Peter Sloterdijk in conversation with Slavoj Žižek, Indigo festival 2023
Debate · Peter Sloterdijk ·
2023 · 2:03:29 · 13,288 words
with Cathy Newman
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populismcapitalismcommunism-socialismecology-climatesexuality-genderrace-antisemitismphilosophy-generaldemocracyrevolution-violencegeopolitics-warhistory
A public dialogue between Slavoj Žižek and Peter Sloterdijk at the Indigo festival, moderated by Alice Landgrebe, covering truth and self-deception, the role of philosophy and the Master, cynicism, trans politics, Western self-criticism, slavery and colonialism, cancel culture, ecology, and the crisis of liberal capitalism. Žižek defends the necessity of a Master figure for political emancipation, criticizes politically correct pseudo-leftism and cancel culture as self-defeating, and argues that people prefer comfortable illusions over truth. The discussion also addresses the history of cynicism (rereading Sloterdijk's 'Critique of Cynical Reason'), the China-fascism connection, and the exhaustion of liberal capitalism in favor of something potentially worse.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Discussed in relation to Heidegger and Hannah Arendt: the birth-end of existence as origin of ontological ecstasy, foregrounded over the death-end of classical metaphysics.
Žižek deploys this Hegelian concept to argue that the Master's function is not 'I know better than you what you want' (Stalinist) but rather 'You can', a figure that kicks subjects out of self-satisfaction and complacency into genuine risk and freedom.
Žižek invokes Fredric Jameson's term to name what is lacking today: any coherent understanding of the global totality, e.g. what China actually is.
Žižek's self-description combining communist commitment with conservative insistence on certain truths, which Die Welt humorously mirrored back as 'moderately communist conservative.'
Žižek engages Sloterdijk's concept of the human sphere as protection against madness: subjectivity and language arise precisely to control the primordial madness that Hegel places at the origin of being human.
Žižek argues that today cynicism no longer functions as mere fetishist denial but as the system's mechanism of self-perpetuation: everything is said openly, in a way that guarantees nothing will actually be done.
as “fetishist denial (Je sais bien, mais quand même)”
Žižek distinguishes classic fetishist disavowal ('I know very well, but all the same') from today's more advanced cynicism where awareness itself is the mechanism of inaction.
as “Zwangsneurose logic”
Žižek uses obsessional neurosis (Zwangsneurose) as the psychoanalytic model for today's ecological discourse: compulsive talking about the problem to avoid confronting it and doing nothing.
Žižek (citing Sloterdijk) uses this to describe cynicism: the subject knows perfectly well how things are and yet continues to act as if the ideology were true, a mode now global rather than confined to the West.
Žižek defines genuine multiculturalism not as integration or empathy but as productive distance: a foreign culture can understand another culture better than it understands itself, as Kurosawa reading Shakespeare.
Žižek's phrase for coalitions between anti-colonial rhetoric and reactionary authoritarian regimes, such as Uganda's anti-homosexuality laws framed as resistance to Western imperialism.
Žižek diagnoses cancel culture as a classical Hegelian contradiction: at the level of content it proclaims inclusion and diversity, but in practice operates exclusively through exclusion and Stasi-like denunciation.
Žižek repurposes the historical Bolshevik emergency term ironically to name a necessary preparedness for global cooperation in the face of coming ecological and pandemic catastrophes.
as “new feudalism”
Žižek (citing Varoufakis) names the trajectory beyond liberal capitalism: not a reformed capitalism but something worse, approaching a neo-feudal structure.
Žižek endorses the paradox of action: we decide for reasons, but retroactively the decision creates the reasons, as in falling in love, where only afterward do we enumerate why.
as “worst kind of unfreedom”
Žižek formulates that the worst unfreedom is the kind experienced as freedom, when one is not even aware of one's subjection.
Stories he reaches for 11
Native Americans Žižek met in Missoula, Montana told him not to call them 'Native Americans', that was the true white racism. They preferred 'Indians' because at least the name is a symbol of white man stupidity (Columbus thinking he was in India).
“We much prefer to be called Indians, because in this way at least our title is a symbol of white man stupidity who thought they were in India.”
Žižek recalls reading in comparative analysis that a Stalinist leader joins the applause because he presents himself as merely the executor of the people's will, while a fascist leader never joins, drawing this distinction as a joke at the end of the event.
“a Stalinist leader always joins the applause because he's just an executor... while a Fascist leader never joins the applause”
Žižek praises Kurosawa's film as the greatest movie version of Shakespeare, Hamlet as Toshiro Mifune returning from studies in the US, illustrating that a foreign artist at a distance can reveal dimensions of a work the original culture could not.
“the greatest movie version of Shakespeare is for me Akira Kurosawa... The Bad Sleep Well. Because of course they don't have conscience”
Uganda's parliament passed the world's most severe anti-homosexuality law (up to death penalty); Ugandan newspapers framed it as anti-colonial resistance: 'LGBT is the way Western imperialism undermines our societies, either you are with us or with the West.'
“They said, LGBT and all that, this is the way Western imperialism tries to undermine our societies.”
Immediately after the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, China recognized them on the condition they do not interfere with China's treatment of Uyghur Muslims, a deal Žižek presents as the model for the new BRICS international of mutual non-interference in each other's atrocities.
“China said, 'We recognize you, who cares about women's rights, but you leave us alone that we do in Uyghur with Muslims there what we want.'”
At a roundtable, someone attacked Rushdie for being too British despite Indian origins; Rushdie replied that his two great Indian influences were Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Austen for understanding middle-class Indian families, Dickens for Indian poverty.
“Two great Indian writers are the main influence on me: Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.”
Žižek notes that the only relatively successful films about the Holocaust are comedies; when truth is too traumatic, realist drama with prisoners maintaining dignity fails, while comedy can approach the horror. Polish Jews in 1943-44 told jokes about themselves as the only way to survive.
“when things are really horrible, there is no place for so-called normal human dignity. Only comedy works.”
Žižek confesses that during his psychoanalysis he talked incessantly to prevent his analyst from asking him a truly difficult question, a perfect illustration of Zwangsneurose logic and its parallel to ecological discourse.
“I talked all the time. Why? Because I was afraid that if I shut up for a second, he may ask me a really difficult question.”
Žižek notes that when Vikings arrived in Iceland in the 7th-8th century it was covered in forests; they stripped it bare in years for their boats, proof that ecological destruction long predates modernity.
“when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th century, it was full of forests. In years it was gone, building their stupid Viking boats”
At a Birkbeck College roundtable on South Africa, a heroic elderly ANC activist nearly wept telling Žižek that the predominant spiritual attitude among poor black South Africans is nostalgia for apartheid: standards of living are comparable to before, but the authoritarian state provided basic safety that the current chaos does not.
“the predominant stance, spiritual stance among them is nostalgia for apartheid”
Around 1924-25, Sun Yat-sen and the young Mao met and concluded that the only thing politically useful from the West was fascism: industrial development covered by strong authority. A school of scholars argues Deng Xiaoping softly enacted this program.
“The only thing that we can take from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development but covered by a strong authority.”
Works invoked 8
Parsifal opera
Žižek quotes 'Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug' from Wagner's Parsifal to argue that only science (the cause of ecological crisis) can resolve it.
Anti-Oedipus book
Žižek cites an Israeli security strategist who used Anti-Oedipus (deterritorialization concepts) to design counter-insurgency tactics against Palestinians, evidence against Deleuze's supposed emancipatory potential.
The Bad Sleep Well film
Žižek calls Kurosawa's adaptation of Hamlet his favorite movie version of Shakespeare, an exemplar of authentic multiculturalism through productive distance.
Žižek credits this Sloterdijk book as hugely important for the dissident movement; praises its reformulation of Marx (Sie wissen sehr gut...) and engages its thesis in updating the analysis of cynicism forty years on.
Žižek recently reread Hegel's third part of the Encyclopedia (Anthropology) and found Hegel more radical than Foucault in placing madness at the origin of the human; language and civilization arise to control it.
Žižek references Sloterdijk's concept of 'civilizing of cultures' (vs. domestication of man) as increasingly relevant, and asks Sloterdijk to identify who might do this work today.
Sloterdijk reads a passage from Nietzsche arguing that our belief in science rests on a metaphysical belief, God is truth, truth is divine, which Žižek engages in the discussion of truth and psychoanalysis.
Sphären (Spheres) book
Žižek deeply appreciates Sloterdijk's trilogy on spheres, engaging its account of human sphere-building as a response to primordial exposure and madness.
People invoked 26
Alenka Zupančič positive
Member of Žižek's Slovene Lacanian Troika; Žižek credits her (with Mladen Dolar) with developing the analysis of how cynicism functions today beyond simple fetishist denial.
Remi Adekoya positive
Žižek describes him as a young, intelligent collaborator who conducted an inquiry revealing that Africans prioritize wealth over equality, useful for critiquing patronizing Western liberal assumptions.
Richard Wagner positive
Žižek quotes Parsifal: 'Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug' (Only the spear that struck the wound can close it) to argue that science, which caused the ecological crisis, is also the only way out.
Žižek argues Deng turned China from a communist country to a new version of a fascist country: patriotic ideology plus industrialization, executing what early Chinese communist leaders explicitly planned after admiring Italian fascism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek identifies himself as Lacanian and references 'there is no sexual relation' in a joke about the Žižek-Sloterdijk dialogue; psychoanalytic concepts underpin his critique of feeling-based trans discourse and his account of truth.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Žižek denies that Deleuze has self-evident emancipatory potential, citing an Israeli military strategist who used Deleuzian concepts of deterritorialization for counter-insurgency tactics against Palestinians.
Mentioned alongside Varoufakis as holding the position that the current system is already neo-feudalism; Žižek considers this plausible but says he doesn't know enough to pass judgment.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Žižek describes him as a friend and the ex-vice president of Bolivia, and cites Bolivia under his leadership as a rare example of relatively successful left-wing governance that doubled living standards without scaring capital.
Described as a 'good friend' and Japanese eco-Marxist who argues for ecological self-limitation; Žižek has a long analysis of his work at Philosophical Salon.
Fredric Jameson positive
Žižek calls him 'my Marxist friend' and invokes his concept of cognitive mapping to name what is lacking in contemporary understanding of global capitalism.
Žižek often disagrees with him but cites his prediction of neo-feudalism as the trajectory beyond liberal capitalism, which Žižek partially endorses.
Heraclitus positive
Mentioned by Sloterdijk (and Žižek engages) as the 'crying philosopher' who said war (polemos) is the father of all things and that the result of war is the division between masters and slaves.
Mladen Dolar positive
Member of the Slovene Lacanian Troika alongside Zupančič; credited for the same analysis of contemporary cynicism.
Evo Morales positive
Implicitly praised through the Bolivia example: forces allied with Morales won re-election after a coup, and their left governance doubled ordinary people's living standards.
Catherine Malabou negative
Žižek says he loves her and they are old friends, but explicitly rejects her Deleuzian claim that philosophy and truth are totally separate and that philosophy's interest lies in sense/non-sense distinction.
Salman Rushdie positive
Žižek says he doesn't much like Rushdie but praises his response to a postcolonial critic: claiming Jane Austen and Charles Dickens as his two great Indian influences, illustrating productive distance as authentic multiculturalism.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek treats Sloterdijk as a productive intellectual enemy-friend, deeply engages his Sphären and Critique of Cynical Reason, credits him with the key insight that cynicism functions even when acknowledged, and frames their dialogue as more generative than comfortable friendships.
Martin Heidegger positive
Žižek engages seriously with Heidegger as the ultimate transcendental thinker of being-disclosure; wonders aloud whether Heidegger's late position (Parmenidean meditation) represents a retreat from science; ultimately finds him indispensable but flawed.
Mentioned in connection with Heidegger's concept of Gebürtigkeit, which Arendt took up as natality.
Walter Benjamin positive
Žižek invokes Benjamin's image that history is like a shot of film whose chemical for development is invented only later, to support the idea that foreigners can reveal latent potentials in a work.
Vladimir Putin negative
Žižek sees Putin's BRICS strategy as building a new international of authoritarian mutual non-interference, allowing each member state to commit atrocities internally without outside challenge.
Akira Kurosawa positive
Žižek calls Kurosawa's 'The Bad Sleep Well' the greatest movie version of Shakespeare, an exemplar of how a foreign culture at a distance can understand another culture better than it understands itself.
Plato positive
Žižek identifies as 'totally Platonic' and endorses the Platonic commitment to objective truth against relativism; contrasts Platonic truth (elimination of subjectivity) with Socratic/psychoanalytic truth (subjectivity must be taken into account).
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek defends Freud against trans-movement critics, arguing Freud's insight that the path from biology to social sexual identity is complicated and traumatic remains indispensable; also uses Freud's lesson that we cannot escape truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek invokes Hegel's Anthropology (Encyclopedia, Part 3) to argue that madness, not sociality, is the primordial human condition; also uses Hegel's concept of Herrschaft for the Master, and frames cancel culture as a classical Hegelian case of falsity.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Sloterdijk reads Nietzsche at length; Žižek notes that Nietzsche was wrongly called a fascist and that his own claim was to be called a fool, used to mock the reflex of labeling any difficult thinker as fascist.
What it argues
self-deception as structural feature of human existencethe necessity of the Master figure for genuine freedomcynicism as enlightened false consciousness that perpetuates itselfcritique of political correctness and cancel culture as self-sabotage of the leftWestern pride and the abolition of slavery as a unique civilizational achievementliberal capitalism disintegrating into something worse than itselfcounter-intuitive truth versus immersion in phenomenal appearances
Dialectical moves 11
“With enemies like this, who needs friends?”
Žižek inverts the standard consolatory phrase ('with friends like this, who needs enemies?') to frame his relationship with Sloterdijk: they may be enemies, but that is more productive than many friendships.
“To really believe in official ideology was already the first step towards becoming a dissident.”
Žižek inverts the expected logic: sincere belief in the ruling ideology, not cynical distance from it, was the subversive act under late socialism, conformity required performed cynicism, not conviction.
“The worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom.”
The deepest form of subjection is not recognized as such; the subject who feels free while being controlled is more thoroughly unfree than one in an openly coercive system.
“Freedom hurts. To reach for freedom means to go against your own sincere, spontaneous intuitions.”
Freedom is not natural or spontaneous but a painful rupture with one's pre-given tendencies, inverting the liberal assumption that freedom is the release of authentic inner impulses.
“It's not that we are spontaneously free and then outer oppression causes us not to be free. Spontaneously, we are not free.”
Žižek reverses the liberal-humanist assumption about freedom: unfreedom is the default condition, not the imposition; liberation requires active work against one's own nature as socially formed.
“Today we should turn around the 11th thesis of Feuerbach: in the 20th century we tried to change the world too fast; now the time has come not just to change it but to understand it.”
Žižek inverts the famous Marxist injunction: the contemporary failure of praxis demands a return to theory and cognitive mapping before further transformative action.
“Cancel culture: at the level of content, all about inclusion and diversity; in their practice, the only thing they do is exclusion.”
Cancel culture enacts the opposite of what it proclaims, a classical Hegelian falsity where the ideological form contradicts its own stated content.
“When you try to lie, the way you live your lie, the truth penetrates it. We never can really escape the truth.”
Žižek reverses the empiricist worry that truth is out there but unreachable: Freud's lesson is that truth is inescapable, forcing itself through even the most determined deception.
“The true question is not 'were Jews really the way Nazis describe them?' The true question is 'why did Nazis need the figure of the Jew to assert their identity?'”
Žižek performs a reflexive turn: instead of debating the object of ideology, examine the structural function the ideological object serves for the subject, the constitutive outside.
“My self-humiliation [as a Western liberal] is false. Apparently I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position.”
White self-abasement paradoxically reinstates white universalism: by abasing particularity the liberal silently claims to occupy the neutral universal standpoint.
“Sincerely believing the official ideology was a first step towards becoming a dissident. Cynical distance was included [in conformity].”
The structural inversion: under late socialism, genuine belief destabilized the system, while cynical play-acting sustained it, ideology reproduced itself through distance, not through conviction.
