Plato’s Critique of Poetry
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-07-03 · 1:24:02 · 10,951 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticslanguagerevolution-violencecinema-art-culturefascism-populismreligion-theologygeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctnessphilosophy-general
Žižek uses Radovan Karadžić's poetry and the Montenegrin epic The Mountain Wreath as entry points to argue that authentic poetry can directly ground ethnic violence, coining the term 'poetic-military complex.' He then traces the logic of nationalist mobilization through the psychoanalytic concept of the superego-as-permissiveness ('you may'), showing how postmodern consumerist ideology and ethnic fundamentalism share the same obscene libidinal structure. The second half turns to language and violence more broadly, reading Heidegger's 'essencing' of language and Lacan's 'torture house of being' to argue that language is inherently violent and stupid, and that great poetry counteracts the real violence latent in mythic language by performing a second-order 'torture of language' that forces it to tell the truth.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek borrows the term from speech-act theory to describe how totalitarian leaders' performative address subverts their explicit message: the act of calling you to sacrifice secretly communicates 'obey and we will have some fun.'
as “obscene superego / permissive superego”
Žižek uses superego not as an agency of prohibition but as the hidden injunction 'you may', the libidinal bribery that nationalist and consumerist ideologies offer by secretly licensing transgression (rape, killing, eating what you want) beneath their official moral rhetoric.
as “ideological glasses / They Live glasses”
Žižek uses the sunglasses from Carpenter's They Live as a materialization of ideology critique: putting them on reveals the bare ideological command beneath colorful advertising, making visible what commodity culture conceals.
as “post-ideological society”
Žižek uses the phrase to describe contemporary consumer society's self-image, no longer interpellated by great ideological causes but by the injunction to enjoy and realize oneself, which he treats as itself the dominant ideology.
as “libidinal bribery”
Žižek's phrase for the unofficial surplus enjoyment that ideology secretly promises, the obscene supplement to the official ideological message, without which mass movements (fascism, ethnic nationalism, consumerism) cannot function.
Žižek identifies the surplus enjoyment ideology offers as the libidinal bribe that makes ethnic or consumerist identifications work, the 'obscene' extra gratification (lynching, rape, feeling good about charity) beyond the official ideological message.
as “carnivalesque suspension”
Žižek invokes Bakhtin's carnival as a temporary suspension of social hierarchies, but immediately subverts it: the true carnival, as Bakhtin's own manuscripts reveal, was the Stalinist purges, showing there is nothing emancipatory in carnivalesque license.
Žižek's coinage for post-Yugoslav ethnic violence, where the pairing of the poet (Karadžić) and the general (Mladić) replaced the industrial-military complex: poets prepared the ideological ground for cleansing by sowing nationalist dreams.
Žižek identifies the more dangerous modern form of racism in which one's own group is identified not with a particular tribe but with universal humanity, thereby rendering the other not merely foreign but inhuman.
as “fantasy as fundamental lie”
Žižek argues that the narrative story we tell ourselves about ourselves, our inner self-experience, is a fantasy that covers the truth rather than revealing it; the truth is what the story is designed to conceal.
as “mythic violence / divine violence”
Žižek draws on Benjamin's distinction, mythic violence founds states (sprachbildend), divine violence destroys and emancipates (staatszerstörend), and transposes it onto language to generate his two-tiered account of linguistic violence.
Žižek invokes Heidegger's verbal sense of Wesen, language 'essences' by establishing hierarchies of what is crucial and what is not, violently imposing a horizon of meaning and disclosure of world.
as “sprachbildende Gewalt (language-founding violence)”
Drawing on Benjamin's mythic/divine violence distinction, Žižek identifies the violence of language that founds a community's horizon of meaning, imposing a worldview, establishing what counts as essential, as the linguistic analogue of mythic state-founding violence.
as “torture house of being”
Žižek's citation of Lacan's reformulation of Heidegger's 'house of being': for Lacan, language is not a peaceful dwelling but a site of trauma, since there is an original and irresolvable gap between the living being and language.
Žižek uses this as the psychoanalytic name for the wound inflicted on the subject by being incorporated into language, the traumatic price of entry into the symbolic order.
Žižek invokes language as the big Other, our spiritual substance, and argues it is inherently stupid and conformist at its core, which is why poets must do violence to it.
as “symbolic death / between the two deaths”
Žižek references the Lacanian space 'between the two deaths', biologically alive but symbolically excluded, exemplified by Antigone and the Muselmänner of the camps, a dimension Heidegger's analysis misses.
as “Homo Sacer / bare life”
Žižek briefly invokes Agamben's Homo Sacer as the symbolically dead but biologically living subject, the Muselmann, the living dead, whose existence Heidegger's existential analytic cannot account for.
Žižek invokes Heidegger's structure of care (Sorge) and Being-towards-death to show its limit: it applies to neurotics but cannot capture the psychotic, who is already a 'living dead' disengaged from this temporal structure.
Stories he reaches for 8
Žižek describes Starbucks's programmatic paragraph claiming customers buy not just coffee but community, solidarity with Guatemalan farmers, and an organic ethic, illustrating how contemporary capitalism sells meaning of life as the commodity.
“"when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don't only buy a cappuccino. You buy a certain ethic of life."”
John Carpenter's They Live features sunglasses that strip away the colorful surface of advertising to reveal bare ideological commands ('Obey,' 'Buy,' 'Don't think'). Žižek uses this as the perfect naive materialization of ideology critique.
“He puts glasses on and sees just a gray surface of the poster with words: "Don't think, obey, family, buy, money is your god."”
Žižek cites D.T. Suzuki's wartime writings advising soldiers that Buddhist enlightenment (satori, experience of void) enables killing without guilt, the sword 'dances' and the body 'falls'; ordinary people can achieve the same through absolute military discipline.
“I am no one, I'm just a pure impersonal gaze observing how my sword is dancing in the air, and as part of the same dance your body somehow falls on my—”
Himmler carried a special leather-bound Bhagavad Gita to solve the psychological problem of how SS killers could commit atrocities without becoming bestial, the Gita's doctrine of detached action provided the spiritual solution.
“Himmler... always had in his pocket a specially bound leather version [of the Bhagavad Gita].”
Žižek reports (via Boris Groys) that manuscript fragments from Bakhtin's Kazan exile reveal that his model for carnival in the Rabelais book was the Stalinist purges, today Politburo member, tomorrow English spy, fully negating carnival's liberatory meaning.
“what was his model for carnival when he was writing the book on Rabelais? The Stalinist purges. That's the true carnival.”
The secret advisor to Richelieu during the 30 Years War was simultaneously the worst Realpolitiker, engineering German division, ordering torture, and a genuine mystic whose meditations rival Teresa of Avila, showing authentic spirituality offers no ethical guarantee.
“This same person in the evenings, after he finished his dirty work day, wrote the most authentic mystical meditations... absolutely genuine.”
Žižek quotes Karadžić's untitled poem, 'nothing is forbidden in my faith, there is loving and drinking', to show how the suspension of moral prohibition is the hidden structure of postmodern nationalism, enacting the obscene superego's 'you may.'
“"People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want."”
Žižek reframes the classic cinema debate: Eisenstein cuts and fragments (torture by cutting), Tarkovsky stretches with long takes (torture by the rack), both are torturers of filmic material, not opposites of violence and peace.
“Eisenstein saying 'I cut him to pieces,' 'no no,' said Tarkovsky, 'it's better to stretch him a little bit.'”
Works invoked 20
Antigone play
Žižek references Sophocles' Antigone as the exemplary figure of the space 'between the two deaths', alive but symbolically dead, a dimension Heidegger's reading of the play misses.
They Live film
Žižek loves the film as 'Hollywood extreme left' and 'beautifully naive, vulgar naive materialization of ideology'; uses the sunglasses motif as his central illustration of ideology critique throughout the talk.
The Parallax View book
Žižek references his own book for passages on Ottoman/Turkish multicultural tolerance, relevant to his argument about Njegoš's Enlightenment universalism.
Bhagavad Gita book
Žižek uses the Gita's doctrine of detached action (acting without being engaged) as the spiritual technology Himmler and Suzuki both drew on to psychologically enable atrocity.
Zen at War book
Žižek praises Brian Victoria's archival study of Zen Buddhism's support for Japanese militarism as a key counterexample to the idea that Eastern spirituality is inherently peaceful.
Invoked for Dostoevsky's famous formula 'If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted,' which Žižek then dialectically inverts.
Grey Eminence book
Žižek recommends Huxley's biography of Père Joseph as a wonderful book posing the problem of mystical authenticity coexisting with political atrocity, though he rejects Huxley's Eastern-wisdom solution.
Écrits book
Mentioned as the text that prompted Heidegger's dismissive remark ('a psychiatrist who himself needs a psychiatrist'), Žižek uses this to introduce Lacan's 'torture house of being.'
Žižek defends Littell's novel for its disturbing effect: it tells the Holocaust from the perpetrator's perspective, confronting the reader with the banality of evil rather than a monster.
Children of Men film
Žižek felt 'sincerely sad and deceived' when the film did not fit his theory, which he had deduced before seeing it, used as an autobiographical joke about Hegelian method.
Žižek invokes Heidegger's structures of Sorge, Entwurf, and Sein zum Tode both to use and to limit: the analytic is appropriate for neurosis but cannot account for psychosis.
Žižek references Hegel's 'silent weaving of the spirit' (stille Weben) from the Phenomenology to describe underground ideological transformation that suddenly explodes visibly.
Homo Sacer book
Agamben's concept of bare life and the Muselmann is briefly invoked in connection with the 'between the two deaths' and Malabou's new wounded.
The Iliad book
Invoked as the comparandum for The Mountain Wreath: one could condemn Homer for tribal ethics, but there the ethics was unreflected, whereas Njegoš already knew modern universalism.
Žižek praises the late François Balmès's book for the clinically devastating argument that Heidegger's Dasein-analytic covers neurotics but not psychotics.
Kangura journal
Hassan Ngeze's Rwandan journal that spread anti-Tutsi hatred, cited to show the poetic-military complex is not uniquely Balkan.
Les Nouveaux Blessés book
Žižek praises Malabou's book on post-traumatic subjects as the new living dead, the paradigmatic pathology of the 21st century, connecting them to Agamben's Muselmänner.
Žižek draws heavily on Benjamin's essay for the mythic/divine violence distinction, which he transposes into linguistic terms as sprachbildende / sprachzerstörende Gewalt.
Žižek calls it 'totally worthless theoretically'; finds value only in its documentary middle chapters showing perpetrators who also cared for their children, and mocks the author's name.
Žižek treats it as a genuine literary masterpiece, 'the Serb Shakespeare / Dante / Homer', but argues real violence is inscribed in it; uses it as his central case study of poetry grounding ethnic cleansing.
People invoked 39
Cited as representative of the long-take, non-interventionist side of cinema theory (with Rossellini and Tarkovsky), reframed by Žižek as a different mode of violence, not its absence.
François Balmès positive
Žižek praises the late French Lacanian for arguing that Heidegger's existential analytic fits neurotics but cannot cover psychotics, a point Žižek finds clinically devastating for Heideggerian ontology.
Used as the prime example of a totalitarian leader who operates not through patriarchal authority but through libidinal bribery, giving Serbs a permanent holiday of permitted transgression.
John Carpenter positive
Žižek praises They Live as a 'beautifully naive, vulgar naive materialization of ideology,' using it as his primary illustration of how ideology critique works.
Radovan Karadžić positive
Žižek finds Karadžić morally repellent but treats his poetry as a serious object of analysis, arguing it should not be dismissed as ridiculous because it provides a key to how ethnic cleansing functions ideologically.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Žižek agrees with Adorno's critique (against Wilhelm Reich) that the totalitarian personality is not a patriarchal authority figure but a pragmatic-contradiction-using leader who offers libidinal bribery.
Žižek briefly mentions Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence as one (insufficient) account of language's violence, before going to a more radical formulation.
Aleksandar Tijanić positive
Serbian journalist whose description of Milošević's Serbia as a 'one great holiday where nothing is punishable' Žižek quotes at length as a perfect illustration of the permissive superego.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek repeatedly invokes Lacan, the torture house of being, symbolic castration, the big Other as stupid, the subject, fantasy as fundamental lie, as the key supplement to Heidegger's account of language.
Steven Weinberg positive
Žižek endorses and extends Weinberg's claim that without religion good people do good and bad people do bad, but only religion makes good people do bad things.
Brian Victoria positive
Žižek praises Victoria's Zen at War as doing wonderful archival work documenting the Zen establishment's support for Japanese militarism, using it as a counterexample to Huxley's Eastern-wisdom solution.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek totally opposes the notion that carnival has any emancipatory potential, and uses Bakhtin's own manuscripts (via Groys) to show his carnival model was the Stalinist purges.
Richard Rorty negative
Žižek rejects the Rortyan narrative-identity liberal ethics ('we are stories we tell ourselves') as producing disgusting mottos like 'an enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear,' though he notes Rorty himself is sometimes more complex.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Žižek briefly invokes Homo Sacer and bare life to connect the 'between the two deaths' dimension (Antigone, Muselmänner) to Agamben's framework.
Jonathan Littell positive
Žižek defends Les Bienveillantes for provoking unease by narrating the Holocaust from the perpetrator's perspective, which is precisely what the Arendt 'banality of evil' reading requires.
Petar II Petrović-Njegoš positive
Žižek treats Njegoš as a genuine literary giant, comparable to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, while arguing that real violence is inscribed in his epic and that his Enlightenment universalism makes it more dangerous than primitive tribal poetry.
Cited as the parallel to Suzuki: Himmler recognized the psychological problem of SS perpetrators committing atrocities and solved it via the Bhagavad Gita's doctrine of detached action.
Catherine Malabou positive
Žižek praises Malabou's Les Nouveaux Blessés for identifying post-traumatic subjects, the new living dead, as the paradigmatic pathology of the 21st century, linking them to the Muselmänner.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Žižek exposes Suzuki's wartime writings providing Zen justification for Japanese militarism, advising soldiers that satori enables killing without guilt, as a key example of authentic spirituality serving atrocity.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Žižek says he doesn't like Jelinek ('too conservative, her crazy') but quotes her formulation 'Language should be tortured to tell the truth' as a perfect encapsulation of his thesis about poetry.
Martin Heidegger positive
Žižek uses Heidegger's 'essencing of language' and 'language as house of being' productively, while supplementing/criticizing him via Lacan, arguing Heidegger misses the violence of language and cannot account for psychosis.
Eric Santner positive
Žižek references Santner's early book on Hölderlin for showing how Heidegger, despite claiming Hölderlin as his exemplary poet, misses the language-torturing paratactic dimension of late Hölderlin.
Daniel Goldhagen negative
Žižek dismisses Hitler's Willing Executioners as 'totally worthless theoretically,' finding only the documentary middle chapter of value, and mockingly notes the author's name combines Hagen and Gold.
Called the 'Karadžić of Rwanda', cited briefly to show the poetic-military complex is not a Balkan specialty.
Hannah Arendt positive
Žižek invokes Arendt's 'banality of evil' to support his point that evil people are not monsters but ordinary people who care for their children, the truth is not in the inner story.
