today there is such a crisis. we cannot arouse people to be more radical death. we need a mega catastrophe, ecological or atomic incident, millions dead, the only thing that will move people. and some of them now ref refugees into this. like a friend recently wrote to me, let's bring 10 million refugees in europe. and they will form the base of the new revolutionary working class. and i said, ah, that's it, you're a marxist, you don't have a revolutionary class, so let's import one. i mean, it's absurdity. the second thing. precisely out of respect for the refugees, i claim that i am tired of this habermasian and of some others' motif of so-called democratic deficit of european union. the basic idea is european union is okay, it's just... has a democratic deficit. this reminds me of my old communist colleagues from the times of real when they said, soviet union, dead there, it's basically okay, it just has a little bit of democratic deficit. no, the point is that this democratic deficit is part of the system. and i'm even ready to go further here. i had recently a debate two, three days ago with yanis varoufakis and assange in london, where i think varoufakis, my very good friend, was a little bit naive, because his point of varoufakis was europe has to democratize itself, render all of it transparent and so on. people should decide. but then i told him about my very sad experience. maybe some of you read it. i gave a month ago or when an interview to j and then they asked me to answer some readers questions and then they told me one question addressed at me which evoked most of interest among the readers. they get hundreds of replies to it was precisely democratic question, but anti-immigrant democratic question. it was the question if we live in democratic society, who authorized angela merkel to call hundreds of thousands of people to move to germany? where is the democratic right here? she should be prosecuted and so on and so on. now, varufaki's answer was, this is confusing. if there really were to be a referendum, merkel would have won here. i doubt it. i'm simply more of a pessimist. i simply think, no. majority can be wrong and most of the time maybe even it is wrong. this doesn't mean that we need an enlightened communist party to lead them, but yes we have to accept this that. you know, for democracy to work, many other things have to work. democracy in itself. doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily change things for the better. so to conclude, just two things. i hope you will find them amusing. two quotes. the first one, the best reply what to do for the refugees. is i hope you know you should read it. oscar wilde. his wonderful short text, the soul of man under socialism. where in the opening lines, he points out that quote, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought, denken. and here is the quote. people find themselves surrounded by terrible poverty, by ugliness, by starvation. it is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this accordingly. with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. but their remedies do not cure the disease they merely prolong it. indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. they try to solve the problem of poverty for instance by keeping the poor alive. or in the case of a very advanced school by amusing the poor. but this is not a solution. it is an aggravation of the difficulty. the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. and the altruistic virtue have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. that's why that's my point of capitalism and so on. of course we should unconditionally help the refugees. but the solution is not the world stays the same. we just help. the refugees. we will have to do more, change the economic system. i don't know i don't know in what way. and my last point, this is the saddest point. you know, there is genuine hatred, jews, palestinians, third world and so on. and what came to my mind here is a very sad lesson. look, it's the last page, don't be afraid. it. i recently read. ruth klüger. she survived as a girl, auschwitz, memoirs still alive, a holocaust girlhood remembered, where she describes after she survived after world war ii in germany, a conversation with some doctoral student here in germany. here is the quote. one reports how in jerusalem he this student made the acquaintance of an old hungarian jew who was a survivor of auschwitz. and yet this man cursed the arabs and held them all in contempt. how can someone who comes from auschwitz talk like that? the german asks. i get into the act and argue. but what did he expect? auschwitz was no educational, instructional institution. you learned nothing there. and least of all, humanity and tolerance. absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps. and there is no catharsis, the sort of thing you go to theater for. they were the most useless pointless establishments imaginable. i think this is a crucial. prejudice that we have to abandon. no, there is nothing noble in suffering as if you've seen that, you will emerge as a wise man understanding. no, auschwitz, and that's also the horror of auschwitz, it's not just what it does to you. from the outside whatever we know what it there is no ethical greatness in it like this heroism you survive it and so on and so on this is what is so horrible about suffering. it doesn't produce poor people but poor people who because they experience suffering they know how to be good no it ruins you from the inside. that's why the worst thing you can do is dealing with refugees or with poor among us is to idealize them. they are poor but they have a certain nobility and so on and so on. no, the problem is to accept that they don't have this nobility but precisely because they were ruined by the system and so on. no, it's not as easy as that as it is, you know, the classical hollywood kids frank capra films where the idea is all people, poor people are really wonderful. gut. you just have to. hear them to discover their inner beauty. no, there is no inner beauty. thank you very much.
ich danke ihnen sehr froh dass ich hier bin leider meine deutscheache nichtug um den ganzen vortrag deutsch zu. but nonetheless, i want to say how grateful i am that i can be here. my gratitude of course, not only to those who are here, but to the one who is not here, my good friend karl-heinz dellwo. then i must say that i like the city of hamburg. because you know many people outside germany identify germany with a certain image of, you know, j lederhoseneln and, well, you don't find that here. no. and i claim that even... my god, even the nazis didn't succeed in ruining the spirit of the city. for example, let's go to the lowest of the lowest. the great, unfortunately, nazi movie director, veit harlan. but when he did a film which takes place in hamburg. at the term of the last century, opfergang. it's a very good film, i claim. so you know, even the worst nat hamburg head. capacity to bring out something which was not totally. totally bad in them so let me go to it okay i should make the usual joke to which you are used probably, i mean, it's nice to be in the fuck room and so on, but i will not dwell on that too much because i have... in view of the difficult situation in which we all in europe are now, i have quite many things to say. say, so let me begin. today, the very idea of a radical social transformation appears as an impossible dream. but this term impossible should make us think. impossible and possible are distributed in strange ways. today. on the one hand in the domain of personal freedoms. and. scientific technology. we are told again and again how nothing is