Claims 23
asserts
Most people prefer comfortable self-deception over truth; the Lincolnian axiom that you cannot deceive all people all the time is false—you can.truth, self-deception, democracy
asserts
Genuine freedom is not spontaneous but requires going against one's own immediate intuitions, which is why it hurts and why a Master figure is necessary.freedom, the Master, subjectivity
reframes
The function of the Master is not Stalinist ('I know better what you want') but an injunction 'You can'—a push out of self-satisfaction into real risk.the Master, Hegelian Herrschaft, political authority
asserts
Today cynicism functions not as fetishist denial but as a systemic mechanism: everything is said openly in a way that guarantees nothing will be done.cynicism, ideology, Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason
rejects
The trans movement's appeal to feeling ('I feel like this') is philosophically invalid; Freud demonstrated that the path from biology to social sexual identity is a complicated, ambiguous process where we often desire what we are unaware of.trans politics, feeling versus analysis, psychoanalysis
asserts
Western civilization is uniquely distinguished by developing, from the late 18th century, a systematic movement to abolish slavery—something no other civilization did.Western civilization, slavery, colonialism
asserts
African societies were themselves deeply implicated in the slave trade; white merchants largely bought surplus slaves from African structures rather than capturing Africans themselves.history of slavery, colonialism, Western self-criticism
asserts
The self-humiliation of Western liberals is secretly a false universalism: it adopts the universal position while feigning self-abasement.liberal self-criticism, white guilt, universalism
rejects
Cancel culture is a Hegelian contradiction: it proclaims inclusion and diversity while practicing only exclusion, operating with a Stasi-like logic of unpredictable rules.cancel culture, political correctness, the left
rejects
The worst ecological ideology is to blame abstract science and call for a return to organic unity with nature; without science there is no way out of the ecological crisis.ecology, anti-science romanticism
asserts
Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrating; what we are moving toward spontaneously is not a better system but something much worse than the capitalism we knew.capitalism, neo-feudalism, political economy
asserts
BRICS and the Putin strategy involves a deal: allow authoritarian regimes to do as they wish internally in exchange for mutual non-interference—a new international of reaction.geopolitics, BRICS, authoritarianism
asserts
Deng Xiaoping's China enacted a soft form of fascism: patriotic ideology combined with industrialization, following the model that early Chinese communists explicitly admired in Mussolini's Italy.China, fascism, Chinese Communist Party history
rejects
Deleuze has no self-evident emancipatory potential; Israeli military strategists used his concepts of deterritorialization to design counter-insurgency tactics against Palestinians.Deleuze, emancipatory philosophy, Deleuzian theory
reframes
The Freudian lesson is not that truth is inaccessible but that we cannot escape truth: even in lying, the truth penetrates the way we live our lies.truth, psychoanalysis, Freud
rejects
Reference to firm truth does not imply totalitarianism; in fact the greatest totalitarians—Stalin, Hitler—were thoroughly pragmatic and non-dogmatic.truth, totalitarianism, relativism
reframes
The Feuerbach 11th thesis should be reversed today: after a century of trying to change the world too fast, the task now is to understand it—cognitive mapping precedes transformation.Marxism, praxis, cognitive mapping, 11th thesis on Feuerbach
asserts
Western liberals' condescension toward Africans—always attributing African violence to colonial causes—is itself a refined form of racism that denies Africans moral agency.racism, postcolonialism, liberal paternalism
asserts
Nostalgia for apartheid among poor black South Africans should not be dismissed as manipulation but understood as reflecting real material conditions and security that the current chaos lacks.South Africa, apartheid nostalgia, ideology critique
rejects
MeToo misidentified women's problems by focusing on elite dating-scene ambiguity rather than the structural economic desperation of millions of women without options.MeToo, feminism, class dimension of gender politics
asserts
Sincerely believing in the official communist ideology in late Yugoslavia was already the first step toward becoming a dissident; cynical distance was structurally required for conformity.ideology, cynicism, late socialist conformity
asserts
Bolivia under Morales/García Linera represents a relatively successful left-wing governance: living standards nearly doubled without scaring capital, unlike Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua.left governance, Bolivia, Latin American politics
reframes
The reflexive turn is the properly philosophical and political move: the question is not 'what are Jews really like?' but 'why did Nazis need the figure of the Jew to assert their identity?'anti-Semitism, reflexivity, ideology critique
Quotes 20
“With enemies like this, who needs friends?”Slavoj Žižek · productive intellectual enmity over empty friendship
“Yes, they can [be deceived all the time]. I think that the moment when the majority... there are very rare moments when they are ready to confront this.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of Lincoln's axiom; democracy's epistemic fragility
“Freedom hurts. To reach for freedom means to go against your even if they are sincere, spontaneous intuitions.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as painful rupture, not spontaneous expression
“The message of the Master is 'You can,' to kick you out of this self-satisfaction, to step out of yourself, to take a risk.”Slavoj Žižek · the Master's function as enabling rather than controlling
“To really believe in official ideology was already a first step towards becoming dissident. Cynical distance was included.”Slavoj Žižek · sincere belief as subversive under late socialism
“The system reproduces itself through a permanent awareness of how it is. Everything is said openly, but in such a way that it guarantees that nothing will really be done.”Slavoj Žižek · cynicism as systemic self-reproduction
“What feeling? Up yours. Feeling doesn't guarantee anything.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of self-feeling as basis for identity claims
“Don't forget into what you see to include your own gaze. Always reflect on how you are included into it.”Slavoj Žižek · reflexivity as philosophical and political imperative
“The true question is not 'were Jews really the way Nazis describe them?' The true point is 'Why did the Nazis need a figure of a Jew to assert their identity?'”Slavoj Žižek · reflexive turn from the object to the subject of ideology
“you don't even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect.”Slavoj Žižek · Western liberal racism as denial of African moral agency
“apparently I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. This my self-humiliation is false.”Slavoj Žižek · white self-flagellation as covert universalism
“cancel culture: at the level of content, they are all about inclusion and diversity. In their practice, the only thing they do is exclusion.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian contradiction internal to cancel culture
“If I were a rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture.”Slavoj Žižek · cancel culture as sabotage of left coalition-building
“we never can really escape the truth. That's the lesson of Freud. Even when you try to lie, the way you live your lie, the truth penetrates it.”Slavoj Žižek · Freudian inescapability of truth
“all great totalitarians, if there was somebody who was in practice totally non-dogmatic pragmatic, it was Stalin. Everything depends on circumstances.”Slavoj Žižek · totalitarianism as pragmatic, not truth-obsessed
“the worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom. You are not even aware.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological subjection as invisible self-imprisonment
“Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrating. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than capitalism that we knew.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's disintegration toward something worse
“I define myself as a war communist... we have to prepare, with hope that it will not happen, to more global cooperation.”Slavoj Žižek · war communism as emergency preparedness for catastrophe
“We are still doing small things in order to do nothing.”Slavoj Žižek · incremental reform as cover for systemic inaction
“Sie wissen sehr gut, was sie tun und dennoch tun sie es. [They know very well what they are doing and yet they do it.]”Slavoj Žižek · the cynical formula that inverts Marx's 'they know not what they do'
Transcript 79 turns
unknown
Dober dan. Dober dan vsem. Welcome to Friday day of Indigo, a long-expected day. Today we have here two prominent guests: Peter Sloterdijk, German philosopher, philosopher and culture theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He got many German international awards for his work. He wrote a iconic book *Kritik der zynischen Vernunft* published by Suhrkamp in *Critique of Cynical Reason*. In Sloterdijk began to co-host in *Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett*, In the Glass House: The Philosophical Quartet, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing key contemporary issues in depth. Peter Sloterdijk wrote numerous books where he finds unexpected and unsought connections which we don't see or don't want to see. If Peter Sloterdijk did not exist, we would have to invent him. Slavoj Žižek. I hope I can not, I will not present, because he's really from Ljubljana, very well-known theorist, professor, lecturer, and as might I say, treasure. He's a regular guest of Indigo festival, and he is here with his guest almost now for four years. I would like to thank and to say hello also to Steirischer Herbst. A lot of people from Graz arrived today for this lecture. And of course, I would like to say thanks to Goethe-Institut and especially director Alice Landgrebe who will take over about discussion about these two important persons. Thank you very much.
Dober dan. Dober dan vsem. Welcome to Friday day of Indigo, a long-expected day. Today we have here two prominent guests: Peter Sloterdijk, German philosopher, philosopher and culture theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He got many German international awards for his work. He wrote a iconic book *Kritik der zynischen Vernunft* published by Suhrkamp in *Critique of Cynical Reason*. In Sloterdijk began to co-host in *Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett*, In the Glass House: The Philosophical Quartet, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing key contemporary issues in depth. Peter Sloterdijk wrote numerous books where he finds unexpected and unsought connections which we don't see or don't want to see. If Peter Sloterdijk did not exist, we would have to invent him. Slavoj Žižek. I hope I can not, I will not present, because he's really from Ljubljana, very well-known theorist, professor, lecturer, and as might I say, treasure. He's a regular guest of Indigo festival, and he is here with his guest almost now for four years. I would like to thank and to say hello also to Steirischer Herbst. A lot of people from Graz arrived today for this lecture. And of course, I would like to say thanks to Goethe-Institut and especially director Alice Landgrebe who will take over about discussion about these two important persons. Thank you very much.
unknown
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. There is a law in Sweden, as soon as two men appear on stage, there have to be two women as well. Probably this law will be soon introduced to all of Europe, and that's why today I'm here to train, although I'm only one. There is not enough time today to discuss all the topics we could, would, but we will all learn tonight, I trust, what it means to be wanting to die for the truth. Let me say a few words about Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek. They are both from different philosophical schools and they see the world very differently, but they also have a lot in common. Sloterdijk was called the most cheerful philosopher of Germany, and Žižek the funniest. They are both world famous, they are both professors, they have fan clubs, and they both wrote bestsellers. And of course, they are both controversial and they have a lot to say to each other. Peter Sloterdijk, as Blaž has already mentioned, has written the *Critique of Cynical Reason*, and the title was, you can say, a stroke of genius. It made him famous immediately. And this was the first philosophical bestseller after Second World War in Germany. Let me hand over the word to Peter Sloterdijk. A warm welcome, and we are going to start with Nietzsche. Shall I begin? Okay. Thank you. So, we agreed to propose our personal concepts of what we think that philosophy means. Let me begin with an anecdote told by Rousseau, who in his founding essays about modern politics quoted an ancient author
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. There is a law in Sweden, as soon as two men appear on stage, there have to be two women as well. Probably this law will be soon introduced to all of Europe, and that's why today I'm here to train, although I'm only one. There is not enough time today to discuss all the topics we could, would, but we will all learn tonight, I trust, what it means to be wanting to die for the truth. Let me say a few words about Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek. They are both from different philosophical schools and they see the world very differently, but they also have a lot in common. Sloterdijk was called the most cheerful philosopher of Germany, and Žižek the funniest. They are both world famous, they are both professors, they have fan clubs, and they both wrote bestsellers. And of course, they are both controversial and they have a lot to say to each other. Peter Sloterdijk, as Blaž has already mentioned, has written the *Critique of Cynical Reason*, and the title was, you can say, a stroke of genius. It made him famous immediately. And this was the first philosophical bestseller after Second World War in Germany. Let me hand over the word to Peter Sloterdijk. A warm welcome, and we are going to start with Nietzsche. Shall I begin? Okay. Thank you. So, we agreed to propose our personal concepts of what we think that philosophy means. Let me begin with an anecdote told by Rousseau, who in his founding essays about modern politics quoted an ancient author
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who reported the story of a woman, a mother from Sparta, who after having
who reported the story of a woman, a mother from Sparta, who after having
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received
received
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the message that five sons
the message that five sons
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had died in battle, fell down on her knees and thanked the gods for becoming such an important mother of heroes. And the strange thing is that Rousseau was very fond of this anecdote because his own concepts of modern society inclined into the direction of a neo-Spartanic homogeneous society, as it were in a kind of social mass in which quasi-Islamic forms of coherence exist. He wanted to suppress the subversive qualities that the Christianity had introduced in Western politics, and the split between conscience and political reason was for him so scandalous. But he introduced at the same time, you could draw back one of the origins of what we later
had died in battle, fell down on her knees and thanked the gods for becoming such an important mother of heroes. And the strange thing is that Rousseau was very fond of this anecdote because his own concepts of modern society inclined into the direction of a neo-Spartanic homogeneous society, as it were in a kind of social mass in which quasi-Islamic forms of coherence exist. He wanted to suppress the subversive qualities that the Christianity had introduced in Western politics, and the split between conscience and political reason was for him so scandalous. But he introduced at the same time, you could draw back one of the origins of what we later
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called fascist tendencies in modern thought, of course you could draw that back to Rousseau. But at the same time, there is an element of extremely progressive and unheard-of point of view you find in his introduction to his famous *Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité*, where he declared: I would have preferred to be born into a small community which is so remote that the greed of a conqueror would not be triggered by this little state and which is weak enough not to lead wars of aggression. And in this small society, I would have lived and died under the rule of laws that nobody would deny and would never come to mind to resist to these reasonable forms of order. And the sensational aspect of this argument is that he assumes a point of view that is authentically philosophical, which is to say that he assumes the impossible position of a pre-natal choice of his own existence. So philosophy is something that unroots the thinking from existence. And you can find this gesture at the beginning and at the end of the history of philosophy. In the beginning with Plato, I shall say a couple of words about his new concept of truth, and in the end with this progressive Rousseau, and later on with Heidegger who invented the concept of *Gebürtigkeit*, which is taken up by Hannah Arendt under the concept of natality. So is no longer mortality the focus of philosophizing, but natality. And if you can adopt this impossible position of someone who puts his real existence in brackets and says, I reject my real life, but to tell you the truth, I would have preferred to have been born in another world, in another society, then for the first time you really assume a philosophical attitude that is as strong as Plato's invention of truth, which has a double face. Let me read a short chapter of the paragraph from *The Gay Science* (*Die fröhliche Wissenschaft*) under the title "To what extent even we are still pious." It is said with good reason that convictions have no civic rights in the domain of science. It is only when a conviction voluntarily condescends to the modesty of an hypothesis, a preliminary standpoint for experiment or a regulative fiction, that it has access to the realm of knowledge, and a certain value therein can be conceded. In another context, Nietzsche says: truth has no stronger and more venomous enemies than convictions. Convictions are more dangerous to truth than lies. But Plato goes on when he says: for what is the deeper reason
called fascist tendencies in modern thought, of course you could draw that back to Rousseau. But at the same time, there is an element of extremely progressive and unheard-of point of view you find in his introduction to his famous *Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité*, where he declared: I would have preferred to be born into a small community which is so remote that the greed of a conqueror would not be triggered by this little state and which is weak enough not to lead wars of aggression. And in this small society, I would have lived and died under the rule of laws that nobody would deny and would never come to mind to resist to these reasonable forms of order. And the sensational aspect of this argument is that he assumes a point of view that is authentically philosophical, which is to say that he assumes the impossible position of a pre-natal choice of his own existence. So philosophy is something that unroots the thinking from existence. And you can find this gesture at the beginning and at the end of the history of philosophy. In the beginning with Plato, I shall say a couple of words about his new concept of truth, and in the end with this progressive Rousseau, and later on with Heidegger who invented the concept of *Gebürtigkeit*, which is taken up by Hannah Arendt under the concept of natality. So is no longer mortality the focus of philosophizing, but natality. And if you can adopt this impossible position of someone who puts his real existence in brackets and says, I reject my real life, but to tell you the truth, I would have preferred to have been born in another world, in another society, then for the first time you really assume a philosophical attitude that is as strong as Plato's invention of truth, which has a double face. Let me read a short chapter of the paragraph from *The Gay Science* (*Die fröhliche Wissenschaft*) under the title "To what extent even we are still pious." It is said with good reason that convictions have no civic rights in the domain of science. It is only when a conviction voluntarily condescends to the modesty of an hypothesis, a preliminary standpoint for experiment or a regulative fiction, that it has access to the realm of knowledge, and a certain value therein can be conceded. In another context, Nietzsche says: truth has no stronger and more venomous enemies than convictions. Convictions are more dangerous to truth than lies. But Plato goes on when he says: for what is the deeper reason
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why we think that truth is so important? And his answer will be: truth is important because we do not want to be deceived. And we do not want to be deceived not even by ourselves. So we are, as it were, condemned to an attitude of absolute honesty, an honesty that goes beyond the limits of the life interest. And therefore Plato can say: I will be understood, namely, that it is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests. And that even the knowing ones of today, the godless and anti-metaphysical, we still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief of a millennium old, the Christian belief which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth and that truth is divine. And it is absolutely clear that Nietzsche cannot stop here, but he has to add one more question: that what about if this belief, this conviction, has become untrustworthy in our own days? What happens if we are abandoned by truth and we are no longer in the position of someone who renounces completely to our faculty of self-deception? This is certainly a point where the psychoanalytical point of view of Slavoj will interfere. But we find something very important: Plato introduces here only one concept of truth, that means the absolute sincerity. But what he does not say here, but Nietzsche is well aware of that, that truth is something that has one strong presupposition: that truth is more important than life. And that Socrates will die for the truth and he will be the first martyr of the European concept of truth, which is a self-lost or a heroic self-loss in objectivity. When objective truth is there, the subject has to disappear. That is the metaphysical foundation of science, that the researcher, the subject who is doing the science has to be nullified with regard to the fact. And when we are no longer able to die for truth, there will be no truth anymore. And so, I think that the history of philosophy is a long drama that is turning around the question: how can humans perform this comedy of selflessness? And how we modern, why have we reintroduced subjectivity into the drama of truth without completely corrupting the concept of truth itself? That is how I would propose my introductory remarks. What if God himself turns out to be our most persistent lie? What if God turns out to be our most persistent liar? Okay, time to reply. Sorry. First, a brief introductory remark. When it was announced that we will be here together, many of my pseudo-leftist friends told me, "How can you speak with this neo-Nazi, whatever? He should be your enemy." And I gave them back a reversal of one well-known in English phrase. You know, when you have a friend who ruins everything for you, the usual way to reply is "With friends like this, who needs enemies?" And my answer to those detractors is not the usual humanist one, "No, we are really