Walter Benjamin positive
Žižek draws on Benjamin's Critique of Violence (mythic vs. divine violence) and his notion of artworks as latent photos whose developer has not yet been discovered, transposing both onto language and poetry.
The UN head of Bosnia administration who banned The Mountain Wreath from Bosnian schools, cited as the trigger for Žižek's close reading of the poem.
Boris Groys positive
Žižek jokes he disagrees theoretically with Groys and that when he takes power Groys goes to the Gulag, but credits him with the crucial Bakhtin-carnival-purges finding.
Friedrich Hölderlin positive
Cited as Heidegger's exemplary poet whose late paratactic style enacts the 'torture of language' that Heidegger himself fails to recognize.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek rejects Habermas's position that there is an ethic of mutual reconciliation inherent to language, arguing that language is not a medium of reconciliation but inherently violent.
Žižek name-checks Beck's concept of reflexive modernity where everything is chosen and opted for, to contrast with the nationalist perception of liberal society as overregulated.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Žižek invokes Eisenstein's montage as the 'cutting torturer' of cinema to argue all artistic form involves violence on its material.
Žižek recommends Huxley's The Grey Eminence as a wonderful book raising the problem of Père Joseph, but finds Huxley's solution (blame Christianity, seek Eastern wisdom) unsatisfying.
Wilhelm Reich negative
Žižek sides with Adorno against Reich's thesis that the Nazi personality follows the line of patriarchal family authority, he calls this 'totally wrong.'
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Žižek invokes Tarkovsky's long takes as the 'stretching torturer' (the rack), not the opposite of Eisenstein's violence but a different mode of the same.
Plato positive
Žižek rehabilitates Plato's expulsion of poets from the city as 'sensible advice' in light of the poetic-military complex in Yugoslavia.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek invokes the Hegelian maxim 'if facts don't fit theory, so much worse for the facts' to describe his own method, and references Hegel's 'silent weaving of the spirit' from the Phenomenology to describe how ideological shifts happen invisibly.
Named as the general half of the poetic-military complex alongside Karadžić the poet.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Žižek invokes the Karamazov formula 'If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted' only to dialectically invert it.
What it argues
the poetic-military complex: poetry as ground of ethnic violencethe obscene superego as permissive 'you may' in nationalism and consumerismlanguage as inherently violent and stupidHeidegger's 'essencing of language' vs. Lacan's 'torture house of being'Benjamin's mythic vs. divine violence transposed onto languageauthentic spiritual experience as no guarantee against atrocityretroactive reading: texts disclose their true meaning only from later experience
Dialectical moves 9
“Superego is not an agent of prohibition — it is the injunction 'you must, therefore you can,' the obscene 'you may.'”
Žižek inverts the received view of the superego as moral constraint to reveal it as the source of transgressive license.
“Far from restoring firm values against the chaos of modernity, nationalist fundamentalism is experienced by its adherents as liberation from excessive liberal regulations.”
The standard sociological account of fundamentalism as fear of freedom is reversed: fundamentalism is enjoyed as freedom from liberal overregulation.
“If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted — but if there IS a God, then everything is permitted to those who act in his name.”
Žižek inverts Dostoevsky's formula to show that religion, not atheism, is what enables good people to commit atrocities.
“Language is not the house of being but the torture house of being.”
Žižek reframes Heidegger's dwelling metaphor via Lacan to insist on the irreducible gap and trauma between the living being and language.
“Language is not a medium of reconciliation but the great divider — its violence is not an external distortion but its very essence.”
Against Habermas and early Lacan, Žižek argues that the violence of language is constitutive rather than a corruption of its communicative function.
“The only way to counteract real violence even in great poetry is to torture language — or we end up in real torture.”
The paradox that artistic violence done to language is what prevents the language of art from becoming a vehicle for physical violence.
“The carnival was not the marketplace or the festival but the Stalinist purges: today you are Politburo member, tomorrow an English spy.”
Bakhtin's liberatory carnival is revealed to have had the most totalitarian event as its actual model, negating its emancipatory claim.
“It is not 'an enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear' — the inner story you tell yourself is the fundamental lie that covers the truth.”
The liberal-therapeutic formula for reconciliation is reversed: narrative self-understanding is not truth but the structure of fantasy concealing it.
“Eisenstein and Tarkovsky are not opposites of violence and reconciliation — they are two kinds of torturer: one cuts, the other stretches.”
The apparent opposition between violent montage and peaceful long-take cinema collapses into a common structure of violence against the filmic material.
Claims 19
asserts
The superego is not an agency of prohibition but of permissiveness — its formula is 'you can because you must,' and nationalist fundamentalism operates by offering a secret 'you may' to violate the regulations of liberal society.superego, nationalism, ideology
rejects
The cliché that nationalist fundamentalism restores firm values to people disoriented by modernity is wrong; on the contrary, nationalists experience liberal society as oppressively overregulated and embrace ethnic identity as liberation.nationalist psychology, modernity
asserts
Without recognizing the obscene permissive superego supplement to explicit social law — the libidinal bribery ideology offers — we cannot grasp the true dynamics of ethnic nationalism.ideology critique, ethnic nationalism
asserts
Karadžić's poetry is not simply ridiculous but deserves close reading because it provides a key to how ethnic cleansing functions ideologically.Karadžić, poetry and violence
asserts
Ethnic violence was prepared by poets, not just manipulative politicians; in post-Yugoslavia there was a poetic-military complex where poets sowed the ideological seeds of cleansing.post-Yugoslav nationalism, role of poetry
asserts
The Mountain Wreath is simultaneously an absolutely authentic great poem and a text that has real violence inscribed into it — one cannot dissolve this deadlock by claiming the violence was only a later distortion.Njegoš, The Mountain Wreath, authenticity and violence
asserts
Njegoš's racism is more dangerous than pre-modern tribal racism because he identifies his side with universal humanity and reason, thereby excluding the other from humanity altogether.universalism, racism, Enlightenment
asserts
Today's religious and ethnic violence is more prevalent precisely because we live in a perceived post-ideological era: without great public causes, a sacred transcendent justification is needed to overcome ordinary people's spontaneous moral repugnance to killing.post-ideological ideology, religion, violence
reframes
Dostoevsky's formula 'If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted' should be reversed: if there is a God (or direct access to historical necessity), then everything is permitted — religion makes good people do bad things.religion, ethics, Dostoevsky
asserts
Consumer ideology today sells not real product properties or status but the 'meaning of life' — Starbucks sells an ethic of solidarity, organic food sells narcissistic satisfaction, charity ads sell enjoyment without sacrifice.consumerism, ideology, meaning
rejects
The Rortyan liberal ethics of 'an enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear' is doubly false: inner self-narration is a fundamental lie that covers the truth rather than disclosing it.Rorty, narrative identity, liberal ethics
asserts
Authentic spiritual or mystical experience — whether Christian (Père Joseph), Zen Buddhist (Suzuki), or Hindu (Bhagavad Gita) — provides no protection against committing or justifying atrocities.religion, spirituality, violence, ethics
rejects
Bakhtin's carnival is not emancipatory: its model, as Bakhtin's manuscripts reveal, was the Stalinist purges — the paradigmatic carnivalesque suspension of hierarchy.Bakhtin, carnival, emancipation
asserts
Language is not a medium of reconciliation (pace Habermas and early Lacan) but is inherently violent: it imposes an exclusive horizon of meaning on the living being, creating an absolute gap between those who dwell in different language-worlds.language, violence, Habermas, Lacan
asserts
Language at its core is stupid and conformist — proverbs are its purest expression, offering a ready legitimation for any outcome — and poetry must torture language to extract truth from it.language, poetry, truth
asserts
Heidegger's existential analytic of Dasein (Being-towards-death, Sorge) can describe neurosis but cannot account for psychosis, where the subject is a 'living dead' already disengaged from the structure of care.Heidegger, Lacan, psychosis
asserts
Benjamin's mythic/divine violence distinction should be transposed onto language: mythic language-founding violence (sprachbildende Gewalt) must be countered by language-destroying violence (sprachzerstörende Gewalt) — the torture poetry performs on language.Benjamin, language, violence, poetry
asserts
Plato's expulsion of poets from the city is a sensible advice in light of post-Yugoslav experience: poets, not corrupt politicians, were at the origin of ethnic cleansing.Plato, poetry, politics
reframes
The two tendencies in cinema (Eisenstein's montage vs. Tarkovsky's long takes) are not violence versus reconciliation but two forms of violence — cutting versus stretching — that confirm the irreducible violence of artistic form.cinema, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, artistic form
Quotes 15
“Superego is not an agent of prohibition. Superego is you must. The best formula of Über-Ich, Superego for me is the turning around of Kant's 'Du sollst, denn du kannst.' It's you can because you must.”Slavoj Žižek · superego as permissive injunction
“Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetic-military complex, personified by the twin figures of Radovan Karadžić the poet and Ratko Mladić the general.”Slavoj Žižek · poetic-military complex
“Without this obscene superego bribery, it doesn't function.”Slavoj Žižek · libidinal bribery as condition of ideology
“The lesson of today's so-called terrorism is on the contrary that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God.”Slavoj Žižek · religion enables atrocity — inversion of Dostoevsky
“While without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. You need religion for that.”Slavoj Žižek · religion makes good people do bad things (Weinberg)
“One should only supplement Weinberg with not only religion but also poetry. And the greater poetry is, the better it does this job.”Slavoj Žižek · poetry joins religion as enabler of atrocity
“The poetic truth or authentic experience — poetic, mystical, religious — is no guarantee against horrors.”Slavoj Žižek · authenticity no ethical guarantee
“For Lacan language is a torture house of being. 'In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.'”Slavoj Žižek · language as torture house of being (Lacan)
“Language should be tortured to tell the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · poetry as torture of language (Jelinek)
“Proverbs are for me the stupidity at its purest. Proverbs are always totally conformist.”Slavoj Žižek · language's inherent conformist stupidity
“The story you are telling yourself about yourself — this is what in psychoanalysis we call fantasy as a fundamental lie — is a fundamental lie. That's not the truth. The truth is what you try to cover with the story.”Slavoj Žižek · self-narrative as fundamental fantasy / lie
“An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear — [but] would you also say, Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his side of the story?”Slavoj Žižek · reductio of liberal narrative ethics
“Either we can rely on mythic violence, we end up in torturing, or we torture language and in this way stop real torture.”Slavoj Žižek · poetic torture of language as alternative to real violence
“It is an authentic poem and nonetheless real violence as a consequence is inscribed into it. We cannot play the game, 'oh this was only later.'”Slavoj Žižek · authenticity and violence as irresolvable deadlock
“There is no properly human violence without language, which is not grounded in language.”Slavoj Žižek · all human violence is linguistically grounded
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Vielen Dank, es ist eine große Ehre für mich, hier zu sein. Leider ist nur meine deutsche Sprache nicht gut genug, um einen Vortrag zu halten. Ich könnte das einfach lesen auf Deutsch, aber das ist dann ein bisschen idiotisch. So leider muss ich auf die Sprache des Imperialismus wechseln oder was. So thanks, Bernd, for your kind introduction. I just cannot restrain from making one or two comments that research project in Essen, Antinomies of Postmodern Reason—I mean, you know why I chose this title. I wanted a pseudo-concrete title which appears to mean something but basically means you do whatever you want. What are antinomies of postmodern reason? It can be Icelandic poetry, it can be agriculture in South Africa, like, that was the idea. And also when you mentioned this Children of Men, here I was faithful to my—okay, Hegelian, it's not as simple as that—but the saying attributed to Hegel: if facts don't fit theory, so much worse for the facts. I gave to Alfonso Cuarón an interview, but I must proudly state before I saw the film. So everything you hear me saying there, I just in a proper Hegelian way deduced it without seeing the film. And I was sincerely—I was sincerely sad and felt deceived upon seeing the film. It didn't fit my theory. Okay. Okay, now a little bit more seriously because I really want to approach the topic, which is not just this ridiculous story about Karadžić—this will be the first half, poetry and ethnic violence—but then I want to go to a more fundamental question which was elaborated in different ways by many philosophers only in the 20th century, from Walter Benjamin to Martin Heidegger, Sprache und Gewalt, language and violence. So I would like to begin as it is announced in the poster with Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader responsible for ethnic cleansing in the post-Yugoslav war, who, as we all know, was finally arrested. Now I think is the time to step back, to take into view also the other side of Karadžić's personality. This psychiatrist by profession was not only a ruthless political and military leader, but also a poet. And you know, now that he ended a certain political career, it's very fashionable to make fun of him, like what kind of ridiculous poet and so on. But since in the 80s I lived in the same state as him, I did a little bit of inquiry and discovered that quite many poets who now denounce him as agent of ethnic cleansing, murderer, ridiculous poet, were throughout the 80s quite respectfully translating him into Slovene, taking him very seriously as the new voice of Bosnian poetry and so on and so on. So I also think that Karadžić's poetry should not be simply dismissed as ridiculous. It deserves a close reading since I think it does provide a key to how ethnic cleansing functions. Here are, for example, the first two lines of an untitled poem by Karadžić, identified by a dedication for Izlet Sarajlić, a friend of him. I quote Karadžić: "Convert to my new faith, O crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want. And this godhead forbids you nothing. Oh obey my call, brothers, people, crowd." End of quote. The suspension of moral prohibitions that we encounter here—remember, "People, nothing is forbidden in my faith"—is the crucial feature I claim of today's so-called postmodern nationalism. This suspension, this nothing is forbidden, you can do what you want, this is what in psychoanalysis is called Über-Ich, Superego. Superego is not an agent of prohibition. Superego is you must. The best formula of Über-Ich, Superego for me is the turning around of Kant's "Du sollst, denn du kannst." It's you can because you must. Here the cliché according to which passionate ethnic identification restores a firm set of values and beliefs in the confusing insecurity of a modern secular global society—this usual cliché, you know, we lack basic coordinates, so we sometimes fall victim to the fundamentalist temptation, take refuge in old stable values and so on. I think on the contrary, we should turn around this. Nationalist fundamentalism rather serves as the operator of a secret, barely concealed "you may." It's today's—namely, this idea came to me when I once in the 90s, when Milošević was still in power, I risked a brief visit to Belgrade. And by a total chance, I found myself in a restaurant with some very hardline nationalists, probably engaged in ethnic cleansing and so on. And it shocked me how they—they didn't know who I am—how they explained to me their engagement. It was exactly the opposite of this cliché "we are afraid of modernity where there are no set rules," where as Ulrich Beck would have put it, everything is reflected, chosen, you have to opt for it. No, they perceived our apparently hedonistic and permissive postmodern reflexive society as excessively saturated by rules and regulations. Their problem was not there is too much freedom, I don't find my way. Their problem is everything is overregulated. As they told me, "this political correctness, I cannot rape a woman, I cannot steal, I cannot smoke when I want, I cannot eat what I want, no fat, no this, no sugar" and so on. So for them, the reference to some passionate ethnic identification, far from further restraining you, rather functioned as a liberating "you may." You may violate not the Decalogue but the stiff regulations of the peaceful coexistence in a liberal tolerant society. You may drink and eat whatever you want, engage in patriarchal customs prohibited by liberal political correctness. Ultimately, you may hate, fight, kill, rape. Without the full recognition of this perverse pseudo-liberating effect of today's nationalism, without the full recognition of how the obscene permissive superego supplements