impossible. we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions. entire archives of music, films are available for downloading. going to space is available to everyone, okay, everyone with money. there is even the prospect of enhancing our physical, psychic abilities, of manipulating our genetic. up to the gnostic dream of achieving immortality by way of transforming our identity into a software and then we just download ourselves into. a new hardware so again, everything is possible. on the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations. our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of communist states, humanity finally. has abandoned the old millenarian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality, which means of course capitalist reality with all its impossibilities. you cannot engage in large collective acts which we are told always end in totalitarian terror cling to the old welfare state it makes you non-competitive and so on and so on. so this is for me the basic paradox. everything is possible. maybe, i don't know, we will be able to live eternally. you will be able, they are already making experiments. i'm not kidding in new york. i met some surgeons for a man to get three penises so that you can do it with three. all this is possible. but you cannot raise the taxes to finance culture for 1%. that's impossible. everything and so on. it. again, our first task is to be always aware that when we are told this is possible, this is not possible, and so on. uh. we are talking about ideology. not about cult. effect. uh but the crucial. point. to always bear in mind here is that. uh we live in what i'm tempted to call the post-political era of the naturalization of economy. political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity when austerity measures are imposed we are repeatedly told that this is simply how things have to be done. in c conditions the exercise of power, and that's crucial, no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness. i would like to quote here my friend alain badiu who wrote. passage since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible. via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication in power. today's global society no longer censors anything. all art and all thought is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. we should become pitiless censors of ourselves. and effectively, today, we seem to be at the opposite point of the ideology of the glorious 60s. the motto of spontaneity, creative self-expression and so on. are all taken over by the system. the old logic of the system of power reproducing itself through. repression. true rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetuses is left behind. non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why... pitiless self-censorship. is today a sine qua non, a necessary condition of emancipatory politics and i mean this quite seriously today more than ever. we... can clearly see how? difficult. it is really to imagine another world. how? when we think that our imagination exploded. into another dimension it's really just the what i like to call the phantasmatic core the innermost dream-like structure of our own uh. society. i think that the lesson that we have to assume today. in our post-revolutionary era. by this i mean the following, and that's why i... i advocate a paradoxical return from marx to hegel. our situation is a very hegelian one, i claim. the revolution happened, not all around, but 20th century was the century of communism, of reactions to communism. basically the communist project. failed. and our problem is how to avoid the cynical conclusion, okay, it failed, let's play the game. there is no alternative. how to remain faithful? two. the radical emancipatory project. without of course, repeating its mistakes. and here i claim we have to go to the end, which means to the beginning. although the analysis of capitalism elaborated by marx in his capital is still an unsurpassed model. it has it. failures, it's... limitations. i think. it can be demonstrated, which i will not do here, of course, that... the implicit vision of post-capitalist, communist, however you call it, society that you find in marx is still a capitalism without capitalism. marx correctly identified the core of capitalism is this. it permanent push towards self-reproduction, self-expansion and so on and so on. and his idea was that. even if you take away. the form of the capital. this expansive self-reproduction would explode. explode explode in an even more free way. so i think that in a way for marx, literally, his vision of communism was capitalism without capitalism. that is to say, this capitalist dynamic of exploding productive power of humanity without the capitalist form. to go very quickly through it, just a metaphor to hint this at you, to give you a hint. what just an indication. this is of course not an analysis. what marx didn't he is. the paradox which jacques lacan, my teacher, identified as the paradox of what he calls object, object, the object cause of desire, which is an... obstacle, but at the same time a positive condition of what it is the obstacle to. let me give you a crazy example, which i think makes perfectly this point. once. it happened in latin america. i will not tell you where. er. a voluptuous elder lady, i don't know, maybe she was flirting with me, she told me that... basically, her point was, i'm still beautiful and sexually attractive in spite of. and she told me how her last lover, when she saw her naked, told her that if she just were to lose two or three kilos, her body would have been perfect. and i told her, just don't lose two or three kilos. because, you know, you often find this paradox that like... two or three kilos less and you would be perfect. but this ideal of perfection only arises when you do have two or three kilos too much. you see my point? you take away the obstacle, that small element which seems to disturb the perfection, and you lose this potential virtual perfection itself. this is the paradox lacon is aiming at. debt. you have, let's put it in abstract terms, an ideal, but some small element. disturb it. but what appears as a disturbing mediator is really the condition of an object. and it can happen at all levels in eroticism especially. for example, a good friend of mine when i was young was in love with a girl. and these were still a little bit more patriarchal times, so he was... in order to gain the access to the girls, he visited her family and talked with her father often. he thought that the whole point is that he has to talk with her father. just to. have full access to the girl. but then... when the father went on a long trip. it no longer functioned. with the girl. you see, what he thought is just an obstacle. oh my god, i have to go through this ritual talking with the father. was not really an obstacle. it was the girl as the object of his desire. entered tisch! fantasy of desire only mediated through the father. you take the father, the obstacle away, you lose the object. okay, i will not go more into it now. i just want to say that how at this level how difficult it is to really imagine a new werk. how often? what we present to ourselves as a radically new world is just some phantasmatic core of the old world. which means we have to abandon, break many taboos here. now comes a little bit more problematic part of my talk. first, i claim. we should abandon not only the two main forms of the 20th century state socialism, the social democratic welfare state and of course the stalinist party dictatorship. but we should also abandon, i think so, the very standard by means of which radical left usually measures the failure of the first two. this libertarian