Poetry in the Round
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-10-24 · 1:44:48 · 13,137 words
ideologyfascism-populismhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisdemocracyliberalism-political-correctnesscinema-art-culturerace-antisemitismgeopolitics-warphilosophy-general
A lecture followed by Q&A in which Žižek ranges across ideology, truth, and political pathology. He opens with a comparison of fascist and Stalinist leader behavior to illustrate different subjective positions, then develops an argument that we live in a hypericological era in which belief is displaced into acts rather than held consciously. He examines the 'death of truth' panic, argues against both postmodern relativism and naïve positivism through a dialectical theory of data interpretation, and closes with Samuel Beckett as the exemplar of productive philosophical abstraction.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “dialectic of enlightenment (Adorno/Horkheimer)”
The Frankfurt School concept that totalitarian terror is an implication of Enlightenment reason itself, invoked to explain what makes Stalinism (with its show-trial rationality) more specifically modern than Nazism.
A structural paradox visible in biodegradable bullets and Soros philanthropy: the agent of harm simultaneously produces the counter-measure against its own damage, the remedy is the same as the threat.
The contemporary ideological condition in which nobody needs to consciously believe; the illusion is carried by acts and social participation, not subjective conviction.
Marx's insight that the fetishist illusion is not in our minds but in our acts, we know money is not magical yet act as if it were in market exchange.
as “canned laughter”
Used as the paradigm example of outsourced or delegated belief: the TV laughs for you so that you end up relaxed as if you had laughed yourself, mirroring Tibetan prayer wheels.
as “belief without belief”
The structure of contemporary ideology in which one can act as a believer (prayer wheels, canned laughter, market participation) without holding any subjective conviction.
The function of contemporary ideology is not to paint an idealized picture or repress dissent but to foreclose the imagination of collective change, to make the status quo feel inescapable.
as “atheist Christian”
Žižek's self-description: endorsing the emancipatory, subversive kernel of Christianity (radical love, the logic of falling, the unconditioned choice) while refusing theological belief.
as “opium of the people (double)”
Žižek's twist on Marx's formula: today we have two new opiums, alt-right populism ('the People' as opium) and literal drugs/psycho-pharmaceuticals, both functioning to absorb and neutralize discontent.
Implied in discussion of dialectical totality: what you encounter when a violent abstraction (the grandmother's voice alone) colors the whole rather than being reabsorbed into organic unity.
as “death of truth”
The contemporary liberal panic over fake news and relativism, which Žižek diagnoses as really a panic about the collapse of hegemonic social consensus rather than about truth per se.
From philosophical hermeneutics: we always approach data from a pre-given interpretive framework that privileges certain data and omits others; this is not cheap relativism but a dialectical feature of knowledge.
as “pathological jealousy (Lacan)”
Lacan's example that jealousy is pathological even when its factual claims are true, because the pathology lies not in the facts but in the subject's need for jealousy to sustain their identity.
Some truths are accessible only through existential commitment: just as one can enumerate reasons for love only once already in love, Marxist and religious truths are grasped only from inside the engaged position.
as “unconscious free choice”
True freedom is not choosing between options but the unchosen, retroactively discovered choice of what one fundamentally is, drawn from German idealism (Hegel, Schelling) and illustrated by falling in love.
as “plus as position”
The LGBT+ 'plus' read not empirically (openness to more categories) but speculatively: being a '+', radically questioning one's own position, is itself a subject-position, the best definition of hysteria.
as “perversion as secret side of power”
Perverts always know what they are and what they must do; unlike hysterics they never question their position, making perversion the obverse complement of normative power rather than its subversion.
as “hysteria as subversion”
Hysteria recast not as pathology but as the most subversive position: the refusal to accept the identity ideology assigns, expressed as the question 'Why am I what you tell me I am?'
as “ideological interpellation”
Althusser's concept that ideology assigns symbolic identities ('you are a man, a woman, a professor'), invoked here to contrast with the hysterical refusal of assigned identity.
Marx's concept that money and exchange relations are not merely conceptual abstractions but actual features of capitalist social reality that individuals live and reproduce.
Lacan's object-cause of desire: the plus over all particular objects, the void that persists once no particular object fully satisfies, structuring desire beyond any prescribed object.
as “violent abstraction”
A dialectical procedure of tearing one element out of its organic context so that the abstracted element then colors the whole differently, illustrated by Proust's grandmother's voice and Beckett's writing.
The universal character that emerges through an actor's roles, distinct from both the actor's real self and any single role; Žižek argues reading the grain-against role reveals the truth of the persona.
Žižek's characterization of Beckett: he extracts a pure Platonic idea (of displacement, terror, bureaucratic dehumanization) from concrete historical material and stages that abstraction directly.
Žižek's term for Netanyahu's strategy of making alliances with openly or implicitly anti-Semitic European right-wing leaders (Orban, Kaczynski) on the implicit deal that they support Israel while expelling their own Jews.
Stories he reaches for 13
A scientist friend asks Bohr why he has a horseshoe above his door if he doesn't believe in superstition. Bohr replies: 'I don't believe in it, but I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' The joke perfectly captures the structure of ideological belief displaced into action.
“I have it there because, although I don't believe in it, I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Unlike a fascist leader who merely receives applause after a speech, the Stalinist leader joins in, signaling 'I am one of you, we all serve the cause.' This different subjective position structures the entire difference between the two totalitarianisms.
“A Stalinist leader always joins the applause. It's a totally different subjective position.”
Every year on Stalin's birthday, Gulag inmates were required to sign congratulatory telegrams to him, a ritual impossible to imagine in Nazism because Nazi guilt was about being, not acting.
“You cannot even imagine such a ritual in Nazism, to on Hitler's birthday gather all the inmates of Auschwitz and make them sign a congratulation message.”
Lacan's example: a husband pathologically jealous of his wife is pathological even if every factual claim he makes is true, because the pathology lies in his need for jealousy to sustain his identity. Applied to anti-Semitism: the question is not whether Jews really have those traits but why Nazis need that figure.
“His jealousy is pathological even if everything that he says is true about his wife. The true question is: Why does he need jealousy to sustain his self-identity?”
Canned laughter on sitcoms functions like a Tibetan prayer wheel: the TV laughs for you and you end up relaxed as if you had laughed. Most people do not laugh along, yet the mechanism works, an instance of outsourced, delegated belief.
“The TV set laughs for me, and at the end I am relaxed as if I have laughed. It's a wonderful mechanism that we know from so-called primitive societies.”
Heydrich wrote in 1936 that Jews are a great people and he wishes them well in Palestine, he just doesn't want them in Germany. Žižek uses this to show how contemporary far-right figures (e.g. Breivik) similarly combine anti-Semitism with support for Israel.
“Jews are a great people. We wish them all the best in Palestine. We want to help them there. We just don't want to get them to have them here.”
A Soviet exhibition painting titled 'Lenin in Warsaw' shows Lenin's wife making love to a young Komsomol member. A shocked visitor asks where Lenin is; the guide calmly answers: 'Lenin is in Warsaw.' Used to illustrate that Lenin's absence enables (and explains) what is visible.
“Lenin is in Warsaw. No. That's why she can do this here.”
A rich merchant and a rabbi both declare themselves 'nothing' before God. A poor Jew then says the same. The rich merchant protests: 'Who is this nobody that he also thinks he can say he is nothing?', illustrating how performed self-humiliation by the powerful conceals arrogance and a claim to universal judgment.
“The rich merchant stabs the rabbi and said: 'Who is this guy, a nobody and he also thinks he can just say that he is nothing?'”
In late Yugoslav communism, not believing the official ideology was fine, but if you took it seriously, authorities considered you dangerous because taking the ideology seriously led to noticing the gap between it and reality.
“Taking the official ideology seriously is a first step towards dissidence. It's an ideology which worked on condition that it was not taken seriously.”
In Proust's novel, the hero hears his grandmother's voice alone on the telephone for the first time and finds it vulgar and common. When he later visits her, this abstracted voice colors his whole perception, the other features become vulgar too. No return to organic unity is possible.
“He is all of a sudden struck by the idea of what a vulgar, common voice this is... her other features become vulgar, common to him. There is no return to organic unity.”
Beckett's short play condenses three levels: communist political terror, a director staging the same terror in the rehearsal, and finally the victim raising his head to stare at the audience, implicating humanitarian spectacle in reproducing the same terror it purports to oppose.
“The falsity of our humanitarian sympathy... the same abstraction is reproduced. How our very humanitarian care, help, can reproduce the same form of horror.”
The US military sought proposals for bullets that biodegrade and contain plant seeds, so that bombing a country simultaneously makes it green. The weapon is its own environmental remedy.
“Imagine bombing a country to make it green. The same structure — the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses.”
Cruise's role as a crudely misogynist pickup artist in Magnolia is proposed as the key that reveals the truth of all his other (heroic) roles, the method of violent abstraction applied to Hollywood.
“Did you see Magnolia? Where Cruise plays that extremely vulgar guy who wants to teach how to fuck them... I claim, maybe this is the key.”
Works invoked 13
Capital book
Marx's commodity fetishism chapter cited as 'maybe the single greatest achievement' of political-economic theory, more actual today than ever.
Adorno and Horkheimer's work cited to explain why Stalinism is more specifically a product of Enlightenment rationality than Nazi terror, which operates on racial being rather than rational confession.
Finnegans Wake book
Dismissed as pretentious and unreadable: 'Don't tell me that you read Finnegans Wake. It's so pretentious.'
Proust's novel provides the grandmother's voice episode, which is Žižek's central illustration of violent abstraction and the impossibility of returning to organic totality.
Gulag: A History book
Anne Applebaum's critical history of the Gulag; cited for the detail about inmates signing birthday telegrams to Stalin, explicitly noted as 'not communist propaganda.'
Catastrophe play
Beckett's short play condenses communist political terror, theatrical staging terror, and complicit humanitarian spectatorship into a single image, the victim raising his head to stare at the audience.
Malone Dies book
Beckett's novel is discussed as abstracting from the specific postwar situation of refugees and displaced persons to stage a 'pure Platonic idea' of bureaucratic terror and homelessness.
In Praise of Love book
Badiou's short book on love (described as 'a beautiful short book, translated in English') cited for the analysis of 'tomber amoureux' (to fall in love) as a literal fall, a surprise cut.
Magnolia film
Tom Cruise's role as a vulgar misogynist pickup-artist instructor proposed as the key that reveals the truth of his other heroic roles.
Sergio Leone western in which Henry Fonda plays a sadistic villain, used as the paradigm of the grain-against-persona role that reveals the truth of an actor's entire screen presence.
Young Mr. Lincoln film
Henry Fonda's portrayal of Lincoln is reread through his Once Upon a Time in the West role, arrogance becomes visible in what appeared as noble virtue.
Dubliners book
One of the Joyce works Žižek salvages after his wholesale attack on Joyce; said to be one he 'really likes.'
The theological debates about Aquinas' aesthetics at the end are described as 'breathtaking.' Žižek offers this as partial apology for his overall attack on Joyce.
People invoked 38
Žižek says he is 'very much against him, critical' but credits him with spirit for his joke about the Florida recount: 'American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said.'
Holocaust denier cited as example that denialists argue as strict empiricists, not postmodern relativists, refuting the liberal attribution of denialism to relativism.
Marcel Proust positive
The episode of the grandmother's voice in In Search of Lost Time is Žižek's main illustration of violent abstraction and the impossibility of returning to organic totality.
Emilie Morin positive
Author of a book on Beckett and politics cited as conclusively demonstrating that Beckett's apparently abstract works are deeply grounded in specific historical experiences (postwar refugees, wartime displacement).
Todd McGowan positive
Described as 'my good friend' based in Vermont; cited as evidence that true intellectual breakthroughs happen in marginal, non-elite institutions.
Described as 'just a moderate leftist, social-democratic nationalist, not a Soviet spy', the US-organized coup against him (restoring the Shah) destabilized Iran and led indirectly to the Islamic revolution.
Jamal Khashoggi positive
His murder by Saudi Arabia is cited as the paradigm of displaced false sympathy: media obsession with this one privileged insider while ignoring Saudi Arabia's systematic destruction of Yemen.
George Soros positive
Used as the example of the philanthropist-speculator paradox. Žižek says 'I appreciate him otherwise' and uses him analytically not polemically.
US support for Saddam against Iran (including providing poisonous gases and satellite intelligence) cited as paradigmatic Western hypocrisy about human rights.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, used to explain why Stalinism is more specifically a product of modernity than Nazism. Also defended against the 'cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory: Adorno's text on Authority and Family actually argues for the value of paternal authority against totalitarianism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Described as 'our, my psychoanalytic teacher.' His paradox about pathological jealousy being pathological even when factually correct is central to the talk's epistemology. Object petit a also invoked.
Louis Althusser positive
His concept of ideological interpellation ('you are this') is invoked as the backdrop against which hysterical refusal of assigned identity is defined as subversive.
Nikolai Bukharin positive
Named as the exemplary Stalinist show-trial defendant who provided a detached, objective confession of his own betrayal, illustrating the paradox of Stalinist rationality.
Judith Butler positive
Žižek recounts trying to convince Butler she is 'a good Cartesian', that her performative theory of identity presupposes an abstract subject not defined by positive features, which he endorses.
Donald Trump positive
Žižek says 'I do hate Trump' but warns against making him the ideal scapegoat; Trump's importance is as symptom of liberal consensus breakdown. Called 'almost a genius' for systematically attacking the implicit rules (not just explicit laws) that underpin democratic custom.
Anne Applebaum positive
Her book Gulag: A History is cited as the source for the detail about inmates signing birthday congratulations to Stalin, a book critical of Gulag, not communist propaganda.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my friend Alain Badiou' (with note of 'some problems'). Cited for the formula that ideology today functions to kill hope; also cited for his book on love and the phrase 'tomber amoureux' as a literal fall.
Mentioned as the incumbent who cheated in the elections that triggered the Green Revolution, against whom Žižek supported the opposition.
Bernie Sanders positive
Praised for mobilizing voters who might otherwise have voted for Trump, having understood that the neglect of working-class concerns enabled the right-wing surge.
Samuel Beckett positive
Described as the great writer of 'violent abstraction' and characterized as a 'materialist Platonist.' Catastrophe and Malone Dies analyzed at length. Žižek declares himself a partisan of Beckett over Joyce.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Criticized for systematically making pacts with anti-Semitic European conservative leaders as part of what Žižek calls 'Zionist anti-Semitism.'