why we think that truth is so important? And his answer will be: truth is important because we do not want to be deceived. And we do not want to be deceived not even by ourselves. So we are, as it were, condemned to an attitude of absolute honesty, an honesty that goes beyond the limits of the life interest. And therefore Plato can say: I will be understood, namely, that it is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests. And that even the knowing ones of today, the godless and anti-metaphysical, we still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief of a millennium old, the Christian belief which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth and that truth is divine. And it is absolutely clear that Nietzsche cannot stop here, but he has to add one more question: that what about if this belief, this conviction, has become untrustworthy in our own days? What happens if we are abandoned by truth and we are no longer in the position of someone who renounces completely to our faculty of self-deception? This is certainly a point where the psychoanalytical point of view of Slavoj will interfere. But we find something very important: Plato introduces here only one concept of truth, that means the absolute sincerity. But what he does not say here, but Nietzsche is well aware of that, that truth is something that has one strong presupposition: that truth is more important than life. And that Socrates will die for the truth and he will be the first martyr of the European concept of truth, which is a self-lost or a heroic self-loss in objectivity. When objective truth is there, the subject has to disappear. That is the metaphysical foundation of science, that the researcher, the subject who is doing the science has to be nullified with regard to the fact. And when we are no longer able to die for truth, there will be no truth anymore. And so, I think that the history of philosophy is a long drama that is turning around the question: how can humans perform this comedy of selflessness? And how we modern, why have we reintroduced subjectivity into the drama of truth without completely corrupting the concept of truth itself? That is how I would propose my introductory remarks. What if God himself turns out to be our most persistent lie? What if God turns out to be our most persistent liar? Okay, time to reply. Sorry. First, a brief introductory remark. When it was announced that we will be here together, many of my pseudo-leftist friends told me, "How can you speak with this neo-Nazi, whatever? He should be your enemy." And I gave them back a reversal of one well-known in English phrase. You know, when you have a friend who ruins everything for you, the usual way to reply is "With friends like this, who needs enemies?" And my answer to those detractors is not the usual humanist one, "No, we are really
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friends." My answer is: maybe we are enemies, but with enemies like this, who needs friends? That's how I see you. I completely agree. But this is not the first occasion to clarify our relationship. Our strange friendship has also been expressed by you yourself in former days when you said after the revolution, you would make sure that I would go to the concentration camp as one of the first ones, but you would provide me with a position in the kitchen. This is wrong rumor. What I truly said is that you go to Gulag, of course. But then, I in my Central Committee building in Moscow will make a special phone call there so that, you know, on Sunday in Gulag you got a little bit better meal, like one rotten fish head in... one roast beef a week? No roast beef, just rotten fish head. And I said I will make a call there that you get two bowls of this soup every Sunday. That was all I said. Sorry. Let's go serious now. To things, please. I come to the conclusion, which echoes if I understood it correctly what you wanted to say now, the underlying insight that, you know, it's not that we are spontaneously, naturally truthful and then we are maybe cheated by some people and so on and so on. No, most of us irreducibly pretend to live in sincere convictions which are lies. And I don't believe in this, some Marxists envisage it, utopian moment when ordinary people will accept the full truth. So my first statement is: you all have heard about Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, which is not just a rhetorical trick, I think it's the ultimate foundation, this presupposition of democracy. Without this axiom, democracy doesn't work. It is, you know it: you can cheat all the time some of the people, you can cheat some people all the time, but all the people cannot be deceived all the time. I'm saying: yes, they can. I think that the moment when the majority, the crowd, however you call them—and I'm not here focusing on the poor people, with so-called educated people it can be the same—there are very rare moments when they are ready to confront this. And I agree here with you who already drew my attention to this, that it's not here a question of this traditional Marxist notion of ideological illusion when you are cheated. No, we in some sense even want to cheat ourselves. It's much more comfortable to live in a certain type of sincere illusion. Now let's go a step further. What do I mean by this? Now comes my, now I am attacked all around the world as a neo-fascist authoritarian, I stop to care about this. But let me give you the first conclusion here. Spontaneously we assume that people want to be free and then some outer oppression causes them not to be free and so on, to obey to orders. No, I think that spontaneously, not in any organic biological sense, but in the sense of in our daily life the way we are educated and so on, we
friends." My answer is: maybe we are enemies, but with enemies like this, who needs friends? That's how I see you. I completely agree. But this is not the first occasion to clarify our relationship. Our strange friendship has also been expressed by you yourself in former days when you said after the revolution, you would make sure that I would go to the concentration camp as one of the first ones, but you would provide me with a position in the kitchen. This is wrong rumor. What I truly said is that you go to Gulag, of course. But then, I in my Central Committee building in Moscow will make a special phone call there so that, you know, on Sunday in Gulag you got a little bit better meal, like one rotten fish head in... one roast beef a week? No roast beef, just rotten fish head. And I said I will make a call there that you get two bowls of this soup every Sunday. That was all I said. Sorry. Let's go serious now. To things, please. I come to the conclusion, which echoes if I understood it correctly what you wanted to say now, the underlying insight that, you know, it's not that we are spontaneously, naturally truthful and then we are maybe cheated by some people and so on and so on. No, most of us irreducibly pretend to live in sincere convictions which are lies. And I don't believe in this, some Marxists envisage it, utopian moment when ordinary people will accept the full truth. So my first statement is: you all have heard about Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, which is not just a rhetorical trick, I think it's the ultimate foundation, this presupposition of democracy. Without this axiom, democracy doesn't work. It is, you know it: you can cheat all the time some of the people, you can cheat some people all the time, but all the people cannot be deceived all the time. I'm saying: yes, they can. I think that the moment when the majority, the crowd, however you call them—and I'm not here focusing on the poor people, with so-called educated people it can be the same—there are very rare moments when they are ready to confront this. And I agree here with you who already drew my attention to this, that it's not here a question of this traditional Marxist notion of ideological illusion when you are cheated. No, we in some sense even want to cheat ourselves. It's much more comfortable to live in a certain type of sincere illusion. Now let's go a step further. What do I mean by this? Now comes my, now I am attacked all around the world as a neo-fascist authoritarian, I stop to care about this. But let me give you the first conclusion here. Spontaneously we assume that people want to be free and then some outer oppression causes them not to be free and so on, to obey to orders. No, I think that spontaneously, not in any organic biological sense, but in the sense of in our daily life the way we are educated and so on, we
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are not free. And our time today is in this sense—here I go maybe a little bit further than you in my direction—that freedom hurts. To reach for freedom means to go against your even if they are sincere, spontaneous intuitions and so on and so on. Which is why—now comes the problematic part—I think there is no struggle for actual truth or if we add liberation without the figure of a Master. Because what is for me the function of the Master? *Herrschaft*, almost in the
are not free. And our time today is in this sense—here I go maybe a little bit further than you in my direction—that freedom hurts. To reach for freedom means to go against your even if they are sincere, spontaneous intuitions and so on and so on. Which is why—now comes the problematic part—I think there is no struggle for actual truth or if we add liberation without the figure of a Master. Because what is for me the function of the Master? *Herrschaft*, almost in the
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Hegelian sense. When we act spontaneously, we stupidly
Hegelian sense. When we act spontaneously, we stupidly
Slavoj Žižek
follow our daily interests. Some, the message of the Master for me is not the Stalinist one: "I know better than you what you want." No, the message of the Master is "You can," to kick you out of this self-satisfaction, to step out of yourself, to take a risk. I will not go further into it, just to give you with what I think about illusion, even we didn't even talk about it, my saddest recent experience. You see, this is the material power of, okay, in some sense illusions, in some sense I understand them. A couple of months ago, I was at a round table at Birkbeck College, we debated South Africa. And there were there two old ladies, heroic African National Congress fought apartheid
follow our daily interests. Some, the message of the Master for me is not the Stalinist one: "I know better than you what you want." No, the message of the Master is "You can," to kick you out of this self-satisfaction, to step out of yourself, to take a risk. I will not go further into it, just to give you with what I think about illusion, even we didn't even talk about it, my saddest recent experience. You see, this is the material power of, okay, in some sense illusions, in some sense I understand them. A couple of months ago, I was at a round table at Birkbeck College, we debated South Africa. And there were there two old ladies, heroic African National Congress fought apartheid
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for years, and I couldn't resist asking them a simple question, which was: "Listen, I'm reading in Western media all the time how South Africa is on the edge of collapse, becoming another Zimbabwe. Please tell me the other side of the story." And a dignified lady there, old ANC fighter, started almost to cry and said, "Let me tell you something horrible. The black majority, poor majority, the predominant stance, *Geisteige*, spiritual stance among
for years, and I couldn't resist asking them a simple question, which was: "Listen, I'm reading in Western media all the time how South Africa is on the edge of collapse, becoming another Zimbabwe. Please tell me the other side of the story." And a dignified lady there, old ANC fighter, started almost to cry and said, "Let me tell you something horrible. The black majority, poor majority, the predominant stance, *Geisteige*, spiritual stance among
Slavoj Žižek
them is nostalgia for apartheid." You shouldn't say this as a leftist. She told me, "Look, the standard of living of the poor majority was under apartheid the same as now, maybe even slightly higher, but precisely because apartheid was an authoritarian state, there were certain
them is nostalgia for apartheid." You shouldn't say this as a leftist. She told me, "Look, the standard of living of the poor majority was under apartheid the same as now, maybe even slightly higher, but precisely because apartheid was an authoritarian state, there were certain
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basic safety and so on and
basic safety and so on and
Slavoj Žižek
so on. Now is such a chaos and so on and so on." So you see how difficult and obscene is to get rid of this fact by simply saying they are manipulated and so on and so on by I don't know what. It's simply stupid to say this. Just one to points that I give you back the word. Would you go here, now I'm addressing you, even a step further in this direction of *Wahrheit*, truth, and say that today maybe it's the time to turn around the 11th thesis of Feuerbach? I think that what today we should say is: in the 20th century we maybe have tried to change the world too fast, too much, without understanding what we are doing. Now the time has come not just to change the world, but we to understand it. Because I think we are more and more missing what my Marxist friend Fredric Jameson calls cognitive mapping, even a vague idea of what is going on today. Just take China, People's Republic. What is this? Is this still the old communist regime manipulating capitalist elements or what it is? It's a problem. Next thing, just to finish, I think it's very important—here I don't think we have a difference, but if you can clarify your stance I will first clarify my stance. Here I take the lesson of psychoanalysis: I don't trust sincerity too much. There are a lot of lies, or whatever, which we can believe sincerely. And that's my big problem. I go immediately into hot waters of today's polemics. That's my problem with trans people. Yes, I give them all the rights, blah blah, no. But you know what's my problem? They talk as if the opposition is, on the one hand, it's biology, our sex is biologically determined, blah blah blah. On the other hand, it is—and I read so many trans texts—it all amounts to this: arguments don't count, I feel like this. I feel that I'm a man and a woman, and or whatever. And my spontaneous answer to this is: what you feel? Up yours. Feeling doesn't guarantee anything. Here trans people like to attack us: "Oh, you are reading, you read Freud, Freud is *passé*." No, Freud taught us something very important: that to come from biology to social sexual identity, it's a complicated, traumatic social process which is very ambiguous, we often desire what we are not even aware that we want and so on and so on. So that would be, that would be one of my points here. And the last one about sincerity and so on. I'm here becoming as I presented myself to a German media, they asked me "What are you?" I said, "Moderately conservative communist," no. And *Die Welt*, they said "Perfect, we are moderately communist conservative," so we can collaborate. And you know what is my point here? My point is that—now it's something horrible that I will tell you, I'm sorry if I sound like a right-winger, but—here I take very seriously what you say with notion of the *Wahrheit*, truth. I'm incidentally totally a Platonic, much more than for Aristotle and so on. But I will immediately finish, sorry if I talk much. What I wanted to say is that what is happening now in the West? We I still believe that, yes, West did many horrible things and so on, and I know many things, it's not only African slavery, it's Latin America, it's maybe one of the most horrible things the British and others' attack on China, Opium War and so on. Horror. But are we aware that even when we criticize this, we strictly remain speak within Western tradition? And we have, isn't it time that we are not ashamed of this, that we, sorry to use this word, proudly assume it and say many things? And then I just say my last story then I stop. Listen: slavery. If I ask you "slavery," admit it, for of you the first reaction would have been "Yeah yeah, whites kidnapping Africans." Sorry, but if you look at the history of slavery, first it was in all societies from Neolithic on. The moment you build houses, permanent settlements, it's nice to have a slave to do it. Then, listen: first, there were no white people who went to Africa kidnapping there slaves. Are you aware that African, I don't know how to designate them, maybe not states in the Western way, already were highly developed in the sense of slavery? Go to Ghana, Accra, Museum of Slavery, and they honestly admit it there. White people, merchants, almost didn't put their feet on Africa, they were just parasitizing on and buying surplus not surplus value, surplus slaves from them. Point two: why only this focus? What about slaves by Arab countries from Eastern Africa? The number is practically the same, if not higher. So what is, I will end with this ultra-provocation, so what is unique about the West? I'm sorry to tell you this. It's the only, in the larger sense, civilization which, from late 18th century, systematically developed a movement to abolish slavery. No other civilization did this. Some Islamist friends told me, "We did it." Read their text. Yes, slavery is permitted, just you shouldn't have Muslim slaves. With others, it's not a problem. So I think that more than ever, we should stop this absolute self-destruction of the West. Whenever somebody says freedom, there will be a politically correct pseudo-leftist, "Yes, but freedom is a mask of exploitation, slavery." No, we should become and that's the only thing we can give the world: we Western Europe, modern United States, we should not be afraid to develop a certain pride in our tradition. Sorry. Maybe we should send these people to Dubai so they can have a look to Dubai so they can see slavery and rotten soup in Gulag for here. So a short... why short? My God, we have time for long, long answer to so many questions. A short message from my virtual Gulag. But the Gulag is a good place to talk about Plato once again. Because for, the essence of the Platonic turn of thought is that he creates a profound divide between perception and reasoning. And there is no truth in perception. And the biggest cheater of all cheaters beyond personal interest is the phenomenology of the world. So phenomena are made to feel us at home in the world, because we have become accustomed to that which appears and appearances show us and tell us that we are at home where we are. The Platonic turn introduced something very horrible because he demonstrates the asteriot, asteroidal quality of thinking, of reasoning, because he can prove sometimes that perception is a deception. And ancient philosophy is nothing but a huge collection of examples of how perception is seduction introducing error and helping you to indulge with your eldest illusions. So this divide between reasoning and feeling has been carried on through the whole history of philosophy. When philosophy became criticized from the early 19th century on, in the post-Hegelian position, the young Hegelians all had one argument: the philosophers have understood everything but they have forgotten reality. They left out reality, they found a truth beyond the reality, but these truths are not rooted. And from the 19th century on, philosophy is about a counter-transcendence. We have transcended too far and too much and we want to re-transcend, re-descend into reality without abandoning the pretension of philosophizing. And that's here this is the point where everything becomes so critical. And if at the end of this movement a trans person shows up saying "I feel like this and my feeling is truth," we have reached the end of this re-transcendence because we have reached the point from which philosophy originally started: that is, it renounces to the immersion into the world of phenomenality. This renouncement is the creative act of philosophizing as such: you prefer thinking to seeing and hearing. That is one of the reasons why the fate of philosophy and the decadence of philosophy began also already with Aristotle when he pretended that all men are looking for truth by their own nature, which is absolutely untrue, whereas Heidegger is true when he says: wherever the man appears, wherever truth appears, humans run away. Humans run away when truth is in the air. Why? Because truth has an unhuman and counter-intuitive aspect. And this the Platonic revolution was announced by the Ionian philosophers, Thales, when he made this enormous sentence that everything of the real cosmos is made out of water. There is no stronger counter-intuitive assertion possible. When the Pythagoreans in their small community in Croton in South Italy pretended that the given world is nothing but the truth is only to be found if you are able to decipher the mathematical partition of being because everything is number, and what you see are numbers in disguise. They came from a musicological point of view because they divided the string of ancient music instruments and they discovered the rules of intervals, and they projected the numeric scheme of the interval onto the being as a whole. And we know today that the Pythagoreans were basically correct and that the counter-intuitive approach to reality is absolutely necessary in order to escape this field of immersion in which our existence is caught. This is one of the reasons why Heidegger is so interesting because in his thinking that is turning around the concept of *Dasein*, it seems to us that the last point of re-immersion into reality has been reached. At the same time, his master Husserl tried to do something similar when he introduced the term of *Lebenswelt* and tried to show that even the most abstract forms of thought are in a way rooted into a pre-philosophical reality. So the interest for the re-immersion of thinking in reality is the main passion of great thinkers in the 20th century. Think about Merleau-Ponty who was one of the heroes of this gesture, or Sartre whose whole idea turned around the concept of situation. Because situation is, as it were, the French way to the *Lebenswelt*. It is a *Lebenswelt* charged by a drama. The Sartrian situation is *Lebenswelt* plus drama plus decision and plus tragedy of course. Whereas Husserl is the thinker, probably the most distant, the most remote thinker when it comes to the question of the tragedy of human existence. He has this god-like serenity until the end. And that is why we have to consider this asteroid quality of truth-seeking and truth-making. Truth is something that interrupts conventional forms of view. And the modern cosmology is nothing else but the biggest expression of this terrible side of counter-intuition. Because if matter does not really exist, but if matter, as the famous formula says, is energy in another state, so and if energy is mass times speed of light squared, you have reached the peak of something you cannot see, nor feel, nor hear. You have once for all left the space of intuition and perception and you have nevertheless to admit that a truth is told when Einstein speaks. And that is something that hurts that much. And the whole history of metaphysics has become dramatic because the humanity as such is divided in those who will partake in the adventure of truth thinking, which means of not flying from truth, and all the rest. And this split between monks and people, or as Gottfried Benn said, monks and criminals. And this is