vision of communism as free association, multitude. cs rete. the anti-rerepresent. t nicht anti-rerepresent. d nicht direct democracy based on citizens permanent. engagement. i think that the critique of political representation. as passivizing alienation. rit! here it limit. the idea to organize society in its entirety as a network of associations, councils and so on. is... . ignores a triple impossibility. first there are numerous cases in which representing, speaking for others is a necessity. it is cynical to say that victims of mass violence from auschwitz to rwanda or the mentally ill, not to mention suffering animals, should organize themselves and speak for themselves. no some somebody has to speak for them. second point. when we effectively get a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people self-organizing themselves horizontally, tahrir square, gazi square, whatever. or syntagma square in athens, we should never forget that they remain a minority. that the silent majority remains outside non-re. i'm much more of a pessimist. i think that most you can get from majority, from the majority is a kind of a silent acceptance but political activity is by definition always constrained. and the third point the permanent political engagement. of people has a limited time span. after a couple of weeks or maybe months the majority disengages and the problem is how to safeguard the results of the uprising at this point in time when things return to normal. so i think that this is why i never was.. too enthusiastic about this great moment, you know, oh my god, we all cry, one million people on square, whatever, sintintag square, tahrir square, we were all one and so on. now, what interests me is the morning after. that is to say, the measure of a successful, whatever we call it, revolution, rebellion, revolt, social change, is... how will ordinary people feel the change the morning after when things return to normal? and here. out. fantasies, rich. i limit i hope some of you saw the film which i hate. v for vendetta. i mean, even tony negri fell for it. wonderful multitude, rebellion. but do you remember the final scene? thousands of unarmed londoners, they all wear the famous guy fawkes masks, march towards parliament. and without orders, the military allows the crowd to pass. the people takes over. okay, a nice ecstatic moment, but... to put it in brutal terms, i and then the film ends, but i would be ready to sell my mother into slavery to see v for vendetta part 2. what happens then? you know, it's easy for the people to win. what happens then? this is why, because, you know, you can see this precisely, at least it was like this when i was younger in france. every honest conservative from sarkozy or whoever, they are proud to say, yeah but of course, i was on the barricades in 68 and so on, you know. how to break out of this cycle where revolt or whatever we call it, rebellion, is just this momentary transgression, happy moment, carnival, and then things return to normal. all conservatives like this revolt, like, you know, people let off their steam and so on. and i think a whole list can be made of this, what i call them false in. transgressions like coming from an ex-communist country. i think that political jokes played this role also, although people were arrested for telling them. but i think... they political jokes, jokes against nomenclatura itself, ruling nomenclatura, played a very constructive role. it simply allowed. people a small opening telling the jokes and so on. so that then you are ready to... go on in your miserable life and it's typical. there was a total fantasy. which was, i learned operative in all socialist countries. it's wrong. for theoretical reasons and also empirically it's wrong, but it's a beautiful fantasy. it has a correct insight. namely, the fantasy is that. within the secret police, there was an ultra-secret department. whose function was to produce political jokes, to keep the people satisfied, not jokes against the west, but jokes against their own party leaders and so on. and you know where this idea came to me in yugoslavia, which was a little bit a special case, throughout the 80s, when everybody saw the writing on the wall. the system is approaching its end. some still communist politicians tried to play this game directly. there were a couple of politicians who tried to become more popular with the people by telling at official meetings jokes about themselves. like i remember, i will not name him, one croat politician who made such a fun of his visit to germany. you must know this joke. it's the most brutal one. he was telling, you know what happened to me when i went to germany? i was on a train passing baden-baden and i asked my begleiter, what's this for a city, he said, baden-baden, you know the joke. and i and my reply was, well, i'm not stupid. you don't have to tell me two times and so on. there is even another version of this joke. he simply thought that in germany, when you are asked where you are from, you have to tell the name twice. so when the begleiter asked him, and where are you from, he said, i'm from zagreb, zagreb, you know. he thought that. but again, my point is the absolutely constructive nature of this. uh gke. uh... uh. two points to conclude this part. first, we have absolutely to abandon, i claim, this vision of we live stiff, bureaucratic, totally controlled lives, and then carnival, freedom, you know, those who are are now beggars, beggars are kings, social hierarchy dissolves. i think no, capitalism is already a carnival of its own. and from my friend boris groys, i learned something wonderful. if some of you know literary theory, you know that the great theorist of social carnival is michael bakhtin. the... one of the the compagnon de route of russian formalists within his book on françois rabelais. but now, groys told me they found some archives of bakhtin where you learn something quite unexpected, that bakhtin did not simply celebrate carnival as the wonderful moment of liberation and so on. no, his secret model for carnival were stalin's purges and gulag. that's the true carnival. today you are a member of the central committee, tomorrow you are a traitor, nobody in gulag and so on. and even in racism or fascism, there is definitely a carnivist aspect even to nazism and so on and so on. that's my first point. the true problem is daily life. that's really difficult to change. the ordinary daily light. how things really changed there. the american film producer sam goldwyn, he's an interesting guy. he was always making stupid mistakes or nonsense, but now we know they were all planned. he had a nice irony. that's one of his legends. once some journals attacked his films produced by him that there are too many old clichés in them. you know what was the memo he goldwin wrote to his scenario department? we urgently need new original clichés. and he was right. that's the most difficult thing to do. new clichliche. new. forms which are precisely cliches for everyday life. and i'm even ready to go here further. i think all this dream about local grassroots permanent engagement. i even personally don't like it. would you really like to live in a local community where every afternoon you would have a meeting, how to organize kindergarten, how to organize electricity, this, that. no thanks. i want to live in a nice alienated society where all this is done by an anonymous institution and i read my books, watch my films and so on and so on. at this point we have to confront the question of democracy i'm not against democracy the problem for me is only that democracy well, it's not a word which, put it, divides. i claim, and i agree here again with my friend alain badieu, a