The Norwegian far-right terrorist who combined anti-Semitism with support for Israel, used to illustrate the contemporary dangerous combination of the two.
Göran Therborn positive
Swedish Marxist who drew hundreds of attendees for lectures on Frankfurt School in Kabul and Bamiyan, cited as evidence of unexpected intellectual vitality.
Bill Gates positive
Described as embodying the same two-faces paradox as Soros: ruthless monopolist and greatest philanthropist in history, the thing-itself-as-remedy structure.
His Law and Justice party is cited as having done more for the actual Polish working class than any moderate left party (lowering retirement age, expanding healthcare), an 'obscenity' of right-wing populism doing leftist economic things. Also mentioned as one of Netanyahu's anti-Semitic European allies.
Viktor Orbán negative
Named as an openly or implicitly anti-Semitic European conservative leader with whom Netanyahu makes pacts, part of the 'Zionist anti-Semitism' argument.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe negative
Called 'a great conservative'; his saying 'Besser Unrecht als Unordnung' (Better injustice than chaos) is cited as expressing the cynical position of those who want a stable ideological consensus even if it is a lie.
His 1936 text wishing Jews well in Palestine while not wanting them in Germany is cited to show how far-right support for Israel and anti-Semitism have coexisted historically.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Grouped with Hegel in German idealism's understanding that true free choice is unconscious.
Jordan Peterson negative
Mentioned as someone whose ideas 'echo' elements of the alt-right 'cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory in documentary material.
Kellyanne Conway negative
Her phrase 'alternative facts' is the standard liberal target; Žižek's point is that attacking her does not resolve the deeper epistemological issues about data and interpretation.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for the point that you cannot first evaluate arguments for Christianity and then decide to believe; you must be a Christian to understand the arguments, illustrating the structure of truth through engagement.
James Joyce negative
Called 'a pretentious, boring idiot'; Finnegans Wake dismissed as unreadable pretension. Žižek notes he goes against Lacan on this, who admired Joyce. He then walks back slightly by praising Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist.
Niels Bohr positive
The subject of the horseshoe joke, used as the paradigm of ideology without belief: a scientist who keeps a superstitious charm because it works even without belief.
Barack Obama negative
Criticized for being 'too careful' about implicit democratic rules regarding the Supreme Court nomination, he respected norms that Trump then broke without hesitation.
Max Horkheimer positive
Co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment; Žižek defends him against the alt-right 'cultural Marxism' conspiracy, noting his text on Authority and Family supports strong paternal figures as resistance to totalitarianism.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked repeatedly: commodity fetishism from Capital as the key to contemporary ideology; the lesson that interest and truth are not mutually exclusive; the concept of real abstraction in bourgeois society. Žižek defends him against simplistic readings while acknowledging Marxism's historical horrors.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
German idealism around Hegel and Schelling cited for the notion that free choice is unconscious, not a deliberate selection among options. The entire dialectical framework of abstraction is implicitly Hegelian.
What it argues
belief displaced into acts rather than consciously heldthe death of truth and fake news panicdialectical interpretation of data vs. naïve empiricismabstraction as a positive feature of reality and subjectivityStalinist vs. fascist subjective positionsBeckettian abstraction as political-philosophical methodthe failure of liberal consensus and the rise of right-wing populism
Dialectical moves 13
“We never lived in a more radically ideological era than today precisely because apparently nobody believes in it.”
The disappearance of conscious belief is not the end of ideology but its most complete form, since belief is now fully displaced into acts.
“The thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses.”
The paradoxical structure of biodegradable bullets (weapon that causes greening) and Soros philanthropy (ruthless speculation funding humanitarian aid) shows that the agent of harm produces its own counter-measure.
“I have it there [the horseshoe] because, although I don't believe in it, I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Ideology works not through subjective conviction but through the objective efficacy of ritual acts regardless of belief, the logic of the canned laugh.
“His jealousy is pathological even if everything he says about his wife is true.”
The pathology of ideology is not in the facts it marshals but in the subject's need for that particular interpretive framework to sustain their identity, applied to anti-Semitism: the question is not whether Jews have the described features but why Nazis need the figure of the Jew.
“The correct horizon from which to interpret data is not our subjective choice — it is inscribed into the object itself.”
Dialectical epistemology reverses the opposition between objective data and subjective interpretation: interpretation is not imposed from outside but is part of what the object is.
“Far from being the most subversive position, perversion is the obverse secret side of power.”
Perverts know exactly what they are and must do, making them complicit with normative power; hysteria, not perversion, is the genuinely subversive stance.
“The plus in LGBT+ is not just openness to more categories — being a plus, that void, is a position in itself.”
What appears as a formal placeholder for uncategorized identities is actually the hysterical position of radical self-questioning: the void is more than absence, it is a determinate stance.
“The only totality you get is a totality based on brutal, violent abstraction — there is no return to organic unity.”
Once a feature is abstracted (the grandmother's voice), it colors the whole differently; the abstract does not dissolve back into the concrete but becomes the new ground of the totality.
“You fall in love — you never can say 'now I'm falling in love'; it's always retroactively that you establish you are deep in it.”
Authentic free choice is not experienced as a choice at the time; freedom is the retroactive discovery of a commitment already made, not the deliberate selection from options.
“The moment you think you know what you are, you are not a subject, you are an object.”
Subjectivity is constitutively defined by ontological openness and uncertainty about one's own identity; full self-transparency collapses the subject into a determinate thing.
“Beckett is a materialist Platonist — he stages not a concrete historical situation but the pure Platonic idea abstracted from it.”
Rather than reducing art to its historical conditions, Beckett abstracts from them to reveal a structural truth that could not be seen from within the concrete situation alone.
“The most efficient lies are lies with truth — lies which reproduce only factual data.”
Factual accuracy does not guarantee truthfulness; data can be selectively organized within a false horizon to serve a systematic lie, as Nazi anti-Semitism demonstrates.
“White people who pretend to renounce their particular identity are actually retaining their grasp on universality — they remain judges of others.”
Performed self-humiliation by dominant groups is not genuine universality but a covert reassertion of hegemonic position dressed as modesty.
Claims 20
asserts
We never lived in a more radically ideological era than today, precisely because apparently nobody believes in ideology anymore.ideology
asserts
The fetishist illusion is not in our minds but in our acts: we know money is not magical yet participate in market exchange as if it were.commodity fetishism
asserts
The function of ideology today is not to offer hope or repress opposition but to kill hope — to make collective change appear impossible.ideology
reframes
The panic about fake news and the 'death of truth' is really a panic about the collapse of a hegemonic social consensus, not about truth per se.fake news / post-truth
rejects
Holocaust deniers do not argue as postmodern relativists; they argue as strict empiricists, which exposes the liberal claim that relativism enables denialism as false.postmodern relativism as cause of Holocaust denial
asserts
The correct horizon from which to interpret data is not subjective but is inscribed into the object itself — how we read facts is conditioned by the objective social position of those who read.truth and data interpretation
asserts
Anti-Semitism is wrong a priori and formally — not because Nazis distorted the facts but because even with accurate facts they served a general lie that obfuscated social antagonisms.anti-Semitism
asserts
Interest and existential engagement are not incompatible with objective truth; some truths are accessible only from within a committed position.truth and political engagement
asserts
Stalinist show trials represent the dialectic of Enlightenment more fully than Nazi terror, because they force prisoners to rationally validate their own condemnation.Stalinism vs. fascism
asserts
The rise of 'culturalist' identity-politics left from the 1980s onward neglected the working class and thereby enabled Trump.the postmodern/cultural left
asserts
Political correctness is a petit-bourgeois excess that obfuscates economic issues rather than advancing genuine Marxist politics.political correctness
asserts
Democracy only functions against a background of implicit shared rules and customs; Trump's genius is attacking these implicit rules rather than explicit legal ones.democracy and Trumpism
asserts
Universality always has a privileged example that embodies it in a given historical constellation; today 'Black Lives Matter' is that privileged example of the universal 'all lives matter'.universality and Black Lives Matter
asserts
Hysteria, not perversion, is the most subversive position because it refuses the identity assigned by ideological interpellation rather than secretly reproducing power's logic.hysteria and subjectivity
asserts
Subjectivity essentially involves abstraction: the moment you think you know what you are, you are no longer a subject but an object.subjectivity
asserts
Abstraction is not merely a cognitive tool but a positive feature of reality itself, constitutive of bourgeois subjectivity and of the logic of desire.abstraction
asserts
Western support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, including supplying chemical weapons and satellite intelligence, was deeply hypocritical and destabilizing.US/Western Middle East policy
asserts
Netanyahu's alliances with anti-Semitic European right-wing politicians represent a form of 'Zionist anti-Semitism' that is extremely dangerous.Israeli politics and anti-Semitism
reframes
True freedom is not free choice among given options but the unconscious, retroactively discovered choice of what one fundamentally is.freedom and choice
asserts
Beckett, not Joyce, is the exemplary writer of productive philosophical abstraction; Joyce is pretentious and boring by comparison.Beckett vs. Joyce
Quotes 15
“We never lived in an era which is so truly, radically ideological than our era today, precisely because apparently nobody believes in it.”Slavoj Žižek · hypericological era / belief displaced into acts
“I have it there because, although I don't believe in it, I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology without belief / horseshoe joke
“Taking the official ideology seriously is a first step towards dissidence.”Slavoj Žižek · Yugoslav ideology / belief structure
“The function of ideology today is no longer to paint an idealized image... it's to kill hope.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as hope-killing
“The most efficient lies are lies with truth, lies which reproduce only factual data.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical theory of truth and lying
“His jealousy is pathological even if everything that he says is true about his wife.”Slavoj Žižek · pathological jealousy / anti-Semitism analogy
“Anti-Semitism is wrong a priori, formally, absolutely... He was wrong even if he didn't distort facts. He was wrong because the way he used facts was to sustain a general lie.”Slavoj Žižek · formal wrongness of anti-Semitism
“The moment you think you know what you are, you are not a subject, you are an object.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectivity and ontological openness
“Falling in love never happens in a present time. You never can say: 'Now I'm falling in love.' It's always that, retroactively, all of a sudden you establish: 'My god, I'm deep in it.'”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive freedom / unconscious choice
“Universality has always a privileged example which embodies it in a certain historical constellation. Today, if you want universal equality in lives matter, you have to emphasize Black Lives Matter.”Slavoj Žižek · concrete universality / Black Lives Matter
“I prefer to be called Indian. At least my name is a monument to your white man stupidity. You know, you thought you are in India.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-patronizing / liberal condescension
“American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said.”Slavoj Žižek · Bill Clinton on the Florida recount
“Better injustice than chaos — Goethe. What they are saying is: we have to impose one version of ideology which will bring a certain stability, even if we all know it's a lie.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal consensus as managed lie
“Imagine bombing a country to make it green.”Slavoj Žižek · biodegradable bullets / thing-itself-as-remedy
“How our very humanitarian care, help, and so on, can reproduce the same form of horror.”Slavoj Žižek · Beckettian abstraction / humanitarian false sympathy
Transcript 35 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I will begin by transcribing the requested audio of Slavoj Zizek's lecture and the following Q&A session verbatim. I want to begin with an old joke of mine. I hope you noticed that I joined the applause. And if you know a little bit my work, you know that I use often this example. Why? Because I always distrusted the notion of totalitarianism. I am not trying to save communism in comparison with fascism that it is somehow better. I’m just saying that one should be very attentive to the distinctions between the two. What always fascinated me, I'm sorry if some of you know this example of mine, is this: Look at the old documentaries, you find all of them today on YouTube. When a fascist leader after finishing his speech receives applause, he just stands and receives the applause. A Stalinist leader always joins the applause. It's a totally different subjective position. The message of—and this doesn't make it any better—the message of Stalinist leader is: I am one of you. It's not really about me. We all serve the cause. You know where you can find this difference also? I was shocked and this is not again communist propaganda, on the contrary, I found this detail in a book very critical of Gulag. Simply the title is *Gulag: A History* by Anne Applebaum. You know that in Gulag, every year on Stalin's birthday, they gathered all the inmates who had to sign a telegram of congratulations to Comrade Stalin wishing him all the best and so on and so on. Of course, it was a ridiculous ritual. It was not serious. But the point is, why this ritual? Because just think about it: You cannot even imagine such a ritual in Nazism, to on Hitler’s birthday to gather all the inmates of Auschwitz and make them sign a congratulation message to Hitler. It’s meaningless. Another point: The Stalinist show trials, you know, where the tortured prisoners admit, yes, I collaborated in a plot to overthrow and kill Comrade Stalin. Such a thing doesn't—cannot happen, doesn't have any place in the Nazi or fascist universe. Hitler could have easily done the same: Select some visible important Jewish figures and claim there is a plot against and they—you torture them to confess. It’s meaningless. Why? Because—and that’s the tragedy, I’m not saying which one is better—because in Nazism, that’s the horror of it, apropos Jews, they are guilty directly for what they are. All you have to prove is that they are Jews. You don't have to prove what they plan to do and so on. On the other hand, what makes Stalinism so mysterious, almost, is that these Stalinist enforced confessions project onto the prisoners a strange duality. You are—and they used all these terrifying terms, the Stalinists—scum of the earth, shit, and so on. But at the same time, they admitted, acknowledged to every accused prisoner the right, as it were, to step on his, her shoulders and objectively pass a judgment on his, her own betrayal. For example, the great Stalinist trials. You have there Bukharin, I don't know, the big traitors for them. The prosecutor asked them: "How did you become an enemy of the people?" And as if from a totally objective position, they begin with: "Already as a young kid, I was educated by my parents to hate the working class and to enjoy exploiting them," whatever. But you see the paradox: You are pure shit, nobody, but at the same time you still participate in universal reason, reason from where you can see what shit you are. In this sense, Stalinism is much more than fascism, what the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, called dialectic of enlightenment. That is to say, the terrifying totalitarian, oppressive, however you call it, consequences, implications of enlightenment itself. But I don't want to get lost in all this. The reason I got lost in this little improvisation is just to let you know how I like to proceed: Take some small, insignificant detail. Oh my god, look Stalin's documentary, he stands up and joins the applause, Hitler doesn’t. And this is for me the proper Freudian reading, through this type of details. And then from