the explicit texture of social symbolic law, we condemn ourselves to the failure of grasping the true dynamics of so-called ethnic nationalism. Here is how Aleksandar Tijanić, a Serb journalist, described way back in the 90s the strange kind of symbiosis between Milošević and the Serbs. A wonderful quote. I start the quote: "Milošević generally suited the Serbs. In the time of his rule, Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. Milošević allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton, or anyone else of the world dignitaries." And incidentally, this was literally true. When NATO bombed Serbia, I remember on cable TV watching Serb news, and they reported a demonstration where somebody—and this was filmed by the camera—had a big poster which says, you remember this was just after the Monica Lewinsky affair where Clinton confessed that Monica Lewinsky, as they put it, gave him a blowjob, fellatio. And the big poster said, "Bill, why are you bombing us? Did Monica suck out your brain also?" or something like that. This was state TV and so on. I go on: "Milošević gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars. Milošević changed the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing, but really nothing, of what you do can be punishable." End of quote. And again, I think this is fundamental. If you read an excellent text by Adorno from late 30s on the psychological structure of fascist propaganda, Adorno already made this point in an implicit critique of Wilhelm Reich who followed this line, which I think—I agree here with Adorno—is totally wrong, the line of: the Nazi authoritarian personality is a consequence or follows to the end the line of patriarchal family. Adorno emphasized that the so-called totalitarian personality is absolutely not a personality subordinated to patriarchal authority. With so-called totalitarian leader, Hitler, for example, we get a leader who is not a father figure. It's a leader—Adorno already got this—who, how to put it, plays on something which in today's Sprach-theorie we would have called pragmatic contradiction. The very way he between the lines addresses you, the very way he calls you to do your duty, to do, subverts the explicit message. The explicit message is what? Something like, for example, of Hitler in the early 30s: enough of Weimar corruption, decadence, time to sacrifice, to think about your country, sacrifice, work, and so on and so on. But the message between the lines is, "obey and we will have some fun, kill some Jews" and so on and so on. Without this, how to put it, obscene superego bribery, it doesn't function. And I think this is how we should learn to read even today's ideology, even today. Today it changed a little bit. Often today it's the apparently the opposite. Like, I wonder if you saw a film which I really like. It's a little bit primitive as a film, but it's—how is he called, the director who did Halloween? John Carpenter. I think in early 90s he did a movie, it's a little bit difficult to get but you can get it, called They Live. It's one of these science fiction paranoia films, but it has a beautifully naive, vulgar naive materialization of ideology. It's a story of an—it's Hollywood extreme left. No wonder it was practically prohibited, not even shown. It's the story of John Nada—Nada is in Spanish nothing, so proletarian position—an unemployed Los Angeles worker who finds in an abandoned church strange sunglasses, a couple of strange sunglasses. He goes on the street, puts the sunglasses on, and what happens is that they are kind of Ideologie-kritische Brille. He sees the true message. It's so wonderfully naively done. Like he walks on the street and sees a big poster all in colors, "Go to Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime, enjoy." He puts glasses on and sees just a gray surface of the poster with words: "Don't think, obey, family, buy, money is your god." Like, as if you see there the direct ideological message in a way. And I think the first thing we should ask today even with the most innocent publicity is what we were—what we would have seen if we were to put on this kind of glasses. For example, let me go to the end, which for me is a very disgusting end. This is I claim today's ideology at its worst. This calls for charity. You know what's the typical image? Like, you have in newspapers or on TV a short spot, usually first they sentimentally manipulate you, some African child starving with cut lips, I don't know, totally deformed. And then comes the message: "Are you aware that for the price of two cappuccinos or whatever, you can save this guy's life?" No? It sounds nice, but again, you put the glasses on. What do you see? What is the real message of this? I think something like: "People are starving in Africa. You know and I know that we don't give a damn about it. But contribute a little bit to our foundation and you will not only, you not only without sacrificing anything you can go on enjoying your nice life, you can even feel good, like you see I'm doing something" and so on and so on. And we can be here, we should be here open to the end in this critical analysis. For example, let me take a very touchy subject: ecology. Do you really—why are you buying—or if you are, I'm not—why are you buying organic food, organic fruit? Do you really believe that those half-rotten apples are any better than the nice-looking one, chemical—I claim I always have this paranoiac suspicion that it's all the same apples. First they take out the beautiful ones and sell them as what they are, genetically—then what remains, the rotten ones they sell them for the double price as organic. But what is my point? Maybe it's even true. My point is, look deep into your heart. I don't think you really believe that these apples are better. You are buying them because it makes you feel good. "Look, even when I buy apples, I do something for Mother Earth. I participate, I do my small contribution to saving nature" and so on and so on. You are not really buying health food. You are buying a pleasurable narcissistic satisfaction experience. And if you don't believe me, look at how publicity functions today. I think one can find a certain trend which is what? Abstractly we can say we have three types of publicity generally. First, the classical publicity where you refer to a certain real property of the object. Like, let's say I want, I'm selling a Land Rover car. I will say it spends only so much gasoline, it really can climb mountains, you can go into the lake, whatever. Like real properties, even if they are a lie, but they pretend to be real properties of the object. Then the next stage is this Thorstein Veblen stage of status symbol and so on. This type of publicity would refer to what social status does it give to you to have a Land Rover. But I think today more and more, if you read it carefully, especially in the United States, I'm surprised how wide it is, it's more and more something else. It's neither real property nor social status but the meaning of life. What does it mean to you the way the life experience you get by it? I claim today's publicity for Land Rover wouldn't, would mention predominantly neither the supposed qualities of the car nor status symbol but something like: "Do you feel alienated in a big Western city, in this concrete jungle and so on, just anonymous? Drive Land Rover and you will feel an authentic man again," and you know, it would focus on the way you experience it. And it is as if the commodity today tries to at the same time not only to consume but to, to give a kind of a meaning of life justification. The clearest example, which is why I have some doubts, I'm not sure if terrorism always works, but at one point I would engage in it. Do you already have here Starbucks coffee shops? There I—okay so that I cannot be prosecuted—if I were to be a terrorist, I would have bombed them. Why? Because I don't know how it is here in Germany but in United States they, they are, they, they developed to the end this perfection of referring to your experience. For example, as they—for example, recently I found in American Starbucks stores kind of a paragraph, which is kind of programmatic paragraph, displayed everywhere where they claim, "when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don't only buy a cappuccino. You buy," they say, "a certain ethic of life." You buy first the community experience. They openly play on this sociological cliché that today no longer sense of community blah blah, Starbucks try to reconstitute it. Then they emphasize how they only buy organic coffee, how they take care that also they build a water supply, they build hospitals for the Guatemala—so the idea is, you know, with a simple cup of cappuccino, it's no longer that stupid, you remember publicity from years ago, "Mmm, what taste, what coffee is this?" No. The point is when you drink a coffee, you are solidary with Mother Earth, you help the poor there. It's the meaning of life that they are selling basically. It's a new sense of solidarity and so on and so on. I'm sorry we don't have the time more to go into this because my thesis is this is what basically happens. That's why I was already when I was young skeptical about '68. This is how '68 was, by '68 I mean all the student upheaval of the 60s was triumphantly reintegrated. Capitalism reinvented itself by basically telling—taking over all this motto of against alienation, against bureaucratic anonymity, authentic experience and so on and so on. And okay, but let's go back to my main line. So Superego. What underlies all this is Superego. Superego as the injunction, this you may. You can, you should because you can. And I claim that this is what we find of course different versions of this in our so-called consumerist societies where let's talk frankly, the basic reference, the basic injunction that we get from society, what society expects from us, I claim in this sense only we live effectively in a post-ideological society. It's no longer some big ideological cause. We are no longer interpelled as, I don't know, sacrifice yourself for democracy, for communism, for Christianity, whatever. I mean, I don't know how you experience your life, but mostly I think if you ask a person "what do you think society wants from you?", the answer would have been quite a correct one: "I feel a pressure to make something out of myself, to live an authentic life," a kind of a slightly spiritualized Dalai Lama type hedonism. Which is why Dalai Lama is such a hit in the West. That's I think the ruling ideology today. And what I'm claiming is that this attitude infested even its opposite, so-called fundamentalism, which already has this pseudo-liberating dimension to it. For me again, the model of, for example, this kind of postmodern false liberation would have been what? I did some study, it interested me how it functioned, Ku Klux Klan in a small Southern city of United States of America in 1920s, let us say, when Ku Klux Klan was still very strong. How did it function? Again we should play this They Live game. The official message was Western civilization, protect Western civilization, Christian life and so on and so on. But the real message was, "okay you protect Western civilization and Christian values by joining Ku Klux Klan, and on the top of it join us and we can have a nice, a nice rape, lynch some blacks, rape some black girls" and so on and so on. This was the, let's call it libidinal bribery, the surplus, the surplus enjoyment ideology is offering you. Without this—which is why, maybe some of you know, if you are also here some of you literary students, the famous theory—it was famous when I was young, I no longer know what is famous today—Alexander Bakhtin (he developed it propos François Rabelais) this notion of carnival. This magical moment of carnivalesque suspension of, you know, when beggar is king, king is beggar, all the social rules are suspended momentarily. Of course I was always a Stalinist leftist although even in—I totally oppose the notion that there is anything subversive in the authentic sense of emancipatory liberation in this notion of carnivalesque suspension. And I was very glad when I learned from a person whom I know, he's half-friend of mine although I don't agree with him theoretically, I made it clear to him when my friends and I take power he goes to Gulag, Boris Groys, no? He told me a nice thing which totally confirms my reading: that they now discovered some manuscript fragments from the time mid-30s when Bakhtin was—he was exiled in some smaller city, I think Kazan or where, as a librarian, that's how he survived the Stalinist purges—and it's clear from these manuscripts that what was his model for carnival when he was writing the book on Rabelais? The Stalinist purges. That's the true carnival. Today you are member of Politburo, tomorrow you are an English spy and so on, you know, like it's this total carnivalesque suspension of hierarchies. That's absolutely crucial dimension of Stalinist purges. So even there we find clearly a carnivalesque suspension. So to go on, what I would say is that here poetry enters. In what sense? Plato's reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. But I think judging from my post-Yugoslav experience, this is a rather sensible advice. Because ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets' dangerous dreams. True, Milošević manipulated nationalist passions. But it was the poets who delivered him the stuff which lent itself to manipulation. They, the sincere poets, not the corrupted politicians, were at the origin of it all when back in the 1970s they started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism, not only in Serbia, but also in other ex-Yugoslav republics. Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetic-military complex, personified by the twin figures of Radovan Karadžić the poet and Ratko Mladić the general. I think that this link is crucial. In his Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel mentions the silent weaving, Weben, of the spirit. The underground work of changing ideological coordinates, mostly invisible to the public eye, and then things suddenly explode, everyone is taken by surprise. I think this is what was going on in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 80s, so that when violence exploded in the late 80s, it was already too late. The old ideological consensus was thoroughly putrid and collapsed in itself. And to avoid the illusion that the poetic-military complex is a Balkan specialty, one should mention at least Hassan Ngeze, the Karadžić of Rwanda, who in his journal Kangura was systematically spreading anti-Tutsi hatred and calling for their genocide. And back to Yugoslavia, other ex-Yugoslav nations and Serbia itself had poets and writers recognized as great and authentic who were also fully engaged in nationalist projects and so on and so on. The story goes on endlessly. And again you see what's my point. My point is we have here poetry, to put it in very simple terms, which is—it's too easy to say this is not authentic poetry. It can be a quite serious big poetry, but nonetheless it is, it can serve directly as an ideological tool of very brutal terror, ethnic cleansing and so on and so on. And I think that it's way too easy to try to solve the problem by these simple limits. First you try to claim this is not really a great poet. Then you try to claim, "okay he's a great poet but he was brutally manipulated" and so on and so on. It's more complex than that. The predominance of religiously or ethnically justified violence can be accounted for by the very fact that we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as a ground of mass violence, since our hegemonic ideology calls us to enjoy life and to realize ourselves, it is difficult for the majority of people to overcome their repulsion at torturing and killing another human being. The majority of people are nonetheless spontaneously moral. Killing another human being is deeply traumatic for most of us, I hope so. So in order to make people do it, a larger sacred cause is needed which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. Of course there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be anesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to the other's suffering. For this, a sacred cause is needed. More than a century ago in his Karamazov Brothers, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism. You know the famous quote: "If God doesn't exist then everything is permitted." The lesson of today's so-called terrorism is on the contrary that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, because a direct link to God justifies our violation of any merely human considerations. The godless Stalinist communists were the ultimate proof of it. Everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, of the historical necessity of progress towards communism. Religious ideologists usually claim that true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people do some good things. But I think that from today's experience, one should rather stick to Steve Weinberg, the theoretical physicist, who claimed that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. You need religion for that. One should only supplement Weinberg with not only religion but also poetry. And the greater poetry is, the better it does this job. I want now to elaborate briefly another example which happened a couple of years, years ago in Bosnia. Back in June Carlos Westendorp, the head of the United Nations administration of Bosnia, outlawed, prohibited the use of the great Montenegro epic poem, The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac) in Bosnian schools, claiming that this poem may offend the national feelings of the Muslim and that its author, the religious secular head in the early 19th century of Montenegro, Petar Petrović Njegoš, was an ideologist of ethnic cleansing. Now this was a shock for Serbs because one should recall that we are dealing here with not only what is considered the greatest literary work of the entire Serb literature but with the text which has a mythic status and is considered the founding text of the Serb national identity. Prohibiting this text is something like prohibiting Homer or Sophocles in Greek schools, or Shakespeare in English schools, or Dante in Italian schools. Many critics dismissed this measure as political correctness brought to extreme, as not only a ridiculously anachronistic reading back into history of our today's attitudes but also as a cultural imperialist imposition of specific liberal sensibilities onto other cultures. So what makes this epic poem, The Mountain Wreath, such a dangerous text? The poem, written by again the Montenegrin prince-bishop Petar Petrović Njegoš and first published in