so on. Now is such a chaos and so on and so on." So you see how difficult and obscene is to get rid of this fact by simply saying they are manipulated and so on and so on by I don't know what. It's simply stupid to say this. Just one to points that I give you back the word. Would you go here, now I'm addressing you, even a step further in this direction of *Wahrheit*, truth, and say that today maybe it's the time to turn around the 11th thesis of Feuerbach? I think that what today we should say is: in the 20th century we maybe have tried to change the world too fast, too much, without understanding what we are doing. Now the time has come not just to change the world, but we to understand it. Because I think we are more and more missing what my Marxist friend Fredric Jameson calls cognitive mapping, even a vague idea of what is going on today. Just take China, People's Republic. What is this? Is this still the old communist regime manipulating capitalist elements or what it is? It's a problem. Next thing, just to finish, I think it's very important—here I don't think we have a difference, but if you can clarify your stance I will first clarify my stance. Here I take the lesson of psychoanalysis: I don't trust sincerity too much. There are a lot of lies, or whatever, which we can believe sincerely. And that's my big problem. I go immediately into hot waters of today's polemics. That's my problem with trans people. Yes, I give them all the rights, blah blah, no. But you know what's my problem? They talk as if the opposition is, on the one hand, it's biology, our sex is biologically determined, blah blah blah. On the other hand, it is—and I read so many trans texts—it all amounts to this: arguments don't count, I feel like this. I feel that I'm a man and a woman, and or whatever. And my spontaneous answer to this is: what you feel? Up yours. Feeling doesn't guarantee anything. Here trans people like to attack us: "Oh, you are reading, you read Freud, Freud is *passé*." No, Freud taught us something very important: that to come from biology to social sexual identity, it's a complicated, traumatic social process which is very ambiguous, we often desire what we are not even aware that we want and so on and so on. So that would be, that would be one of my points here. And the last one about sincerity and so on. I'm here becoming as I presented myself to a German media, they asked me "What are you?" I said, "Moderately conservative communist," no. And *Die Welt*, they said "Perfect, we are moderately communist conservative," so we can collaborate. And you know what is my point here? My point is that—now it's something horrible that I will tell you, I'm sorry if I sound like a right-winger, but—here I take very seriously what you say with notion of the *Wahrheit*, truth. I'm incidentally totally a Platonic, much more than for Aristotle and so on. But I will immediately finish, sorry if I talk much. What I wanted to say is that what is happening now in the West? We I still believe that, yes, West did many horrible things and so on, and I know many things, it's not only African slavery, it's Latin America, it's maybe one of the most horrible things the British and others' attack on China, Opium War and so on. Horror. But are we aware that even when we criticize this, we strictly remain speak within Western tradition? And we have, isn't it time that we are not ashamed of this, that we, sorry to use this word, proudly assume it and say many things? And then I just say my last story then I stop. Listen: slavery. If I ask you "slavery," admit it, for of you the first reaction would have been "Yeah yeah, whites kidnapping Africans." Sorry, but if you look at the history of slavery, first it was in all societies from Neolithic on. The moment you build houses, permanent settlements, it's nice to have a slave to do it. Then, listen: first, there were no white people who went to Africa kidnapping there slaves. Are you aware that African, I don't know how to designate them, maybe not states in the Western way, already were highly developed in the sense of slavery? Go to Ghana, Accra, Museum of Slavery, and they honestly admit it there. White people, merchants, almost didn't put their feet on Africa, they were just parasitizing on and buying surplus not surplus value, surplus slaves from them. Point two: why only this focus? What about slaves by Arab countries from Eastern Africa? The number is practically the same, if not higher. So what is, I will end with this ultra-provocation, so what is unique about the West? I'm sorry to tell you this. It's the only, in the larger sense, civilization which, from late 18th century, systematically developed a movement to abolish slavery. No other civilization did this. Some Islamist friends told me, "We did it." Read their text. Yes, slavery is permitted, just you shouldn't have Muslim slaves. With others, it's not a problem. So I think that more than ever, we should stop this absolute self-destruction of the West. Whenever somebody says freedom, there will be a politically correct pseudo-leftist, "Yes, but freedom is a mask of exploitation, slavery." No, we should become and that's the only thing we can give the world: we Western Europe, modern United States, we should not be afraid to develop a certain pride in our tradition. Sorry. Maybe we should send these people to Dubai so they can have a look to Dubai so they can see slavery and rotten soup in Gulag for here. So a short... why short? My God, we have time for long, long answer to so many questions. A short message from my virtual Gulag. But the Gulag is a good place to talk about Plato once again. Because for, the essence of the Platonic turn of thought is that he creates a profound divide between perception and reasoning. And there is no truth in perception. And the biggest cheater of all cheaters beyond personal interest is the phenomenology of the world. So phenomena are made to feel us at home in the world, because we have become accustomed to that which appears and appearances show us and tell us that we are at home where we are. The Platonic turn introduced something very horrible because he demonstrates the asteriot, asteroidal quality of thinking, of reasoning, because he can prove sometimes that perception is a deception. And ancient philosophy is nothing but a huge collection of examples of how perception is seduction introducing error and helping you to indulge with your eldest illusions. So this divide between reasoning and feeling has been carried on through the whole history of philosophy. When philosophy became criticized from the early 19th century on, in the post-Hegelian position, the young Hegelians all had one argument: the philosophers have understood everything but they have forgotten reality. They left out reality, they found a truth beyond the reality, but these truths are not rooted. And from the 19th century on, philosophy is about a counter-transcendence. We have transcended too far and too much and we want to re-transcend, re-descend into reality without abandoning the pretension of philosophizing. And that's here this is the point where everything becomes so critical. And if at the end of this movement a trans person shows up saying "I feel like this and my feeling is truth," we have reached the end of this re-transcendence because we have reached the point from which philosophy originally started: that is, it renounces to the immersion into the world of phenomenality. This renouncement is the creative act of philosophizing as such: you prefer thinking to seeing and hearing. That is one of the reasons why the fate of philosophy and the decadence of philosophy began also already with Aristotle when he pretended that all men are looking for truth by their own nature, which is absolutely untrue, whereas Heidegger is true when he says: wherever the man appears, wherever truth appears, humans run away. Humans run away when truth is in the air. Why? Because truth has an unhuman and counter-intuitive aspect. And this the Platonic revolution was announced by the Ionian philosophers, Thales, when he made this enormous sentence that everything of the real cosmos is made out of water. There is no stronger counter-intuitive assertion possible. When the Pythagoreans in their small community in Croton in South Italy pretended that the given world is nothing but the truth is only to be found if you are able to decipher the mathematical partition of being because everything is number, and what you see are numbers in disguise. They came from a musicological point of view because they divided the string of ancient music instruments and they discovered the rules of intervals, and they projected the numeric scheme of the interval onto the being as a whole. And we know today that the Pythagoreans were basically correct and that the counter-intuitive approach to reality is absolutely necessary in order to escape this field of immersion in which our existence is caught. This is one of the reasons why Heidegger is so interesting because in his thinking that is turning around the concept of *Dasein*, it seems to us that the last point of re-immersion into reality has been reached. At the same time, his master Husserl tried to do something similar when he introduced the term of *Lebenswelt* and tried to show that even the most abstract forms of thought are in a way rooted into a pre-philosophical reality. So the interest for the re-immersion of thinking in reality is the main passion of great thinkers in the 20th century. Think about Merleau-Ponty who was one of the heroes of this gesture, or Sartre whose whole idea turned around the concept of situation. Because situation is, as it were, the French way to the *Lebenswelt*. It is a *Lebenswelt* charged by a drama. The Sartrian situation is *Lebenswelt* plus drama plus decision and plus tragedy of course. Whereas Husserl is the thinker, probably the most distant, the most remote thinker when it comes to the question of the tragedy of human existence. He has this god-like serenity until the end. And that is why we have to consider this asteroid quality of truth-seeking and truth-making. Truth is something that interrupts conventional forms of view. And the modern cosmology is nothing else but the biggest expression of this terrible side of counter-intuition. Because if matter does not really exist, but if matter, as the famous formula says, is energy in another state, so and if energy is mass times speed of light squared, you have reached the peak of something you cannot see, nor feel, nor hear. You have once for all left the space of intuition and perception and you have nevertheless to admit that a truth is told when Einstein speaks. And that is something that hurts that much. And the whole history of metaphysics has become dramatic because the humanity as such is divided in those who will partake in the adventure of truth thinking, which means of not flying from truth, and all the rest. And this split between monks and people, or as Gottfried Benn said, monks and criminals. And this is
unknown
the deep divide of humanity, just as Koestler divided humanity as the activist part of the humanity
the deep divide of humanity, just as Koestler divided humanity as the activist part of the humanity
Slavoj Žižek
into Yogi and Commissars, so Gottfried Benn divided humanity into monks and criminals. And the criminals are
into Yogi and Commissars, so Gottfried Benn divided humanity into monks and criminals. And the criminals are
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those
those
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who are content with their
who are content with their
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self-deception and the deception of others. Yeah, but finally we cannot decide who is who between
self-deception and the deception of others. Yeah, but finally we cannot decide who is who between
Slavoj Žižek
us. There's an old tradition that there is one crying
us. There's an old tradition that there is one crying
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philosopher which is Heraclitus, that could be your role, and a laughing philosopher which is Democritus. I'm for Democritus. But we both cry, I'm afraid, we are both... we pretend to laugh but we cry both. I deeply... sorry, did you finish? What you said now, it may appear just a rhetorical trick, this cry-laugh, but there is deep truth in it in what sense? I was attentive always, this is my old story, maybe you know it, to the fact that why are all relatively solid, not really good, but nonetheless films about Holocaust comedies? I think that when truth is too traumatic, it's fake you translate it into our intuitions if you make an ordinary drama, like a prisoner in Auschwitz confronts the Nazi or in Gulag kill me I'm proud. No, when things are really horrible, there is no place for so-called normal human dignity. Only comedy works. And you know, I will not take your time now, but I learned wonderful stories from my Polish Jewish friends. You know that already in '43, '44, there were in Poland jokes by
philosopher which is Heraclitus, that could be your role, and a laughing philosopher which is Democritus. I'm for Democritus. But we both cry, I'm afraid, we are both... we pretend to laugh but we cry both. I deeply... sorry, did you finish? What you said now, it may appear just a rhetorical trick, this cry-laugh, but there is deep truth in it in what sense? I was attentive always, this is my old story, maybe you know it, to the fact that why are all relatively solid, not really good, but nonetheless films about Holocaust comedies? I think that when truth is too traumatic, it's fake you translate it into our intuitions if you make an ordinary drama, like a prisoner in Auschwitz confronts the Nazi or in Gulag kill me I'm proud. No, when things are really horrible, there is no place for so-called normal human dignity. Only comedy works. And you know, I will not take your time now, but I learned wonderful stories from my Polish Jewish friends. You know that already in '43, '44, there were in Poland jokes by
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Jews about Jews. It was the only way to survive. You remember thirty years ago, Srebrenica massacre? I will not bore you with them, but here, wonderful, I like them, extremely brutal, vulgar jokes about Srebrenica. But let me not get lost. Let me go on with more important things. I find this counter-intuition stuff so important because first—now you answer yes or no just if I got you correctly then I go on—this is why, and would you follow me here, I totally oppose a certain they like to call themselves anti-Descartes, anti-Cartesian trend when they say this split between feelings and reason is modern divide, we should unite the two and so on and so on. No, this is too easy. And I will give you, sorry I don't lose time, an example which I find very important on what to say. The worst ecological orientation today is to put it in terms "our science, abstract approach screwed it up, we should return to organic unity with nature." That's a fast road to total catastrophe. If anything, yes, science is responsible, but I like to quote here Wagner, *Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug*. But without science there is also there is also no way out of it. And it's so important what you said how this counter-intuition grows. Already with Galileo it begins, I will not go into details, but then you have Einstein, not to mention quantum physics now and so on. I mean it's we are in a totally counter-intuitive work. So just two concluding remarks. The first one: what I'm nonetheless tempted to do—and here I move a little bit, screw them if they will be bored, topic of more metaphysics—I deeply appreciate your big thick work on *Sphären*, Spheres. But would you accept what I will say now, something relatively precise? That this need for a sphere in human sense, language and so on, appears only to a human being who is already out of its instinctive natural sphere and exposed to wilderness. And following my beloved Hegel, I recently reread his you know third part of *Encyclopedia*, beginning Anthropology, where my God, Hegel is more radical than Michel Foucault. He said at the beginning of being human, it's madness, self-destructive madness. And language civilization arose, you build a sphere to control your own madness. So I see subjectivity already already at this level. The last point: I will try to and I wonder how you will react, what is in my nature? Now I will be a hypocrite, God created me like this, I'm an obscene guy, I cannot function without a dirty joke. But I think this joke makes a point. Maybe some of you know. It's a dirty one but I'm not ashamed to tell it because it has a feminist twist, the woman wins. Wife is with her lover on the first floor in a bed making love. And the
Jews about Jews. It was the only way to survive. You remember thirty years ago, Srebrenica massacre? I will not bore you with them, but here, wonderful, I like them, extremely brutal, vulgar jokes about Srebrenica. But let me not get lost. Let me go on with more important things. I find this counter-intuition stuff so important because first—now you answer yes or no just if I got you correctly then I go on—this is why, and would you follow me here, I totally oppose a certain they like to call themselves anti-Descartes, anti-Cartesian trend when they say this split between feelings and reason is modern divide, we should unite the two and so on and so on. No, this is too easy. And I will give you, sorry I don't lose time, an example which I find very important on what to say. The worst ecological orientation today is to put it in terms "our science, abstract approach screwed it up, we should return to organic unity with nature." That's a fast road to total catastrophe. If anything, yes, science is responsible, but I like to quote here Wagner, *Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug*. But without science there is also there is also no way out of it. And it's so important what you said how this counter-intuition grows. Already with Galileo it begins, I will not go into details, but then you have Einstein, not to mention quantum physics now and so on. I mean it's we are in a totally counter-intuitive work. So just two concluding remarks. The first one: what I'm nonetheless tempted to do—and here I move a little bit, screw them if they will be bored, topic of more metaphysics—I deeply appreciate your big thick work on *Sphären*, Spheres. But would you accept what I will say now, something relatively precise? That this need for a sphere in human sense, language and so on, appears only to a human being who is already out of its instinctive natural sphere and exposed to wilderness. And following my beloved Hegel, I recently reread his you know third part of *Encyclopedia*, beginning Anthropology, where my God, Hegel is more radical than Michel Foucault. He said at the beginning of being human, it's madness, self-destructive madness. And language civilization arose, you build a sphere to control your own madness. So I see subjectivity already already at this level. The last point: I will try to and I wonder how you will react, what is in my nature? Now I will be a hypocrite, God created me like this, I'm an obscene guy, I cannot function without a dirty joke. But I think this joke makes a point. Maybe some of you know. It's a dirty one but I'm not ashamed to tell it because it has a feminist twist, the woman wins. Wife is with her lover on the first floor in a bed making love. And the
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wife tells her lover, "Don't be afraid, my husband is out drinking, he never comes home early, we have time." Nonetheless, then they hear some steps, a drunken husband is returning. The lover says, "Oh my God, should I jump through the window?" "No no," says the wife, "he will just fall asleep drunk, we can go on making love." And this is what happens. But then, one hour afterwards, the husband nonetheless awakens a little bit, kicks the wife who is between him and the lover and says, "My God darling, am I so drunk or what? But usually when I look down our bed, I see four feet, two of you two... now I see six." And then the wife, feminist, good, says "Listen, yes, you are drunk. Step out to the door and look again." So he does it and says, "Yes, you are right, there are only four feet." I think that what philosophy also can teach us is: don't forget into what you see to include your own gaze, as it were. Always reflect on how you are included into it. This has nothing to do with some subjective relativization of truth and so on. What does it mean politically? For example, we now talk about, I will go directly into dirty politics, we say Western liberal democracy is fighting new forms of oriental domination and so on and so on. No, this would be four feet. We are divided, new forms of neo-authoritarianism and so on. There are six feet. You must include not only us as an United Western block, but the division here. Without our division you cannot see it. Or just if I conclude with another, sorry, similar example that I always use. Here for me not subjectivity, it's still objective truth comes. Let's imagine, I will take you so that I don't pick only on him, we are in '35 in Germany. You are not anti-Semitic liberal, I am a Nazi. We debate Jews. And the moment we reduce the debate onto an objective level—"how are really the Jews, are they like this or not"—we are lost. The true question is not "were Jews really the way Nazis describe them?" There the result is some cheap compromise: "Yeah, maybe they had a little bit too much influence." The true point is "Why did the Nazis need a figure of a Jew to assert their identity?" This reflexive turn is for me in at everyday level close to something maybe philosophical, this philosophical reflection. And now I speak too much. *Hast du mal gelesen, wenn du jung warst, Winnetou, Karl May?* Of course. Yes. You know how after *Winnetou* ends, he says, "Howgh, ich habe gesprochen." Howgh, ich habe gesprochen, yeah. Now I say, "Howgh, ich habe gesprochen, bitte du gehst weiter." He talked also to his horse. What was... I didn't... he talked with his horse. No, you know who... no you are here in no way... King Charles speaks with