this, you pass or you see the universal feature at its, at its—in its abstraction, precisely. But let's not get lost. Let me begin with our era. First, I planned a more theoretical lecture, pure philosophy. Then when Russell, to whom apart from all of you, the department, I am very grateful to be here, and I’m proud to be here, and I will tell you why: For the last two decades at least, this is my experience—I am not just kissing your ass here in a vulgar way—the—my experience is that the big universities, Princeton, Harvard, they are full of shit, basically. They think they are the center of the world. But not like Harvard thinks they are the focus, the center of liberalism. They are totally non-productive. Nothing interesting happens here. And I think in places like yours here, or where my good friend who is also here, Todd McGowan, in Vermont, from Vermont, and so on, in these apparently marginal places the true breakthroughs are taking place today. Okay, they—I’m not saying they necessarily do. What I’m saying is the space in these slightly marginal places is much more open to true discoveries, at least in humanities. So, it will be a little bit more mixed with politics and popular examples, just to make it possible to follow. I would like begin with a wonderful technological invention. I read about it, which I think serves as the best metaphor maybe for where we are today in ideology. In our age of ideological decay, when inconsistency is less and less considered a reproach, we don't have—we found an example of this inconsistency, of coincidence of the opposites, even in domains where one would least expect it. Like, is there anything more brutal and destructive than a direct military attack? Shooting at something. Yes, of course it is: chemical and nuclear attack. But for most of us, shooting at the enemy is still the paradigm of aggression. Should we then be surprised that the US military—and I’m not here engaged in US bashing, I think that today there are others who are even, in spite of Trump, worse than United States—but nonetheless, the US military is now searching for—this is real, what I will read you, but it's so incredible—searching for bullets which would be biodegradable and contain seeds for new plants to grow where the bullet hits the ground. Here is a report—forgive me this long quote: "Firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations, but after the job is done, the environment suffers. Not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, but they can also prove to be a hazard to local wildlife. Not to mention the impact that chemical residues, such as bullet metals and rust, can have on future plant growth and sustainability. The US military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue. Back in January the US Department of Justice sent out a public request for proposals to develop biodegradable ammunition loaded with specialized seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants. This effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components developed under this project. Animals should be able to consume the plants without any ill effects." End of quote. So, these bullets are first to be used for training. And then, I like this dream: Imagine bombing a country to make it green. You know, like, then full of plants, no waste left on the ground. The same structure—the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses—is widely visible in today's ideological landscape. Tell the figure of the financier and philanthropist—for example, I appreciate him otherwise—George Soros. Soros stands on the one hand for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation. But it's combined with its counter-agent: The humanitarian worry about catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Even his daily routine, I read, is marked by a self-annihilating counterpoint: Half of his working time is devoted to financial speculations, and the other half to humanitarian activities, such as providing finances for cultural and democratic progress, for writing essays and books, and so on. So, and I think the two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros. First, we have Gates, the cruel businessman who destroys or buys out competitors, aimed at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade to achieve his goals. Meanwhile, the other side is the greatest philanthropist in the history of humanity who asks—it's a quote: "What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?" and so on and so on. So again, I like this idea how an activity includes its own counterpoint. I hope you see the parallel. It's the same at bullets, which at the same time cause the greening. How—okay, Bill Gates can be a ruthless competitor, but at the same time, my god, he gives so much to humanitarian health, and so on and so on and so on. So, how does this strange, paradoxical situation, how does it condition our ideological thinking? You—your conclusion may be: "But wait a minute, today we live in an post-ideological era. It's pure cynicism. Who cares about ideology? And nobody really believes in it," and so on and so on. One has to be much more specific here. First, we should always remember that—because my idea is that we never lived in an era which is so truly, radically ideological than our era today, precisely because apparently nobody believes in it. But you know, belief is a very paradoxical structure. Allow me—even if some of you maybe know these old jokes of mine—allow me a brief improvisation. What does it mean to believe? There is one lesson from Marx—and I’m not trying to brainwash you, I’m very critical of Marx when where one needs to be. But in his well-known theory of commodity fetishism from the beginning of *Capital*, Marx discovered something that I think is more actual today than it ever was. His idea of fetishism is not the usual illusion, like on the market we are dealing in social exchange, but in our misperception we think money is something magical, we think we are in a domain of—we're in a magical domain, and so on. Marx is saying almost the exact opposite, if you read him closely. We are cynics today. We don't believe. But the belief is in our acts, in our activity. The fetishist illusion is not in our mind. In our mind we know there is nothing magical about money. Money just gives us part, access to part of the social product, and so on and so on. The illusion is in what we do, how we act in our social life, participating in the market exchange and so on and so on. If you allow me to repeat an old joke of mine which I think only in the United States I used, I would say, between and times. But it's too perfect not to use it. I'm sorry if you know it. It's a well-known—sorry, I have nervous tics and so on—it's a wonderful joke about Niels Bohr. You know, the Copenhagen guy. He had a house in the countryside, an old house to retreat in his holidays, for holidays and free weekends. And there, above the entrance to the house, was a horseshoe. I don't know how it is with you, but in Europe, a horseshoe is a superstitious sign. The idea is that it keeps the evil spirits from entering the house. So, that's the anecdote: A friend visited him, a fellow scientist, and asked him: "But wait a minute, you are a scientist. Why do you have this bullshit there? You know, like, do you believe in it?" Niels Bohr answers: "My god, I am not an idiot. Of course, I don't believe in it. I am a scientist." Then the friend insists: "But why do you have it there?" I hope you know the brilliant answer: "I have it there because, although I don't believe in it, I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's ideology today. Nobody has to believe. Trump doesn't believe, and so on. The illusion is in our acts. And I'm so sorry I don't have time to go in details here, because a whole theory of ideology can be developed out of, from this, based on what I think is maybe the single greatest achievement, contribution of American—by this I mean United States—culture to world civilization, at least in the 20th century. On your TV shows, you know this canned laughter. Laughter is part of the soundtrack. Can you imagine what a magic, wonderful mechanism this is? Be careful and observe how it works. Those primitive behaviorists are totally wrong, those who claim: "Oh, it's simply to automatically trigger your laughter." No, I read a good empirical analysis which claims over of people do not laugh. But it has this wonderful magic effect, at least—okay, maybe I am an idiot—with me: I come home in the evening, tired. I look at it, some stupid show, *Cheers*, whatever, *Friends*. And the TV set laughs for me, and at the end I am relaxed as if I have laughed. It's a wonderful mechanism that we know from so-called primitive societies. You know, from Tibet, I was always fascinated by those praying wheels or, you know, you write your prayer onto piece of paper, you put it in, you turn it around, and then it doesn't matter. You can think about sex, whatever. Objectively, you are praying. But they were maybe not so primitive. We are doing exactly the same thing. And again, the parallel between this and Marx is exactly in these displacements: How you can believe without believing. Subjectively, you can not believe, but objectively, in your activity, you believe. I think we should not underestimate the extent to which this functions today. People know that our votes are manipulated, that our justice is corrupted. Nonetheless, you act as if you believe in it. And what fascinated me already when I was young, still living in a communist country—a relatively liberal one but still a communist country—to what extent, at least in the last two decades of communism in ex-Yugoslavia, not believing in the official ideology was not only no problem, they didn't care if you believe it or not. They went a step further, and they even considered, if they detected that you take seriously the Yugoslav communist ideology, that we have a specific self-management socialism which is much better than Soviet bureaucratic socialism, it was considered dangerous to take it seriously. The idea was, if you take it seriously, you will soon notice that things are not really like that. The idea is, taking the official ideology seriously is a first step towards dissidence. So, the idea was, it's a wonderful example of an ideology which worked on condition that it was not taken seriously. Okay, I don't want to get lost here. I want to go to the next step of—sorry, of where we are in ideology today. To locate it, you should always bear in mind that the function of ideology today is no longer to paint an idealized image, like: "Oh, the world is not as bad as you think. There is hope. We have whatever." No, it's—it's not even to oppress opposition. Police does that, social control, etc. It's, as my friend Alain Badiou put it some time ago, it's to kill hope. What does he mean by this? I am shocked how when I debate with my enemies, for example, about ecology, threat of a new world war, or whatever, I noticed how I don't have to convince them that we are really—sorry for the expression—in deep shit. They go even further than me. They said: "Yes, we agree. Probably we are ecologically lost. It's just a matter of or years," and so on. Their message is just: "But if we try to organize and change it, it will be even better." So again, it's just to convince you that, bad as things are, we cannot really do anything. Next feature of ideology today is that—I think that—but don't be afraid, I have deep respect for Christianity. My god, I wrote three, four books on celebrating still the emancipatory dimension of Christianity. Of course, I define myself as an atheist Christian. What this means, it's not time today to explain. But you know Marx's well-known formula: "Religion is the opium of the people." I think that we have to correct Marx here a little bit. Yes, ideology is today the opium of the people. But we have today—I hope if you haven't heard already my joke, it's not a joke, I think it's very serious, that you will get it—the joke that we have two new opiums of the people today. I hope you will guess which are they: Opium and the people. On the one hand, we have the alt-right populism, which is precisely the people as the opium. Evoking the people, but in a false, ideological way. The people as some imaginary unity which then, in a half-fascist way, is always threatened by an external danger. It can be immigrants, the flow of immigrants, like now the panic almost in United States, at least in the right-wing media, of some poor immigrants from Honduras. You know, this idea of "we live in a privileged cupola" and, my god, there are leaks, they are penetrating it. So, we have—I will not go into it it's further, it's clearly—this today's populism as the new opium. And it precisely serves as an opium. Opium in the sense of presenting you with a fascinating image of the enemy and you—"Oh my god, that's it," external enemy, and so on. The second opium is the opium itself, of course, in a broader sense. From the lowest level, all the drugs that we are taking to calm ourselves, to whatever, to—to strengthen our desirable qualities, to slightly more serious ones, Xanax, Prozac, all those psycho-drugs, up to drugs as such, the real thing—crack, opium, whatever you want. And it's wonderful to study the logic here, the contradictory logic again. First, if you are overexcited, you take drugs, sedatives, to bring peace. Then, of course, too much of this brings depression, and again you have to take drugs to revitalize your desire or whatever. The sad thing about this—and statistics are here incredible in our, I mean it ironically, degenerate circles of academia—I read somewhere that at least to professors, assistants, students are already on some kind of this type of psycho-drugs. As if it's needed for our normal psychic reproduction to regulate it through—to regulate it through chemistry in some external, artificial way. So again, what’s the problem behind all this? The problem is, of course, that the ruling—if I may use this terribly sounding, old-fashioned Marxist term—that the ruling ideological hegemony, this let's call it broad liberal consensus, is breaking down. And that's for me the true importance of Donald Trump. Not Trump as such—of course, he is the mega enemy—but what his rise means. What was breaking down that he was able to come? This is why it's against the background of this breaking consensus that we have this obsession with, right-wingers and left-wingers, obsession with—the obsession with the topic of fake news. Traditional liberal critics like to point out three events which combined bring about what they like to call even the death of truth. First, it is the rise of religious and ethnic fundamentalisms. And its obvious, stiff political correctness. I am now reproducing there the centrist liberal view which disavow rational argumentation, and they ruthlessly manipulate data. Christian fundamentalists—it’s their term used positively—"lie for Jesus." Like, you can—are allowed to twist data if it serves our cause. But also politically correct leftists, at least in Europe, obfuscate news which show their preferred victims in a bad light. For example, in Europe—and I oppose to this precisely because I try to do something for the refugees—you know, the liberal media, when there is some problem with Muslim immigrants, some rapes, violence, and so on, they say: "Let's not publish it. Let's keep it down," and so on and so on, "let's ignore it." I think this is a catastrophe because then this is used by the right-wing media to say: "You see how liberals try to whitewash it," and paranoia against refugees and immigrants is exploding. So, this rise of different types of fundamentalisms is the first element of the death of truth. Then there are the new digital media which enable people to form communities defined by specific ideological interests. Communities where they can exchange news and opinions outside a unified public space, and where conspiracy theories and so on can flourish without constraints. Just look at the thriving neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic websites. And here, don't you think that you are the only bad guys. In Europe now, the situation is getting even worse. I found when I was just browsing the web, three, four well-organized 10-hour mini-series documentaries which, not between the lines implicitly but fully explicitly, rehabilitate Hitler. They bring together all these elements which echo even a little bit in Jordan Peterson and so on. First, this idea of "cultural Marxism." The idea that Frankfurt School and critical Western Marxism came to be because when communists realized in the early 20s that there will not be a communist revolution in Western Europe, they saw why this is happening. They saw that—that’s alt-right reading—they saw that Christianity is too strong among ordinary people and that you only can have successful revolution if you first destroy the moral foundations of a society. That’s why—and here comes the paranoia—Bolsheviks, Stalin and so on, directly through this detour of Argentina financed Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer, and so on, to destroy moral foundations of the West. And then this culminates today with political correctness, transgender, and so on and so on. So, again, it's horrifying to read it. And I don't know if you know this conspiracy theories, they are so crazy that they almost—but it's horrible, it's a dangerous game to play—they almost fascinate me. You know, for example, according to these theories, this idea that Middle East is in a conflict, Jews against Palestinians, they claim this is just a false conflict to—to seduce us. They claim that in reality they are working together to destroy Western Europe. What’s their proof? They claim: "Okay, immigrants are penetrating, Muslim immigrants, Europe." But they say, "this cannot happen by itself, this is not spontaneous." This is, incidentally, where those leftists who claim Palestinians are today’s Jews, or immigrants, the foreigner to be excluded, are wrong. Because Jews in the Nazi imaginary were by definition more or less invisible. They were the secret masters. While refugees are all too visible. We are obsessed with how they just walk with their—women, faces hidden—along our streets. So, they claim that they are too visible, so there must be a secret