Vienna in is vaguely based on a historical event in Montenegro that took place towards the end of the 17th century, known as the extermination of the Muslim converts—the term is poturice in Serb language—when Montenegrins decided to simply kill all their compatriots—men, women and children—who had agreed to being converted to Islam. The central figure of the poem is Prince Danilo who at that time ruled over the multitude of Montenegro tribes. At a gathering of tribal chiefs which opens the poem, Danilo's warriors suggest celebrating Pentecost by cleansing, literally čistiti (the verb used to clean), cleansing their land of non-Christians. Now it is clear to everyone that they are dealing with a conflict among brothers of the same blood. In old tribal Montenegro, they had a ceremony to reconcile a blood feud called kuma. When the Muslim suggests a kuma reconciliation between them and between Christian and Muslim Montenegrins, Danilo's men object that the kuma ceremony requires baptism. In a very modern way, the Muslim Montenegrins, whose representatives also attend the gathering, offer an ecumenic analogy, suggesting that the Muslim hair-cutting ceremony is a parallel in their tradition to baptism. Their main argument is a plea for religious tolerance. Why could different religious orientations not coexist within the same ethnic group? A quote from the poem, official English translation: "Small enough is our land, yet two faiths, two beliefs there still may be as in one bowl soups may agree, let us still as brothers live." End of quote. To this multiculturalist plea, dismissed by Bishop Danilo as a satanic temptation, his men respond with a stream of scatological insults. They insist slaughter is the only way. Danilo then orders the total destruction of the Muslim Montenegrins. The line from the poem: "Our land is foul, it reeks of this false religion." So in the so-called Christmas Eve massacre, all Muslim Montenegrins were effectively killed—children, wives, women, everyone. The Mountain Wreath ends with the triumphant extermination of all Muslim Montenegrins as a formal initiation of Serb nationhood. The shedding of Muslim blood is presented in itself as an act of baptism. I quote the final lines—almost towards the end of the poem: "No single seeing eye, no tongue of Turk escaped to tell his tale another day. We put them all unto the sword, all those who would not be baptized. But who paid homage to the holy child were all baptized with sign of Christian cross. And as brother each was hailed and greeted. We put to fire the Turkish houses that there might be no stick nor trace of these true servants of the devil." End of quote. This then is the case for the prosecution. We are talking about Bosnia in years ago. In the present situation in ex-Yugoslavia, the basic message of the poem cannot but appear as providing ideological legitimization for ethnic cleansing, for the cleansing of the Slavic Muslims in Bosnia, celebrating what can be considered the first paradigmatic case of such cleansing. How can one forget that Karadžić and his companions also perceived themselves as uncorrupted mountain people laying the seeds on the corrupted valley of Sarajevo? That this was, you know, when Sarajevo was in the early 90s under siege, this was all the time evoked, this poem in Serbia, this idea of "we are the honest mountain people, we are laying siege to the corrupted valley, to the corrupted city." And effectively already before The Mountain Wreath, this poem was regularly used by the Serb nationalists in this way, as a text which also tells the Serbs how to act today. Now probably your obvious reproach will be that this line of argumentation is ridiculously anachronistic. That I project into the past modern attitudes and that if one reasons in this way, one should no less condemn endless classical works, starting with Homer's Iliad, which also displays tribal ethics. But the problem is that there were different attitudes in that time. You know what I mean, when for example they sacrifice, they torture in Iliad, you can say this was the predominant ethics. Here things are complicated. The poem was written in and Njegoš knew his contemporary romantic and enlightenment literature and ideology. And as I already showed to you, these more tolerant attitudes are represented within the poem itself, in which the Muslim Montenegrins plea for religious tolerance. Furthermore, the claim that Turkish Empire was multiculturaly tolerant is not today's orientalist fantasy. In my book Parallax View, I quote multiple passages of how today we perceive Muslims as intolerant and so on, exclusive, but do you know that till mid-19th century Turkey—what shocked Western travelers when they visited Turkey was the extent of tolerance there. For example, some French guy who visited in the 18th century Constantinople, Istanbul, reports on how, "this is horrible, you see there on the street a Jewish priest talking with a Muslim clerk joined by a Catholic" and so on. And he said, "this is Mohammedan degeneration. They don't have the sense of unity" and so on and so on. So it's nice how at that point precisely they were tolerant ahead of time. Ahead of time in a way. And so there are numerous wonderful stories here. For example, there was some small Christian sect, they had a monastery in France in Napoleonic times. Napoleon threw them out, they found refuge somewhere close to here in Bavaria, in Southern Germany, closer in Bavaria, more to the east from here. Then in I think, they were even thrown out from Germany. This was some Christian sect, they just wanted a small monastery to live in peace there. And then they applied to all European states who can give them just a small piece of land. All Europe. You know where they got it? In Turkish Empire, in today's Bosnia near Banja Luka. So they were at this level more tolerant. I claim that what makes this poem so genuinely dangerous is that Njegoš, its author, knew already of modern universalism. So his racism was no longer the particular pre-modern racism, "my tribe, my limited community against your limited community." He does something much more dangerous: he identifies his side with universal humanity. He claims "we Montenegrin Serbs are the voice of European freedom and reason. We are human as such. They—they are inhuman." They, you know, it's already this universalist enlightenment racism. For example, when a Muslim nobleman from Shkodër, who was himself ethnically Montenegrin, wrote to Njegoš—this is a real letter—asking him for better relations, "why cannot we treat each other humanely?" and so on. This is the answer of Njegoš in a letter: "Firstly, what you say is to wash up our hearts and then make nice way and harmony on our borders. My heart is always clean and washed for humans, but with inhuman people a man is forced to behave inhumanly, otherwise he could not even if he would like," and so on and so on. So his idea is clear. It's not simple tribal opposition. It's "we are human, you are not." So again, according to the standard view of The Mountain Wreath, its main plot—the extermination of the converts—illuminates the poem's basic theme: the struggle for freedom, justice and dignity. And I remember from my youth, years ago—this was still Yugoslavia in the late 60s—and I was—we were taught whole passages of this poem claiming, "you see, this is the greatest poem about struggle for freedom" and so on and so on. And now I must confess retroactively nobody even noticed that what really happens in this poem is not a struggle for freedom. It's a purely religious problem. In the Montenegro nation, one third were converted into Islam, but again they remained culturally, in language and so on, they remained Slavic, they remained Montenegrins. And their offer was, "why cannot we live side by side?" And we are not talking about some primitive times. We are talking again about 18th and 19th century. And then the reply was, "no, kill them all" and so on and so on. So I claim that while fighting to correct a local flaw in their society—the presence of Muslim converts—the heroes in the poem fight for ideals which concern all mankind. Njegoš, that's the horror of this poem, all its rhetoric is not the rhetoric of primitive tribal identity. It's the rhetoric of—there are even some references to Rousseau if you want. It's a rhetoric of universal freedom. And I think it is precisely this universal character of the Montenegrin struggle, the fact that they stand for universal freedom, justice and dignity, which excludes their opponents from the universal space. So now you will say where do I stand here? I claim that I don't have a solution here. But I claim that one should absolutely admit this deadlock. The deadlock is this undoubtedly is—to avoid any misunderstanding—I'm talking my god about Serb or even Southern Slavic Shakespeare. This guy is an absolutely—he is more than your Goethe, how to put it. Okay, I mean comparatively. He's the absolute, you know what I mean, he's like Homer, Dante, figure. Absolute founding figure. If you read at it, if you read the poem through today's experience, it's of course terrible. And my solution here is that we have to be honest enough to admit both. It is an authentic poem and nonetheless real violence as a consequence is inscribed into it. We cannot play the game, "oh this was only later." Incidentally, we can even in this case, that's why I like this case, because it's clinically pure in the sense that we can test it. For example, Njegoš was still doing this. There were still down there in the area of Montenegro which was still held by Turks, there were still some, in the middle of 19th century, some Montenegro groups which were Muslim. And Njegoš often attacked them, a village, killed them all, and the typical move was then to quickly send an emissary to Russia asking for protection, so that the Russia put pressure on Turkey that the Turkey didn't take too much revenge and so on and so on. So my reference here would be Walter Benjamin, who claimed that works of art—you know this classical line from Benjamin—how works of art often function like shots taken on a film for which the developer has not yet been discovered. So that you know, even when the poet wrote it, you cannot read it properly. You can read a poem properly only from later experience. I think it's a case here. I think that, you know, this Benjaminian idea of text as an open, you have to read it retroactively to get the right meaning. I think we should do things like, we should exactly do it like this here. And again, my difficult pessimistic conclusion is that the poetic truth or authentic experience—poetic, mystical, religious—is no guarantee against horrors. In the sense that, that if you are sincere, in the sense of having a nice authentic experience, this somehow protects you from doing horrors in real life. I love here the extreme examples if I may improvise a little bit. For example, did you read a wonderful book by Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence (L'éminence grise)? It's the biography of Le Père Joseph, Father Joseph, who was, to cut a long story short, the secret advisor, the grey eminence of Cardinal Richelieu of France in the time of Years War, I think Why such a fascination of this person? On the one hand he was the worst Realpolitiker you can imagine. If, you know, we can play this nice although of course imaginary game of trying to locate the moment when things went wrong in Europe so that Hitler was possible. This guy is the ultimate reason if you play this game. Why? When there was the Years War, you know, about Catholicism, Protestantism, this guy had a nice idea, nice in a terrible cynical sense. He immediately got it that this war is really not about religion but about who will be the strongest state in Europe dominating Europe, France or Germany. So for him the true point of the war was prevent German unification, keep Germany weak. So what he did in a total cynicism was to make a pact with Catholic France, made a pact with Protestant Sweden against Germany. And basically they won, in the sense at least of preventing German unification and then the story goes on. You know that because of this German Verspätung, First World War and then Second World War. So one can, to extrapolate a little bit, one can say Père Joseph is at the origin of this mistake of European history, German Verspätung which rendered Hitler possible. And he was, he ordered torturing, he personally tortured, poisoned, he was a true ugly politician. But what is the other side of the story? Read the book—maybe it's even translated, probably years ago Huxley was a hit, at least when I was young. This same person in the evenings, metaphorically, not always the evenings, after he finished his dirty work day, wrote the most authentic mystical meditations. And it's so difficult to acknowledge they are the real thing. They are, if I may put it in a little bit cynical way, at the level of, you know, the biggest hits of Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, they are that level. They are the top. No way to escape it. It's absolutely genuine. So this is what bothers Huxley. How is this possible? Huxley tries to avoid the problem so that he takes refuge in Far East, in Buddhism and so on. His solution is there is something wrong in Christianity itself, this focus on Christ's suffering and so on, which opens up the way for this cynical militaristic manipulation, exploitation, so we need Eastern wisdom. But I think that here a counterexample can be listed. My favorite book—I refer to it all the time again, I don't think it's translated into German, you should read it in English—Brian Victoria, stupid name, but he is a Zen Buddhist priest. The title of the book is Zen at War. What he does is something wonderful. He did—this book is no big theory, just a simple exploration of what was the attitude of Zen Buddhist community in Japan. There were I think around millions of them in the late 30s and early 40s when Japan in the 30s, you know, attacked, occupied half of China and then World War II. And he—what he discovered is horrible. Where is this holistic, peaceful, organic, whatever attitude? Nowhere. Except for literally among millions, maximum less than dissidents, small voices, the entire Zen Buddhist hierarchy not only totally supported Japanese militarism, but now comes the nice point, actively provided legitimization for it. First in this typical way which we find also in Europe, you know that sometimes to prevent the greater crime you must do a smaller crime. So although Buddhism prevents you from taking life, if by taking a single life you save more, you can do it. Along these lines, I don't know if some of you read it when you were young at least this big popularizer of Zen Buddhism, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Haha, read his writing from the 30s and 40s, they are much more interesting than this boring hippie stuff from the 60s. There he has propos of Chinese invasion—à propos of Japanese invasion of China—a wonderful text where he explains how Chinese are like, are like evil children who don't see that the Japanese sword which is killing them is really a sword of love and so on. But that's not the true horror. The true horror is then how he sees a certain problem, which was also the problem of Heinrich Himmler. Himmler was aware that Gestapo and SS people doing the Holocaust had to do horrible things ethically, you know, kill not only soldiers but helpless children, blah blah. And Himmler interestingly enough does approach in some of his letters, I think, the problem of how can we do this horrible thing without becoming bestialic demonic beings ourselves. You know what was Himmler's answer? Bhagavad Gita. He always had in his pocket a specially bound leather version. You know in Bhagavad Gita there is that famous line where Arjuna I think, the warrior king, in—when just before the battle breaks down, like "my god, thousands will die, what can I do?" And then Krishna—I don't know which god appears to him—and tells him basically, "reality is not true reality, it's just an appearance, reality has no substantial value, so go on in the battle, kill, no problem" and so on and so on. The idea is in Bhagavad Gita you find this notion of acting at a distance, in the sense of acting without being engaged in it. And that's what Suzuki proposes there. He has a wonderful in the horrible sense metaphor, he really gives advice to soldiers how to kill without feeling bad. And his solution is go through Buddhist, Zen Buddhist satori, this experience of void, and you will be able to do it. You know he has—I will almost verbatim quote it now—he has a wonderful passage where he says: if you are still part engaged in this false empirical reality, then you think there is a—sorry I don't mean you personally but there has to be someone—here I have a sword, I now push my sword into your chest. "Ah," says Suzuki, "no, this is wrong, you are still caught in the false appearance of Maya, where I misperceive myself as an agent" and so on. Suzuki said the right attitude is the following one: I am no one, I'm just a pure impersonal gaze observing how my sword is dancing in the air, and as part of the same dance your body somehow falls on my—nice explanation. No, so and literally he then goes even a step further and says that since ordinary people don't have enough time, money to engage in this years of meditation, he says to ordinary people, absolute military discipline is the best way to reach Buddhist enlightenment. And he gives an example: when the officer tells you "shoot," and when you are ready to shoot without thinking, you overcome your false identity, your false self, which asks you—so now what's my point here? Ah, here I must be open now. My point is not here, "oh you see Zen Buddhists, dirty militarists" and so on. No, it's authentic deep—I wouldn't even say mystical, this is probably theoretically wrong, I mean to use this European terms for them, but let's call it neutrally spiritual. Deep spiritual experience, nonetheless it can justify ethnic—and incidentally I even admire Suzuki because at least after World War II, he wasn't ashamed to admit that he was doing that. His solution was a total technization. He liked to emphasize in his writing after World War II that Zen Buddhism is not an ethics, is not, is not thing to political—he claimed it's a pure technology of meditation. You can be politically, his words, capitalist, liberal, fascist, communist, I don't care, this is just a technology of meditation. So what I'm claiming is that this is so difficult to accept. And here, I don't have time to, I would have to go into also a little bit into psychoanalysis. Because in psychoanalytic terms, what this means is, and this would have been my critique of this Rortyan—although with Rorty it's sometimes a little bit