true idea or concept divides in the sense that you use it in order to draw a distinction between naively ideology and truth or whatever. democracy... doesn't work like that. it can designate something very authentic, i know, but we all know what other things can be covered, legitimized with the appeal to democracy. i claim that democracy in a certain ideological sense often functions in a literal freudian sense as a fetish. you know, for freud, fetish is basically the last thing you see before you see the concentration in the naive sense that a woman doesn't have a penis and so on and so on. and i think that in our societies in its everyday use, democracy. ich also. a fetish in the sense of it's that which prevents us to see the radicality of our social antagonisms. let me give you an example from cinema. you know all those big hollywood leftist blockbusters, all the president's men, pelican brief and so on and so on. the story is always the same. a couple of ordinary people, lawyers, journalists, discover a mega scandal which reaches up to the president of the united states. so corruption is shown to reach the very top. so we will say, my god, wonderful. it shows the truth about american democracy. why then do we feel so good after these films? because we are satisfied because the message of the film is what a great democratic country is our country where a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on earth. that's what's false about these films. that's why, but i don't have time for this, although politically, of course, i'm very sympathetic towards the linkke, but i have a problem, theoretical, for practical strategic reasons. i have nothing against it, with a term like democratic socialism. i think that both words are suspicious for me. democratic again. blurring like what democracy it's not everybody is for democracy today it means nothing socialism it's the same. my god, i read an interview with bill gates where he says in some deeper sense i'm a socialist socialism basically means in everyday. ideological, in its everyday ideological, only something like, yeah, yeah, not just personal egotism, we should also care about community and so on. no, so i agree with otto weininger, geschlecht und charakter, that guy, who said, but of course, i mean it in the opposite sense, that socialism is aryan and communism is jewish. that's why i have problem with democratic socialism. so what do all these... confusions. indicate. the basic problem is the following one. the eternal story of contemporary left is that of a leader or party elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a new world, mandela, syriza and so on. but then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma. does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms or does one decide to play the game? if one disturbs the capitalist mechanisms, one is swiftly punished by market perturbations, economic chaos, and so on. today's protests and revolts are usually sustained by the combination or even overlapping of different levels. we fight for. if the country is authoritarian. for normal parliamentary democracy we fight against racism and sexism especially the hatred directed at immigrants and refugees we fight for the welfare state against neoliberalism we fight against corruption in politics and economy we fight for new forms of democracy and finally, questioning the global capitalist system as such. now i claim we have to avoid here both extremes. on the one hand, the abstract radical leftist position, which basically means nothing, which is what really matters is the abolition of liberal parliamentary capitalism. all other fights are secondary. but we should also avoid false gradualism. now we fight for simple democracy, forget your socialist dreams, they come later, and so on and so on. the problem is nonetheless dichwan. let's take the big revolts of the last years, like tahrir square. in egypt. it's easy to mobilize the people against corruption, unfreedom, humiliation and so on and so on. but then the entire strategy of global capitalist system is that. you get literally what you wanted, but at a deeper level, things do not really change. you know, and that's then the crucial moment of disappointment that i designated in the title of my talk today as how to go beyond mandela, because anc in south africa won the price was to accept global capitalist coordinates. how to go further than that without falling into, without becoming mugabe, this ridiculous excess of false liberation, of perversion. lib liberation strag. the tragedy is that the ruling ideology. today uses all ich. instruments to block to prevent this radicalization they tell us that, i mean, the latest theory, my preferred one is is developed by maurizio lazzarato in his the rise of the indebted man, this idea of self- entrepreneurshippreneurship, that in a modern democratic society, the difference between capitalists and workers is basically only a quantitative one. the idea is, let's say you're a poor worker and then you. get. get indebted, take a credit for 20,000 euros, and then you are free to do whatever you want with it. you can invest it into your health, into a big holiday, into better healthcare care for your children, into universities for your children. so the idea is even a modest worker is today a self-entrepreneur, a small capitalist. we are all capitalists, responsible through our freedom. choices for our destiny and so on and so on. uh and this is where ideology is operative. today. for example, take the so-called theory of not ulrich beck, he was a little bit better, j zweite moderne, but the english version. with anthony gens. he. point, and it's a masterful ideological trick, is to present you the very new forms of oppression, exploitation as forms of freedom. for example, it's very difficult as we know, it's less and less possible today to get a permanent job. the tendency of capitalism is to move towards the predominance of so-called precarious work. you get one, two years contract, you are never sure and so on and so on. this then is presented to you as a new freedom. anthony gons developed this like, isn't it wonderful? you are not like a clichliche reduced to a permanent role. every two years you can reinvent yourself, you can... or for example, you don't get universal health care. isn't this wonderful? you can make a free decision. do you prefer health or do you prefer a good holiday or whatever? you see the trick. the trick is that actual unfreedom is presented to you as the growth in your is growth in your freedom. so what should we do? here comes my point, especially in times like today. what works for us is that nonetheless. capitalism is inconsistent. it it is necessarily inconsistent. it breaks its own rules all the time. you have democracy, but there are places where there is no democracy and so on and so on. so i claim that what we should be doing today mostly. is's not wait for the big revolution, but thank! what i would like to call, again following baudieu, le point d'impossible, the points of impossibility of the system. which means... apparently small specific demands which appear totally realistic. but for a concrete society, they are the sensitive points. even here i even have a soft spot for obama, the president. i mean, some of the leftist critics of obama are a little bit stupid. they behave as if, what did they think? that he will introduce communism into the united states? no, remember or if you followed it. for example, the point of impossibility for united states, already not for canada, point of impossibility in the sense of something which is unbearably traumatic for the predominant ideology was obviously universal healthcare care. you know what happened