master behind them. And these are Jews, of course. So, they claim it's a shared Muslim-Jewish plot to destroy our civilization. What I’m saying is something very simple: It's that—and everybody knows it—what happened in the last years is that this kind of conspiracy theories were all the time here. But what’s so sad is that what was till now constrained to—this we go after a talk like this today to—to a bar, restaurant, and all the dirty talk, rumors you exchange, now it's becoming part of our public space. The third figure to blame for the so-called death of truth is the legacy—so they claim, liberals who bemoan the death of truth—of postmodern deconstructionism and its historicist relativism. They attack the claims that there is no objective truth valid for all, that every truth relies on a specific horizon and is rooted in a subjective standpoint that depends on power relations, and that the greatest ideology is precisely the claim that we can step out of it and look at things objectively. They claim opposite to this historicist deconstructionist relativism, as they read it, that we can look at things objectively, there is objective truth, and so on and so on. So, what’s my problem with this? And of course, the standard target here is—you remember that I always forget her name—Kellyanne Conway, something. That blonde lady who is one of Trump's assistants. She used the unfortunate—the unfortunate term "alternative facts." And they emphatically say: "No, there are no alternative facts. There may be alternative opinions, theories, but facts are facts. Holocaust happened," and so on and so on. But I think—I am not a relativist, absolutely not—but things are a little bit more complex here. The first thing to notice—I wonder if you will agree with me—in my perverse taste, I did read some of Holocaust revisionists, deniers. And correct me if I’m wrong: Not one of them argues as a postmodern deconstructionist. "No, your theory of Holocaust—who knows what happened—it’s just your discursive contract," and so on. Go—go to the—go to the YouTube and Google or whatever David Irving, maybe the best-known Holocaust revisionist. No, he strictly argues as the best British empiricist. They had so many ovens in Auschwitz and so on, and even if they were burning all the time, they could have burned maximum of Jews, not million, or whatever. So, that’s the first point, but it doesn't mean a lot. My basic point is that it's difficult to accept it, but data are a vast and impenetrable domain. And we have to accept—this does not mean some cheap relativism—that we always approach data from what philosophical hermeneutics calls a certain horizon of understanding, privileging some data and omitting others. All our histories are precisely that: Stories, a combination of selected data into consistent narratives. For example, I will give you a provocative example—don't be afraid, my conclusion will not be relativist. I can write a book and I can guarantee you, every detail will be—all data will be true, convincingly demonstrating that Hitler was justified in bemoaning the excessive influence of Jews in Germany in the late 20s and early 1930s. It's simply true. of lawyers in Germany, at least in big cities, were Jews. Jews were extraordinarily influential in cinema, as journalists, and so on and so on, in art, and so on and so on. So, again, all these data are true. And what should we do? If you say: "But we need other data which are more valid," and so on, you already need a certain theoretical frame to say this. And we should say this. That would be my point. Let me repeat another old story of mine that I like to repeat, I’m sorry if you heard it. I think it's extremely useful precisely today. This Lacan’s—Jacques Lacan's, our, my psychoanalytic teacher—paradoxical statement, very precise, that imagine—I'm sorry for the male chauvinist twist of this statement—imagine a husband who is pathologically jealous of his wife, obsessed with the idea that she is all the time sleeping around with other men and so on. And Lacan says something wonderful. He says: "His jealousy is pathological even if everything that he says is true about his wife." Why? Simply because the true question is not "Is his wife really like that?" The true question is—and therein resides the pathology: "Why does he need jealousy to sustain his self-identity?" And it's the same with Jews for the fascist. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, they are mostly telling lies. But I’m saying, the moment you accept debate at this level and ask: "Aren't Germans exaggerating a little bit? Jews are not really like that," you sell your soul to the devil. Because the point is not "Are Jews really like that?", the point is: "Why do the Nazis, in order to sustain their vision of society—organic community where antagonisms can explode only if they are imported by foreign bodies from outside—why do they need the figure of the Jew to maintain their vision of society?" So, that's my point here. The most efficient lies are lies with truth, lies with—which reproduce only factual data. I don't—I’m not saying by this that truth should be relativized. I mean, Holocaust happened. Absolutely. No doubt. I’m just saying that in a proper dialectical approach, it's wrong to oppose in this rude way the data and our interpretation of them. The correct horizon, conceptual field, and so on, from which we interpret data, is not just our subjective choice. It’s part of the object itself. This is a very Hegelian notion that how we read facts—it's not our subjectivity, it's inscribed into facts themselves. In what sense? Let's take precisely anti-Semitism. The way you interpret the presence of Jews in Germany in the late 1920s. Either you say: "Oh, these are foreigners who destroy our community," or you say: "Fascists construct them as threat to justify their dictatorship," and so on. This is precisely conditioned by the objective social situation of those who read, of those who read the data, those who read the data in this way. What this approach enables us, for example, apropos of anti-Semitism, is to say—and here I avoid relativism: Anti-Semitism for this reason is—and other racisms, don't be afraid I’m critical of Zionism and so on very much, I even probably they will prohibit me to enter Israel soon, I support in a very moderate way BDS—but I’m totally allergic because we do have it now in Europe real, old-fashioned anti-Semitism again. What I’m saying is that anti-Semitism is wrong a priori, formally, absolutely. You know what I’m saying? It's not a question of: "Okay, Hitler was a little bit right. Maybe there were too many Jews in culture, whatever in, in among journalists, but he exaggerated." No. No. He was absolutely wrong. In what sense? Wrong because—not because how he distorted facts—he was wrong even if he didn't, but he did distort facts. He was wrong because the way he used facts was in order to sustain a general lie about society, obfuscating its antagonisms and so on and so on. So, this is a very dialectical notion of truth, but not mystical, that—again, you can use correct data to serve a lie. And how do you measure—now you will tell me: "Okay, but I’m naive here. How do I know what is lie and what is not? Don't I reserve for myself the position of standing outside and 'oh, I know this is a lie'?" No, I can measure it immanently. If you analyze closely the Nazi edifice, you can see that their anti-Semitism is immanently a lie. Immanently in the sense that it obfuscates certain social antagonisms, and this obfuscation is inscribed into the very way they formulate anti-Semitism and so on and so on. So, my conclusion here, not to get lost here, is that—is that the idea that—and that’s the difficult thing for some partisans of positive, objective truth to accept. Another great lesson of Marxism—and in spite of all horrors that Marxism caused, I’m the first to admit it—this is another important lesson of Marxism actual today, is that interest and being interested or engaged and objective truth are not mutually exclusive. There are some truths—in plural—to which we have access only through an existential engagement. I will not lose time here with this too much, just to warn you, to let you know what I aim at, that paradoxically here—and I don't hold this as an argument neither against Marx or against religion—Marx reproduced here what I consider the most subversive things about an authentic religion. You know, for an authentic religion—and I think there is nothing obscurantist in this—it's wrong to say: "I respect God. I believe in God because I looked at the arguments and, my god, I was convinced that whichever religion you choose—Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism (which is not a religion)—they convinced me." No. As Kierkegaard put it nicely: The true religious position is not "My god, Christianity has the best arguments, I believe in it." It’s: "Only by being a Christian, I can understand correctly the arguments for Christianity." You will say I am dreaming here. No. I will give you another example. I hope you will like it because it's from our ordinary life. Doesn't love function like this? Yes, you can say—again, as a man, heterosexual, I'm sorry to adopt this automatic, male-chauvinist perspective—but I can say I fell in love with that lady because of, whatever, her nice smile, her witty character, her hair. Even as Trump said in obscene way about Ivanka, she has beautiful legs, look at her legs. Yes, true. But in authentic love, it’s not that you look around and then notice: "Oh, that lady has nice legs, nice smile, nice breasts. Let's make a list. None other, so I will fall in love." No. In a way, only once you are in love, you can enumerate reasons why, why you are in love. That's why there are other wonderful notions here of critique of ideology to be developed. That's why—that's why falling in love—did you notice this, it’s a wonderful temporality—never happens in a present time. You never can say: "Now I’m falling in love." If you do it, it’s a fake. It's—it’s always that, retroactively, all of a sudden you establish: "My god, I’m deep in it. I fall in love." And here, I characterize myself as a atheist Christian, fully endorsing this lesson of Christianity, that also in Freud you find it, that—here I’m against this ideology of free choice, you know—freedom at its fundamental, the most radical freedom, is not free choice in this cheap sense: I go to a—I go to a delicatessen store and, my god, strawberry cake, lemon cake, chocolate cake, I can make a choice. No. Free—the truly free choice is unconscious choice, as German idealists around Hegel, Schelling, and so on, already knew it. Free choice is a choice in a much more radical way. It's a choice of what you are, and it cannot be experienced as a free choice. That's why as, again, my friend with whom I have some problems but we are still friends, Alain Badiou, pointed out, referring to this beautiful short book on love—is translated, I think, in English—he’s a beautiful short book where he points out this wonderful occurrence of the verb to fall in love. It works, as far as I know, only in English and in French. Maybe it some others, in my language it doesn't work. *Tomber amoureux*, to fall in love. And he says: We have to take this quite literally. There is a surprise, a cut. You fall in love. All of a sudden, you find yourself in love. That's how things happen. So, not to get lost—let's go on. I think there is another thing in this that is false, in this panic about fake news, multiple truth, and so on. If you read closely those who worry about it, they repeatedly emphasize between the lines—but they do that—what they worry about is not so much that we don't have any truth, but that we no longer have a clear hegemonic idea, a basic social pact accepted by all across the board. So, their position of those who bemoan we need an obligatory social frame, it's a very cynical one, basically. What they are saying is what Goethe—the writer, *Faust*, and so on, a great conservative—said in German: "*Besser Unrecht als Unordnung.*" Better injustice than chaos. The idea is that we have to impose one version of ideology which will bring a certain stability, even if we all know it's a lie. And what is so enigmatic here with this one version and so on is that the consequences on—on—of it for democracy. Because as many intelligent observers have demonstrated, democracy is nice—competition, alternate pretenders to power, and so on—but democracy only works against the background of a whole set of agreements. Not only this obvious agreement: Whoever wins, I recognize it in spite of all the manipulations. But certain basic values have to be shared and so on and so on. When social, ideological, religious, whatever, differences between ways of life get too strong, you cannot play democracy. Democracy in the formal sense of majority wins have to be replaced by some type of negotiation and compromise. For example, today's conflict between Palestinians and Jews. You cannot make general elections there. It has to be—it has to be a compromise. And I think that this is why you, in the United States, are now, maybe in a—maybe in a difficult moment, a very difficult moment. I think that the differences now between alt-right, or the fundamentalist Trump people, and liberal democratic consensus, are growing so strong that you are reaching slowly the point of no compromise. Like, one has to win, or there is war or whatever. It will be, I warn you, less and less possible to resolve this in the good old formal democratic way. And this is clear to Trump. Did you notice how he systematically lays the foundations, prepares the public for an emergency state? Like, all the time he is making statements which basically hint that—like even now he gave some statements: "Beware of the false electoral lists," and so on and so on. You know, he is breaking this basic consensus which says—of democracy, which is: We can complain that it was manipulated and so on and so on. But we have to accept this unconditional rule: Whoever wins, he or she or they, they win. We can complain, but the result is here. Even if it's ambiguous. Although I am very critical of Bill Clinton, when it was that Florida scandal, you remember—Bush or Al Gore, a couple of tens of votes decided—Bill Clinton made, my god, this guy, I am very much against him, critical, but he has some spirit. You remember what he said? He said: "American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said." There is some spirit in this, no? No. So again, what I’m saying is that beneath this abstract problem, truth and so on—is there one truth?—we have to accept it that truth is not simply objective truth. What a well-functioning society needs—sorry, I will try to—oh my god, the time is running. Okay, I will condense it, so at least that I will finish with the word Beckett, or whatever. Okay, sorry, let me go on, let me go on. Nonetheless, I will try to condense it. I got lost. Okay. Know that we shouldn't speak about objective truth. We should speak about a basic customs, social pact, which is not only a pact at the level of explicit political rules. It's also a pact at the level which is much more important. And here, Trump I must say is almost a genius. A pact at the level of not only explicit rules, but a thick network of implicit rules of how you practice explicit rules. How you do it. Trump is a master not so much of breaking the explicit rules, but breaking this implicit customs which regulated the use of—remember the Supreme Kavanaugh Justice. If—and I think Obama was here too careful. Obama could have nominated much earlier. But he respected too much the rules, "no, we don't do it like that in the United States," and so on. Trump doesn't have problems with this. He breaks these implicit rules all the time. Okay, let's go on. So now I'm coming finally to my big topic. I will really, if you give me a little bit more time, try to condense it. The problem of abstraction. Because the lesson of what I was saying here—I go a little bit fast even if it's a rough jump now just to be able to squeeze in everything—is that the truth is not holistic, all sides and so on. What we have to accept is that the truth is always partial, one-sided. For example, with all my, again, support for Palestinians. But in Germany, It's to—it was totally false to say: "Okay, we have two partial extremes, the Nazis, the Jews. The truth must be somewhere in the middle, let's look at all." No. The only way to arrive at the truth, the horror what was happening there in Germany, is to look at it from the standpoint of victims. The truth was on their side. In this sense, we need abstraction. What do I need—I mean by abstraction? I go a little bit quickly here just to point it out. The first approach to abstraction: LGBT+. I'm sorry if some of you know this line of mine. Not only I am not opposed to it—I deeply support it—but maybe with a twist which, as some of you maybe know, brought me a lot of trouble, you know. I’m saying this: What is the function of that plus? LGBT+? As a speculative, Hegelian philosopher, I would have said I’m against this simple, empiricist use of it. Mostly, LGBT people—but not all, there are some very intelligent there with true speculative spirit—most of them take it at a simple, empirical level. Like, we have this, that, queer, butch, whatever, positions. But we have to be open, maybe we missed still some positions. So, plus means we are not excluding any others. All the others, the place should be kept open for them. But I think there is another, much more wonderful reading, proposed by some LGBT theory themselves, that what if we claim that plus—being a plus, that void, more—is a position in itself? You can be a plus. How? Precisely by radically questioning your position. Plus is the best definition of feminine hysteria. And hysteria is here not meant in this patriarchal way of arrogance, "oh, hysterical women, they don't know what they want." No. Hysteria is in authentic Freudian way the most subversive position. Not perversion. Perverts are always the observe—the, sorry, obverse secret side of power. Hysteria means what? You know Althusser’s, Louis Althusser, the old Marxist, cri—notion of ideological interpellation. Ideology works so that an authority or society tells you "you are this." Gives you a symbolic identity in the social edifice. You are a man, a woman, even