wife tells her lover, "Don't be afraid, my husband is out drinking, he never comes home early, we have time." Nonetheless, then they hear some steps, a drunken husband is returning. The lover says, "Oh my God, should I jump through the window?" "No no," says the wife, "he will just fall asleep drunk, we can go on making love." And this is what happens. But then, one hour afterwards, the husband nonetheless awakens a little bit, kicks the wife who is between him and the lover and says, "My God darling, am I so drunk or what? But usually when I look down our bed, I see four feet, two of you two... now I see six." And then the wife, feminist, good, says "Listen, yes, you are drunk. Step out to the door and look again." So he does it and says, "Yes, you are right, there are only four feet." I think that what philosophy also can teach us is: don't forget into what you see to include your own gaze, as it were. Always reflect on how you are included into it. This has nothing to do with some subjective relativization of truth and so on. What does it mean politically? For example, we now talk about, I will go directly into dirty politics, we say Western liberal democracy is fighting new forms of oriental domination and so on and so on. No, this would be four feet. We are divided, new forms of neo-authoritarianism and so on. There are six feet. You must include not only us as an United Western block, but the division here. Without our division you cannot see it. Or just if I conclude with another, sorry, similar example that I always use. Here for me not subjectivity, it's still objective truth comes. Let's imagine, I will take you so that I don't pick only on him, we are in '35 in Germany. You are not anti-Semitic liberal, I am a Nazi. We debate Jews. And the moment we reduce the debate onto an objective level—"how are really the Jews, are they like this or not"—we are lost. The true question is not "were Jews really the way Nazis describe them?" There the result is some cheap compromise: "Yeah, maybe they had a little bit too much influence." The true point is "Why did the Nazis need a figure of a Jew to assert their identity?" This reflexive turn is for me in at everyday level close to something maybe philosophical, this philosophical reflection. And now I speak too much. *Hast du mal gelesen, wenn du jung warst, Winnetou, Karl May?* Of course. Yes. You know how after *Winnetou* ends, he says, "Howgh, ich habe gesprochen." Howgh, ich habe gesprochen, yeah. Now I say, "Howgh, ich habe gesprochen, bitte du gehst weiter." He talked also to his horse. What was... I didn't... he talked with his horse. No, you know who... no you are here in no way... King Charles speaks with
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trees and horses. Yeah. I would like to go back for just for a moment to that concept of immersion. Because I think it has a not only technological meaning. The term as such stems from the field of virtual reality designers and it describes this kind of optical devices you put in front of your own eyes and you look into a different world. But the reality of immersion is almost boundless. Because once you understand the principle of that immersive or situationist thinking, you see that everything is tinged by this question of immersion: how much are people in their situations, and to which to what extent they do not really belong to the situation in which they are? And Heidegger has reached an the utmost limit of this immersive quality of existence when he spoke about *Dasein*. But his *Dasein* is this paradoxical unit of ecstasy and situation. Situatedness means to be included
trees and horses. Yeah. I would like to go back for just for a moment to that concept of immersion. Because I think it has a not only technological meaning. The term as such stems from the field of virtual reality designers and it describes this kind of optical devices you put in front of your own eyes and you look into a different world. But the reality of immersion is almost boundless. Because once you understand the principle of that immersive or situationist thinking, you see that everything is tinged by this question of immersion: how much are people in their situations, and to which to what extent they do not really belong to the situation in which they are? And Heidegger has reached an the utmost limit of this immersive quality of existence when he spoke about *Dasein*. But his *Dasein* is this paradoxical unit of ecstasy and situation. Situatedness means to be included
Slavoj Žižek
in a place, to share the quality of *Dasein* means to be outside, to be in an ecstatic relationship with the situation. And the whole of the modern philosophical anthropology with Plessner and his eccentric positionality of human beings and and the rest of of all them, they all have understood that there is something exceptional and rebellious about the human position. Max Scheler called the human the *Catilina* of the cosmos. So he's just not a creature which is designed into to fit completely into his environment, because every environment is exactly that which what humans are leaving. And that leads back to the question the difference between natality and mortality. Because life is something that is in the middle of both. And the classical metaphysics were strongly oriented towards the finality of human life and they interpret interpreted the end of life as death, but they always neglected the fact that there is an original end at the beginning. And this original end is the moment when the ontological ecstasy begins, because we are born creatures and we are leaving a natural space that we are used to call mother. But in that case it is a wrong expression, we rather should call it matrix or something like this, because this is a motherly situation we could call nature. And humans have the tendency to reproduce intra-uterine situations in the outer world, especially when we are sleeping, because as sleepers we stop this ecstatic ontological ecstatic situation of our existence and we turn the back to reality and turn towards an inner world that has maybe something to do with the outer one, but not necessarily. So my point is that everything drives us back to the question: in which kind of situation do we really believe to be immersed? And we are surrounded by an exteriority which is highly structured by counter-intuitive truth. It is as as if every truth was a spaceship or a satellite turning around the earth. And we are as it were besieged by truth that we do not really encounter. Can I make, if it's not too philosophical, a risk and then we can go to more popular stuff? I for a long time wanted to ask you because I'm sincerely not sure: am I an idiot here, did I get it right? For me, Heidegger is—I will explain how I know his critique of the notion of transcendental approach—the ultimate transcendental thinker, in what sense? For Heidegger, the ultimate *Ereignis* event is disclosure of being in a new way. Things appear not in a superficial sense like *Dasein* means *Sein* appears to us in a new epochal new way. But then from time to time, I found this in the late twenties in his seminar on *Vier Grundbegriffe* up to some late book short dialogue with Eugen Fink, he asks, Heidegger, this totally, totally naive question: but what happens with entities, things, independently of our perception of them? And then very strangely, Heidegger engages in some almost theosophic speculations which remind me even of Walter Benjamin. At some point he speculates that there is an infinite pain in nature, and that human language is a way for the pain which is already in nature independently of us coming to word. So the problem with which I, with my in my books which nobody reads, am obsessed is precisely this: can we move beyond this Heideggerian horizon which is: different epochs of being, now only our only hope is another disclosure of being, without, of course, returning to old naive materialist realism? "Yes, we are part of nature" and so on. I'm struggling with this. Do you have something or... Yeah, but finally he strives back to a new form of immersion in the Parmenidean sphere. He reintroduces in a kind of a pre-Socratic regression a state of meditation. Because the human is, according to the late Heidegger, is provoked to abandon himself into a final meditation of his situatedness. So with in the innermost point of the sphere of Parmenides. That is very strange, but it proves something that he finally abandoned his struggle with science and he lost the struggle with science because he was no longer ready to follow the path of science into the depths and the abysmal realities of counter-intuition. He wanted to win back a situation in which a simple being there on your walking way through the wood is enough to reconcile you with being as a whole. But the critical moment is that in his interpretation of the history of the disclosure of being in technology, he hears nothing but the bad news of technological power, and he does no longer want to hear that. But we have to deal with these powers in a position of a, as it were, divided immersion, to stay in contact without losing yourself to that. And it reminds me a little bit of this, as you are quoting, the suffering of animals and the whole nature. That's what the Apostle Paul already said, that the whole nature is waiting for redemption in a way. But humans could only redeem the suffering of the world by extinguishing everything. Especially as some radical ecologists claim, especially extinguishing themselves. Yeah, themselves, but they would miss the mission to redeem the unhappy animals as well, and unhappy plants where suffering begins. I totally agree with you here. You know what is my polemic with those ecologists who focus on "humanity is a hubris, we ruin some kind of a natural balance." My point is, sorry, are you crazy? Our sources of energy—coal, oil—can we even imagine what catastrophes must have happened on our earth before humanity for us to have sources of energy? But can I now move a step further in my Gulag with a human face approach? Bitte. Five minutes? Five more minutes and then we open. Yes. Sorry. Just I terribly would like to ask you, but I will bring them together, two questions as they are important for our context here. At the beginning, you were right to emphasize the importance of *Kritik der zynischen Vernunft*. I don't know if you are aware how important that book was here for the so-called, under quotation marks, "dissident movement," at least parts of it. Because the way you wonderfully there paraphrase, turn around Marx: not *Sie wissen nicht, was sie tun, aber sie tun es*, but *Sie wissen sehr gut, was sie tun und dennoch tun sie es*. And nonetheless they are doing it. I remember that was my experience in the mid-late eighties. It was... I had a friend at Central Committee of the Communist Party. He sincerely believed in ruling ideology. He
in a place, to share the quality of *Dasein* means to be outside, to be in an ecstatic relationship with the situation. And the whole of the modern philosophical anthropology with Plessner and his eccentric positionality of human beings and and the rest of of all them, they all have understood that there is something exceptional and rebellious about the human position. Max Scheler called the human the *Catilina* of the cosmos. So he's just not a creature which is designed into to fit completely into his environment, because every environment is exactly that which what humans are leaving. And that leads back to the question the difference between natality and mortality. Because life is something that is in the middle of both. And the classical metaphysics were strongly oriented towards the finality of human life and they interpret interpreted the end of life as death, but they always neglected the fact that there is an original end at the beginning. And this original end is the moment when the ontological ecstasy begins, because we are born creatures and we are leaving a natural space that we are used to call mother. But in that case it is a wrong expression, we rather should call it matrix or something like this, because this is a motherly situation we could call nature. And humans have the tendency to reproduce intra-uterine situations in the outer world, especially when we are sleeping, because as sleepers we stop this ecstatic ontological ecstatic situation of our existence and we turn the back to reality and turn towards an inner world that has maybe something to do with the outer one, but not necessarily. So my point is that everything drives us back to the question: in which kind of situation do we really believe to be immersed? And we are surrounded by an exteriority which is highly structured by counter-intuitive truth. It is as as if every truth was a spaceship or a satellite turning around the earth. And we are as it were besieged by truth that we do not really encounter. Can I make, if it's not too philosophical, a risk and then we can go to more popular stuff? I for a long time wanted to ask you because I'm sincerely not sure: am I an idiot here, did I get it right? For me, Heidegger is—I will explain how I know his critique of the notion of transcendental approach—the ultimate transcendental thinker, in what sense? For Heidegger, the ultimate *Ereignis* event is disclosure of being in a new way. Things appear not in a superficial sense like *Dasein* means *Sein* appears to us in a new epochal new way. But then from time to time, I found this in the late twenties in his seminar on *Vier Grundbegriffe* up to some late book short dialogue with Eugen Fink, he asks, Heidegger, this totally, totally naive question: but what happens with entities, things, independently of our perception of them? And then very strangely, Heidegger engages in some almost theosophic speculations which remind me even of Walter Benjamin. At some point he speculates that there is an infinite pain in nature, and that human language is a way for the pain which is already in nature independently of us coming to word. So the problem with which I, with my in my books which nobody reads, am obsessed is precisely this: can we move beyond this Heideggerian horizon which is: different epochs of being, now only our only hope is another disclosure of being, without, of course, returning to old naive materialist realism? "Yes, we are part of nature" and so on. I'm struggling with this. Do you have something or... Yeah, but finally he strives back to a new form of immersion in the Parmenidean sphere. He reintroduces in a kind of a pre-Socratic regression a state of meditation. Because the human is, according to the late Heidegger, is provoked to abandon himself into a final meditation of his situatedness. So with in the innermost point of the sphere of Parmenides. That is very strange, but it proves something that he finally abandoned his struggle with science and he lost the struggle with science because he was no longer ready to follow the path of science into the depths and the abysmal realities of counter-intuition. He wanted to win back a situation in which a simple being there on your walking way through the wood is enough to reconcile you with being as a whole. But the critical moment is that in his interpretation of the history of the disclosure of being in technology, he hears nothing but the bad news of technological power, and he does no longer want to hear that. But we have to deal with these powers in a position of a, as it were, divided immersion, to stay in contact without losing yourself to that. And it reminds me a little bit of this, as you are quoting, the suffering of animals and the whole nature. That's what the Apostle Paul already said, that the whole nature is waiting for redemption in a way. But humans could only redeem the suffering of the world by extinguishing everything. Especially as some radical ecologists claim, especially extinguishing themselves. Yeah, themselves, but they would miss the mission to redeem the unhappy animals as well, and unhappy plants where suffering begins. I totally agree with you here. You know what is my polemic with those ecologists who focus on "humanity is a hubris, we ruin some kind of a natural balance." My point is, sorry, are you crazy? Our sources of energy—coal, oil—can we even imagine what catastrophes must have happened on our earth before humanity for us to have sources of energy? But can I now move a step further in my Gulag with a human face approach? Bitte. Five minutes? Five more minutes and then we open. Yes. Sorry. Just I terribly would like to ask you, but I will bring them together, two questions as they are important for our context here. At the beginning, you were right to emphasize the importance of *Kritik der zynischen Vernunft*. I don't know if you are aware how important that book was here for the so-called, under quotation marks, "dissident movement," at least parts of it. Because the way you wonderfully there paraphrase, turn around Marx: not *Sie wissen nicht, was sie tun, aber sie tun es*, but *Sie wissen sehr gut, was sie tun und dennoch tun sie es*. And nonetheless they are doing it. I remember that was my experience in the mid-late eighties. It was... I had a friend at Central Committee of the Communist Party. He sincerely believed in ruling ideology. He
unknown
lost
lost
Slavoj Žižek
his job. Because to really believe in official ideology
his job. Because to really believe in official ideology
unknown
was already
was already
Slavoj Žižek
a first step towards becoming dissident. Cynical
a first step towards becoming dissident. Cynical
unknown
distance was included. And now I refer
distance was included. And now I refer
Slavoj Žižek
very briefly, don't be afraid, to my maybe some of them is here to my the other two members of Slovene Lacanian Troika, Troika in the sense
very briefly, don't be afraid, to my maybe some of them is here to my the other two members of Slovene Lacanian Troika, Troika in the sense
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of KGB three liquidators, Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar, who developed this in a wonderful way: how cynicism functions today. It's no longer simply this fetishist denial, *Je sais bien, mais quand même*, I know how it is, but nonetheless. It is that the system reproduces itself through a permanent awareness of how it is. Like I think today the predominant talk on ecology: they say everything openly, but they say it in such a way that it guarantees that nothing will really be done. And I know this why: because this is *Zwangsneurose* logic, and I am a model of that. When I was in with my analyst, I talked all the time. Why? Because I was
of KGB three liquidators, Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar, who developed this in a wonderful way: how cynicism functions today. It's no longer simply this fetishist denial, *Je sais bien, mais quand même*, I know how it is, but nonetheless. It is that the system reproduces itself through a permanent awareness of how it is. Like I think today the predominant talk on ecology: they say everything openly, but they say it in such a way that it guarantees that nothing will really be done. And I know this why: because this is *Zwangsneurose* logic, and I am a model of that. When I was in with my analyst, I talked all the time. Why? Because I was
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afraid that if I shut up for a second, he may ask me a really difficult question. So first, do you have anything to add propos today's situation? And my last question, here it's maybe deep, deep, deep, not so much polemic as a question. In your wonderful book, *Was geschah*, in English *What Happened in the 20th Century*, you do something which I think is now becoming more and more actual, when you say that we need not domestication of man, but civilizing of cultures. Today this is returning with a violence. Hegel is here the culprit, for him, at the highest point of ethics of a citizen is war, to risk your life. And the whole ethical edifice, otherwise we are just particular beings caught in our pleasures, is that from time to time you are called to do this. Okay, now I ask you one thing that I already asked you, I don't remember getting an answer. I quote you in English again, the title just, "From the Domestication of Men to the Civilizing of Cultures." Who, how, where do you see even a minimal hope who will do it today? I am trying to impute you a secret communism here as you can imagine. Yeah, you can formulate a perspective of hope as soon as you take a long-term view of human evolution. And in the long run, there is a chance that cultures will overcome the situation of mutual distrust and combat and become intertwined in such a way that the mutual domestication can go on. At the moment being, the open state of war has returned. After Second World War there was a period of illusion because we believed that with the Cold War, we would assist to the last war and that we observe the virtualization of warfare. As long as it is cold, we know that both parts of a possible warfare know that this war can no longer be won. We observe today a regression into the ideology of victory. And as long as the idea of victory is in the world, this is the real poison of world history. As long as the idea of victory is there, we live in a Heraclitean world, because Heraclitus said that the war or *polemos* is the father of all things. And the second part of his saying is more important: the result of war is the divide between God and men, let us say between commanders and those who are to obey, and masters and slaves. So the result of war is the division between the free one and the slave, and this is the essential result of world history as war history. As long as
afraid that if I shut up for a second, he may ask me a really difficult question. So first, do you have anything to add propos today's situation? And my last question, here it's maybe deep, deep, deep, not so much polemic as a question. In your wonderful book, *Was geschah*, in English *What Happened in the 20th Century*, you do something which I think is now becoming more and more actual, when you say that we need not domestication of man, but civilizing of cultures. Today this is returning with a violence. Hegel is here the culprit, for him, at the highest point of ethics of a citizen is war, to risk your life. And the whole ethical edifice, otherwise we are just particular beings caught in our pleasures, is that from time to time you are called to do this. Okay, now I ask you one thing that I already asked you, I don't remember getting an answer. I quote you in English again, the title just, "From the Domestication of Men to the Civilizing of Cultures." Who, how, where do you see even a minimal hope who will do it today? I am trying to impute you a secret communism here as you can imagine. Yeah, you can formulate a perspective of hope as soon as you take a long-term view of human evolution. And in the long run, there is a chance that cultures will overcome the situation of mutual distrust and combat and become intertwined in such a way that the mutual domestication can go on. At the moment being, the open state of war has returned. After Second World War there was a period of illusion because we believed that with the Cold War, we would assist to the last war and that we observe the virtualization of warfare. As long as it is cold, we know that both parts of a possible warfare know that this war can no longer be won. We observe today a regression into the ideology of victory. And as long as the idea of victory is in the world, this is the real poison of world history. As long as the idea of victory is there, we live in a Heraclitean world, because Heraclitus said that the war or *polemos* is the father of all things. And the second part of his saying is more important: the result of war is the divide between God and men, let us say between commanders and those who are to obey, and masters and slaves. So the result of war is the division between the free one and the slave, and this is the essential result of world history as war history. As long as
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war is there, slavery will exist. But in the long run, I could imagine that the process of mutual dependence would make strong progressive steps that all this could disappear. But let me comment on the first question as well. Forty years after the publication of the *Critique of Cynical Reason*, I understand my main error. Because when I made this big chapter on the phenomenology of cynicism in the roaring twenties of the 20th century, I was sincerely believing that I was describing a span of time with an amount of phenomena that could never return in the same way. And I was sincerely convinced