more complex, I'm talking about Richard Rorty—theory of this discursive postmodernism, like "we are," I think this is the usual phrase, "we are stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves," that our identity is made of the narrative texture we compose for ourselves. And then of course from here you get this typical Rortyan liberal ethics, that there is no objective truth, each his, her, their story. So our basic right is the right to complain about our pain, to tell our side, our story. From here comes one of the most disgusting ethical mottos. It was used by some stupid this multicultural conference, I really hate them, where the motto of this conference was—it sounds so deep—was: "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear." It sounds so deep, you know, like, okay, this time, sorry, you, not you, you are already dead from—like, you know, I objectify you, you are my enemy, but if I allow you to tell your story, I can see you are also a person with your fears, dreams, I cannot any longer hate you. I think this is doubly false, worthless existentially. First to show you how false it is, do something very simple: replace the general form with a concrete one. Would you also say, Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his side of the story? And you should! This is why, in spite of all its problematic character and who has the time today to read pages, is it already translated in German? I'm not sure. That novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), Jonathan Littell. This is why it provoked such an unease, because it tells the story from the side of a mid-level bureaucrat Holocaust SS officer who simply presents his case in detail and so on and so on. That's so horrible. I mean, here, this is how I read also Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. I mean, you know, when you have an evil person who does horrible thing, it's not that if you look closely you will discover a monster. No, you will discover somebody who likes his children, maybe he's even ready to sacrifice himself for his friends and so on and so on. Incidentally, if you read that book which is totally worthless theoretically, I think, but was a bestseller, Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners—the only interesting thing I find in this book is the name of the author. This is a guy who claims that, you know, anti-Semitism is German collective identity and so on. And this guy's name is Hagen and Gold. Hagen, you know, is the figure in Wagner's ring who is looking for gold. [laughter] It's a wonderful joke. Okay, but what I want to say is that the only good part of that book is I think one of the middle chapter, documentary chapter, where he quotes all the home letters, and effectively you can see how the very people who were killing children, blah blah, beating Jews out of the ghettos in, in Eastern Europe, were ready to then in a battle to sacrifice for a friend and they cared about their children. I mean, I don't think there is any truth in how you from within experience yourself. The story you are telling yourself about yourself—this is what in psychoanalysis we call fantasy as a fundamental lie—is a fundamental lie. That's not the truth. The truth is what you try to cover with the story. The truth is as they say in X-Files, you know, "the truth is out there," or what was it? I mean, you know, the your inner self-experience is not—it's not true. And here I think poets, great poets, were always ready to provide the way you experience yourself and in this way to be used to legitimate violence and so on and so on. So if you allow me a little bit more because now comes the only interesting theoretical part, a little bit more general. So if we cannot simply oppose language and violence, if language, or poetry as language at its most creative, can harbor violence, how does this violence function? You know that in his Critique of Violence, Benjamin raises this question: is any non-violent resolution of conflict possible? Although later he develops so-called divine violence, in the beginning of his Zur Kritik der Gewalt, Benjamin claims that there is a sphere of human agreement which is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of understanding, language. This thesis of Benjamin belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the predominant idea of language and symbolic order is that of Versöhnung, reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful coexistence. It's not only Habermas but even early Lacan whose idea is this. The idea being that we have these imaginary violent dual conflicts and then language is as such a medium of reconciliation. The idea being that even if I am in language violent to you, shout at you, give orders, already at the most elementary level I must recognize you as a partner in dialogue. So from here it's only one step to what Habermas develops in detail, of how there is a certain ethic of mutual reconciliation inherent to language as such, so that when language is used for domination and violence it's an external because of power relations distortion of language. I—I am tempted to claim exactly the opposite. That there is a violence in language, a violence not only in this sense widely analyzed by sociolinguistic or by some theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence, of how by addressing you in a certain way I can reproduce the whole set of domination and so on all that, but in a more radical sense. Language is in a way found—found always at the foundation of a community. It's the very substantial medium in which within which we coexist. But as such language is a great divider. In what sense? In the sense that, how to put it, imagine you live on the same street with some people from other culture, an Algerian, a Turk, a Chinese or whatever. This is for me the absolute violence, that although you live physically in the same world, you live in different worlds. It's kind of, it's an absolute gap. And this is the violence of language, that it violently imposes a certain—what in very non-appropriate terms we would have called worldview. It's a certain vision of reality, horizon of understanding which is ultimately violently imposed and exclusive of others. Even when you are open to the other, you are automatically translating the other into your horizon and so on and so on. Heidegger of all people isolated very nicely this violent aspect of language, when he—and here Heidegger has something important to say I claim. When Heidegger refers to essence of language as the verbal form, das Wesen, essencing of language. What does he mean? He means that the language—he doesn't mean the essence of language, he means that the language west, essences, in the sense that it establishes relations of what is crucial, what is not crucial, and so on. A very simple example. For example, let's take a castrato voice. Till early modernity, castrato voice was considered the most beautiful. It was basically considered as the closest we can get to angel's voice before the fall, before sexual difference, before Eve intervened, of course. But a little bit later with modern—with French Revolution, Enlightenment, castrato voice was considered a disgusting abomination and so on. Or the classically ridiculously famous example of Swiss Alps which, you know, when Goethe was very young they were still considered a horror, no? Like this ugly part you pass over it just with curtains closed when going to beautiful Italy. As you probably know, years later they were considered this violent sublime and so on and so on. Why does this happen? Something changes in language. Language, as it were, establishes priority. This would have been the essencing of language which is violent, violent in the sense that it's not in continuity with reality. It twists, it throws out of balance reality. This is the violence of language of which Heidegger talks. But now I would like to—and this is again language as violently—as, as Heidegger puts it, the house of being. That is to say, founding a certain horizon of meaning. The world is disclosed, opened up to us through language as a certain horizon of meaning. And Heidegger is fully aware this is always an extremely violent act. And of course this is why in all political physical violence, there is always language. When an anti-Semite beats a Jew, when a skinhead beats a foreigner and so on, it's never just physical. You should ask why does he find the foreigner or the Jew disgusting? Because the horizon of meaning within which he dwells tells him this. There is no properly human violence without language, which is not grounded in language. But here I would like to supplement Heidegger with Jacques Lacan. Throughout his work, Lacan proposes variations on Heidegger's motive of language as the house of being. But Lacan adds something. For Lacan language is a torture house of being. Quote from Lacan: "In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language." And that's for Lacan the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. What we call symptoms, from conversion symptoms inscribed into the body up to total psychotic breakdowns, these are all so many traces of how there is—that's Lacan's idea—between living being and language there is an original gap. This is why also as we know in so-called primitive societies the entry into language or into symbolic community is always marked by some act of violence, initiatic, sacrifice or whatever. This for Lacan Heidegger ignores. This radical discord, disharmony between language and subject. And this, as I will not have time to develop it fully today, but this is the reason why Lacan sticks to the term subject. Because people often ask Lacan, Jacques Lacan who was a close reader of Heidegger, although they were not really friends, Heidegger thought Lacan was—that famous phrase, Heidegger's reaction to Lacan's Écrits was "here is ein—here is a psychiatrist who himself needs a psychiatrist" or something like that. But nonetheless, why did Lacan insist, why didn't he want to give up the term of subject? What was for Lacan missing in Heidegger's Dasein as his name for the essence of being human? For Lacan—Lacan was not a subjectivist in this active sense of—for Heidegger we are just passive beings, the 'da', the 'here' of being and where is the active creativity of human? No, it's rather this radical passivity, the trauma, the pain of being incorporated into language. The psychoanalytic term for this wound of language is of course symbolic castration. But now Lacan implicitly draws another conclusion from this. The conclusion is that not only language tortures us—again, in this sense that being integrated into language is always a traumatic experience—but language as such—I think this is the deepest insight, often it's ignored by Lacan—that language as such, in its substantial presence as the big other, our spiritual substance, is stupid. Is inherently stupid, conformist, stupid, whatever you want. And I quote here Elfriede Jelinek—I don't like too much, I'm too conservative, her crazy, but—she said something very nice. She wrote: "Language should be tortured to tell the truth." And I think this is poetry. Poetry is a form of torture. Just imagine at the most naive level what how much linguistic torture is involved in doing a poem? How much you must force, cut words, artificial. The idea is that language—the idea is that we should drop this mystique of "we must open our eyes to the wisdom message which is in language itself." Language itself is stupid. Language at its purest are what? Are proverbs. Proverbs are for me the stupidity at its purest. Proverbs are always totally conformist. Like, you know, for example let's say you are about to do something risky and you succeed. Then you have a proverb to legitimate it. I don't know what you have, in Slovene we have something like "only those who risk can profit" or like celebrating risk. Then let's say you do the same but you fail. Ah, no problem. You have the opposite proverb. I don't know what you have in Slovene, we have like "you cannot urinate against the wind" or something like that. You know, this conformist stupidity, this is the wisdom of language. Like for anything I have a proverb, for everything, whatever happens I have a proverb to justify it and so on. So this idea that, that you have to treat brutally language. Poets torture language. Poets break all the rules of natural flow. Poets do extreme violence to language. And I think the same goes for all arts. For example, for cinema. There is a big opposition in cinema theory between Eisenstein on the one side who liked cutting, montage and there Bazin, Tarkovsky, this continuous long shots and so on. Eisenstein, my god, he all the time uses the language of torture: cut, montage, artificial. He is literally creating Frankensteins. He is fascinated by how you can cut a fragment out and then recompose it artificially and so on. Now you will say but isn't this modern cinema with Rossellini, André Bazin up to Tarkovsky, where the idea is you should let the images speak, not intervene with montage? Isn't this the opposite where precisely they try to cancel this violence? No, I claim it's just a different violence. Look a little bit of Tarkovsky. It's just protracting if—if Eisenstein is a torturer at the level of "I cut your fingers" and so on, how do you call that apparatus? I think it's called—I knew the English name—that torture to extend you, you know. The rack. Yeah, yeah, Tarkovsky is this kind of torture. So for me when you have a debate between Eisenstein and Tarkovsky, it's two torturers talking, no? Eisenstein saying "I cut him to pieces," "no no," said Tarkovsky, "it's better to stretch him a little bit" and so on. But why this? Again because language as such is at its fundamental—okay, now it's time to finish. So I don't have time to go into the really interesting part: how precisely because of missing this dimension of violence, it can be nicely shown how Heidegger in his otherwise interesting reading of Antigone misses the dimension which is so blatantly, openly present in Sophocles, the dimension of between the two deaths. You know this idea of Antigone is alive but already symbolically dead and so on. This space between the two deaths. And I think we can even link this to the topic of Agamben, Homo Sacer and so on. Homo Sacer is precisely human being, symbolically dead human being. You are alive but excluded from community, reduced to bare life. And this is what happened in concentration camps and so on. And I'm so sad I don't have time more to go into it because it can also be shown, one of the wonderful criticisms of Heidegger that I read from Lacanian standpoint is a French reader of Lacan, unfortunately he died, wonderful book he wrote, "Ce que Lacan dit de l'être" (What Lacan says about being), François Balmès, who claimed in an apparently very naive clinical way that Heidegger's existential analytic of Dasein, of Sein zum Tode (Being towards death), is appropriate for neurotics but cannot cover psychotics. It sounds so stupidly naive, but I think it works. Why? Because it's very interesting to read—if you read those letters between Heidegger and, how is he called, Medard Boss, the Swiss psychiatrist whom Heidegger was visiting. Not Bernd Moss, something like that. Okay, it will come to me. It—you can see how when this psychiatrist presents to Heidegger cases, Heidegger all he can do is put variations on which remain within the horizon of this Sein zum Tode or this existential engagement, you know, the scheme of Sorge and so on. What Heidegger cannot—to put it in the terms of Sein und Zeit, a psychotic is a subject who is no longer engaged in Sein zum Tode or in this structure of Sorge how, you know, through the past, future project you approach the present out of Entwurf, the past, this structure is suspended in a psychotic. Psychotic is literally disengaged, no tension towards death, he in a way already is a living dead. Heidegger cannot think that. It's a very nice intelligent critique. It can even be further developed, I've written about it, about how a French Hegelian philosopher, pupil of Derrida, Catherine Malabou, wrote a wonderful book called Les Nouveaux Blessés (The New Wounded)—I mistranslated it, the new wounded—where she claims that the so-called post-traumatic subjects are the new form of pathology which will be the pathology of the 21st century. And these are exactly the living dead. Their first historical example—not empirical, but that passed into wide historical memory—are again what Agamben talks about, so-called Muselmänner from concentration camps, living dead. They are still alive, can react, talk, but they are as it were deprived of all symbolic substance, non-engaged, totally passive, the living dead. So this is for Lacan—he has a very radical reading here—this is for Lacan the truly radical dimension of Cartesian cogito which escapes Heidegger. But now let me go just on to conclude. So now to conclude, I would like to return to Benjamin. You know how Benjamin distinguishes between mythic violence, which is staatsbildend, constitutes a state, this obscene violence which—and then the divine violence which is staatszerstörend, emancipatory, revolutionary and so on. I claim that maybe, and that would be my final thesis, we should apply the same to language. The violence of which Heidegger speaks when he speaks about this violent imposition of mythos as the founding power would be sprachbildende Gewalt. The violence of imposing a certain comprehension of being, certain disclosure of world and so on and so on. But then we should—and this for me is maybe missing in Heidegger—we should supplement this violence with sprachzerstörend, with what would be the language equivalent of divine violence in politics. This violence on language which, where you torture language to make it tell the truth. And I think because this torture is the only way to counteract the potential for real violence even in great poetry. I think there are poets who cannot be used the way that great Montenegro poet and many others can be used. These are those poets—maybe, I'm not so sure, I am here with Heidegger from Hölderlin on who, for example—and it's typical how limited is here—my good friend Erik Santner wrote an early book on Hölderlin where he shows how although Heidegger often refers to late Hölderlin with this paratactic structure more, he, he really, how to put it, although Hölderlin is Heidegger's divine the poet, he misses this language-torturing dimension in late Hölderlin. And this is how we should counteract, so counteract the potential of real violence even, counteract the danger in language, great poetry to ground violence. So either we can rely on mythic violence, we end up in torturing, or we torture language and in this way stop real torture. Thank you very much.