to obama by insisting on at least some form of universal health care? he was brought to supreme court and so on. it was traumatic. and nobody can accuse him of socialism or whatever, although a total idiot like that actor chuck norris did accuse him. introducing communism. but what i want to say is that i want to refer here to the wonderful scene of science fiction films. the idea is this truman show. you live in an artificial reality and then if you touch a wrong object, all of reality, like you are in a room and there is a button. you press that button and walls start to fall down, the whole reality disintegrates. but it's a modest point. and that works and of course different countries have situations have different points of impossibility this is where we should begin because it a demand which is totally legal. not prohibited. like there is nothing illegal in demanding universal health service in the united states. and again, each situation has its own point of impossibility. like in a country like turkey, ordinary multiculturalism, the rights for kurds and other minorities is obviously another point of impossibility and so on and so on. but what i want to tell you is and this is also my memory from, i wasn't a great dissident, but some kind of dissident, smaller in ex-yugoslavia. i remember there, at least in the last decade, this may shock you. communists easily tolerated big demands. like if you wrote, i'm not kidding, this literally happened. if you wrote a treatise claiming yugoslav communism is worse than stalinism, it's oppressive in more refined way, communist project is the greatest catastrophe in humanity, whatever. they basically you gave you the plane ticket to go to the west to some anti-communist congress. nobody cared about that. but if you said naively like, as a communist, i don't like that specific law, change that specific law or that specific element, a totally modest demand. totally justifiable by the ruling ideology, even you risk to be arrested and so on. so we had, that was a big lesson for me, we have a whole small class, dozens but nonetheless of, let's call them official dissidents. they make a pact with nomenclatura like yes, you do. you know all that open society popuper from plato, rousseau, marx, bedgeist, catastrophe. you do all this, we don't care just don't be too concrete here with small concrete demands and so on and so on. uh... here because of this inconsistency of capitalism. it's worth... but we should be very careful which fights we select. it's worth fighting these apparently modest fights. sometimes, that would be my ultimate hegelian zeltbeziehung, self-referential irony. even capitalism can be used against capitalism. i remember. one of my most depressing experiences is when 15 years ago, i think i watched on cnn, cnn was a little bit better than it's now at that point. a report on mali where the minister of agriculture of mali said listen, we don't want any state intervention help from you. just follow your own rules. because he said mali in the african republic produces excellent cotton. and it's difficult for them to export it. why? because americans subsidize their cotton producers. they give to them as financial aid more money than the entire state budget of mali. so his message was, just follow your own market rules. you know, everything can be used here or another topic, slavery. we know the paradox of capitalism, how slavery, which more or less, have to be careful here, disappeared in western world around 15th century, we know how from early capitalism onwards, slavery exploded. and i claim that now, in a way, it's returning. in a slightly different form, but it's returning. i saw this when i visited as a tourist, of course, not officially, dubai, qatar and those places. these are de facto slave societies. the majority of people there are. legal but apartheid excluded. workers from nepal to indonesia and so on who are totally deprived of all rights and so on, passports taken from them, they can be arrested, deported, whatever, total exploitation. then not to mention other forms, not even only in third world arabia, africa, like massive slavery, de facto slavery in congo and so on. but do you remember? in december of 2013, when seven people died in a chinese-owned clothing factory in an industrial zone close to firenze. why did they die? because they were de facto slaves. they lived in a small house made out of remainders of wood and so on. and then shocking shock, they discovered that they have the whole slave camp. in the suburb of firenze so i think that we shouldn't be too. peche nicht. again, the big art is to find that button. to insist on small, well-chosen small points where everyone has to agree with you like today, for example with the refugees. of course i am for refugees. they're right and i'm glad to be here. i was told what this theater is doing for them, allowing them to sleep here, helping them and so on. but isn't the enigma for example, refugees escaping syria and iraq. okay, i will not go through the usual story. you know it, how the west is co-responsible for that crisis. but what i wanted to say is, but what about, do you know what happens? why don't they go? do you know that the countries which have the same religion as most of the refugees, sunni muslims. extremely wealthy country. let's enumerate them. saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, emirates. they practically accept no refugees. and they are deeply involved in the crisis which generated refugees. like we know the role saudi arabia plays in financing some opposition to assad in syria and so on and so on. so what about focusing on this point? for me, saudi arabia is... almost a kind of ontological abomination today. a country which is a kind of a political equivalent, you know, those monsters which are sometimes born, like a cow with two heads and three legs or whatever. why? because on the one hand, it is... it presents itself as a traditional muslim country, orthodox. sunni. islam and so on. but at the same time, it's a country which is basically an outpost of western banks. i mean, investing money. it's a country which is financial capitalism at its purest. know that saudi arabia owns almost 10% of the entire value, all factories and so on, of the united states. what about intervening a little bit more strongly there? i mean, when people criticize iran today, i am critical of iran for curtailing women's rights and so on, but i can tell you that iran is a feminist paradise compared with saudi arabia and so on. you see? of course! what i'm aiming at here we approach theory. we i don't have the time to go into it, is how what opens up? the space for radical political interventions today is the fact that capitalism can less and less stick to its own universality. for example, the ideal capitalism, even for marx, was we are all formally free workers, we are only, the slavery enters, we have the same political rights, everyone, slavery enters through wage labor and so on and so on. isn't it clear with all these new forms of apartheid, special economic zones and so on and so on, that world capitalism can less and less afford even this ideology? form of democracy. we are getting new and new forms of apartheid and so on and so on. so now i come to the crucial point of my talk. how to coordinate this multitude of struggles? i would like to refer here to a wonderful new film which you haven't yet seen. i saw a rough version. it's not yet finished of my friend, the aewish anti-zionist. pro-palestinian movieaker udi aloni, he's just finishing a film junction 48. it will be officially shown at the next, in february now berlin film festival. it deals with the difficult predicament of young israeli palestinians