war is there, slavery will exist. But in the long run, I could imagine that the process of mutual dependence would make strong progressive steps that all this could disappear. But let me comment on the first question as well. Forty years after the publication of the *Critique of Cynical Reason*, I understand my main error. Because when I made this big chapter on the phenomenology of cynicism in the roaring twenties of the 20th century, I was sincerely believing that I was describing a span of time with an amount of phenomena that could never return in the same way. And I was sincerely convinced
Slavoj Žižek
that I was describing the peak of the cynical state of minds in the world. But this was an error because the old distinction that Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had made in the eighties, when he said the main moral problem of the West is cynicism and the main moral problem of the East is lie—he was right for his own time. But in the meantime, the *aufgeklärtes falsches Bewusstsein*, the enlightened false consciousness, has conquered the whole of the planet. And from Brazil to the United States, to Russia, and many other parts of the world, we see the emergence of thousand new forms of peaks of cynical manifestations. And so, maybe we should do a second edition, *Selbstkritische*. So, can I really, I will stop, but one my favorite maybe sentence from you, I would like, I think it's also ultra-actual. Whenever we talk about relationship different cultures, blah blah blah today, it's always integration, understanding each other. But you said something absolutely wonderful, I forgot the expression you used: "More communication means at first above all more conflict." You pointed out that what we need today is not this eternal obsession with "do of course I don't understand you because I don't even understand myself and you don't understand me." You said we need to learn—I forgot the expression you used—to keep at a distance. Why should this be bad? I hate this eternal pressure. And here for me, my concluding thought, I promise, here for me the formula of authentic multiculturalism—I hate even the word "multiculturalism" exists at some the way it is used today. Not this integration, blah blah, but: I love examples when from a distance another culture can understand a culture, not in a racist way but in a much more dialectical
that I was describing the peak of the cynical state of minds in the world. But this was an error because the old distinction that Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had made in the eighties, when he said the main moral problem of the West is cynicism and the main moral problem of the East is lie—he was right for his own time. But in the meantime, the *aufgeklärtes falsches Bewusstsein*, the enlightened false consciousness, has conquered the whole of the planet. And from Brazil to the United States, to Russia, and many other parts of the world, we see the emergence of thousand new forms of peaks of cynical manifestations. And so, maybe we should do a second edition, *Selbstkritische*. So, can I really, I will stop, but one my favorite maybe sentence from you, I would like, I think it's also ultra-actual. Whenever we talk about relationship different cultures, blah blah blah today, it's always integration, understanding each other. But you said something absolutely wonderful, I forgot the expression you used: "More communication means at first above all more conflict." You pointed out that what we need today is not this eternal obsession with "do of course I don't understand you because I don't even understand myself and you don't understand me." You said we need to learn—I forgot the expression you used—to keep at a distance. Why should this be bad? I hate this eternal pressure. And here for me, my concluding thought, I promise, here for me the formula of authentic multiculturalism—I hate even the word "multiculturalism" exists at some the way it is used today. Not this integration, blah blah, but: I love examples when from a distance another culture can understand a culture, not in a racist way but in a much more dialectical
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way, even better than that culture itself. I'm obsessed for example, my eternal example: Shakespeare. I hate historicists who say to understand Shakespeare you have to know Elizabethan England. My first reaction is no, to understand Elizabethan England read Shakespeare, you will understand more than reading... But
way, even better than that culture itself. I'm obsessed for example, my eternal example: Shakespeare. I hate historicists who say to understand Shakespeare you have to know Elizabethan England. My first reaction is no, to understand Elizabethan England read Shakespeare, you will understand more than reading... But
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second point: you know there are things in Shakespeare that obviously he himself didn't know what he said, what are the potentials? So I think we are we as foreigners at coming later... what if we are in a position to see dimensions which are in Shakespeare we don't simply impute or them on him, which were in some sense there but we can bring them out? I'm here referring to the well-known saying by Walter Benjamin that sometimes history is like you take a shot, cinema, but the chemical to develop the film are invented only later. My saying is for example Shakespeare: the greatest movie version of Shakespeare is for me Akira Kurosawa in Toshiro Mifune is Hamlet returns from studies in United States, blah blah the usual story. And it's a with a wonderful title, so true: *The Bad Sleep Well*. Because of course they don't have conscience they... And I love this so although I don't like too much, with this I will really conclude, Salman Rushdie. But at one round table with him, an idiot from the public attacked him in a politically correct way claiming, "But you are of Indian origins, you are now too much under British influence." And he gave a perfect answer. He said, "No, it's not true. Two great Indian writers are the main influence on me: Jane Austen and Charles Dickens." He said, "To understand middle class in India today is Jane Austen, this slightly impoverished families, how to marry your daughter. To understand poverty in India is Dickens." You know, this paradox, this interconnection
second point: you know there are things in Shakespeare that obviously he himself didn't know what he said, what are the potentials? So I think we are we as foreigners at coming later... what if we are in a position to see dimensions which are in Shakespeare we don't simply impute or them on him, which were in some sense there but we can bring them out? I'm here referring to the well-known saying by Walter Benjamin that sometimes history is like you take a shot, cinema, but the chemical to develop the film are invented only later. My saying is for example Shakespeare: the greatest movie version of Shakespeare is for me Akira Kurosawa in Toshiro Mifune is Hamlet returns from studies in United States, blah blah the usual story. And it's a with a wonderful title, so true: *The Bad Sleep Well*. Because of course they don't have conscience they... And I love this so although I don't like too much, with this I will really conclude, Salman Rushdie. But at one round table with him, an idiot from the public attacked him in a politically correct way claiming, "But you are of Indian origins, you are now too much under British influence." And he gave a perfect answer. He said, "No, it's not true. Two great Indian writers are the main influence on me: Jane Austen and Charles Dickens." He said, "To understand middle class in India today is Jane Austen, this slightly impoverished families, how to marry your daughter. To understand poverty in India is Dickens." You know, this paradox, this interconnection
Slavoj Žižek
where you have to go out to understand a culture?
where you have to go out to understand a culture?
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That's the only multiculturalism that I admit. Absolutely not this obsession with "we should integrate, understand each other." Why? There are many people, even nations,
That's the only multiculturalism that I admit. Absolutely not this obsession with "we should integrate, understand each other." Why? There are many people, even nations,
Slavoj Žižek
that I fully respect but I am not interested in them. *Ich habe gesprochen.* *Winnetou*, second part. Last reply? I say only one, I would add something more elementary to that observation. The so-called post-colonial situation is conditioned by the fact that European cultures exported one of the most dangerous concepts that have ever been conceived on earth: the nation-state. Because the nation-state is a political form that asks for being filled by the ideology of a coherent population. But in the most cases, there is no coherent population. Take the example of Indonesia, for instance, a state created around in the shadow of the Second World War, a highly artificial construction consisting out of at least different peoples and more than thousand different languages. But the concept of the nation-state that was introduced here and Europeans were unable to call it back, as we do with with broken down cars, if something is not working, we call it back to the garage. But we cannot call back the concept of the nation-state. And so Suharto and his followers had to fabricate a special national identity, a national ideology, which was brewed with elements of socialism, Hinduism, and Western humanism, and which delivers today the pretext for the most terrible prosecutions of so-called dissidents. So when I look out into the world horizon, I almost always see the results of the unfulfilled promises of decolonization. Because the colonial powers always left at the wrong moment, either too early or too late. And by the way, when it comes to the question of Indian identity, there were French and German scholars who gave back to the Indian their holy scriptures in the 19th century. There was Max Müller who collected the writings of the Mahabharata and other holy scriptures of the Indian. And this is the greatest gift a European scholar has ever made to a different culture. This is why the German Goethe-Institut in India are called Max Müller Bhavan. And that is a beautiful example for a productive meeting of cultures. But what I mean is that they should not come too close to each other. Then it gets dangerous. Okay, now you have your task. Goethe-Institut should be Sloterdijk-Institut. Yeah, we try to. Thank you so much, Mr. Sloterdijk. Thank you so much, Mr. Žižek. I think we all had a great time and learned a lot again. I'm sure you can't wait to ask questions. Don't let them be too PC. He has a question. Yeah, you get a mic. Because we will hear you but probably the working class back there will not hear you. First of all, allow me to give a very general comment. propos Lacan who says there's no sexual relation, it was nice to see you both sitting here and looking at each other but there was no relation here. Like, I felt like there were two languages that are spoken here, two different philosophical mentalities or different ways of thinking. But it was nice also to hear you both speaking. My question is to you, Slavoj, when you were talking about pseudo-leftism or people who keep on talking about slavery, they are anti-slavery, they hold this very pseudo-leftist position. And I also absolutely agree on what you said and I've been following what you've been writing recently. But my question is: how would you formulate a
that I fully respect but I am not interested in them. *Ich habe gesprochen.* *Winnetou*, second part. Last reply? I say only one, I would add something more elementary to that observation. The so-called post-colonial situation is conditioned by the fact that European cultures exported one of the most dangerous concepts that have ever been conceived on earth: the nation-state. Because the nation-state is a political form that asks for being filled by the ideology of a coherent population. But in the most cases, there is no coherent population. Take the example of Indonesia, for instance, a state created around in the shadow of the Second World War, a highly artificial construction consisting out of at least different peoples and more than thousand different languages. But the concept of the nation-state that was introduced here and Europeans were unable to call it back, as we do with with broken down cars, if something is not working, we call it back to the garage. But we cannot call back the concept of the nation-state. And so Suharto and his followers had to fabricate a special national identity, a national ideology, which was brewed with elements of socialism, Hinduism, and Western humanism, and which delivers today the pretext for the most terrible prosecutions of so-called dissidents. So when I look out into the world horizon, I almost always see the results of the unfulfilled promises of decolonization. Because the colonial powers always left at the wrong moment, either too early or too late. And by the way, when it comes to the question of Indian identity, there were French and German scholars who gave back to the Indian their holy scriptures in the 19th century. There was Max Müller who collected the writings of the Mahabharata and other holy scriptures of the Indian. And this is the greatest gift a European scholar has ever made to a different culture. This is why the German Goethe-Institut in India are called Max Müller Bhavan. And that is a beautiful example for a productive meeting of cultures. But what I mean is that they should not come too close to each other. Then it gets dangerous. Okay, now you have your task. Goethe-Institut should be Sloterdijk-Institut. Yeah, we try to. Thank you so much, Mr. Sloterdijk. Thank you so much, Mr. Žižek. I think we all had a great time and learned a lot again. I'm sure you can't wait to ask questions. Don't let them be too PC. He has a question. Yeah, you get a mic. Because we will hear you but probably the working class back there will not hear you. First of all, allow me to give a very general comment. propos Lacan who says there's no sexual relation, it was nice to see you both sitting here and looking at each other but there was no relation here. Like, I felt like there were two languages that are spoken here, two different philosophical mentalities or different ways of thinking. But it was nice also to hear you both speaking. My question is to you, Slavoj, when you were talking about pseudo-leftism or people who keep on talking about slavery, they are anti-slavery, they hold this very pseudo-leftist position. And I also absolutely agree on what you said and I've been following what you've been writing recently. But my question is: how would you formulate a
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leftist—if I may use this stupid word—authentic leftist position here? If I'm going to say, "No, I'm not with this very naive
leftist—if I may use this stupid word—authentic leftist position here? If I'm going to say, "No, I'm not with this very naive
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anti-slavery movement, for example," if I'm going to say, if I'm going to use this discourse, what's the radical position here? What's the radical discourse here? And I do understand you since I am a very good reader, I may say, to Hegel and to Lacan who always talk about freedom from within the law and not from without the law. And I do understand you said in relation to Hegel this way. But if I'm going to say, how would you talk about this topic? For example, racism, or how would you formulate your position as a leftist, not as a right-winger, since you are always attacked that you are fascist, that you're a right-winger? How would you describe your position in right words, in for example in relation to this topic? Am I clear here or... I hope so. I mean, how do you describe it? How would you reply, what is your response to all those attacks who always say that you are I don't know this and that? First, I will say that I absolutely reject the position that if you criticize something, you must have a complete positive program, otherwise you shut up. I think we live in a horrible time of I call them unholy alliances. For example, let's forget about South Africa, but you know what a horrible phenomenon this is? I've written about it, but not here, I don't want to be published here in this, as President Trump would have said, shithole of a country, Slovenia. Do you know what happened in Uganda now, it's already half a year ago? With big majority, their parliament voted the most severe law against homosexuality probably in the world. It's if you are caught in homosexual act, it's up to death penalty. Okay, so what? Ah ah. You know, but I did something that many journalists who protested this didn't do. I went, because they speak also English there, to check on the web their newspapers. You know how they formulated it, all of it? As anti-colonial struggle. They said, "LGBT and all that, this is the way Western imperialism tries to undermine our societies. Either you are with us here or you are with the West." And incidentally, I don't want to lose time now, this is what the game Putin is playing now. This is the idea of this new BRICS block. It means: allow Saudi Arabia to do what it does, allow Taliban to do what they do. The model of where we are moving for me are: immediately after the victory of Taliban in Afghanistan, the deal they
anti-slavery movement, for example," if I'm going to say, if I'm going to use this discourse, what's the radical position here? What's the radical discourse here? And I do understand you since I am a very good reader, I may say, to Hegel and to Lacan who always talk about freedom from within the law and not from without the law. And I do understand you said in relation to Hegel this way. But if I'm going to say, how would you talk about this topic? For example, racism, or how would you formulate your position as a leftist, not as a right-winger, since you are always attacked that you are fascist, that you're a right-winger? How would you describe your position in right words, in for example in relation to this topic? Am I clear here or... I hope so. I mean, how do you describe it? How would you reply, what is your response to all those attacks who always say that you are I don't know this and that? First, I will say that I absolutely reject the position that if you criticize something, you must have a complete positive program, otherwise you shut up. I think we live in a horrible time of I call them unholy alliances. For example, let's forget about South Africa, but you know what a horrible phenomenon this is? I've written about it, but not here, I don't want to be published here in this, as President Trump would have said, shithole of a country, Slovenia. Do you know what happened in Uganda now, it's already half a year ago? With big majority, their parliament voted the most severe law against homosexuality probably in the world. It's if you are caught in homosexual act, it's up to death penalty. Okay, so what? Ah ah. You know, but I did something that many journalists who protested this didn't do. I went, because they speak also English there, to check on the web their newspapers. You know how they formulated it, all of it? As anti-colonial struggle. They said, "LGBT and all that, this is the way Western imperialism tries to undermine our societies. Either you are with us here or you are with the West." And incidentally, I don't want to lose time now, this is what the game Putin is playing now. This is the idea of this new BRICS block. It means: allow Saudi Arabia to do what it does, allow Taliban to do what they do. The model of where we are moving for me are: immediately after the victory of Taliban in Afghanistan, the deal they
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immediately made. It is: China said, "We recognize you, who cares about women's rights, but you leave us alone that we do in Uyghur with Muslims there what we want." That's what, that's where we are moving. So I just have this perplexity. As for what you said racism and so on, now I will tell you something that may surprise you. I have, but it's not in the same way as this racist saying goes—you know, if you say "some of
immediately made. It is: China said, "We recognize you, who cares about women's rights, but you leave us alone that we do in Uyghur with Muslims there what we want." That's what, that's where we are moving. So I just have this perplexity. As for what you said racism and so on, now I will tell you something that may surprise you. I have, but it's not in the same way as this racist saying goes—you know, if you say "some of
Slavoj Žižek
my friends are Jews," this is the definition of anti-Semitism—not friends, I have many collaborators among the blacks. For example, a young guy who is very intelligent, Rémi Adekoya. He wrote a book on cultural differences, not in a very deep sense, between Africa and Western Europe. He did something very simple: he made a large inquiry, "Which is the highest political value for you?" In Europe it was equality. In Africa it was wealth obtained illegally or legally, it doesn't matter. It's incredible how we talk about inequality, how we treat Africans. Africans, they want wealth, survive, they don't care, literally, about equality. Here problems emerge. As for racism, feminism, sorry to repeat my old stories, but I got a lesson of a lifetime of this. When I was, some of you may know the story, some fifteen years ago, Missoula, Montana, and met some Native Americans, so-called, you know what happened? They told me, "Don't call us Native Americans. This is for us the true white racism." Because first, Native American... and what are you? Cultural Americans or what? And they gave me a wonderful, maybe you know it, jokish answer. They said, "We much prefer to be called Indians, because in this way at least our title is a symbol of white man stupidity who thought they were in India." Here, you know how often, that's what's the problem today with political correctness and so on, are they aware the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on, and especially feminism, is secretly patronizing? For example, I spoke with Africans—I have friends there, friends okay, we met in London, blah—who told me that for them the most refined form of Western liberal racism is when there are big crimes in Africa like Rwanda slaughter, immediately the Western left reaction was "This is just an effect of colonialism," no. And he said, "F three points you, you don't even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect." They are so sensitive. Or you know where is another form of racism here? When some immigrants or whoever—and I'm open towards them, blah—do something horrible, the it's always "they are not guilty, it's how we treat them, they are conditioned." Yeah, but so are we. The implicit presupposition of this is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless in some sense free. You know, that's why I never trust this white people's self-humiliation. We shouldn't assert our identity, like if Indians dance their dance, there it's freedom. If you in a German village or me here dance a Slovene dance, it's neo-fascism or whatever. You know what: apparently I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. This my self-humiliation is false. And so it's the same with MeToo, with all that stuff. Do MeToo ideologists even know, do they talk with real women at their problem? You know where was for me the