Vielen Dank, es ist eine große Ehre für mich, hier zu sein. Leider ist nur meine deutsche Sprache nicht gut genug, um einen Vortrag zu halten. Ich könnte das einfach lesen auf Deutsch, aber das ist dann ein bisschen idiotisch. So leider muss ich auf die Sprache des Imperialismus wechseln oder was. So thanks, Bernd, for your kind introduction. I just cannot restrain from making one or two comments that research project in Essen, Antinomies of Postmodern Reason—I mean, you know why I chose this title. I wanted a pseudo-concrete title which appears to mean something but basically means you do whatever you want. What are antinomies of postmodern reason? It can be Icelandic poetry, it can be agriculture in South Africa, like, that was the idea. And also when you mentioned this Children of Men, here I was faithful to my—okay, Hegelian, it's not as simple as that—but the saying attributed to Hegel: if facts don't fit theory, so much worse for the facts. I gave to Alfonso Cuarón an interview, but I must proudly state before I saw the film. So everything you hear me saying there, I just in a proper Hegelian way deduced it without seeing the film. And I was sincerely—I was sincerely sad and felt deceived upon seeing the film. It didn't fit my theory. Okay. Okay, now a little bit more seriously because I really want to approach the topic, which is not just this ridiculous story about Karadžić—this will be the first half, poetry and ethnic violence—but then I want to go to a more fundamental question which was elaborated in different ways by many philosophers only in the 20th century, from Walter Benjamin to Martin Heidegger, Sprache und Gewalt, language and violence. So I would like to begin as it is announced in the poster with Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader responsible for ethnic cleansing in the post-Yugoslav war, who, as we all know, was finally arrested. Now I think is the time to step back, to take into view also the other side of Karadžić's personality. This psychiatrist by profession was not only a ruthless political and military leader, but also a poet. And you know, now that he ended a certain political career, it's very fashionable to make fun of him, like what kind of ridiculous poet and so on. But since in the 80s I lived in the same state as him, I did a little bit of inquiry and discovered that quite many poets who now denounce him as agent of ethnic cleansing, murderer, ridiculous poet, were throughout the 80s quite respectfully translating him into Slovene, taking him very seriously as the new voice of Bosnian poetry and so on and so on. So I also think that Karadžić's poetry should not be simply dismissed as ridiculous. It deserves a close reading since I think it does provide a key to how ethnic cleansing functions. Here are, for example, the first two lines of an untitled poem by Karadžić, identified by a dedication for Izlet Sarajlić, a friend of him. I quote Karadžić: "Convert to my new faith, O crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun for as long as you want. And this godhead forbids you nothing. Oh obey my call, brothers, people, crowd." End of quote. The suspension of moral prohibitions that we encounter here—remember, "People, nothing is forbidden in my faith"—is the crucial feature I claim of today's so-called postmodern nationalism. This suspension, this nothing is forbidden, you can do what you want, this is what in psychoanalysis is called Über-Ich, Superego. Superego is not an agent of prohibition. Superego is you must. The best formula of Über-Ich, Superego for me is the turning around of Kant's "Du sollst, denn du kannst." It's you can because you must. Here the cliché according to which passionate ethnic identification restores a firm set of values and beliefs in the confusing insecurity of a modern secular global society—this usual cliché, you know, we lack basic coordinates, so we sometimes fall victim to the fundamentalist temptation, take refuge in old stable values and so on. I think on the contrary, we should turn around this. Nationalist fundamentalism rather serves as the operator of a secret, barely concealed "you may." It's today's—namely, this idea came to me when I once in the 90s, when Milošević was still in power, I risked a brief visit to Belgrade. And by a total chance, I found myself in a restaurant with some very hardline nationalists, probably engaged in ethnic cleansing and so on. And it shocked me how they—they didn't know who I am—how they explained to me their engagement. It was exactly the opposite of this cliché "we are afraid of modernity where there are no set rules," where as Ulrich Beck would have put it, everything is reflected, chosen, you have to opt for it. No, they perceived our apparently hedonistic and permissive postmodern reflexive society as excessively saturated by rules and regulations. Their problem was not there is too much freedom, I don't find my way. Their problem is everything is overregulated. As they told me, "this political correctness, I cannot rape a woman, I cannot steal, I cannot smoke when I want, I cannot eat what I want, no fat, no this, no sugar" and so on. So for them, the reference to some passionate ethnic identification, far from further restraining you, rather functioned as a liberating "you may." You may violate not the Decalogue but the stiff regulations of the peaceful coexistence in a liberal tolerant society. You may drink and eat whatever you want, engage in patriarchal customs prohibited by liberal political correctness. Ultimately, you may hate, fight, kill, rape. Without the full recognition of this perverse pseudo-liberating effect of today's nationalism, without the full recognition of how the obscene permissive superego supplements the explicit texture of social symbolic law, we condemn ourselves to the failure of grasping the true dynamics of so-called ethnic nationalism. Here is how Aleksandar Tijanić, a Serb journalist, described way back in the 90s the strange kind of symbiosis between Milošević and the Serbs. A wonderful quote. I start the quote: "Milošević generally suited the Serbs. In the time of his rule, Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. Milošević allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton, or anyone else of the world dignitaries." And incidentally, this was literally true. When NATO bombed Serbia, I remember on cable TV watching Serb news, and they reported a demonstration where somebody—and this was filmed by the camera—had a big poster which says, you remember this was just after the Monica Lewinsky affair where Clinton confessed that Monica Lewinsky, as they put it, gave him a blowjob, fellatio. And the big poster said, "Bill, why are you bombing us? Did Monica suck out your brain also?" or something like that. This was state TV and so on. I go on: "Milošević gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars. Milošević changed the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing, but really nothing, of what you do can be punishable." End of quote. And again, I think this is fundamental. If you read an excellent text by Adorno from late 30s on the psychological structure of fascist propaganda, Adorno already made this point in an implicit critique of Wilhelm Reich who followed this line, which I think—I agree here with Adorno—is totally wrong, the line of: the Nazi authoritarian personality is a consequence or follows to the end the line of patriarchal family. Adorno emphasized that the so-called totalitarian personality is absolutely not a personality subordinated to patriarchal authority. With so-called totalitarian leader, Hitler, for example, we get a leader who is not a father figure. It's a leader—Adorno already got this—who, how to put it, plays on something which in today's Sprach-theorie we would have called pragmatic contradiction. The very way he between the lines addresses you, the very way he calls you to do your duty, to do, subverts the explicit message. The explicit message is what? Something like, for example, of Hitler in the early 30s: enough of Weimar corruption, decadence, time to sacrifice, to think about your country, sacrifice, work, and so on and so on. But the message between the lines is, "obey and we will have some fun, kill some Jews" and so on and so on. Without this, how to put it, obscene superego bribery, it doesn't function. And I think this is how we should learn to read even today's ideology, even today. Today it changed a little bit. Often today it's the apparently the opposite. Like, I wonder if you saw a film which I really like. It's a little bit primitive as a film, but it's—how is he called, the director who did Halloween? John Carpenter. I think in early 90s he did a movie, it's a little bit difficult to get but you can get it, called They Live. It's one of these science fiction paranoia films, but it has a beautifully naive, vulgar naive materialization of ideology. It's a story of an—it's Hollywood extreme left. No wonder it was practically prohibited, not even shown. It's the story of John Nada—Nada is in Spanish nothing, so proletarian position—an unemployed Los Angeles worker who finds in an abandoned church strange sunglasses, a couple of strange sunglasses. He goes on the street, puts the sunglasses on, and what happens is that they are kind of Ideologie-kritische Brille. He sees the true message. It's so wonderfully naively done. Like he walks on the street and sees a big poster all in colors, "Go to Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime, enjoy." He puts glasses on and sees just a gray surface of the poster with words: "Don't think, obey, family, buy, money is your god." Like, as if you see there the direct ideological message in a way. And I think the first thing we should ask today even with the most innocent publicity is what we were—what we would have seen if we were to put on this kind of glasses. For example, let me go to the end, which for me is a very disgusting end. This is I claim today's ideology at its worst. This calls for charity. You know what's the typical image? Like, you have in newspapers or on TV a short spot, usually first they sentimentally manipulate you, some African child starving with cut lips, I don't know, totally deformed. And then comes the message: "Are you aware that for the price of two cappuccinos or whatever, you can save this guy's life?" No? It sounds nice, but again, you put the glasses on. What do you see? What is the real message of this? I think something like: "People are starving in Africa. You know and I know that we don't give a damn about it. But contribute a little bit to our foundation and you will not only, you not only without sacrificing anything you can go on enjoying your nice life, you can even feel good, like you see I'm doing something" and so on and so on. And we can be here, we should be here open to the end in this critical analysis. For example, let me take a very touchy subject: ecology. Do you really—why are you buying—or if you are, I'm not—why are you buying organic food, organic fruit? Do you really believe that those half-rotten apples are any better than the nice-looking one, chemical—I claim I always have this paranoiac suspicion that it's all the same apples. First they take out the beautiful ones and sell them as what they are, genetically—then what remains, the rotten ones they sell them for the double price as organic. But what is my point? Maybe it's even true. My point is, look deep into your heart. I don't think you really believe that these apples are better. You are buying them because it makes you feel good. "Look, even when I buy apples, I do something for Mother Earth. I participate, I do my small contribution to saving nature" and so on and so on. You are not really buying health food. You are buying a pleasurable narcissistic satisfaction experience. And if you don't believe me, look at how publicity functions today. I think one can find a certain trend which is what? Abstractly we can say we have three types of publicity generally. First, the classical publicity where you refer to a certain real property of the object. Like, let's say I want, I'm selling a Land Rover car. I will say it spends only so much gasoline, it really can climb mountains, you can go into the lake, whatever. Like real properties, even if they are a lie, but they pretend to be real properties of the object. Then the next stage is this Thorstein Veblen stage of status symbol and so on. This type of publicity would refer to what social status does it give to you to have a Land Rover. But I think today more and more, if you read it carefully, especially in the United States, I'm surprised how wide it is, it's more and more something else. It's neither real property nor social status but the meaning of life. What does it mean to you the way the life experience you get by it? I claim today's publicity for Land Rover wouldn't, would mention predominantly neither the supposed qualities of the car nor status symbol but something like: "Do you feel alienated in a big Western city, in this concrete jungle and so on, just anonymous? Drive Land Rover and you will feel an authentic man again," and you know, it would focus on the way you experience it. And it is as if the commodity today tries to at the same time not only to consume but to, to give a kind of a meaning of life justification. The clearest example, which is why I have some doubts, I'm not sure if terrorism always works, but at one point I would engage in it. Do you already have here Starbucks coffee shops? There I—okay so that I cannot be prosecuted—if I were to be a terrorist, I would have bombed them. Why? Because I don't know how it is here in Germany but in United States they, they are, they, they developed to the end this perfection of referring to your experience. For example, as they—for example, recently I found in American Starbucks stores kind of a paragraph, which is kind of programmatic paragraph, displayed everywhere where they claim, "when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don't only buy a cappuccino. You buy," they say, "a certain ethic of life." You buy first the community experience. They openly play on this sociological cliché that today no longer sense of community blah blah, Starbucks try to reconstitute it. Then they emphasize how they only buy organic coffee, how they take care that also they build a water supply, they build hospitals for the Guatemala—so the idea is, you know, with a simple cup of cappuccino, it's no longer that stupid, you remember publicity from years ago, "Mmm, what taste, what coffee is this?" No. The point is when you drink a coffee, you are solidary with Mother Earth, you help the poor there. It's the meaning of life that they are selling basically. It's a new sense of solidarity and so on and so on. I'm sorry we don't have the time more to go into this because my thesis is this is what basically happens. That's why I was already when I was young skeptical about '68. This is how '68 was, by '68 I mean all the student upheaval of the 60s was triumphantly reintegrated. Capitalism reinvented itself by basically telling—taking over all this motto of against alienation, against bureaucratic anonymity, authentic experience and so on and so on. And okay, but let's go back to my main line. So Superego. What underlies all this is Superego. Superego as the injunction, this you may. You can, you should because you can. And I claim that this is what we find of course different versions of this in our so-called consumerist societies where let's talk frankly, the basic reference, the basic injunction that we get from society, what society expects from us, I claim in this sense only we live effectively in a post-ideological society. It's no longer some big ideological cause. We are no longer interpelled as, I don't know, sacrifice yourself for democracy, for communism, for Christianity, whatever. I mean, I don't know how you experience your life, but mostly I think if you ask a person "what do you think society wants from you?", the answer would have been quite a correct one: "I feel a pressure to make something out of myself, to live an authentic life," a kind of a slightly spiritualized Dalai Lama type hedonism. Which is why Dalai Lama is such a hit in the West. That's I think the ruling ideology today. And what I'm claiming is that this attitude infested even its opposite, so-called fundamentalism, which already has this pseudo-liberating dimension to it. For me again, the model of, for example, this kind of postmodern false liberation would have been what? I did some study, it interested me how it functioned, Ku Klux Klan in a small Southern city of United States of America in 1920s, let us say, when Ku Klux Klan was still very strong. How did it function? Again we should play this They Live game. The official message was Western civilization, protect Western civilization, Christian life and so on and so on. But the real message was, "okay you protect Western civilization and Christian values by joining Ku Klux Klan, and on the top of it join us and we can have a nice, a nice rape, lynch some blacks, rape some black girls" and so on and so on. This was the, let's call it libidinal bribery, the surplus, the surplus enjoyment ideology is offering you. Without this—which is why, maybe some of you know, if you are also here some of you literary students, the famous theory—it was famous when I was young, I no longer know what is famous today—Alexander Bakhtin (he developed it propos François Rabelais) this notion of carnival. This magical moment of carnivalesque suspension of, you know, when beggar is king, king is beggar, all the social rules are suspended momentarily. Of course I was always a Stalinist leftist although even in—I totally oppose the notion that there is anything subversive in the authentic sense of emancipatory liberation in this notion of carnivalesque suspension. And I was very glad when I learned from a person whom I know, he's half-friend of mine although I don't agree with him theoretically, I made it clear to him when my friends and I take power he goes to Gulag, Boris Groys, no? He told me a nice thing which totally confirms my reading: that they now discovered some manuscript fragments from the time mid-30s when Bakhtin was—he was exiled in some smaller city, I think Kazan or where, as a librarian, that's how he survived the Stalinist purges—and it's clear from these manuscripts that what was his model for carnival when he was writing the book on Rabelais? The Stalinist purges. That's the true carnival. Today you are member of Politburo, tomorrow you are an English spy and so on, you know, like it's this total carnivalesque suspension of hierarchies. That's absolutely crucial dimension of Stalinist purges. So even there we find clearly a carnivalesque suspension. So to go on, what I would say is that here poetry enters. In what sense? Plato's reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. But I think judging from my post-Yugoslav experience, this is a rather sensible advice. Because ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets' dangerous dreams. True, Milošević manipulated nationalist passions. But it was the poets who delivered him the stuff which lent itself to manipulation. They, the sincere poets, not the corrupted politicians, were at the origin of it all when back in the 1970s they started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism, not only in Serbia, but also in other ex-Yugoslav republics. Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetic-military complex, personified by the twin figures of Radovan Karadžić the poet and Ratko Mladić the general. I think that this link is crucial. In his Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel mentions the silent weaving, Weben, of the spirit. The underground work of changing ideological coordinates, mostly invisible to the public eye, and then things suddenly explode, everyone is taken by surprise. I think this is what was going on in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 80s, so that when violence exploded in the late 80s, it was already too late. The old ideological consensus was thoroughly putrid and collapsed in itself. And to avoid the illusion that the poetic-military complex is a Balkan specialty, one should mention at least Hassan Ngeze, the Karadžić of Rwanda, who in his journal Kangura was systematically spreading anti-Tutsi hatred and calling for their genocide. And back to Yugoslavia, other ex-Yugoslav nations and Serbia itself had poets and writers recognized as great and authentic who were also fully engaged in nationalist projects and so on and so on. The story goes on endlessly. And again you see what's my point. My point is we have here poetry, to put it in very simple terms, which is—it's too easy to say this is not authentic poetry. It can be a quite serious big poetry, but nonetheless it is, it can serve directly as an ideological tool of very brutal terror, ethnic cleansing and so on and so on. And I think that it's way too easy to try to solve the problem by these simple limits. First you try to claim this is not really a great poet. Then you try to claim, "okay he's a great poet but he was brutally manipulated" and so on and so on. It's more complex than that. The predominance of religiously or ethnically justified violence can be accounted for by the very fact that we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as a ground of mass violence, since our hegemonic ideology calls us to enjoy life and to realize ourselves, it is difficult for the majority of people to overcome their repulsion at torturing and killing another human being. The majority of people are nonetheless spontaneously moral. Killing another human being is deeply traumatic for most of us, I hope so. So in order to make people do it, a larger sacred cause is needed which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. Of course there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be anesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to the other's suffering. For this, a sacred cause is needed. More than a century ago in his Karamazov Brothers, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism. You know the famous quote: "If God doesn't exist then everything is permitted." The lesson of today's so-called terrorism is on the contrary that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, because a direct link to God justifies our violation of any merely human considerations. The godless Stalinist communists were the ultimate proof of it. Everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, of the historical necessity of progress towards communism. Religious ideologists usually claim that true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people do some good things. But I think that from today's experience, one should rather stick to Steve Weinberg, the theoretical physicist, who claimed that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. You need religion for that. One should only supplement Weinberg with not only religion but also poetry. And the greater poetry is, the better it does this job. I want now to elaborate briefly another example which happened a couple of years, years ago in Bosnia. Back in June Carlos Westendorp, the head of the United Nations administration of Bosnia, outlawed, prohibited the use of the great Montenegro epic poem, The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac) in Bosnian schools, claiming that this poem may offend the national feelings of the Muslim and that its author, the religious secular head in the early 19th century of Montenegro, Petar Petrović Njegoš, was an ideologist of ethnic cleansing. Now this was a shock for Serbs because one should recall that we are dealing here with not only what is considered the greatest literary work of the entire Serb literature but with the text which has a mythic status and is considered the founding text of the Serb national identity. Prohibiting this text is something like prohibiting Homer or Sophocles in Greek schools, or Shakespeare in English schools, or Dante in Italian schools. Many critics dismissed this measure as political correctness brought to extreme, as not only a ridiculously anachronistic reading back into history of our today's attitudes but also as a cultural imperialist imposition of specific liberal sensibilities onto other cultures. So what makes this epic poem, The Mountain Wreath, such a dangerous text? The poem, written by again the Montenegrin prince-bishop Petar Petrović Njegoš and first published in Vienna in is vaguely based on a historical event in Montenegro that took place towards the end of the 17th century, known as the extermination of the Muslim converts—the term is poturice in Serb language—when Montenegrins decided to simply kill all their compatriots—men, women and children—who had agreed to being converted to Islam. The central figure of the poem is Prince Danilo who at that time ruled over the multitude of Montenegro tribes. At a gathering of tribal chiefs which opens the poem, Danilo's warriors suggest celebrating Pentecost by cleansing, literally čistiti (the verb used to clean), cleansing their land of non-Christians. Now it is clear to everyone that they are dealing with a conflict among brothers of the same blood. In old tribal Montenegro, they had a ceremony to reconcile a blood feud called kuma. When the Muslim suggests a kuma reconciliation between them and between Christian and Muslim Montenegrins, Danilo's men object that the kuma ceremony requires baptism. In a very modern way, the Muslim Montenegrins, whose representatives also attend the gathering, offer an ecumenic analogy, suggesting that the Muslim hair-cutting ceremony is a parallel in their tradition to baptism. Their main argument is a plea for religious tolerance. Why could different religious orientations not coexist within the same ethnic group? A quote from the poem, official English translation: "Small enough is our land, yet two faiths, two beliefs there still may be as in one bowl soups may agree, let us still as brothers live." End of quote. To this multiculturalist plea, dismissed by Bishop Danilo as a satanic temptation, his men respond with a stream of scatological insults. They insist slaughter is the only way. Danilo then orders the total destruction of the Muslim Montenegrins. The line from the poem: "Our land is foul, it reeks of this false religion." So in the so-called Christmas Eve massacre, all Muslim Montenegrins were effectively killed—children, wives, women, everyone. The Mountain Wreath ends with the triumphant extermination of all Muslim Montenegrins as a formal initiation of Serb nationhood. The shedding of Muslim blood is presented in itself as an act of baptism. I quote the final lines—almost towards the end of the poem: "No single seeing eye, no tongue of Turk escaped to tell his tale another day. We put them all unto the sword, all those who would not be baptized. But who paid homage to the holy child were all baptized with sign of Christian cross. And as brother each was hailed and greeted. We put to fire the Turkish houses that there might be no stick nor trace of these true servants of the devil." End of quote. This then is the case for the prosecution. We are talking about Bosnia in years ago. In the present situation in ex-Yugoslavia, the basic message of the poem cannot but appear as providing ideological legitimization for ethnic cleansing, for the cleansing of the Slavic Muslims in Bosnia, celebrating what can be considered the first paradigmatic case of such cleansing. How can one forget that Karadžić and his companions also perceived themselves as uncorrupted mountain people laying the seeds on the corrupted valley of Sarajevo? That this was, you know, when Sarajevo was in the early 90s under siege, this was all the time evoked, this poem in Serbia, this idea of "we are the honest mountain people, we are laying siege to the corrupted valley, to the corrupted city." And effectively already before The Mountain Wreath, this poem was regularly used by the Serb nationalists in this way, as a text which also tells the Serbs how to act today. Now probably your obvious reproach will be that this line of argumentation is ridiculously anachronistic. That I project into the past modern attitudes and that if one reasons in this way, one should no less condemn endless classical works, starting with Homer's Iliad, which also displays tribal ethics. But the problem is that there were different attitudes in that time. You know what I mean, when for example they sacrifice, they torture in Iliad, you can say this was the predominant ethics. Here things are complicated. The poem was written in and Njegoš knew his contemporary romantic and enlightenment literature and ideology. And as I already showed to you, these more tolerant attitudes are represented within the poem itself, in which the Muslim Montenegrins plea for religious tolerance. Furthermore, the claim that Turkish Empire was multiculturaly tolerant is not today's orientalist fantasy. In my book Parallax View, I quote multiple passages of how today we perceive Muslims as intolerant and so on, exclusive, but do you know that till mid-19th century Turkey—what shocked Western travelers when they visited Turkey was the extent of tolerance there. For example, some French guy who visited in the 18th century Constantinople, Istanbul, reports on how, "this is horrible, you see there on the street a Jewish priest talking with a Muslim clerk joined by a Catholic" and so on. And he said, "this is Mohammedan degeneration. They don't have the sense of unity" and so on and so on. So it's nice how at that point precisely they were tolerant ahead of time. Ahead of time in a way. And so there are numerous wonderful stories here. For example, there was some small Christian sect, they had a monastery in France in Napoleonic times. Napoleon threw them out, they found refuge somewhere close to here in Bavaria, in Southern Germany, closer in Bavaria, more to the east from here. Then in I think, they were even thrown out from Germany. This was some Christian sect, they just wanted a small monastery to live in peace there. And then they applied to all European states who can give them just a small piece of land. All Europe. You know where they got it? In Turkish Empire, in today's Bosnia near Banja Luka. So they were at this level more tolerant. I claim that what makes this poem so genuinely dangerous is that Njegoš, its author, knew already of modern universalism. So his racism was no longer the particular pre-modern racism, "my tribe, my limited community against your limited community." He does something much more dangerous: he identifies his side with universal humanity. He claims "we Montenegrin Serbs are the voice of European freedom and reason. We are human as such. They—they are inhuman." They, you know, it's already this universalist enlightenment racism. For example, when a Muslim nobleman from Shkodër, who was himself ethnically Montenegrin, wrote to Njegoš—this is a real letter—asking him for better relations, "why cannot we treat each other humanely?" and so on. This is the answer of Njegoš in a letter: "Firstly, what you say is to wash up our hearts and then make nice way and harmony on our borders. My heart is always clean and washed for humans, but with inhuman people a man is forced to behave inhumanly, otherwise he could not even if he would like," and so on and so on. So his idea is clear. It's not simple tribal opposition. It's "we are human, you are not." So again, according to the standard view of The Mountain Wreath, its main plot—the extermination of the converts—illuminates the poem's basic theme: the struggle for freedom, justice and dignity. And I remember from my youth, years ago—this was still Yugoslavia in the late 60s—and I was—we were taught whole passages of this poem claiming, "you see, this is the greatest poem about struggle for freedom" and so on and so on. And now I must confess retroactively nobody even noticed that what really happens in this poem is not a struggle for freedom. It's a purely religious problem. In the Montenegro nation, one third were converted into Islam, but again they remained culturally, in language and so on, they remained Slavic, they remained Montenegrins. And their offer was, "why cannot we live side by side?" And we are not talking about some primitive times. We are talking again about 18th and 19th century. And then the reply was, "no, kill them all" and so on and so on. So I claim that while fighting to correct a local flaw in their society—the presence of Muslim converts—the heroes in the poem fight for ideals which concern all mankind. Njegoš, that's the horror of this poem, all its rhetoric is not the rhetoric of primitive tribal identity. It's the rhetoric of—there are even some references to Rousseau if you want. It's a rhetoric of universal freedom. And I think it is precisely this universal character of the Montenegrin struggle, the fact that they stand for universal freedom, justice and dignity, which excludes their opponents from the universal space. So now you will say where do I stand here? I claim that I don't have a solution here. But I claim that one should absolutely admit this deadlock. The deadlock is this undoubtedly is—to avoid any misunderstanding—I'm talking my god about Serb or even Southern Slavic Shakespeare. This guy is an absolutely—he is more than your Goethe, how to put it. Okay, I mean comparatively. He's the absolute, you know what I mean, he's like Homer, Dante, figure. Absolute founding figure. If you read at it, if you read the poem through today's experience, it's of course terrible. And my solution here is that we have to be honest enough to admit both. It is an authentic poem and nonetheless real violence as a consequence is inscribed into it. We cannot play the game, "oh this was only later." Incidentally, we can even in this case, that's why I like this case, because it's clinically pure in the sense that we can test it. For example, Njegoš was still doing this. There were still down there in the area of Montenegro which was still held by Turks, there were still some, in the middle of 19th century, some Montenegro groups which were Muslim. And Njegoš often attacked them, a village, killed them all, and the typical move was then to quickly send an emissary to Russia asking for protection, so that the Russia put pressure on Turkey that the Turkey didn't take too much revenge and so on and so on. So my reference here would be Walter Benjamin, who claimed that works of art—you know this classical line from Benjamin—how works of art often function like shots taken on a film for which the developer has not yet been discovered. So that you know, even when the poet wrote it, you cannot read it properly. You can read a poem properly only from later experience. I think it's a case here. I think that, you know, this Benjaminian idea of text as an open, you have to read it retroactively to get the right meaning. I think we should do things like, we should exactly do it like this here. And again, my difficult pessimistic conclusion is that the poetic truth or authentic experience—poetic, mystical, religious—is no guarantee against horrors. In the sense that, that if you are sincere, in the sense of having a nice authentic experience, this somehow protects you from doing horrors in real life. I love here the extreme examples if I may improvise a little bit. For example, did you read a wonderful book by Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence (L'éminence grise)? It's the biography of Le Père Joseph, Father Joseph, who was, to cut a long story short, the secret advisor, the grey eminence of Cardinal Richelieu of France in the time of Years War, I think Why such a fascination of this person? On the one hand he was the worst Realpolitiker you can imagine. If, you know, we can play this nice although of course imaginary game of trying to locate the moment when things went wrong in Europe so that Hitler was possible. This guy is the ultimate reason if you play this game. Why? When there was the Years War, you know, about Catholicism, Protestantism, this guy had a nice idea, nice in a terrible cynical sense. He immediately got it that this war is really not about religion but about who will be the strongest state in Europe dominating Europe, France or Germany. So for him the true point of the war was prevent German unification, keep Germany weak. So what he did in a total cynicism was to make a pact with Catholic France, made a pact with Protestant Sweden against Germany. And basically they won, in the sense at least of preventing German unification and then the story goes on. You know that because of this German Verspätung, First World War and then Second World War. So one can, to extrapolate a little bit, one can say Père Joseph is at the origin of this mistake of European history, German Verspätung which rendered Hitler possible. And he was, he ordered torturing, he personally tortured, poisoned, he was a true ugly politician. But what is the other side of the story? Read the book—maybe it's even translated, probably years ago Huxley was a hit, at least when I was young. This same person in the evenings, metaphorically, not always the evenings, after he finished his dirty work day, wrote the most authentic mystical meditations. And it's so difficult to acknowledge they are the real thing. They are, if I may put it in a little bit cynical way, at the level of, you know, the biggest hits of Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, they are that level. They are the top. No way to escape it. It's absolutely genuine. So this is what bothers Huxley. How is this possible? Huxley tries to avoid the problem so that he takes refuge in Far East, in Buddhism and so on. His solution is there is something wrong in Christianity itself, this focus on Christ's suffering and so on, which opens up the way for this cynical militaristic manipulation, exploitation, so we need Eastern wisdom. But I think that here a counterexample can be listed. My favorite book—I refer to it all the time again, I don't think it's translated into German, you should read it in English—Brian Victoria, stupid name, but he is a Zen Buddhist priest. The title of the book is Zen at War. What he does is something wonderful. He did—this book is no big theory, just a simple exploration of what was the attitude of Zen Buddhist community in Japan. There were I think around millions of them in the late 30s and early 40s when Japan in the 30s, you know, attacked, occupied half of China and then World War II. And he—what he discovered is horrible. Where is this holistic, peaceful, organic, whatever attitude? Nowhere. Except for literally among millions, maximum less than dissidents, small voices, the entire Zen Buddhist hierarchy not only totally supported Japanese militarism, but now comes the nice point, actively provided legitimization for it. First in this typical way which we find also in Europe, you know that sometimes to prevent the greater crime you must do a smaller crime. So although Buddhism prevents you from taking life, if by taking a single life you save more, you can do it. Along these lines, I don't know if some of you read it when you were young at least this big popularizer of Zen Buddhism, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Haha, read his writing from the 30s and 40s, they are much more interesting than this boring hippie stuff from the 60s. There he has propos of Chinese invasion—à propos of Japanese invasion of China—a wonderful text where he explains how Chinese are like, are like evil children who don't see that the Japanese sword which is killing them is really a sword of love and so on. But that's not the true horror. The true horror is then how he sees a certain problem, which was also the problem of Heinrich Himmler. Himmler was aware that Gestapo and SS people doing the Holocaust had to do horrible things ethically, you know, kill not only soldiers but helpless children, blah blah. And Himmler interestingly enough does approach in some of his letters, I think, the problem of how can we do this horrible thing without becoming bestialic demonic beings ourselves. You know what was Himmler's answer? Bhagavad Gita. He always had in his pocket a specially bound leather version. You know in Bhagavad Gita there is that famous line where Arjuna I think, the warrior king, in—when just before the battle breaks down, like "my god, thousands will die, what can I do?" And then Krishna—I don't know which god appears to him—and tells him basically, "reality is not true reality, it's just an appearance, reality has no substantial value, so go on in the battle, kill, no problem" and so on and so on. The idea is in Bhagavad Gita you find this notion of acting at a distance, in the sense of acting without being engaged in it. And that's what Suzuki proposes there. He has a wonderful in the horrible sense metaphor, he really gives advice to soldiers how to kill without feeling bad. And his solution is go through Buddhist, Zen Buddhist satori, this experience of void, and you will be able to do it. You know he has—I will almost verbatim quote it now—he has a wonderful passage where he says: if you are still part engaged in this false empirical reality, then you think there is a—sorry I don't mean you personally but there has to be someone—here I have a sword, I now push my sword into your chest. "Ah," says Suzuki, "no, this is