homosexual, professor, socialist, alt-right, whatever. You are given an identity. And the basic hysterical question is: "Why am I what you are telling me that I am?" This doubt, directed not so much at objects but "who am I?", this lack of position of your own subjective identity. And I think it can be shown that this openness about your own position—I don't know what an object I am—which concretely in the case of hysteria means: "I see a desire out there. I am some kind of object of desire for others, but I don't know what they see in me." This uncertainty, ontological, is for Freud, Lacan and so on, constitutive of subjectivity. The moment you think you know what you are, you are not a subject, you are an object. And the model of this is a pervert. Perverts always know what they are and what they have to do. They don't question their—they don't question their position. So now, I have to, unfortunately, cut it short. Because what I wanted to show you was how this abstraction—this "you want something but you don't know what," this imperfection, ontological openness—is constitutive of subjectivity, as I already said, in the sense that it's not simply kind of a misrecognition and so on, but it's a positive constituent of subjectivity. Subject involves an abstraction. This is the limit of the standard, historicist approach. You know, like, always historicize, reduce an element to its historical constellation, specific constellation, and so on. But in authentic vision, even of Marx himself, not to mention many others, abstraction can also be a hysteric—sorry—historical fact. Abstraction is not just: There is out there full reality, and we getting to know it, abstract some features. Abstraction is a feature of reality itself. That's what also Marx means by—by bourgeois subjectivity. Marx is interested not only in the fact that abstraction of money rules our societies, but that in a developed, bourgeois society—and this is not just a critical point, for Marx, the only path to freedom is through this abstraction—for Marx, in bourgeois society, you yourself in your most intimate self-experience, relate to yourself as an abstract individual. And I tried to convince once Judith Butler—and I think I almost succeeded—that she is a good Cartesian. That the whole point in this sense that her entire—I use the naive term, it's not a good one—anthropology, is anthropology of—you know, this idea that there is no fixed identity of a subject, subject—subjectivity is constructed through repetitive, performative games and so on. This precisely presupposes that at the most basic level, you are not defined by certain features—positive features—but precisely by the fact that every feature is mediated. You are not that. That abstraction is described, for example, in the logic of desire. When objects of desire are no longer prescribed, like: It's normal to be heterosexual, whatever and so on, even if it's done in a more complex, psychoanalytical way. You search for women, but in the end you search for the image of your mother, or whatever those stupidities. Here, the object of desire is always prescribed. But the Freudian idea is: No, it's, again, objects, objects, objects plus. And you have this plus over all objects, particular, becomes for Lacan a specific object he calls object *petit a*, the object cause of desire. So, let me give you—give me, who are the boss, you are the boss, who is the boss. Can I get another good five minutes if—okay, okay. I somehow, I was ready to tell you if you would say no, I would say fuck off, throw me though, I mean yeah. This was a purely rhetorical question, you know yeah. Okay, so let me go on. You know, I will try to give you an idea of the power of this abstraction, which I used already in one of my books—you haven't read it probably. In a wonderful passage of Marcel Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time*, Marcel—not Proust, but the hero of the novel—speaks for the first time with his grandmother in Paris. And for the first time, he hears her voice torn out, abstracted from the totality of her body. You know, it’s—before, he thought: "My grandmother is a wonderful old being. Oh my god, what a wonderful figure." Now that he hears her voice alone, he is all of a sudden struck by the idea of what a vulgar, common voice this is. Before it was covered by her gentle appearance and so on. And now comes the true achievement. So first we have this violent abstraction: Voice alone, horror, dirty old lady, confused. Then, when he visits her in Paris, this abstracted voice colors his entire perception of her. There is no return to—oh, but this—to organic unity. "Oh, but this voice was just one of the features, now I see all of it." No. Her other features become vulgar, common to him. That’s how dialectical analysis does. The only totality that you get is a totality based on some—on some brutal, violent abstraction. Out of this abstraction, all other things appear in a new way. So, to amuse you a little bit, I tried to do the same thing with some movie stars. You know, this usual universality of a movie star is so-called "screen persona." It’s not what the actor really is—who cares. It’s also not the roles he plays, but through the roles a certain character emerges. Like, James Stewart plays a certain guy, and so on and so on. But I think a very productive procedure is to take a role which runs against the grain of a screen persona, and read it as the key to the actor’s actual persona. Then it spoils everything. For example, Henry Fonda. I don't know how much you know cinema history. One of his last roles, in the Sergio Leone western *Once Upon a Time in the West*, was, I think, his defining role. It was the first role of a truly bad guy, sadistic killer. But if you tear out this role and then look at his other roles through—the—you can then find arrogant, uncanny features, like when he plays Abraham Lincoln, the young Lincoln. You can see arrogance there, and so on. Or my example that I took—I hope I will not hurt you—is Tom Cruise. Did you see *Magnolia*? Where Cruise plays that extremely vulgar guy who wants to teach how to fuck them, that’s the only thing that matters. I claim, maybe this is the key, and you should read all his other, you know. I think this is again the proper dialectical approach. And now, if you allow me, just seriously, the finale. I will try to be very brief. The great writer of this type of violent abstraction is Samuel Beckett. What Beckett does is, on the one hand—it's worth reading it. I mean, I am really a partisan here. For me—I’m sorry to disappoint you—the enemy is James Joyce. Pretentious, boring idiot. Don't tell me that you read—yeah, sorry, okay. Don't tell me that you read *Finnegans Wake*. It's so pretentious. I mean, this idea of "for years people will have to"—and I know I am going here against Lacan. Okay, but let me convince you what I like about Beckett. For a partisan of standard Marxist notion of concrete analysis, the idea is Beckett is very anti-Marxist. He always abstracts from a concrete situation. But this abstraction is always inscribed into a concrete situation. Let me take—let me take a wonderful example. Take his *Malone Dies*. It's—I forgot the lady’s name, I am very sorry. But I recently read a book which is already was written by Emilie Morin, yes, is the lady, about Beckett and politics. And he conclusively demonstrates how Beckett was ex—extremely grounded in a historical experience. For example, *Malone Dies*. It's full of implicit references to a specific situation at the end of the World War II when all those refugees, wartime prisoners, were returning. All that situation and so on. And Beckett—but Beckett abstracts from it to a kind of a, almost, I would say, from all this idea of homeless refugees, the way they are treated bureaucratically and so on. I am almost tempted to say he is a materialist Platonist. What he stages is a kind of a pure Platonic idea of this terror of being displaced. And it's wrong to translate it back into historical constellation. Only through this move of abstraction do you get, in a way, the truth on it. This is why I wanted to conclude by—he—my—I think you mentioned it to your students already—his late play *Catastrophe*. It's a wonderful play. It's just from till minutes, however it is staged. It—it abstracts from, it condenses three levels. One level is about communist political terror. A—a—arrested guy is questioned and so on, brutally interrogated. But then, in the play itself, this is staged. What happens on the stage is a director giving precise instructions to the author and his secretary how to do it—"do it like this" and so on—reproducing the same terror. And then you have a third level—that’s how we should read the end of the play—where the—not the hero, the victim, the guy who is brutally interrogated—just raises his head and looks at us, the viewers. And Beckett explicitly said, that’s the ultimate image. That with many of these humanitarian events, solidarity with victims, performances for, the same basic terror structure is reproduced. This is Beckett at his greatest. He does not—he goes a step further into abstraction. Again, it’s not just this rather vulgar comparison that a brutal staging can also reproduce terror. It's precisely the falsity of our humanitarian sympathy, and so on and so on, that the same again—the same abstraction is reproduced. And I think what we need today, in all this human rights debates and so on and so on, is precisely this type of Beckettian abstraction. How our very humanitarian care, help, and so on, can—reproduce the same form of horror. Let me give you one example, and with this I will really conclude, of this horror. You know our media are now full of that—how do you pronounce the guy, no racist pun intended—Khashoggi, Jamal, the—Saudi Arabian guy killed in, no? You know what I find a true scandal in it? Not the fact that, of course, it’s terrifying what the Saudi Arabians did. But we get so excited about this one guy who was one of us, privileged, living in the United States, part of the royal family. You get in the media while Saudi Arabia is systematically destroying an entire country, Yemen now. Bombing children and so on. Oh, that’s—you don't talk about that. That’s the true scandal of it. It’s a totally displaced sympathy and so on. It’s a nightmare. It embodies again everything that is false. So, more Beckett. And to apologize myself, of course, I exaggerated. But nonetheless, the Beckett that I really like is, if you ask me, *Dubliners* and *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*. Those theological debates about Aquinas' aesthetics at the end of *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* are breathtaking. So I exaggerate a little bit. I apologize. When I take power, the people through me to spoke, you will not be sent to Gulag, I promise you, for loving Joyce. Thank you very much for your kind. Thanks Slavoj. Um, I—I was kind of disappointed that you actually did get to Beckett at the end, because I thought he was going to be in the real, we can't approach him— Getting to Beckett would have been a little bit too obvious Lacanian structure, you know, the other side. Oh, you know, sorry, I have to repeat—I’m sorry, you provoked me—another wonderful, vulgar joke that I often quote. I’m sorry if you know it, from Soviet Union. You know, that classical one about Lenin in Warsaw. You know, there is a big exhibition in Soviet Union and there is a painting: *Lenin in Warsaw*. And on the image you see Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, passionately making love to a young Komsomol member. And a shocked visitor said: "Oh my god, but where is Lenin here?" And the guide calmly answers: "Lenin is in Warsaw." No. That's why she can do this here. So, I would say Beckett, yes, like Beckett is in Warsaw, you know, and we can talk about it here. Sorry, yeah. Okay, we do have some time for—for a few questions. Um, and I'll ask Slavoj to try to be as brief as possible and—and— You know what you will get from me? I like to provoke this: I will give you this Buddhist wisdom answers, like clap with one hand, or whatever. So, okay, sorry, let's go on. I have—I have this—I have this gavel here so that if you go on too—this I actually got this in Ljubljana, so this has some sort of—this will have some sort of essentialistic qualities. I bang this and then— Old joke about me is that the ideal seat for me would have been—you saw James Bond, *Goldfinger*. You remember that car with the red button. And like, you need red button if I talk too much, you press it and I promise to— Okay. Um, we have a mic in—in the center. So, um, for whoever wants to ask the first question. Uh, we have questions? Okay, um, right here. Could you please go to the mic? And then Ruth will be next. Just so everyone can—can hear and so Slavoj can hear the question. You mentioned cultural Marxism before. Yeah. Um, the alt-right loves to—loves to use that term. Yeah. I understand you believe it’s a conspiracy theory—I do too, to a certain extent—no? Okay. I—you know, I understand you believe it’s a conspiracy theory to a certain extent. You know, I believe that too. But I'm just kind of wondering: The whole concept with identity politics, intersectionality, that all comes under cultural Marxism, basically. Do you find anything positive in any of those concepts? Yes, but first, what I disagree with is the very concept of, I think, cultural—you need—this idea that they wanted to undermine paternal authority and so on. Read the great studies by Adorno, Horkheimer. Like, Horkheimer wrote in late 30s a text on *Authority and Family*. And his whole point is not destroy it. He makes a wonderfully refined point that—it's a very deep insight in Adorno also—that totalitarian structures like Nazi—Nazi—Hitler is not a paternal figure. And he openly says that a strong paternal figure can give to young boy a kind of a moral support to resist social oppression, to resist the totalitarian reader. So, Adorno and Horkheimer are here much more refined, and you absolutely cannot push them in this direction. And also, on the other hand, let's be serious. Uh, in all real socialist, in all communist countries—I mean, they were much—they were much more pro-family, to put it like that. And it was not only in the sense of "we do it here but let the West be decadent" and so on. You know what shocked me so much? I am old enough, unfortunately, I remember it—it's a bad example—in the late 50s when the true Elvis Presley popularity exploded. In United States, some conservatives were shocked that all those movement with hips, this is return to barbarity and so on. But this was the reaction also of Soviet Union. They wrote in a total panic: "Elvis Presley means we are returning to animality, end of civilization," and so on and so on. So, I am also very critical of some aspects of LGBT and so on and so on. But I think that now—okay, I will give you an answer in a Marxist jargon. What I dislike in it was precisely that it's not really Marxism. It’s a petit bourgeois obstacle against Marxism. I think that political correctness is for me a typical petit bourgeois excess which really—uh—really tries to continue to obfuscate economic issues. And in this sense—I’m simplifying it and I will stop, not to lose time—I think that cultural Marxism—if by this we mean the culturalization of the left from late 80s onwards. This is what enabled Trump. We all know, and in Europe, because the left—this postmodern left, which is terribly afraid to be connected with real working class. They like minorities, they like whatever—uh—Third World nations and so on. And—uh—they, of course, as we all know, they neglected your own working class. That's why today—and it's a tragedy in Europe—for example, which European party did most for actual working class in Europe now? It’s horror. The—uh—Law and Justice, the Polish arch-conservative—uh—Kaczynski, the brothers, one died, party where precisely on behalf of right-wing populism, they did things that no moderate leftist today dare to do. They lowered retirement age—age. They expanded healthcare and so on. They—they made better credits for students and so on and so on. So, in this sense, for me, it was—I support them totally—but it was an obscenity of—do you remember two, three week, two, three month between before Trump was elected, the big topic in left-liberal media was how to solve the problem of toilets with—with transgender people? Do we need unite toilet? Do we need more toilets and so on and so on? I think that this total neglect of concerns of ordinary working people was a catastrophe. And that's why I like Bernie Sanders, because many intelligent people got it. He succeeded in mobilizing for the left those who otherwise would not have voted for Hillary, but maybe even for—for Donald Trump. So, okay, I didn't answer your question, but you see the— That’s great. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Um, actually, wait. So Ruth was going to—you—okay. Um, but before I forget, um, immediately after the Q&A, there's the bookstore is outside, they're selling books and Slavoj will—will sign—will sign your book. Um, just— Whatever you prefer for illiterate people: A cross or a finger. Okay, sorry, please. Okay. Please. Lady is there—wait, please. Hi. Can you talk a bit about the linkages between the rise of white nationalism in the United States and Europe? And also just to make a point—just to make a point about the left in the US: They're not only focused on minorities because many minorities are also in the working class. So they are— No, no, I totally support them. What I will say is this: There is only one implicit aspect of white supremacism—suprematism that I—I wouldn't say I like it, but that I find of use. When they claim—we should take them more literally than they take themselves—when they say: "There are other minorities, we are also an endangered minority." I know how they cheat here. I know. But that would be for me the true solution: To treat white men and so on as just another minority. I find much more dangerous the liberal stance of—I often noticed, and here it's another problem of abstraction—how false, you know, many left-liberals have this position: The further you are from white male identity, the more you are allowed to—I simplify analysis very much