my friends are Jews," this is the definition of anti-Semitism—not friends, I have many collaborators among the blacks. For example, a young guy who is very intelligent, Rémi Adekoya. He wrote a book on cultural differences, not in a very deep sense, between Africa and Western Europe. He did something very simple: he made a large inquiry, "Which is the highest political value for you?" In Europe it was equality. In Africa it was wealth obtained illegally or legally, it doesn't matter. It's incredible how we talk about inequality, how we treat Africans. Africans, they want wealth, survive, they don't care, literally, about equality. Here problems emerge. As for racism, feminism, sorry to repeat my old stories, but I got a lesson of a lifetime of this. When I was, some of you may know the story, some fifteen years ago, Missoula, Montana, and met some Native Americans, so-called, you know what happened? They told me, "Don't call us Native Americans. This is for us the true white racism." Because first, Native American... and what are you? Cultural Americans or what? And they gave me a wonderful, maybe you know it, jokish answer. They said, "We much prefer to be called Indians, because in this way at least our title is a symbol of white man stupidity who thought they were in India." Here, you know how often, that's what's the problem today with political correctness and so on, are they aware the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on, and especially feminism, is secretly patronizing? For example, I spoke with Africans—I have friends there, friends okay, we met in London, blah—who told me that for them the most refined form of Western liberal racism is when there are big crimes in Africa like Rwanda slaughter, immediately the Western left reaction was "This is just an effect of colonialism," no. And he said, "F three points you, you don't even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect." They are so sensitive. Or you know where is another form of racism here? When some immigrants or whoever—and I'm open towards them, blah—do something horrible, the it's always "they are not guilty, it's how we treat them, they are conditioned." Yeah, but so are we. The implicit presupposition of this is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless in some sense free. You know, that's why I never trust this white people's self-humiliation. We shouldn't assert our identity, like if Indians dance their dance, there it's freedom. If you in a German village or me here dance a Slovene dance, it's neo-fascism or whatever. You know what: apparently I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. This my self-humiliation is false. And so it's the same with MeToo, with all that stuff. Do MeToo ideologists even know, do they talk with real women at their problem? You know where was for me the
unknown
whole MeToo project wrong? Not
whole MeToo project wrong? Not
unknown
from the beginning.
from the beginning.
unknown
There is an old black lady whom I met, we love each other. I was obscene with her, she returned obscenity, we embraced, that's my form of love. But what I want to say: she, she, forgot her name, she invented even the term MeToo some years ago. And she told me she is horrified that because of instead of confronting real women's actual problem... Did you notice one mistake of MeToo which immediately tells you about the class dimension? If you reduce it to principal examples, wasn't it always about typical dating scene? "We met at a bar, yes or no, did he rape me?" Sorry, what about millions of women who, let's say, are in their mid-30s, losing so-called from our male chauvinist standard sexual attraction, have two three women, have no way out? Who talks about all these horrors and so on? In this sense, let me just conclude, I must go here or there: this is my problem with cancel culture. This is a classical Hegelian case of falsity. At the level of content, they are all about inclusion and diversity. In their practice, the only thing they do is exclusion. In a kind of, I have friends there who admit this to me, it's almost a Stasi logic. You never know even what rules are, when you will become suspicious. This is why, when I had a polemic with a right-winger in United States, I told him, "If I were a
There is an old black lady whom I met, we love each other. I was obscene with her, she returned obscenity, we embraced, that's my form of love. But what I want to say: she, she, forgot her name, she invented even the term MeToo some years ago. And she told me she is horrified that because of instead of confronting real women's actual problem... Did you notice one mistake of MeToo which immediately tells you about the class dimension? If you reduce it to principal examples, wasn't it always about typical dating scene? "We met at a bar, yes or no, did he rape me?" Sorry, what about millions of women who, let's say, are in their mid-30s, losing so-called from our male chauvinist standard sexual attraction, have two three women, have no way out? Who talks about all these horrors and so on? In this sense, let me just conclude, I must go here or there: this is my problem with cancel culture. This is a classical Hegelian case of falsity. At the level of content, they are all about inclusion and diversity. In their practice, the only thing they do is exclusion. In a kind of, I have friends there who admit this to me, it's almost a Stasi logic. You never know even what rules are, when you will become suspicious. This is why, when I had a polemic with a right-winger in United States, I told him, "If I were a
unknown
rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture." Why? Because the way it works, it's permanent self-division. I suspect isn't what you said already anti-feminist, it sabotages, blocks any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity. These, these are my problem. And no, I'm sorry, I don't have a formula. I know that there will not be a new Central Committee. If you ask me—I will stop immediately, then you focus on [unintelligible]—if you ask me, "Okay, but you are an idiot, tell me one way where the left at least did its work relatively well." Well, I was engaged a couple of times, among others, you may not agree, I knew situation very well, I'm friendly with the ex vice president of Bolivia, Alvaro García Linera. Bolivia: the left was there years in power.
rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture." Why? Because the way it works, it's permanent self-division. I suspect isn't what you said already anti-feminist, it sabotages, blocks any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity. These, these are my problem. And no, I'm sorry, I don't have a formula. I know that there will not be a new Central Committee. If you ask me—I will stop immediately, then you focus on [unintelligible]—if you ask me, "Okay, but you are an idiot, tell me one way where the left at least did its work relatively well." Well, I was engaged a couple of times, among others, you may not agree, I knew situation very well, I'm friendly with the ex vice president of Bolivia, Alvaro García Linera. Bolivia: the left was there years in power.
unknown
The
The
Slavoj Žižek
standard of ordinary people almost doubled. And they did it in such
standard of ordinary people almost doubled. And they did it in such
unknown
intelligent way that they didn't scare the capital. That's why, you remember two years ago, there was a coup d'état, then new elections which Morales forces won again.
intelligent way that they didn't scare the capital. That's why, you remember two years ago, there was a coup d'état, then new elections which Morales forces won again.
Slavoj Žižek
So I'm totally opposed to Cuba, Chavez, Venezuela, Nicaragua, they screwed it up. In
So I'm totally opposed to Cuba, Chavez, Venezuela, Nicaragua, they screwed it up. In
Cathy Newman
Bolivia they didn't. So I see just particular hopes here and there. I'm very sorry, that's why I like to define myself as a war communist. I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency state. And what Europe is doing now, the world even more, is you know treat it like, "Okay, let's change a little bit more, here tax," so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing. By "war communism," brutal term that I use with all the irony, of course, I mean we have to prepare, with hope that it will not happen, to more global cooperation. It will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic. Imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on. We will have to collaborate, otherwise we will really enter new feudalism, what Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don't agree, predicts. I think, to conclude, really really sorry, that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else. Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrating. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than capitalism that we knew. My God, the third *ich habe gesprochen*, now ask. Bitte? Is it part of capitalism? What? The thing that we're
Bolivia they didn't. So I see just particular hopes here and there. I'm very sorry, that's why I like to define myself as a war communist. I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency state. And what Europe is doing now, the world even more, is you know treat it like, "Okay, let's change a little bit more, here tax," so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing. By "war communism," brutal term that I use with all the irony, of course, I mean we have to prepare, with hope that it will not happen, to more global cooperation. It will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic. Imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on. We will have to collaborate, otherwise we will really enter new feudalism, what Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don't agree, predicts. I think, to conclude, really really sorry, that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else. Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrating. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than capitalism that we knew. My God, the third *ich habe gesprochen*, now ask. Bitte? Is it part of capitalism? What? The thing that we're
Slavoj Žižek
moving
moving
Cathy Newman
to. Is it part of capitalism or is it something totally different? This is a big question of debate. I don't know enough to give an
to. Is it part of capitalism or is it something totally different? This is a big question of debate. I don't know enough to give an
Slavoj Žižek
answer. Because some people like Varoufakis, Jodi Dean, think it's already a neo-feudalism. I don't know enough to pass a judgment. Sorry. *Spätkapitalismus.* Bitte? *Spätkapitalismus.* Yeah, but all these terms... you know what I hate in the left? I hope we agree. Whenever they see something they don't like, they call it fascism. Without any serious analysis, it's a *Schimpfwort* which prevents you to think. Yeah, they also called Nietzsche a fascist. And he, his claim was to be called a fool. Yeah. And our claim should be to be insulted as much as possible. Absolutely agree with you, yes. When somebody agrees with me, the wrong guy, then I'm in a panic. Once in United States, somebody praised me and I started to sweat: "What did I say wrong? What's happening?" Sorry, sorry, please. Next question, please. Yes, thank you very much for the talk. I was just going to hone in on the relationship between philosophy and truth as you've both sketched it tonight. There's another speaker for the festival, Catherine Malabou, who was here yesterday and the day before, who very, in a very similar Q&A, very explicitly said that philosophy and truth are totally separate. They don't... the relationship, the interest of philosophy ought to be in a kind of Deleuzian sense, distinction between sense and non-sense. I'd just like to hear your comments on not only that, but maybe just broadly the idea that the task of philosophy is to distinguish reason from madness, health from disease, space of reasons from the space of causes, a kind of a distinguishing act. Would you agree with that, disagree? Just curious to hear. Yeah, but thinking begins with two gestures. The first gesture is to point to something. But as the totality is something that you cannot point to, you must believe that the act of speech refers to something. That's the basic function of language: to make you believe that meaning exists. And if you cannot believe that meaning exists, the language will die down and you will have the feeling that there is nothing to say. But if you have something to say, you will probably in the beginning pronounce distinctions. Because, and you will see that binary distinction will help you to get oriented into the openness of the world. And the philosophical moment starts at the very moment if you understand that you have to go beyond the self-made dichotomies, the self-made dualities. No, and the very moment when the third term comes into the game of thinking, all these distinctions become remobilized. And the act of distinguishing itself will be made conscious. And then you see yourself make your distinctions. And as the distinction maker, you feel the freedom to distinguish in a different way. That's what I could comment on that. But I would like to add something more elementary to that observation. The so-called post-colonial situation is conditioned by the fact that European cultures exported one of the most dangerous concepts that have ever been conceived on earth: the nation-state. Because the nation-state is a political form that asks for being filled by the ideology of a coherent population. But in the most cases, there is no coherent population. Take the example of Indonesia, for instance, a state created around in the shadow of the Second World War, a highly artificial construction consisting out of at least different peoples and more than thousand different languages. But the concept of the nation-state that was introduced here and Europeans were unable to call it back, as we do with with broken down cars, if something is not working, we call it back to the garage. But we cannot call back the concept of the nation-state. And so Suharto and his followers had to fabricate a special national identity, a national ideology, which was brewed with elements of socialism, Hinduism, and Western humanism, and which delivers today the pretext for the most terrible prosecutions of so-called dissidents. One should know this when you use these arguments. But as far as philosophical approach to reality is concerned, since antiquity we have two types of martyrdom. The first one clings to the pattern of Socrates. In Christian times Jesus and Socrates were parallelized very often because both of them were martyrs of truth, in spite of the fact that the truth of Socrates was totally different from the Christian truth. And the Socratic truth in its own way was once more very different from the Platonic truth or the scientific truth, which is based on the elimination of subjectivity. Whereas the Socratic truth like the psychoanalytic truth insists on the fact that subjectivity must be taken into account. And these types of truth are still struggling. And there is a type of very toxic objectivism in classical Marxism because the as a Marxist metaphysics is a continuation of classical metaphysics from the point of view that subjectivity has to disappear when confronted with truth or with facts or objectivity. And one of the keywords of the Stalinist vocabulary in Europe in the from in the thirties and forties and fifties and even sixties was "objectively." Whenever something was called "objective," it was always implied that the bourgeois intellectual had to disappear. And it was a Gulag word. And I think this verbal Gulag makers are still at work. But finally we could make phone calls in Moscow and recommend us mutually for a double portion of food on Sundays, right? Sorry. Can I very briefly, but I can't resist. First, what you say about fascism is so deeply true. Do you know, for example, I read in a book, I forgot which one, report on history of Stalinism, that the pact when there was a pact in '39 Molotov-Ribbentrop, no, and this collaboration, you know what Beria did? Beria, proto-Gorbachev, he first opened the Soviet Union in '50s. Okay. He sent a special letter to all Gulags because you know there guards shouted at you "fascist, English spy, whatever, Trotskyite." He prohibited the word "fascist" so that Germans would not be mad. It's crazy. But another thing: ah my God, now we... Do you know this? Maybe I will nonetheless, you know everything, teach you some let you know something. I now got important books, not even rightist books, about the link between early development of Chinese Communist Party and fascism. There was a meeting just before Sun Yat-sen, the founder of Chinese republic, modern China, met with young Mao Zedong, and this was '24, '25, Italy, blah blah, happened, and their conclusion was that we need West but not in the individual way. The only thing that we can take for from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development but covered by a strong authority. I find this fascinating and there is a whole school now, not in China, they would be prohibited, who claim that that's what in a soft way Deng Xiaoping did: he turned China from communist
answer. Because some people like Varoufakis, Jodi Dean, think it's already a neo-feudalism. I don't know enough to pass a judgment. Sorry. *Spätkapitalismus.* Bitte? *Spätkapitalismus.* Yeah, but all these terms... you know what I hate in the left? I hope we agree. Whenever they see something they don't like, they call it fascism. Without any serious analysis, it's a *Schimpfwort* which prevents you to think. Yeah, they also called Nietzsche a fascist. And he, his claim was to be called a fool. Yeah. And our claim should be to be insulted as much as possible. Absolutely agree with you, yes. When somebody agrees with me, the wrong guy, then I'm in a panic. Once in United States, somebody praised me and I started to sweat: "What did I say wrong? What's happening?" Sorry, sorry, please. Next question, please. Yes, thank you very much for the talk. I was just going to hone in on the relationship between philosophy and truth as you've both sketched it tonight. There's another speaker for the festival, Catherine Malabou, who was here yesterday and the day before, who very, in a very similar Q&A, very explicitly said that philosophy and truth are totally separate. They don't... the relationship, the interest of philosophy ought to be in a kind of Deleuzian sense, distinction between sense and non-sense. I'd just like to hear your comments on not only that, but maybe just broadly the idea that the task of philosophy is to distinguish reason from madness, health from disease, space of reasons from the space of causes, a kind of a distinguishing act. Would you agree with that, disagree? Just curious to hear. Yeah, but thinking begins with two gestures. The first gesture is to point to something. But as the totality is something that you cannot point to, you must believe that the act of speech refers to something. That's the basic function of language: to make you believe that meaning exists. And if you cannot believe that meaning exists, the language will die down and you will have the feeling that there is nothing to say. But if you have something to say, you will probably in the beginning pronounce distinctions. Because, and you will see that binary distinction will help you to get oriented into the openness of the world. And the philosophical moment starts at the very moment if you understand that you have to go beyond the self-made dichotomies, the self-made dualities. No, and the very moment when the third term comes into the game of thinking, all these distinctions become remobilized. And the act of distinguishing itself will be made conscious. And then you see yourself make your distinctions. And as the distinction maker, you feel the freedom to distinguish in a different way. That's what I could comment on that. But I would like to add something more elementary to that observation. The so-called post-colonial situation is conditioned by the fact that European cultures exported one of the most dangerous concepts that have ever been conceived on earth: the nation-state. Because the nation-state is a political form that asks for being filled by the ideology of a coherent population. But in the most cases, there is no coherent population. Take the example of Indonesia, for instance, a state created around in the shadow of the Second World War, a highly artificial construction consisting out of at least different peoples and more than thousand different languages. But the concept of the nation-state that was introduced here and Europeans were unable to call it back, as we do with with broken down cars, if something is not working, we call it back to the garage. But we cannot call back the concept of the nation-state. And so Suharto and his followers had to fabricate a special national identity, a national ideology, which was brewed with elements of socialism, Hinduism, and Western humanism, and which delivers today the pretext for the most terrible prosecutions of so-called dissidents. One should know this when you use these arguments. But as far as philosophical approach to reality is concerned, since antiquity we have two types of martyrdom. The first one clings to the pattern of Socrates. In Christian times Jesus and Socrates were parallelized very often because both of them were martyrs of truth, in spite of the fact that the truth of Socrates was totally different from the Christian truth. And the Socratic truth in its own way was once more very different from the Platonic truth or the scientific truth, which is based on the elimination of subjectivity. Whereas the Socratic truth like the psychoanalytic truth insists on the fact that subjectivity must be taken into account. And these types of truth are still struggling. And there is a type of very toxic objectivism in classical Marxism because the as a Marxist metaphysics is a continuation of classical metaphysics from the point of view that subjectivity has to disappear when confronted with truth or with facts or objectivity. And one of the keywords of the Stalinist vocabulary in Europe in the from in the thirties and forties and fifties and even sixties was "objectively." Whenever something was called "objective," it was always implied that the bourgeois intellectual had to disappear. And it was a Gulag word. And I think this verbal Gulag makers are still at work. But finally we could make phone calls in Moscow and recommend us mutually for a double portion of food on Sundays, right? Sorry. Can I very briefly, but I can't resist. First, what you say about fascism is so deeply true. Do you know, for example, I read in a book, I forgot which one, report on history of Stalinism, that the pact when there was a pact in '39 Molotov-Ribbentrop, no, and this collaboration, you know what Beria did? Beria, proto-Gorbachev, he first opened the Soviet Union in '50s. Okay. He sent a special letter to all Gulags because you know there guards shouted at you "fascist, English spy, whatever, Trotskyite." He prohibited the word "fascist" so that Germans would not be mad. It's crazy. But another thing: ah my God, now we... Do you know this? Maybe I will nonetheless, you know everything, teach you some let you know something. I now got important books, not even rightist books, about the link between early development of Chinese Communist Party and fascism. There was a meeting just before Sun Yat-sen, the founder of Chinese republic, modern China, met with young Mao Zedong, and this was '24, '25, Italy, blah blah, happened, and their conclusion was that we need West but not in the individual way. The only thing that we can take for from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development but covered by a strong authority. I find this fascinating and there is a whole school now, not in China, they would be prohibited, who claim that that's what in a soft way Deng Xiaoping did: he turned China from communist
unknown
country to a
country to a
Slavoj Žižek
new version of fascist country. By this I mean patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on. Let's not
new version of fascist country. By this I mean patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on. Let's not
unknown
lose time.