palestinians who art. settled within israel. in the borders of '49, pre-'67, and whose everyday life involves a continuous struggle at two fronts, against israeli state oppression as well as against the fundamentalist pressures from within their own community. the main role is played by tamer nafar, a well-known israeli-palestinian rapper who in his music not only deals with israeli oppression, but also attacks mocks the tradition of honor killings of palestinian girls by their families. then, and that's why i'm telling you this story. a strange thing happened to nar during a recent visit to the united states. at some college, i think it's ucla, i'm not sure, after nar performed his song protesting honor killings, some anti-zionist students reproached him for promoting the zionist view of palestinians as barbaric primitives. der line was dead. uh if there are any honor killings among palestinians, israel is responsible for them since the israeli occupation keeps palestinians in primitive conditions and so on and so on. you know, this was typical pseudo-radicalism of, of course, white, wealthy students in r. american university. and nafar gave them a dignified, wonderful reply. i quote it literally. when you criticize me, you criticize my own community in english to impress your radical professors. i sing in arabic to protect the women in my own hood. end of quote. so an important aspect of navar's position is that he is not just protecting palestinian girls from family terror. he's allowing them to fight for themselves, to take the risk. it's not a patronizing position. and again, the film deals with all of it. so... that's the problem. this tension between you know, that's my problem. on the one hand, we have, of course struggle with the oppressed people and so on and so on. on the other hand, we have our own struggles. feminist struggle, struggle against religious fundamentalism and so on and so on. what are you... absolutely! don't accept. is this idea that on behalf of a greater struggle anti-imperialist struggle we should somehow uh abstain from advocating our feminist, gay rights and so on struggles. as my now you will say nobody advocates this. no, maybe not publicly, but i... practically, the majority of my leftist friends tell me privately, you know, i know they have honor killings, religious oppression, but you know, it's not the moment to emphasize this too much. you know, it happens to me all the time and i... i we should break this taboo i think the multiculturalist defence of different ways of life covers up. the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life. uh let me give you an example. now we come to mugabe. mugabe recently gave a talk at the united nations general assembly. uh and basically his talk was a justification for brutal homophobia, but formulated in anti-colonial struggle terms. a quote from mugabe. respecting and upholding human rights is the obligation of all states and it's enshrined in the united nations charter. nowhere does the charter arrogate the right to some to sit in judgment over others in carrying out this universal obligation. in that regard, we reject the politicization of this important issue, homosexuality. uh. and the application of double standards to victimize those who dare to think and act independently of the self-anointed prefects of our time. we reject the attempts to prescribe new rights, he means gay rights, that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions, and beliefs. then he emphasized, we are not gays. cooperation and respect for each other will advance the cause of human rights worldwide. confrontation, vilification, and double standards will not. end of quote. what can mugabe's emphatic claim, we are not gays, mean with regard to the fact that for certain there are many gays, also in zimbabwe? it means, of course, that gays are reduced to an oppressed minority whose acts are often directly criminalized. but one can understand the underlying logic. the gay movement is perceived as the cultural impact of globalization. end if a way globalization undermines traditional social and cultural forms. so the conclusion is the struggle against gays is an aspect of the anti-colonialist struggle. and the same even holds for boko haram. for certain... radical muslims, the liberation of women appears as the most visible feature of the destructive cultural impact of capitalist modernization. therefore, boko haram, which i hope you know what the name means, it can roughly be translated as western education of women specifically is forbidden. boko haram can perceive itself as a way of fighting the destructive aspect of capitalist modernization. but the idea is that. hierarchical regulation of the relations between the two sexes is how you fight capitalism. and... this paradox, i think, at least should give us to think. namely, the paradox debt. uh we have movement today. not only in muslim countries up to a point even in putin's russia where what date really find unbearable. in the west. is not. military interventions is not global capitalist economy, but what they call this liberal, dissolute, immoral, whatever way of life. for example, in the short book on islam that i published with ulstein, i quote it there, komeini said, it's a very important passage. he said, we do not fear western military superiority. we can fight that. we have martyrs. we do not fear western economic imperialism. we can organize ourselves. what we do fear is the dissolute western way of life. and the third thing is that, and you can detect this even in how putin and russian establishment reacted to the victory of that ridiculous singer, you remember, konchita wurst, eurovision and so on. i have no sympathy for him here. i am here a conservative. but nonetheless, i know that how all of a sudden, and boko haram is the extreme example of this. sexual became political, but not in the sense of the late 60s, but in a very paradoxical way that. the basic political program of escaping capitalism decadence is to reintroduce. proper hierarchy in relations between sex. here, now i will go to the edge of what is problematic in what i'm saying. here i remain a little bit of a eurocentrist. in what sense? of course i totally agree with this refugees should enjoy the same rights as the members of other diverse communities that make up europe so i up i admire what you are doing i'm engaged in doing this i i am even ready to adopt the radical leftist view and to claim that it's even wrong to treat them as foreign refugees. no they are part of us. we are co-responsible for their situation. it's not this der topic of hospitality a foreigner comes you have to be kind to him. no they are part of our world. we do not even have the right to treat them as coming from another world. but the catch for me is this one. yes, they have to enjoy the same rights as all of us, but which exactly are these same rights? while europe is now fighting for full gay and women's rights, the right to abortion, same-sex marriages and so on. uh uh should this right also be extended to gays and women among the refugees even if they are in conflict with the customs they bring with themselves and this again this aspect should in no way be dismissed as marginal. i am here again for a certain level of eurocentrism. yes, you should have the same rights, but also your women should have the same rights. also your... gays among you should have the same rights and so on and so on. now of course they are quite justified in saying but this is eurocentrism because they will say in our traditional universe collective rights play a stronger role than individual rights. by allowing so much freedom to individuals, you already undermine our culture. no, i think here we