I will begin by transcribing the requested audio of Slavoj Zizek's lecture and the following Q&A session verbatim. I want to begin with an old joke of mine. I hope you noticed that I joined the applause. And if you know a little bit my work, you know that I use often this example. Why? Because I always distrusted the notion of totalitarianism. I am not trying to save communism in comparison with fascism that it is somehow better. I’m just saying that one should be very attentive to the distinctions between the two. What always fascinated me, I'm sorry if some of you know this example of mine, is this: Look at the old documentaries, you find all of them today on YouTube. When a fascist leader after finishing his speech receives applause, he just stands and receives the applause. A Stalinist leader always joins the applause. It's a totally different subjective position. The message of—and this doesn't make it any better—the message of Stalinist leader is: I am one of you. It's not really about me. We all serve the cause. You know where you can find this difference also? I was shocked and this is not again communist propaganda, on the contrary, I found this detail in a book very critical of Gulag. Simply the title is *Gulag: A History* by Anne Applebaum. You know that in Gulag, every year on Stalin's birthday, they gathered all the inmates who had to sign a telegram of congratulations to Comrade Stalin wishing him all the best and so on and so on. Of course, it was a ridiculous ritual. It was not serious. But the point is, why this ritual? Because just think about it: You cannot even imagine such a ritual in Nazism, to on Hitler’s birthday to gather all the inmates of Auschwitz and make them sign a congratulation message to Hitler. It’s meaningless. Another point: The Stalinist show trials, you know, where the tortured prisoners admit, yes, I collaborated in a plot to overthrow and kill Comrade Stalin. Such a thing doesn't—cannot happen, doesn't have any place in the Nazi or fascist universe. Hitler could have easily done the same: Select some visible important Jewish figures and claim there is a plot against and they—you torture them to confess. It’s meaningless. Why? Because—and that’s the tragedy, I’m not saying which one is better—because in Nazism, that’s the horror of it, apropos Jews, they are guilty directly for what they are. All you have to prove is that they are Jews. You don't have to prove what they plan to do and so on. On the other hand, what makes Stalinism so mysterious, almost, is that these Stalinist enforced confessions project onto the prisoners a strange duality. You are—and they used all these terrifying terms, the Stalinists—scum of the earth, shit, and so on. But at the same time, they admitted, acknowledged to every accused prisoner the right, as it were, to step on his, her shoulders and objectively pass a judgment on his, her own betrayal. For example, the great Stalinist trials. You have there Bukharin, I don't know, the big traitors for them. The prosecutor asked them: "How did you become an enemy of the people?" And as if from a totally objective position, they begin with: "Already as a young kid, I was educated by my parents to hate the working class and to enjoy exploiting them," whatever. But you see the paradox: You are pure shit, nobody, but at the same time you still participate in universal reason, reason from where you can see what shit you are. In this sense, Stalinism is much more than fascism, what the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, called dialectic of enlightenment. That is to say, the terrifying totalitarian, oppressive, however you call it, consequences, implications of enlightenment itself. But I don't want to get lost in all this. The reason I got lost in this little improvisation is just to let you know how I like to proceed: Take some small, insignificant detail. Oh my god, look Stalin's documentary, he stands up and joins the applause, Hitler doesn’t. And this is for me the proper Freudian reading, through this type of details. And then from this, you pass or you see the universal feature at its, at its—in its abstraction, precisely. But let's not get lost. Let me begin with our era. First, I planned a more theoretical lecture, pure philosophy. Then when Russell, to whom apart from all of you, the department, I am very grateful to be here, and I’m proud to be here, and I will tell you why: For the last two decades at least, this is my experience—I am not just kissing your ass here in a vulgar way—the—my experience is that the big universities, Princeton, Harvard, they are full of shit, basically. They think they are the center of the world. But not like Harvard thinks they are the focus, the center of liberalism. They are totally non-productive. Nothing interesting happens here. And I think in places like yours here, or where my good friend who is also here, Todd McGowan, in Vermont, from Vermont, and so on, in these apparently marginal places the true breakthroughs are taking place today. Okay, they—I’m not saying they necessarily do. What I’m saying is the space in these slightly marginal places is much more open to true discoveries, at least in humanities. So, it will be a little bit more mixed with politics and popular examples, just to make it possible to follow. I would like begin with a wonderful technological invention. I read about it, which I think serves as the best metaphor maybe for where we are today in ideology. In our age of ideological decay, when inconsistency is less and less considered a reproach, we don't have—we found an example of this inconsistency, of coincidence of the opposites, even in domains where one would least expect it. Like, is there anything more brutal and destructive than a direct military attack? Shooting at something. Yes, of course it is: chemical and nuclear attack. But for most of us, shooting at the enemy is still the paradigm of aggression. Should we then be surprised that the US military—and I’m not here engaged in US bashing, I think that today there are others who are even, in spite of Trump, worse than United States—but nonetheless, the US military is now searching for—this is real, what I will read you, but it's so incredible—searching for bullets which would be biodegradable and contain seeds for new plants to grow where the bullet hits the ground. Here is a report—forgive me this long quote: "Firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations, but after the job is done, the environment suffers. Not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, but they can also prove to be a hazard to local wildlife. Not to mention the impact that chemical residues, such as bullet metals and rust, can have on future plant growth and sustainability. The US military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue. Back in January the US Department of Justice sent out a public request for proposals to develop biodegradable ammunition loaded with specialized seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants. This effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components developed under this project. Animals should be able to consume the plants without any ill effects." End of quote. So, these bullets are first to be used for training. And then, I like this dream: Imagine bombing a country to make it green. You know, like, then full of plants, no waste left on the ground. The same structure—the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses—is widely visible in today's ideological landscape. Tell the figure of the financier and philanthropist—for example, I appreciate him otherwise—George Soros. Soros stands on the one hand for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation. But it's combined with its counter-agent: The humanitarian worry about catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Even his daily routine, I read, is marked by a self-annihilating counterpoint: Half of his working time is devoted to financial speculations, and the other half to humanitarian activities, such as providing finances for cultural and democratic progress, for writing essays and books, and so on. So, and I think the two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros. First, we have Gates, the cruel businessman who destroys or buys out competitors, aimed at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade to achieve his goals. Meanwhile, the other side is the greatest philanthropist in the history of humanity who asks—it's a quote: "What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?" and so on and so on. So again, I like this idea how an activity includes its own counterpoint. I hope you see the parallel. It's the same at bullets, which at the same time cause the greening. How—okay, Bill Gates can be a ruthless competitor, but at the same time, my god, he gives so much to humanitarian health, and so on and so on and so on. So, how does this strange, paradoxical situation, how does it condition our ideological thinking? You—your conclusion may be: "But wait a minute, today we live in an post-ideological era. It's pure cynicism. Who cares about ideology? And nobody really believes in it," and so on and so on. One has to be much more specific here. First, we should always remember that—because my idea is that we never lived in an era which is so truly, radically ideological than our era today, precisely because apparently nobody believes in it. But you know, belief is a very paradoxical structure. Allow me—even if some of you maybe know these old jokes of mine—allow me a brief improvisation. What does it mean to believe? There is one lesson from Marx—and I’m not trying to brainwash you, I’m very critical of Marx when where one needs to be. But in his well-known theory of commodity fetishism from the beginning of *Capital*, Marx discovered something that I think is more actual today than it ever was. His idea of fetishism is not the usual illusion, like on the market we are dealing in social exchange, but in our misperception we think money is something magical, we think we are in a domain of—we're in a magical domain, and so on. Marx is saying almost the exact opposite, if you read him closely. We are cynics today. We don't believe. But the belief is in our acts, in our activity. The fetishist illusion is not in our mind. In our mind we know there is nothing magical about money. Money just gives us part, access to part of the social product, and so on and so on. The illusion is in what we do, how we act in our social life, participating in the market exchange and so on and so on. If you allow me to repeat an old joke of mine which I think only in the United States I used, I would say, between and times. But it's too perfect not to use it. I'm sorry if you know it. It's a well-known—sorry, I have nervous tics and so on—it's a wonderful joke about Niels Bohr. You know, the Copenhagen guy. He had a house in the countryside, an old house to retreat in his holidays, for holidays and free weekends. And there, above the entrance to the house, was a horseshoe. I don't know how it is with you, but in Europe, a horseshoe is a superstitious sign. The idea is that it keeps the evil spirits from entering the house. So, that's the anecdote: A friend visited him, a fellow scientist, and asked him: "But wait a minute, you are a scientist. Why do you have this bullshit there? You know, like, do you believe in it?" Niels Bohr answers: "My god, I am not an idiot. Of course, I don't believe in it. I am a scientist." Then the friend insists: "But why do you have it there?" I hope you know the brilliant answer: "I have it there because, although I don't believe in it, I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's ideology today. Nobody has to believe. Trump doesn't believe, and so on. The illusion is in our acts. And I'm so sorry I don't have time to go in details here, because a whole theory of ideology can be developed out of, from this, based on what I think is maybe the single greatest achievement, contribution of American—by this I mean United States—culture to world civilization, at least in the 20th century. On your TV shows, you know this canned laughter. Laughter is part of the soundtrack. Can you imagine what a magic, wonderful mechanism this is? Be careful and observe how it works. Those primitive behaviorists are totally wrong, those who claim: "Oh, it's simply to automatically trigger your laughter." No, I read a good empirical analysis which claims over of people do not laugh. But it has this wonderful magic effect, at least—okay, maybe I am an idiot—with me: I come home in the evening, tired. I look at it, some stupid show, *Cheers*, whatever, *Friends*. And the TV set laughs for me, and at the end I am relaxed as if I have laughed. It's a wonderful mechanism that we know from so-called primitive societies. You know, from Tibet, I was always fascinated by those praying wheels or, you know, you write your prayer onto piece of paper, you put it in, you turn it around, and then it doesn't matter. You can think about sex, whatever. Objectively, you are praying. But they were maybe not so primitive. We are doing exactly the same thing. And again, the parallel between this and Marx is exactly in these displacements: How you can believe without believing. Subjectively, you can not believe, but objectively, in your activity, you believe. I think we should not underestimate the extent to which this functions today. People know that our votes are manipulated, that our justice is corrupted. Nonetheless, you act as if you believe in it. And what fascinated me already when I was young, still living in a communist country—a relatively liberal one but still a communist country—to what extent, at least in the last two decades of communism in ex-Yugoslavia, not believing in the official ideology was not only no problem, they didn't care if you believe it or not. They went a step further, and they even considered, if they detected that you take seriously the Yugoslav communist ideology, that we have a specific self-management socialism which is much better than Soviet bureaucratic socialism, it was considered dangerous to take it seriously. The idea was, if you take it seriously, you will soon notice that things are not really like that. The idea is, taking the official ideology seriously is a first step towards dissidence. So, the idea was, it's a wonderful example of an ideology which worked on condition that it was not taken seriously. Okay, I don't want to get lost here. I want to go to the next step of—sorry, of where we are in ideology today. To locate it, you should always bear in mind that the function of ideology today is no longer to paint an idealized image, like: "Oh, the world is not as bad as you think. There is hope. We have whatever." No, it's—it's not even to oppress opposition. Police does that, social control, etc. It's, as my friend Alain Badiou put it some time ago, it's to kill hope. What does he mean by this? I am shocked how when I debate with my enemies, for example, about ecology, threat of a new world war, or whatever, I noticed how I don't have to convince them that we are really—sorry for the expression—in deep shit. They go even further than me. They said: "Yes, we agree. Probably we are ecologically lost. It's just a matter of or years," and so on. Their message is just: "But if we try to organize and change it, it will be even better." So again, it's just to convince you that, bad as things are, we cannot really do anything. Next feature of ideology today is that—I think that—but don't be afraid, I have deep respect for Christianity. My god, I wrote three, four books on celebrating still the emancipatory dimension of Christianity. Of course, I define myself as an atheist Christian. What this means, it's not time today to explain. But you know Marx's well-known formula: "Religion is the opium of the people." I think that we have to correct Marx here a little bit. Yes, ideology is today the opium of the people. But we have today—I hope if you haven't heard already my joke, it's not a joke, I think it's very serious, that you will get it—the joke that we have two new opiums of the people today. I hope you will guess which are they: Opium and the people. On the one hand, we have the alt-right populism, which is precisely the people as the opium. Evoking the people, but in a false, ideological way. The people as some imaginary unity which then, in a half-fascist way, is always threatened by an external danger. It can be immigrants, the flow of immigrants, like now the panic almost in United States, at least in the right-wing media, of some poor immigrants from Honduras. You know, this idea of "we live in a privileged cupola" and, my god, there are leaks, they are penetrating it. So, we have—I will not go into it it's further, it's clearly—this today's populism as the new opium. And it precisely serves as an opium. Opium in the sense of presenting you with a fascinating image of the enemy and you—"Oh my god, that's it," external enemy, and so on. The second opium is the opium itself, of course, in a broader sense. From the lowest level, all the drugs that we are taking to calm ourselves, to whatever, to—to strengthen our desirable qualities, to slightly more serious ones, Xanax, Prozac, all those psycho-drugs, up to drugs as such, the real thing—crack, opium, whatever you want. And it's wonderful to study the logic here, the contradictory logic again. First, if you are overexcited, you take drugs, sedatives, to bring peace. Then, of course, too much of this brings depression, and again you have to take drugs to revitalize your desire or whatever. The sad thing about this—and statistics are here incredible in our, I mean it ironically, degenerate circles of academia—I read somewhere that at least to professors, assistants, students are already on some kind of this type of psycho-drugs. As if it's needed for our normal psychic reproduction to regulate it through—to regulate it through chemistry in some external, artificial way. So again, what’s the problem behind all this? The problem is, of course, that the ruling—if I may use this terribly sounding, old-fashioned Marxist term—that the ruling ideological hegemony, this let's call it broad liberal consensus, is breaking down. And that's for me the true importance of Donald Trump. Not Trump as such—of course, he is the mega enemy—but what his rise means. What was breaking down that he was able to come? This is why it's against