lose time.
Slavoj Žižek
But the second thing that, you know Catherine Malabou, my God, we are old friends, I love her and so on. But I am not a Deleuzian. I don't believe in any big emancipatory potential of
But the second thing that, you know Catherine Malabou, my God, we are old friends, I love her and so on. But I am not a Deleuzian. I don't believe in any big emancipatory potential of
unknown
Deleuze. Whenever people tell me, "You Lacanians are potentially conservative,"
Deleuze. Whenever people tell me, "You Lacanians are potentially conservative,"
Slavoj Žižek
I just mention one book which I love, it should be obligatory reading for all Deleuzians: everybody knows it in Israel. A
I just mention one book which I love, it should be obligatory reading for all Deleuzians: everybody knows it in Israel. A
unknown
specialist of Mossad or who for inner security wrote a book,
specialist of Mossad or who for inner security wrote a book,
unknown
short book, how to
short book, how to
unknown
fight Palestinian terror, which is all Deleuze, *Anti-Oedipus*. You know when Deleuze speaks about deterritorialization, different relations of space? He based on Deleuze he elaborated the strategy of how instead of the street from the side you enter a Palestinian house when... and so on. I think that it's absolutely not as self-evident as it may appear that Deleuze in this sense has some great emancipatory potential. I remain here with you and with myself.
fight Palestinian terror, which is all Deleuze, *Anti-Oedipus*. You know when Deleuze speaks about deterritorialization, different relations of space? He based on Deleuze he elaborated the strategy of how instead of the street from the side you enter a Palestinian house when... and so on. I think that it's absolutely not as self-evident as it may appear that Deleuze in this sense has some great emancipatory potential. I remain here with you and with myself.
unknown
You know, truth is not simply something objective there. Truth is for a up to a point Freudian like me something very paradoxical. It's not the problem this empiricist problem, it's out there we never can reach the truth. No, the problem is we never can really escape the truth. That's the lesson of Freud. Even when you try to lie, the way you live, you lie, the truth penetrates it. So no, I'm sorry, I totally reject the notion, which is popular, that any reference to firm truth means the first step towards totalitarianism. No, all great totalitarians,
You know, truth is not simply something objective there. Truth is for a up to a point Freudian like me something very paradoxical. It's not the problem this empiricist problem, it's out there we never can reach the truth. No, the problem is we never can really escape the truth. That's the lesson of Freud. Even when you try to lie, the way you live, you lie, the truth penetrates it. So no, I'm sorry, I totally reject the notion, which is popular, that any reference to firm truth means the first step towards totalitarianism. No, all great totalitarians,
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if there was somebody who was in practice totally non-dogmatic pragmatic, it was Stalin. Everything depends of circumstances. Read Hitler: totally pragmatic and so on. Sorry. Thank you very much. *Noch eine Frage, bitte?* I think time's up, unfortunately. But who decides this? The boss. Where is the boss? He's the boss. Gulag, you go to Gulag. You don't even get a special second plate on Sunday. Let... but we are here, it's a... you know, what happens if we stand five minutes more? My God. Yes? Okay. That's what I call a democratic dialogue. Okay, Stalinism. Please, you have the guy here. Can you hear me? So I have a question about your critique of certain forms of ecology because a lot of Marxist ecologists would say that in this fossil fuel society in which we're living we're extracting resources to produce a form of... should I stand up? To produce a form of surplus energy. So why would you say that previous forms of civilizations created or I guess committed greater catastrophes than the one in which we're currently living? Oh my God. F three points you. Ask him, not me, I'm all the time here. So I will be very brief. Go to Google: "Philosophical Salon." In a week you get it for free. I have a long analysis of my good friend, Japanese eco-Marxist, Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for a kind of ecological self-limitation and so on. Second thing: I didn't say much greater blah blah up and down. I'm just saying: but you know how many nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity? Look Iceland. I was there, they told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th century, it was full of forests. In years it was gone, building their stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don't... so many already previous civilizations, they ruined so many things. I know today it's something more special and so on. But you know what disturbs me with this
if there was somebody who was in practice totally non-dogmatic pragmatic, it was Stalin. Everything depends of circumstances. Read Hitler: totally pragmatic and so on. Sorry. Thank you very much. *Noch eine Frage, bitte?* I think time's up, unfortunately. But who decides this? The boss. Where is the boss? He's the boss. Gulag, you go to Gulag. You don't even get a special second plate on Sunday. Let... but we are here, it's a... you know, what happens if we stand five minutes more? My God. Yes? Okay. That's what I call a democratic dialogue. Okay, Stalinism. Please, you have the guy here. Can you hear me? So I have a question about your critique of certain forms of ecology because a lot of Marxist ecologists would say that in this fossil fuel society in which we're living we're extracting resources to produce a form of... should I stand up? To produce a form of surplus energy. So why would you say that previous forms of civilizations created or I guess committed greater catastrophes than the one in which we're currently living? Oh my God. F three points you. Ask him, not me, I'm all the time here. So I will be very brief. Go to Google: "Philosophical Salon." In a week you get it for free. I have a long analysis of my good friend, Japanese eco-Marxist, Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for a kind of ecological self-limitation and so on. Second thing: I didn't say much greater blah blah up and down. I'm just saying: but you know how many nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity? Look Iceland. I was there, they told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th century, it was full of forests. In years it was gone, building their stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don't... so many already previous civilizations, they ruined so many things. I know today it's something more special and so on. But you know what disturbs me with this
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new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No, I think once we are in modernity, we cannot step out. It's lost. *Noch eine Frage, bitte?* Yeah, ecosocialism. I see a hand there on extreme right. So my question is about freedom and dictatorships. In the sense that I think freedom has these three elements in the way that: one is having the information to make the act you want; the second is having the choice to make the act you want; and the third is to execute the act you want. And in a dictatorship we can see that the level of information between individuals drops, in the sense that there is less information and there's worse information, so everybody
new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No, I think once we are in modernity, we cannot step out. It's lost. *Noch eine Frage, bitte?* Yeah, ecosocialism. I see a hand there on extreme right. So my question is about freedom and dictatorships. In the sense that I think freedom has these three elements in the way that: one is having the information to make the act you want; the second is having the choice to make the act you want; and the third is to execute the act you want. And in a dictatorship we can see that the level of information between individuals drops, in the sense that there is less information and there's worse information, so everybody
Slavoj Žižek
becomes more anxious about the future in the sense that they can't make the decisions they would want. And so my question is: given that information becomes scarce or basically unusable in a dictatorship, is the dictator free in his dictatorship? Yes, the classical answer is that in the tyrannical state the tyrant is the only free person. But there is a second thought to that statement: the philosophical irony wanted to demonstrate that the tyrant is times more unhappy than an ordinary citizen. So freedom can mean the highest degree of unhappiness if you are the one to have to mishandle all your compatriots. But as you use the very often the term of information, I think that in the classical situations of acting, the information principle was reduced to a sign, to a sign that makes you act. There is in Suetonius, the Roman historiographer, there is a nice episode when he describes Caesar's hesitation when he is resting with his army on the northern side of the Rubicon. He does not really know what to do. And one day he took a decision by interpreting a strange fact: that on the other side of the river a young, almost naked man, blond, playing on a flute was sitting. And Caesar jumped on the occasion and said, "This is Dionysus who gave us a hint. And now let's go and to fulfill what the unjustness of our enemies and the rightness of God command to us." And then he went beyond the Rubicon. There's always a connection between the disinhibition of the act of acting, the *passage l'acte* in psychoanalytical terms, there must always happen a moment when the discontinuity between motivation and project has to be bridged. And the bridging very often happens by the decision to take one particle of this informational environment more seriously than others. There's another nice example from the eighth song of the *Aeneid* when Aeneas is sitting in front of an Italian city that has not yet been conquered and he is also waiting for his own decision. And then happens something very strange, and that leads into the peak expression of Roman
becomes more anxious about the future in the sense that they can't make the decisions they would want. And so my question is: given that information becomes scarce or basically unusable in a dictatorship, is the dictator free in his dictatorship? Yes, the classical answer is that in the tyrannical state the tyrant is the only free person. But there is a second thought to that statement: the philosophical irony wanted to demonstrate that the tyrant is times more unhappy than an ordinary citizen. So freedom can mean the highest degree of unhappiness if you are the one to have to mishandle all your compatriots. But as you use the very often the term of information, I think that in the classical situations of acting, the information principle was reduced to a sign, to a sign that makes you act. There is in Suetonius, the Roman historiographer, there is a nice episode when he describes Caesar's hesitation when he is resting with his army on the northern side of the Rubicon. He does not really know what to do. And one day he took a decision by interpreting a strange fact: that on the other side of the river a young, almost naked man, blond, playing on a flute was sitting. And Caesar jumped on the occasion and said, "This is Dionysus who gave us a hint. And now let's go and to fulfill what the unjustness of our enemies and the rightness of God command to us." And then he went beyond the Rubicon. There's always a connection between the disinhibition of the act of acting, the *passage l'acte* in psychoanalytical terms, there must always happen a moment when the discontinuity between motivation and project has to be bridged. And the bridging very often happens by the decision to take one particle of this informational environment more seriously than others. There's another nice example from the eighth song of the *Aeneid* when Aeneas is sitting in front of an Italian city that has not yet been conquered and he is also waiting for his own decision. And then happens something very strange, and that leads into the peak expression of Roman
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imperialism.
imperialism.
Slavoj Žižek
There happens a lightning out of a clear sky, *der Blitz aus heiterem Himmel*. And Aeneas'
There happens a lightning out of a clear sky, *der Blitz aus heiterem Himmel*. And Aeneas'
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reaction is very clear: let's do it, what we have to do, we will create this city of Alba which will be the precursor of Rome. And then he says what all these dictators and great men say: *Ego poscor Olympo*, which
reaction is very clear: let's do it, what we have to do, we will create this city of Alba which will be the precursor of Rome. And then he says what all these dictators and great men say: *Ego poscor Olympo*, which
Slavoj Žižek
means "The Olymp is calling for me, the gods are calling for me." And so acting is always something that creates a relationship between a divine sphere or a sphere of truth and the low sphere of tendencies or inclinations. And in order to transform an inclination into an act you need sort of a hinge point as highly established as possible. That's why the term "information" is too weak to make clear what kind of energies are at stake in decision-making. Would you agree with this beautiful, bit me again, temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorists: yes, we decide for
means "The Olymp is calling for me, the gods are calling for me." And so acting is always something that creates a relationship between a divine sphere or a sphere of truth and the low sphere of tendencies or inclinations. And in order to transform an inclination into an act you need sort of a hinge point as highly established as possible. That's why the term "information" is too weak to make clear what kind of energies are at stake in decision-making. Would you agree with this beautiful, bit me again, temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorists: yes, we decide for
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reasons, but retroactively our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position: "Look look look, these three... It's like falling in love. I like your hair, whatever, but that's why I fall in love with you. No, only after I am in love I see reasons. But to conclude, not to drag time: you know where I doubt what you said. You called something "democratic non-totalitarian societies" where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you
reasons, but retroactively our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position: "Look look look, these three... It's like falling in love. I like your hair, whatever, but that's why I fall in love with you. No, only after I am in love I see reasons. But to conclude, not to drag time: you know where I doubt what you said. You called something "democratic non-totalitarian societies" where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you
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think we live in such a society? We don't. Maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people nonetheless—you cannot say it publicly—but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled. They are much less in illusion than us. Or to repeat my old formula: the worst kind of unfreedom is
think we live in such a society? We don't. Maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people nonetheless—you cannot say it publicly—but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled. They are much less in illusion than us. Or to repeat my old formula: the worst kind of unfreedom is
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the unfreedom which you experience as freedom. You are not even aware. Stop, stop, stop. Now we have... Can I repeat my ur-alt joke? I read in my comparative analysis that when there is applause, a Stalinist leader always joins the applause because he's just an executor, it's applause [unintelligible], while a Fascist leader never joins the applause. We draw this distinction here.
the unfreedom which you experience as freedom. You are not even aware. Stop, stop, stop. Now we have... Can I repeat my ur-alt joke? I read in my comparative analysis that when there is applause, a Stalinist leader always joins the applause because he's just an executor, it's applause [unintelligible], while a Fascist leader never joins the applause. We draw this distinction here.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you.
Thank you.