should insist on our own. i'm not afraid to say this, even if some idiots already proclaimed me. being that i'm passing over to pegida. oh my god. another taboo. that must be overcome involves the equation of any reference to european emancipatory legacy as cultural imperialism and racism. i know, i've written about it, in what way western liberalism justifies colonialism and so on and so on. but i wonder why is it exactly now that it's so fashionable to be a critique of eurocentrism. my claim is that in this situation today a certain degree of eurocentrism is worth defending why? because i see this globalization almost of anti. eurocentrism is an indication of a very sad fact, that today's global capitalism no longer needs democracy, equality and so on, but functions quite well with an authoritarian structure. today, for me, the ideal capitalists would have been who like the indian prime minister modi, who is at the same time in economy, a radical neoliberal, he openly said the chance for india is to have even a cheaper labor force than china to sell. them to western companies, millions of indians and so on and so on. at the same time, he is clearly a hindu nationalist and so on. so uh... isn't it it for me? so symptomatic that one tends to reject western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of those values, egalitarianism and so on, can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalization. did we already forget that the entire idea of communist emancipation esh envisaged by marx is a radically eurocentric one. i claim paradoxically, and i'm ready to defend to death this paradox, that it enlightened self-critical. eurocentrism is the only way to really break out of eurocentrism. but i agree with the basic point i repeated it endlessly that the true danger to europe are not muslim terrorists or muslim invasions. the true danger to europe are the fundamentalist anti-immigrant defenders of europe. let's be clear here. that's what i fear. no doubt about it. but precisely because of this, i'm not afraid to claim, no, sorry. it's not enough to just play this endless game of self-humiliation. yes, we europeans are guilty for everything. all our values are fake values. the more we think we are free, the more we are enslaving others and so on and so on. don't we see that the very way we criticize ourselves is... rooted in european tradition. i think that the best way to criticize actual cultural imperialism and so on, it is true. being faithful to the. emancipatory core of european enlightened earth. tradition because you know cultural imperialism never had any problem with cultural diversity. i discovered in india that you know that in 18th century, traditional hindu hierarchy was already disappearing. and then when the british colonized india, they had a very intelligent idea that the only way to control indians is not to allow indian society to disintegrate into modernization. in this way you would have proletarians. you would have western politicization, but... to take care that the majority of indians will remain faithful to their caste society and so on. so one of the most horrible books of ideology of all time, the law legal system of manu, the total manual of with all sub differences of caste society, with all the rules. was resuscitated in 19th century by the british colonizers. so now to conclude, if you allow me a little bit more time, and this will be a little bit more amusing, but also i hope so problematic for you, i want to move at a deeper level. of... let's say anthropological. yeah level. i find so when precisely we are dealing with refugees and other foreigners, what makes me absolutely tired, and i think although it sounds nice, it's politically catastrophic, i claim, is this accent on humanitarian... on humanitarian compassion and so on and so on. no. you know, this idea of let me give you the formula which condensenses the evil for me. it sounds as a very deep formula. it is. the formula ich. that immediately an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. it sounds so deep, you know. other people are foreigners for us, but listen to their story. and you will see, no, and brutally, this is one of the greatest stupidities that you can imagine. how? just applied to a guy, a well-known german politician who i was told by karl-heinz, the myth is that he stayed in the same hotel that i stay here, reichshof, hitler. are you ready to say hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story? no, sorry, there are enemies. real enemies. what does this mean? that the truth of what you do is not in the story.'re too much the construction this idiot. it's not that we are the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. no, we are the horror which we are doing and we reconstruct stories to make, to obfuscate the true horror of what we are doing. the truth is in what you are doing, not there is always a story about it's wonderful to read how... i've written a text on it. how behind every ethnic cleansing, there are some poets. why? because, you know, basically... i hope so. we are not totally bad like if someone were to tell me now go there and pick out that guy's eyes and eat them? well, i would find it a little bit difficult. so what i need is a strong poetic or religious myth. weeks makes me perceive the horror that i will do as the ultimate ethical sacrifice and so on. and for this you need mythologists, you need poets. it's not only karadic of bosnia. everyone had its own karadic. so my point is what? that we don't need more understanding and so on. this is again this liberal trick of, oh we never understand enough the other and so on and so on. i am here for a return to in all provocative. content of this. uh judeo-christian notion of ne ne. in judeo-christian tradition is's not a fellow man. he's not a guy who is like you. you encounter a neighbor when you see the abyss in the other. you know, let's say i have a friend. i think i know him. then all of a sudden that friend does something either horrible. or maybe sublime, but she appears as a stranger to me, like, my god, i didn't know he is like that. at that point, you see the neighbor. in this sense, that stupid postmodern phrase has some truth in it, that we are not only strangers to others, but strangers to ourselves. this is why whenever you hear about universal love, comprehension, and so on, there is something false about it. i think that i wouldn't like to live in a society where i would like to live, and i often did, in a big apartment house where there is an indian here, an arab there, a jew there, a latino- american there. but i don't want to understand them. i want polite distance, respect. maybe from time to time i get close to someone, but it's a miracle. how can we understand each other fully when we even don't understand ourselves? that would be my first one. i mean, it's wrong to think that... like you see what i mean? i don't think a foreign culture, ours included. that we should. focus on some hidden core that we should fully understand and so on and so on. no, the whole point is to learn to maintain maintain a proper distance and especially i think this holds for refugees, you know, this idea of, but refugees are not so bad. listen to them, they are people like us. oh i'm so afraid of this. no, no, precisely because i'm for refugees. because, you know, then you always discover, of course, that. my god, refugees are shitty people like us. some are good, many are bad. of course, if you get hundreds of thousands of them, there will be rapists and so on among them. so the worst thing, you respect their otherness, not their sameness. don't play this game, which is always ideological game of we are all humans. i learned this lesson. when