the background of this breaking consensus that we have this obsession with, right-wingers and left-wingers, obsession with—the obsession with the topic of fake news. Traditional liberal critics like to point out three events which combined bring about what they like to call even the death of truth. First, it is the rise of religious and ethnic fundamentalisms. And its obvious, stiff political correctness. I am now reproducing there the centrist liberal view which disavow rational argumentation, and they ruthlessly manipulate data. Christian fundamentalists—it’s their term used positively—"lie for Jesus." Like, you can—are allowed to twist data if it serves our cause. But also politically correct leftists, at least in Europe, obfuscate news which show their preferred victims in a bad light. For example, in Europe—and I oppose to this precisely because I try to do something for the refugees—you know, the liberal media, when there is some problem with Muslim immigrants, some rapes, violence, and so on, they say: "Let's not publish it. Let's keep it down," and so on and so on, "let's ignore it." I think this is a catastrophe because then this is used by the right-wing media to say: "You see how liberals try to whitewash it," and paranoia against refugees and immigrants is exploding. So, this rise of different types of fundamentalisms is the first element of the death of truth. Then there are the new digital media which enable people to form communities defined by specific ideological interests. Communities where they can exchange news and opinions outside a unified public space, and where conspiracy theories and so on can flourish without constraints. Just look at the thriving neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic websites. And here, don't you think that you are the only bad guys. In Europe now, the situation is getting even worse. I found when I was just browsing the web, three, four well-organized 10-hour mini-series documentaries which, not between the lines implicitly but fully explicitly, rehabilitate Hitler. They bring together all these elements which echo even a little bit in Jordan Peterson and so on. First, this idea of "cultural Marxism." The idea that Frankfurt School and critical Western Marxism came to be because when communists realized in the early 20s that there will not be a communist revolution in Western Europe, they saw why this is happening. They saw that—that’s alt-right reading—they saw that Christianity is too strong among ordinary people and that you only can have successful revolution if you first destroy the moral foundations of a society. That’s why—and here comes the paranoia—Bolsheviks, Stalin and so on, directly through this detour of Argentina financed Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer, and so on, to destroy moral foundations of the West. And then this culminates today with political correctness, transgender, and so on and so on. So, again, it's horrifying to read it. And I don't know if you know this conspiracy theories, they are so crazy that they almost—but it's horrible, it's a dangerous game to play—they almost fascinate me. You know, for example, according to these theories, this idea that Middle East is in a conflict, Jews against Palestinians, they claim this is just a false conflict to—to seduce us. They claim that in reality they are working together to destroy Western Europe. What’s their proof? They claim: "Okay, immigrants are penetrating, Muslim immigrants, Europe." But they say, "this cannot happen by itself, this is not spontaneous." This is, incidentally, where those leftists who claim Palestinians are today’s Jews, or immigrants, the foreigner to be excluded, are wrong. Because Jews in the Nazi imaginary were by definition more or less invisible. They were the secret masters. While refugees are all too visible. We are obsessed with how they just walk with their—women, faces hidden—along our streets. So, they claim that they are too visible, so there must be a secret master behind them. And these are Jews, of course. So, they claim it's a shared Muslim-Jewish plot to destroy our civilization. What I’m saying is something very simple: It's that—and everybody knows it—what happened in the last years is that this kind of conspiracy theories were all the time here. But what’s so sad is that what was till now constrained to—this we go after a talk like this today to—to a bar, restaurant, and all the dirty talk, rumors you exchange, now it's becoming part of our public space. The third figure to blame for the so-called death of truth is the legacy—so they claim, liberals who bemoan the death of truth—of postmodern deconstructionism and its historicist relativism. They attack the claims that there is no objective truth valid for all, that every truth relies on a specific horizon and is rooted in a subjective standpoint that depends on power relations, and that the greatest ideology is precisely the claim that we can step out of it and look at things objectively. They claim opposite to this historicist deconstructionist relativism, as they read it, that we can look at things objectively, there is objective truth, and so on and so on. So, what’s my problem with this? And of course, the standard target here is—you remember that I always forget her name—Kellyanne Conway, something. That blonde lady who is one of Trump's assistants. She used the unfortunate—the unfortunate term "alternative facts." And they emphatically say: "No, there are no alternative facts. There may be alternative opinions, theories, but facts are facts. Holocaust happened," and so on and so on. But I think—I am not a relativist, absolutely not—but things are a little bit more complex here. The first thing to notice—I wonder if you will agree with me—in my perverse taste, I did read some of Holocaust revisionists, deniers. And correct me if I’m wrong: Not one of them argues as a postmodern deconstructionist. "No, your theory of Holocaust—who knows what happened—it’s just your discursive contract," and so on. Go—go to the—go to the YouTube and Google or whatever David Irving, maybe the best-known Holocaust revisionist. No, he strictly argues as the best British empiricist. They had so many ovens in Auschwitz and so on, and even if they were burning all the time, they could have burned maximum of Jews, not million, or whatever. So, that’s the first point, but it doesn't mean a lot. My basic point is that it's difficult to accept it, but data are a vast and impenetrable domain. And we have to accept—this does not mean some cheap relativism—that we always approach data from what philosophical hermeneutics calls a certain horizon of understanding, privileging some data and omitting others. All our histories are precisely that: Stories, a combination of selected data into consistent narratives. For example, I will give you a provocative example—don't be afraid, my conclusion will not be relativist. I can write a book and I can guarantee you, every detail will be—all data will be true, convincingly demonstrating that Hitler was justified in bemoaning the excessive influence of Jews in Germany in the late 20s and early 1930s. It's simply true. of lawyers in Germany, at least in big cities, were Jews. Jews were extraordinarily influential in cinema, as journalists, and so on and so on, in art, and so on and so on. So, again, all these data are true. And what should we do? If you say: "But we need other data which are more valid," and so on, you already need a certain theoretical frame to say this. And we should say this. That would be my point. Let me repeat another old story of mine that I like to repeat, I’m sorry if you heard it. I think it's extremely useful precisely today. This Lacan’s—Jacques Lacan's, our, my psychoanalytic teacher—paradoxical statement, very precise, that imagine—I'm sorry for the male chauvinist twist of this statement—imagine a husband who is pathologically jealous of his wife, obsessed with the idea that she is all the time sleeping around with other men and so on. And Lacan says something wonderful. He says: "His jealousy is pathological even if everything that he says is true about his wife." Why? Simply because the true question is not "Is his wife really like that?" The true question is—and therein resides the pathology: "Why does he need jealousy to sustain his self-identity?" And it's the same with Jews for the fascist. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, they are mostly telling lies. But I’m saying, the moment you accept debate at this level and ask: "Aren't Germans exaggerating a little bit? Jews are not really like that," you sell your soul to the devil. Because the point is not "Are Jews really like that?", the point is: "Why do the Nazis, in order to sustain their vision of society—organic community where antagonisms can explode only if they are imported by foreign bodies from outside—why do they need the figure of the Jew to maintain their vision of society?" So, that's my point here. The most efficient lies are lies with truth, lies with—which reproduce only factual data. I don't—I’m not saying by this that truth should be relativized. I mean, Holocaust happened. Absolutely. No doubt. I’m just saying that in a proper dialectical approach, it's wrong to oppose in this rude way the data and our interpretation of them. The correct horizon, conceptual field, and so on, from which we interpret data, is not just our subjective choice. It’s part of the object itself. This is a very Hegelian notion that how we read facts—it's not our subjectivity, it's inscribed into facts themselves. In what sense? Let's take precisely anti-Semitism. The way you interpret the presence of Jews in Germany in the late 1920s. Either you say: "Oh, these are foreigners who destroy our community," or you say: "Fascists construct them as threat to justify their dictatorship," and so on. This is precisely conditioned by the objective social situation of those who read, of those who read the data, those who read the data in this way. What this approach enables us, for example, apropos of anti-Semitism, is to say—and here I avoid relativism: Anti-Semitism for this reason is—and other racisms, don't be afraid I’m critical of Zionism and so on very much, I even probably they will prohibit me to enter Israel soon, I support in a very moderate way BDS—but I’m totally allergic because we do have it now in Europe real, old-fashioned anti-Semitism again. What I’m saying is that anti-Semitism is wrong a priori, formally, absolutely. You know what I’m saying? It's not a question of: "Okay, Hitler was a little bit right. Maybe there were too many Jews in culture, whatever in, in among journalists, but he exaggerated." No. No. He was absolutely wrong. In what sense? Wrong because—not because how he distorted facts—he was wrong even if he didn't, but he did distort facts. He was wrong because the way he used facts was in order to sustain a general lie about society, obfuscating its antagonisms and so on and so on. So, this is a very dialectical notion of truth, but not mystical, that—again, you can use correct data to serve a lie. And how do you measure—now you will tell me: "Okay, but I’m naive here. How do I know what is lie and what is not? Don't I reserve for myself the position of standing outside and 'oh, I know this is a lie'?" No, I can measure it immanently. If you analyze closely the Nazi edifice, you can see that their anti-Semitism is immanently a lie. Immanently in the sense that it obfuscates certain social antagonisms, and this obfuscation is inscribed into the very way they formulate anti-Semitism and so on and so on. So, my conclusion here, not to get lost here, is that—is that the idea that—and that’s the difficult thing for some partisans of positive, objective truth to accept. Another great lesson of Marxism—and in spite of all horrors that Marxism caused, I’m the first to admit it—this is another important lesson of Marxism actual today, is that interest and being interested or engaged and objective truth are not mutually exclusive. There are some truths—in plural—to which we have access only through an existential engagement. I will not lose time here with this too much, just to warn you, to let you know what I aim at, that paradoxically here—and I don't hold this as an argument neither against Marx or against religion—Marx reproduced here what I consider the most subversive things about an authentic religion. You know, for an authentic religion—and I think there is nothing obscurantist in this—it's wrong to say: "I respect God. I believe in God because I looked at the arguments and, my god, I was convinced that whichever religion you choose—Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism (which is not a religion)—they convinced me." No. As Kierkegaard put it nicely: The true religious position is not "My god, Christianity has the best arguments, I believe in it." It’s: "Only by being a Christian, I can understand correctly the arguments for Christianity." You will say I am dreaming here. No. I will give you another example. I hope you will like it because it's from our ordinary life. Doesn't love function like this? Yes, you can say—again, as a man, heterosexual, I'm sorry to adopt this automatic, male-chauvinist perspective—but I can say I fell in love with that lady because of, whatever, her nice smile, her witty character, her hair. Even as Trump said in obscene way about Ivanka, she has beautiful legs, look at her legs. Yes, true. But in authentic love, it’s not that you look around and then notice: "Oh, that lady has nice legs, nice smile, nice breasts. Let's make a list. None other, so I will fall in love." No. In a way, only once you are in love, you can enumerate reasons why, why you are in love. That's why there are other wonderful notions here of critique of ideology to be developed. That's why—that's why falling in love—did you notice this, it’s a wonderful temporality—never happens in a present time. You never can say: "Now I’m falling in love." If you do it, it’s a fake. It's—it’s always that, retroactively, all of a sudden you establish: "My god, I’m deep in it. I fall in love." And here, I characterize myself as a atheist Christian, fully endorsing this lesson of Christianity, that also in Freud you find it, that—here I’m against this ideology of free choice, you know—freedom at its fundamental, the most radical freedom, is not free choice in this cheap sense: I go to a—I go to a delicatessen store and, my god, strawberry cake, lemon cake, chocolate cake, I can make a choice. No. Free—the truly free choice is unconscious choice, as German idealists around Hegel, Schelling, and so on, already knew it. Free choice is a choice in a much more radical way. It's a choice of what you are, and it cannot be experienced as a free choice. That's why as, again, my friend with whom I have some problems but we are still friends, Alain Badiou, pointed out, referring to this beautiful short book on love—is translated, I think, in English—he’s a beautiful short book where he points out this wonderful occurrence of the verb to fall in love. It works, as far as I know, only in English and in French. Maybe it some others, in my language it doesn't work. *Tomber amoureux*, to fall in love. And he says: We have to take this quite literally. There is a surprise, a cut. You fall in love. All of a sudden, you find yourself in love. That's how things happen. So, not to get lost—let's go on. I think there is another thing in this that is false, in this panic about fake news, multiple truth, and so on. If you read closely those who worry about it, they repeatedly emphasize between the lines—but they do that—what they worry about is not so much that we don't have any truth, but that we no longer have a clear hegemonic idea, a basic social pact accepted by all across the board. So, their position of those who bemoan we need an obligatory social frame, it's a very cynical one, basically. What they are saying is what Goethe—the writer, *Faust*, and so on, a great conservative—said in German: "*Besser Unrecht als Unordnung.*" Better injustice than chaos. The idea is that we have to impose one version of ideology which will bring a certain stability, even if we all know it's a lie. And what is so enigmatic here with this one version and so on is that the consequences on—on—of it for democracy. Because as many intelligent observers have demonstrated, democracy is nice—competition, alternate pretenders to power, and so on—but democracy only works against the background of a whole set of agreements. Not only this obvious agreement: Whoever wins, I recognize it in spite of all the manipulations. But certain basic values have to be shared and so on and so on. When social, ideological, religious, whatever, differences between ways of life get too strong, you cannot play democracy. Democracy in the formal sense of majority wins have to be replaced by some type of negotiation and compromise. For example, today's conflict between Palestinians and Jews. You cannot make general elections there. It has to be—it has to be a compromise. And I think that this is why you, in the United States, are now, maybe in a—maybe in a difficult moment, a very difficult moment. I think that the differences now between alt-right, or the fundamentalist Trump people, and liberal democratic consensus, are growing so strong that you are reaching slowly the point of no compromise. Like, one has to win, or there is war or whatever. It will be, I warn you, less and less possible to resolve this in the good old formal democratic way. And this is clear to Trump. Did you notice how he systematically lays the foundations, prepares the public for an emergency state? Like, all the time he is making statements which basically hint that—like even now he gave some statements: "Beware of the false electoral lists," and so on and so on. You know, he is breaking this basic consensus which says—of democracy, which is: We can complain that it was manipulated and so on and so on. But we have to accept this unconditional rule: Whoever wins, he or she or they, they win. We can complain, but the result is here. Even if it's ambiguous. Although I am very critical of Bill Clinton, when it was that Florida scandal, you remember—Bush or Al Gore, a couple of tens of votes decided—Bill Clinton made, my god, this guy, I am very much against him, critical, but he has some spirit. You remember what he said? He said: "American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said." There is some spirit in this, no? No. So again, what I’m saying is that beneath this abstract problem, truth and so on—is there one truth?