wrong, you are still caught in the false appearance of Maya, where I misperceive myself as an agent" and so on. Suzuki said the right attitude is the following one: I am no one, I'm just a pure impersonal gaze observing how my sword is dancing in the air, and as part of the same dance your body somehow falls on my—nice explanation. No, so and literally he then goes even a step further and says that since ordinary people don't have enough time, money to engage in this years of meditation, he says to ordinary people, absolute military discipline is the best way to reach Buddhist enlightenment. And he gives an example: when the officer tells you "shoot," and when you are ready to shoot without thinking, you overcome your false identity, your false self, which asks you—so now what's my point here? Ah, here I must be open now. My point is not here, "oh you see Zen Buddhists, dirty militarists" and so on. No, it's authentic deep—I wouldn't even say mystical, this is probably theoretically wrong, I mean to use this European terms for them, but let's call it neutrally spiritual. Deep spiritual experience, nonetheless it can justify ethnic—and incidentally I even admire Suzuki because at least after World War II, he wasn't ashamed to admit that he was doing that. His solution was a total technization. He liked to emphasize in his writing after World War II that Zen Buddhism is not an ethics, is not, is not thing to political—he claimed it's a pure technology of meditation. You can be politically, his words, capitalist, liberal, fascist, communist, I don't care, this is just a technology of meditation. So what I'm claiming is that this is so difficult to accept. And here, I don't have time to, I would have to go into also a little bit into psychoanalysis. Because in psychoanalytic terms, what this means is, and this would have been my critique of this Rortyan—although with Rorty it's sometimes a little bit more complex, I'm talking about Richard Rorty—theory of this discursive postmodernism, like "we are," I think this is the usual phrase, "we are stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves," that our identity is made of the narrative texture we compose for ourselves. And then of course from here you get this typical Rortyan liberal ethics, that there is no objective truth, each his, her, their story. So our basic right is the right to complain about our pain, to tell our side, our story. From here comes one of the most disgusting ethical mottos. It was used by some stupid this multicultural conference, I really hate them, where the motto of this conference was—it sounds so deep—was: "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear." It sounds so deep, you know, like, okay, this time, sorry, you, not you, you are already dead from—like, you know, I objectify you, you are my enemy, but if I allow you to tell your story, I can see you are also a person with your fears, dreams, I cannot any longer hate you. I think this is doubly false, worthless existentially. First to show you how false it is, do something very simple: replace the general form with a concrete one. Would you also say, Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his side of the story? And you should! This is why, in spite of all its problematic character and who has the time today to read pages, is it already translated in German? I'm not sure. That novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), Jonathan Littell. This is why it provoked such an unease, because it tells the story from the side of a mid-level bureaucrat Holocaust SS officer who simply presents his case in detail and so on and so on. That's so horrible. I mean, here, this is how I read also Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. I mean, you know, when you have an evil person who does horrible thing, it's not that if you look closely you will discover a monster. No, you will discover somebody who likes his children, maybe he's even ready to sacrifice himself for his friends and so on and so on. Incidentally, if you read that book which is totally worthless theoretically, I think, but was a bestseller, Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners—the only interesting thing I find in this book is the name of the author. This is a guy who claims that, you know, anti-Semitism is German collective identity and so on. And this guy's name is Hagen and Gold. Hagen, you know, is the figure in Wagner's ring who is looking for gold. [laughter] It's a wonderful joke. Okay, but what I want to say is that the only good part of that book is I think one of the middle chapter, documentary chapter, where he quotes all the home letters, and effectively you can see how the very people who were killing children, blah blah, beating Jews out of the ghettos in, in Eastern Europe, were ready to then in a battle to sacrifice for a friend and they cared about their children. I mean, I don't think there is any truth in how you from within experience yourself. The story you are telling yourself about yourself—this is what in psychoanalysis we call fantasy as a fundamental lie—is a fundamental lie. That's not the truth. The truth is what you try to cover with the story. The truth is as they say in X-Files, you know, "the truth is out there," or what was it? I mean, you know, the your inner self-experience is not—it's not true. And here I think poets, great poets, were always ready to provide the way you experience yourself and in this way to be used to legitimate violence and so on and so on. So if you allow me a little bit more because now comes the only interesting theoretical part, a little bit more general. So if we cannot simply oppose language and violence, if language, or poetry as language at its most creative, can harbor violence, how does this violence function? You know that in his Critique of Violence, Benjamin raises this question: is any non-violent resolution of conflict possible? Although later he develops so-called divine violence, in the beginning of his Zur Kritik der Gewalt, Benjamin claims that there is a sphere of human agreement which is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of understanding, language. This thesis of Benjamin belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the predominant idea of language and symbolic order is that of Versöhnung, reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful coexistence. It's not only Habermas but even early Lacan whose idea is this. The idea being that we have these imaginary violent dual conflicts and then language is as such a medium of reconciliation. The idea being that even if I am in language violent to you, shout at you, give orders, already at the most elementary level I must recognize you as a partner in dialogue. So from here it's only one step to what Habermas develops in detail, of how there is a certain ethic of mutual reconciliation inherent to language as such, so that when language is used for domination and violence it's an external because of power relations distortion of language. I—I am tempted to claim exactly the opposite. That there is a violence in language, a violence not only in this sense widely analyzed by sociolinguistic or by some theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence, of how by addressing you in a certain way I can reproduce the whole set of domination and so on all that, but in a more radical sense. Language is in a way found—found always at the foundation of a community. It's the very substantial medium in which within which we coexist. But as such language is a great divider. In what sense? In the sense that, how to put it, imagine you live on the same street with some people from other culture, an Algerian, a Turk, a Chinese or whatever. This is for me the absolute violence, that although you live physically in the same world, you live in different worlds. It's kind of, it's an absolute gap. And this is the violence of language, that it violently imposes a certain—what in very non-appropriate terms we would have called worldview. It's a certain vision of reality, horizon of understanding which is ultimately violently imposed and exclusive of others. Even when you are open to the other, you are automatically translating the other into your horizon and so on and so on. Heidegger of all people isolated very nicely this violent aspect of language, when he—and here Heidegger has something important to say I claim. When Heidegger refers to essence of language as the verbal form, das Wesen, essencing of language. What does he mean? He means that the language—he doesn't mean the essence of language, he means that the language west, essences, in the sense that it establishes relations of what is crucial, what is not crucial, and so on. A very simple example. For example, let's take a castrato voice. Till early modernity, castrato voice was considered the most beautiful. It was basically considered as the closest we can get to angel's voice before the fall, before sexual difference, before Eve intervened, of course. But a little bit later with modern—with French Revolution, Enlightenment, castrato voice was considered a disgusting abomination and so on. Or the classically ridiculously famous example of Swiss Alps which, you know, when Goethe was very young they were still considered a horror, no? Like this ugly part you pass over it just with curtains closed when going to beautiful Italy. As you probably know, years later they were considered this violent sublime and so on and so on. Why does this happen? Something changes in language. Language, as it were, establishes priority. This would have been the essencing of language which is violent, violent in the sense that it's not in continuity with reality. It twists, it throws out of balance reality. This is the violence of language of which Heidegger talks. But now I would like to—and this is again language as violently—as, as Heidegger puts it, the house of being. That is to say, founding a certain horizon of meaning. The world is disclosed, opened up to us through language as a certain horizon of meaning. And Heidegger is fully aware this is always an extremely violent act. And of course this is why in all political physical violence, there is always language. When an anti-Semite beats a Jew, when a skinhead beats a foreigner and so on, it's never just physical. You should ask why does he find the foreigner or the Jew disgusting? Because the horizon of meaning within which he dwells tells him this. There is no properly human violence without language, which is not grounded in language. But here I would like to supplement Heidegger with Jacques Lacan. Throughout his work, Lacan proposes variations on Heidegger's motive of language as the house of being. But Lacan adds something. For Lacan language is a torture house of being. Quote from Lacan: "In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language." And that's for Lacan the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. What we call symptoms, from conversion symptoms inscribed into the body up to total psychotic breakdowns, these are all so many traces of how there is—that's Lacan's idea—between living being and language there is an original gap. This is why also as we know in so-called primitive societies the entry into language or into symbolic community is always marked by some act of violence, initiatic, sacrifice or whatever. This for Lacan Heidegger ignores. This radical discord, disharmony between language and subject. And this, as I will not have time to develop it fully today, but this is the reason why Lacan sticks to the term subject. Because people often ask Lacan, Jacques Lacan who was a close reader of Heidegger, although they were not really friends, Heidegger thought Lacan was—that famous phrase, Heidegger's reaction to Lacan's Écrits was "here is ein—here is a psychiatrist who himself needs a psychiatrist" or something like that. But nonetheless, why did Lacan insist, why didn't he want to give up the term of subject? What was for Lacan missing in Heidegger's Dasein as his name for the essence of being human? For Lacan—Lacan was not a subjectivist in this active sense of—for Heidegger we are just passive beings, the 'da', the 'here' of being and where is the active creativity of human? No, it's rather this radical passivity, the trauma, the pain of being incorporated into language. The psychoanalytic term for this wound of language is of course symbolic castration. But now Lacan implicitly draws another conclusion from this. The conclusion is that not only language tortures us—again, in this sense that being integrated into language is always a traumatic experience—but language as such—I think this is the deepest insight, often it's ignored by Lacan—that language as such, in its substantial presence as the big other, our spiritual substance, is stupid. Is inherently stupid, conformist, stupid, whatever you want. And I quote here Elfriede Jelinek—I don't like too much, I'm too conservative, her crazy, but—she said something very nice. She wrote: "Language should be tortured to tell the truth." And I think this is poetry. Poetry is a form of torture. Just imagine at the most naive level what how much linguistic torture is involved in doing a poem? How much you must force, cut words, artificial. The idea is that language—the idea is that we should drop this mystique of "we must open our eyes to the wisdom message which is in language itself." Language itself is stupid. Language at its purest are what? Are proverbs. Proverbs are for me the stupidity at its purest. Proverbs are always totally conformist. Like, you know, for example let's say you are about to do something risky and you succeed. Then you have a proverb to legitimate it. I don't know what you have, in Slovene we have something like "only those who risk can profit" or like celebrating risk. Then let's say you do the same but you fail. Ah, no problem. You have the opposite proverb. I don't know what you have in Slovene, we have like "you cannot urinate against the wind" or something like that. You know, this conformist stupidity, this is the wisdom of language. Like for anything I have a proverb, for everything, whatever happens I have a proverb to justify it and so on. So this idea that, that you have to treat brutally language. Poets torture language. Poets break all the rules of natural flow. Poets do extreme violence to language. And I think the same goes for all arts. For example, for cinema. There is a big opposition in cinema theory between Eisenstein on the one side who liked cutting, montage and there Bazin, Tarkovsky, this continuous long shots and so on. Eisenstein, my god, he all the time uses the language of torture: cut, montage, artificial. He is literally creating Frankensteins. He is fascinated by how you can cut a fragment out and then recompose it artificially and so on. Now you will say but isn't this modern cinema with Rossellini, André Bazin up to Tarkovsky, where the idea is you should let the images speak, not intervene with montage? Isn't this the opposite where precisely they try to cancel this violence? No, I claim it's just a different violence. Look a little bit of Tarkovsky. It's just protracting if—if Eisenstein is a torturer at the level of "I cut your fingers" and so on, how do you call that apparatus? I think it's called—I knew the English name—that torture to extend you, you know. The rack. Yeah, yeah, Tarkovsky is this kind of torture. So for me when you have a debate between Eisenstein and Tarkovsky, it's two torturers talking, no? Eisenstein saying "I cut him to pieces," "no no," said Tarkovsky, "it's better to stretch him a little bit" and so on. But why this? Again because language as such is at its fundamental—okay, now it's time to finish. So I don't have time to go into the really interesting part: how precisely because of missing this dimension of violence, it can be nicely shown how Heidegger in his otherwise interesting reading of Antigone misses the dimension which is so blatantly, openly present in Sophocles, the dimension of between the two deaths. You know this idea of Antigone is alive but already symbolically dead and so on. This space between the two deaths. And I think we can even link this to the topic of Agamben, Homo Sacer and so on. Homo Sacer is precisely human being, symbolically dead human being. You are alive but excluded from community, reduced to bare life. And this is what happened in concentration camps and so on. And I'm so sad I don't have time more to go into it because it can also be shown, one of the wonderful criticisms of Heidegger that I read from Lacanian standpoint is a French reader of Lacan, unfortunately he died, wonderful book he wrote, "Ce que Lacan dit de l'être" (What Lacan says about being), François Balmès, who claimed in an apparently very naive clinical way that Heidegger's existential analytic of Dasein, of Sein zum Tode (Being towards death), is appropriate for neurotics but cannot cover psychotics. It sounds so stupidly naive, but I think it works. Why? Because it's very interesting to read—if you read those letters between Heidegger and, how is he called, Medard Boss, the Swiss psychiatrist whom Heidegger was visiting. Not Bernd Moss, something like that. Okay, it will come to me. It—you can see how when this psychiatrist presents to Heidegger cases, Heidegger all he can do is put variations on which remain within the horizon of this Sein zum Tode or this existential engagement, you know, the scheme of Sorge and so on. What Heidegger cannot—to put it in the terms of Sein und Zeit, a psychotic is a subject who is no longer engaged in Sein zum Tode or in this structure of Sorge how, you know, through the past, future project you approach the present out of Entwurf, the past, this structure is suspended in a psychotic. Psychotic is literally disengaged, no tension towards death, he in a way already is a living dead. Heidegger cannot think that. It's a very nice intelligent critique. It can even be further developed, I've written about it, about how a French Hegelian philosopher, pupil of Derrida, Catherine Malabou, wrote a wonderful book called Les Nouveaux Blessés (The New Wounded)—I mistranslated it, the new wounded—where she claims that the so-called post-traumatic subjects are the new form of pathology which will be the pathology of the 21st century. And these are exactly the living dead. Their first historical example—not empirical, but that passed into wide historical memory—are again what Agamben talks about, so-called Muselmänner from concentration camps, living dead. They are still alive, can react, talk, but they are as it were deprived of all symbolic substance, non-engaged, totally passive, the living dead. So this is for Lacan—he has a very radical reading here—this is for Lacan the truly radical dimension of Cartesian cogito which escapes Heidegger. But now let me go just on to conclude. So now to conclude, I would like to return to Benjamin. You know how Benjamin distinguishes between mythic violence, which is staatsbildend, constitutes a state, this obscene violence which—and then the divine violence which is staatszerstörend, emancipatory, revolutionary and so on. I claim that maybe, and that would be my final thesis, we should apply the same to language. The violence of which Heidegger speaks when he speaks about this violent imposition of mythos as the founding power would be sprachbildende Gewalt. The violence of imposing a certain comprehension of being, certain disclosure of world and so on and so on. But then we should—and this for me is maybe missing in Heidegger—we should supplement this violence with sprachzerstörend, with what would be the language equivalent of divine violence in politics. This violence on language which, where you torture language to make it tell the truth. And I think because this torture is the only way to counteract the potential for real violence even in great poetry. I think there are poets who cannot be used the way that great Montenegro poet and many others can be used. These are those poets—maybe, I'm not so sure, I am here with Heidegger from Hölderlin on who, for example—and it's typical how limited is here—my good friend Erik Santner wrote an early book on Hölderlin where he shows how although Heidegger often refers to late Hölderlin with this paratactic structure more, he, he really, how to put it, although Hölderlin is Heidegger's divine the poet, he misses this language-torturing dimension in late Hölderlin. And this is how we should counteract, so counteract the potential of real violence even, counteract the danger in language, great poetry to ground violence. So either we can rely on mythic violence, we end up in torturing, or we torture language and in this way stop real torture. Thank you very much.