i was in israel, a weird thing happened reported in all the media there. israeli anti-terrorist unit brutally entered the palestinian home because they suspected the father of the family is a... terrorist and he was not at home the father but there was mother with some children of course, when soldiers brutally enter your apartment, you are in a panic, so the girl starts to cry. starts to shout, cry, and mother called her, i don't know what by name. oh byalam, come to me, everything okay and then came the kick. you know, like an israeli soldier discovered that, my god, this girl has the same name as my own girl. and he showed the mother the photo, you know, you see, we are human all and so on and so on. this is falsity at its purest. the true ideology is not we are not just figures of ideology. we are all humans. no. no differences matter. we are not all humans in the same sense. that's the respect to the others, where you don't accept this simple universalization and so on and so on. the most again, the most dangerous thing is to idealize the other. that's true actual racism for me. like open yourself to them and so on. no, treat them respectfully, absolutely admit them. in der other and so on and so on. just now, really to conclude with two problematic points concerning the refugees. another way of idealizing refugees is, and many of my radical leftist friends play this game, i'm horrified at this, the idea is this one. i will not name them. it would be embarrassing. but many of my radical leftist friends, they tell you this secretly, privately, very well-known names, but i will not mention them, is that you know today there is such a crisis. we cannot arouse people to be more radical death. we need a mega catastrophe, ecological or atomic incident, millions dead, the only thing that will move people. and some of them now ref refugees into this. like a friend recently wrote to me, let's bring 10 million refugees in europe. and they will form the base of the new revolutionary working class. and i said, ah, that's it, you're a marxist, you don't have a revolutionary class, so let's import one. i mean, it's absurdity. the second thing. precisely out of respect for the refugees, i claim that i am tired of this habermasian and of some others' motif of so-called democratic deficit of european union. the basic idea is european union is okay, it's just... has a democratic deficit. this reminds me of my old communist colleagues from the times of real when they said, soviet union, dead there, it's basically okay, it just has a little bit of democratic deficit. no, the point is that this democratic deficit is part of the system. and i'm even ready to go further here. i had recently a debate two, three days ago with yanis varoufakis and assange in london, where i think varoufakis, my very good friend, was a little bit naive, because his point of varoufakis was europe has to democratize itself, render all of it transparent and so on. people should decide. but then i told him about my very sad experience. maybe some of you read it. i gave a month ago or when an interview to j and then they asked me to answer some readers questions and then they told me one question addressed at me which evoked most of interest among the readers. they get hundreds of replies to it was precisely democratic question, but anti-immigrant democratic question. it was the question if we live in democratic society, who authorized angela merkel to call hundreds of thousands of people to move to germany? where is the democratic right here? she should be prosecuted and so on and so on. now, varufaki's answer was, this is confusing. if there really were to be a referendum, merkel would have won here. i doubt it. i'm simply more of a pessimist. i simply think, no. majority can be wrong and most of the time maybe even it is wrong. this doesn't mean that we need an enlightened communist party to lead them, but yes we have to accept this that. you know, for democracy to work, many other things have to work. democracy in itself. doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily change things for the better. so to conclude, just two things. i hope you will find them amusing. two quotes. the first one, the best reply what to do for the refugees. is i hope you know you should read it. oscar wilde. his wonderful short text, the soul of man under socialism. where in the opening lines, he points out that quote, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought, denken. and here is the quote. people find themselves surrounded by terrible poverty, by ugliness, by starvation. it is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this accordingly. with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. but their remedies do not cure the disease they merely prolong it. indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. they try to solve the problem of poverty for instance by keeping the poor alive. or in the case of a very advanced school by amusing the poor. but this is not a solution. it is an aggravation of the difficulty. the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. and the altruistic virtue have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. that's why that's my point of capitalism and so on. of course we should unconditionally help the refugees. but the solution is not the world stays the same. we just help. the refugees. we will have to do more, change the economic system. i don't know i don't know in what way. and my last point, this is the saddest point. you know, there is genuine hatred, jews, palestinians, third world and so on. and what came to my mind here is a very sad lesson. look, it's the last page, don't be afraid. it. i recently read. ruth klüger. she survived as a girl, auschwitz, memoirs still alive, a holocaust girlhood remembered, where she describes after she survived after world war ii in germany, a conversation with some doctoral student here in germany. here is the quote. one reports how in jerusalem he this student made the acquaintance of an old hungarian jew who was a survivor of auschwitz. and yet this man cursed the arabs and held them all in contempt. how can someone who comes from auschwitz talk like that? the german asks. i get into the act and argue. but what did he expect? auschwitz was no educational, instructional institution. you learned nothing there. and least of all, humanity and tolerance. absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps. and there is no catharsis, the sort of thing you go to theater for. they were the most useless pointless establishments imaginable. i think this is a crucial. prejudice that we have to abandon. no, there is nothing noble in suffering as if you've seen that, you will emerge as a wise man understanding. no, auschwitz, and that's also the horror of auschwitz, it's not just what it does to you. from the outside whatever we know what it there is no ethical greatness in it like this heroism you survive it and so on and so on this is what is so horrible about suffering. it doesn't produce poor people but poor people who because they experience suffering they know how to be good no it ruins you from the inside. that's why the worst thing you can do is dealing with refugees or with poor among us is to idealize them. they are poor but they have a certain nobility and so on and so on. no, the problem is to accept that they don't have this nobility but precisely because they were ruined by the system and so on. no, it's not as easy as that as it is, you know, the classical hollywood kids frank capra films where the idea is all people, poor people are really wonderful. gut. you just have to. hear them to discover their inner beauty. no, there is no inner beauty. thank you very much.