—we have to accept it that truth is not simply objective truth. What a well-functioning society needs—sorry, I will try to—oh my god, the time is running. Okay, I will condense it, so at least that I will finish with the word Beckett, or whatever. Okay, sorry, let me go on, let me go on. Nonetheless, I will try to condense it. I got lost. Okay. Know that we shouldn't speak about objective truth. We should speak about a basic customs, social pact, which is not only a pact at the level of explicit political rules. It's also a pact at the level which is much more important. And here, Trump I must say is almost a genius. A pact at the level of not only explicit rules, but a thick network of implicit rules of how you practice explicit rules. How you do it. Trump is a master not so much of breaking the explicit rules, but breaking this implicit customs which regulated the use of—remember the Supreme Kavanaugh Justice. If—and I think Obama was here too careful. Obama could have nominated much earlier. But he respected too much the rules, "no, we don't do it like that in the United States," and so on. Trump doesn't have problems with this. He breaks these implicit rules all the time. Okay, let's go on. So now I'm coming finally to my big topic. I will really, if you give me a little bit more time, try to condense it. The problem of abstraction. Because the lesson of what I was saying here—I go a little bit fast even if it's a rough jump now just to be able to squeeze in everything—is that the truth is not holistic, all sides and so on. What we have to accept is that the truth is always partial, one-sided. For example, with all my, again, support for Palestinians. But in Germany, It's to—it was totally false to say: "Okay, we have two partial extremes, the Nazis, the Jews. The truth must be somewhere in the middle, let's look at all." No. The only way to arrive at the truth, the horror what was happening there in Germany, is to look at it from the standpoint of victims. The truth was on their side. In this sense, we need abstraction. What do I need—I mean by abstraction? I go a little bit quickly here just to point it out. The first approach to abstraction: LGBT+. I'm sorry if some of you know this line of mine. Not only I am not opposed to it—I deeply support it—but maybe with a twist which, as some of you maybe know, brought me a lot of trouble, you know. I’m saying this: What is the function of that plus? LGBT+? As a speculative, Hegelian philosopher, I would have said I’m against this simple, empiricist use of it. Mostly, LGBT people—but not all, there are some very intelligent there with true speculative spirit—most of them take it at a simple, empirical level. Like, we have this, that, queer, butch, whatever, positions. But we have to be open, maybe we missed still some positions. So, plus means we are not excluding any others. All the others, the place should be kept open for them. But I think there is another, much more wonderful reading, proposed by some LGBT theory themselves, that what if we claim that plus—being a plus, that void, more—is a position in itself? You can be a plus. How? Precisely by radically questioning your position. Plus is the best definition of feminine hysteria. And hysteria is here not meant in this patriarchal way of arrogance, "oh, hysterical women, they don't know what they want." No. Hysteria is in authentic Freudian way the most subversive position. Not perversion. Perverts are always the observe—the, sorry, obverse secret side of power. Hysteria means what? You know Althusser’s, Louis Althusser, the old Marxist, cri—notion of ideological interpellation. Ideology works so that an authority or society tells you "you are this." Gives you a symbolic identity in the social edifice. You are a man, a woman, even homosexual, professor, socialist, alt-right, whatever. You are given an identity. And the basic hysterical question is: "Why am I what you are telling me that I am?" This doubt, directed not so much at objects but "who am I?", this lack of position of your own subjective identity. And I think it can be shown that this openness about your own position—I don't know what an object I am—which concretely in the case of hysteria means: "I see a desire out there. I am some kind of object of desire for others, but I don't know what they see in me." This uncertainty, ontological, is for Freud, Lacan and so on, constitutive of subjectivity. The moment you think you know what you are, you are not a subject, you are an object. And the model of this is a pervert. Perverts always know what they are and what they have to do. They don't question their—they don't question their position. So now, I have to, unfortunately, cut it short. Because what I wanted to show you was how this abstraction—this "you want something but you don't know what," this imperfection, ontological openness—is constitutive of subjectivity, as I already said, in the sense that it's not simply kind of a misrecognition and so on, but it's a positive constituent of subjectivity. Subject involves an abstraction. This is the limit of the standard, historicist approach. You know, like, always historicize, reduce an element to its historical constellation, specific constellation, and so on. But in authentic vision, even of Marx himself, not to mention many others, abstraction can also be a hysteric—sorry—historical fact. Abstraction is not just: There is out there full reality, and we getting to know it, abstract some features. Abstraction is a feature of reality itself. That's what also Marx means by—by bourgeois subjectivity. Marx is interested not only in the fact that abstraction of money rules our societies, but that in a developed, bourgeois society—and this is not just a critical point, for Marx, the only path to freedom is through this abstraction—for Marx, in bourgeois society, you yourself in your most intimate self-experience, relate to yourself as an abstract individual. And I tried to convince once Judith Butler—and I think I almost succeeded—that she is a good Cartesian. That the whole point in this sense that her entire—I use the naive term, it's not a good one—anthropology, is anthropology of—you know, this idea that there is no fixed identity of a subject, subject—subjectivity is constructed through repetitive, performative games and so on. This precisely presupposes that at the most basic level, you are not defined by certain features—positive features—but precisely by the fact that every feature is mediated. You are not that. That abstraction is described, for example, in the logic of desire. When objects of desire are no longer prescribed, like: It's normal to be heterosexual, whatever and so on, even if it's done in a more complex, psychoanalytical way. You search for women, but in the end you search for the image of your mother, or whatever those stupidities. Here, the object of desire is always prescribed. But the Freudian idea is: No, it's, again, objects, objects, objects plus. And you have this plus over all objects, particular, becomes for Lacan a specific object he calls object *petit a*, the object cause of desire. So, let me give you—give me, who are the boss, you are the boss, who is the boss. Can I get another good five minutes if—okay, okay. I somehow, I was ready to tell you if you would say no, I would say fuck off, throw me though, I mean yeah. This was a purely rhetorical question, you know yeah. Okay, so let me go on. You know, I will try to give you an idea of the power of this abstraction, which I used already in one of my books—you haven't read it probably. In a wonderful passage of Marcel Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time*, Marcel—not Proust, but the hero of the novel—speaks for the first time with his grandmother in Paris. And for the first time, he hears her voice torn out, abstracted from the totality of her body. You know, it’s—before, he thought: "My grandmother is a wonderful old being. Oh my god, what a wonderful figure." Now that he hears her voice alone, he is all of a sudden struck by the idea of what a vulgar, common voice this is. Before it was covered by her gentle appearance and so on. And now comes the true achievement. So first we have this violent abstraction: Voice alone, horror, dirty old lady, confused. Then, when he visits her in Paris, this abstracted voice colors his entire perception of her. There is no return to—oh, but this—to organic unity. "Oh, but this voice was just one of the features, now I see all of it." No. Her other features become vulgar, common to him. That’s how dialectical analysis does. The only totality that you get is a totality based on some—on some brutal, violent abstraction. Out of this abstraction, all other things appear in a new way. So, to amuse you a little bit, I tried to do the same thing with some movie stars. You know, this usual universality of a movie star is so-called "screen persona." It’s not what the actor really is—who cares. It’s also not the roles he plays, but through the roles a certain character emerges. Like, James Stewart plays a certain guy, and so on and so on. But I think a very productive procedure is to take a role which runs against the grain of a screen persona, and read it as the key to the actor’s actual persona. Then it spoils everything. For example, Henry Fonda. I don't know how much you know cinema history. One of his last roles, in the Sergio Leone western *Once Upon a Time in the West*, was, I think, his defining role. It was the first role of a truly bad guy, sadistic killer. But if you tear out this role and then look at his other roles through—the—you can then find arrogant, uncanny features, like when he plays Abraham Lincoln, the young Lincoln. You can see arrogance there, and so on. Or my example that I took—I hope I will not hurt you—is Tom Cruise. Did you see *Magnolia*? Where Cruise plays that extremely vulgar guy who wants to teach how to fuck them, that’s the only thing that matters. I claim, maybe this is the key, and you should read all his other, you know. I think this is again the proper dialectical approach. And now, if you allow me, just seriously, the finale. I will try to be very brief. The great writer of this type of violent abstraction is Samuel Beckett. What Beckett does is, on the one hand—it's worth reading it. I mean, I am really a partisan here. For me—I’m sorry to disappoint you—the enemy is James Joyce. Pretentious, boring idiot. Don't tell me that you read—yeah, sorry, okay. Don't tell me that you read *Finnegans Wake*. It's so pretentious. I mean, this idea of "for years people will have to"—and I know I am going here against Lacan. Okay, but let me convince you what I like about Beckett. For a partisan of standard Marxist notion of concrete analysis, the idea is Beckett is very anti-Marxist. He always abstracts from a concrete situation. But this abstraction is always inscribed into a concrete situation. Let me take—let me take a wonderful example. Take his *Malone Dies*. It's—I forgot the lady’s name, I am very sorry. But I recently read a book which is already was written by Emilie Morin, yes, is the lady, about Beckett and politics. And he conclusively demonstrates how Beckett was ex—extremely grounded in a historical experience. For example, *Malone Dies*. It's full of implicit references to a specific situation at the end of the World War II when all those refugees, wartime prisoners, were returning. All that situation and so on. And Beckett—but Beckett abstracts from it to a kind of a, almost, I would say, from all this idea of homeless refugees, the way they are treated bureaucratically and so on. I am almost tempted to say he is a materialist Platonist. What he stages is a kind of a pure Platonic idea of this terror of being displaced. And it's wrong to translate it back into historical constellation. Only through this move of abstraction do you get, in a way, the truth on it. This is why I wanted to conclude by—he—my—I think you mentioned it to your students already—his late play *Catastrophe*. It's a wonderful play. It's just from till minutes, however it is staged. It—it abstracts from, it condenses three levels. One level is about communist political terror. A—a—arrested guy is questioned and so on, brutally interrogated. But then, in the play itself, this is staged. What happens on the stage is a director giving precise instructions to the author and his secretary how to do it—"do it like this" and so on—reproducing the same terror. And then you have a third level—that’s how we should read the end of the play—where the—not the hero, the victim, the guy who is brutally interrogated—just raises his head and looks at us, the viewers. And Beckett explicitly said, that’s the ultimate image. That with many of these humanitarian events, solidarity with victims, performances for, the same basic terror structure is reproduced. This is Beckett at his greatest. He does not—he goes a step further into abstraction. Again, it’s not just this rather vulgar comparison that a brutal staging can also reproduce terror. It's precisely the falsity of our humanitarian sympathy, and so on and so on, that the same again—the same abstraction is reproduced. And I think what we need today, in all this human rights debates and so on and so on, is precisely this type of Beckettian abstraction. How our very humanitarian care, help, and so on, can—reproduce the same form of horror. Let me give you one example, and with this I will really conclude, of this horror. You know our media are now full of that—how do you pronounce the guy, no racist pun intended—Khashoggi, Jamal, the—Saudi Arabian guy killed in, no? You know what I find a true scandal in it? Not the fact that, of course, it’s terrifying what the Saudi Arabians did. But we get so excited about this one guy who was one of us, privileged, living in the United States, part of the royal family. You get in the media while Saudi Arabia is systematically destroying an entire country, Yemen now. Bombing children and so on. Oh, that’s—you don't talk about that. That’s the true scandal of it. It’s a totally displaced sympathy and so on. It’s a nightmare. It embodies again everything that is false. So, more Beckett. And to apologize myself, of course, I exaggerated. But nonetheless, the Beckett that I really like is, if you ask me, *Dubliners* and *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*. Those theological debates about Aquinas' aesthetics at the end of *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* are breathtaking. So I exaggerate a little bit. I apologize. When I take power, the people through me to spoke, you will not be sent to Gulag, I promise you, for loving Joyce. Thank you very much for your kind. Thanks Slavoj. Um, I—I was kind of disappointed that you actually did get to Beckett at the end, because I thought he was going to be in the real, we can't approach him— Getting to Beckett would have been a little bit too obvious Lacanian structure, you know, the other side. Oh, you know, sorry, I have to repeat—I’m sorry, you provoked me—another wonderful, vulgar joke that I often quote. I’m sorry if you know it, from Soviet Union. You know, that classical one about Lenin in Warsaw. You know, there is a big exhibition in Soviet Union and there is a painting: *Lenin in Warsaw*. And on the image you see Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, passionately making love to a young Komsomol member. And a shocked visitor said: "Oh my god, but where is Lenin here?" And the guide calmly answers: "Lenin is in Warsaw." No. That's why she can do this here. So, I would say Beckett, yes, like Beckett is in Warsaw, you know, and we can talk about it here. Sorry, yeah. Okay, we do have some time for—for a few questions. Um, and I'll ask Slavoj to try to be as brief as possible and—and— You know what you will get from me? I like to provoke this: I will give you this Buddhist wisdom answers, like clap with one hand, or whatever. So, okay, sorry, let's go on. I have—I have this—I have this gavel here so that if you go on too—this I actually got this in Ljubljana, so this has some sort of—this will have some sort of essentialistic qualities. I bang this and then— Old joke about me is that the ideal seat for me would have been—you saw James Bond, *Goldfinger*. You remember that car with the red button. And like, you need red button if I talk too much, you press it and I promise to— Okay. Um, we have a mic in—in the center. So, um, for whoever wants to ask the first question. Uh, we have questions? Okay, um, right here. Could you please go to the mic? And then Ruth will be next. Just so everyone can—can hear and so Slavoj can hear the question. You mentioned cultural Marxism before. Yeah. Um, the alt-right loves to—loves to use that term. Yeah. I understand you believe it’s a conspiracy theory—I do too, to a certain extent—no? Okay. I—you know, I understand you believe it’s a conspiracy theory to a certain extent. You know, I believe that too. But I'm just kind of wondering: The whole concept with identity politics, intersectionality, that all comes under cultural Marxism, basically. Do you find anything positive in any of those concepts? Yes, but first, what I disagree with is the very concept of, I think, cultural—you need—this idea that they wanted to undermine paternal authority and so on. Read the great studies by Adorno, Horkheimer. Like, Horkheimer wrote in late 30s a text on *Authority and Family*. And his whole point is not destroy it. He makes a wonderfully refined point that—it's a very deep insight in Adorno also—that totalitarian structures like Nazi—Nazi—Hitler is not a paternal figure. And he openly says that a strong paternal figure can give to young boy a kind of a moral support to resist social oppression, to resist the totalitarian reader. So, Adorno and Horkheimer are here much more refined, and you absolutely cannot push them in this direction. And also, on the other hand, let's be serious. Uh, in all real socialist, in all communist countries—I mean, they were much—they were much more pro-family, to put it like that. And it was not only in the sense of "we do it here but let the West be decadent" and so on. You know what shocked me so much? I am old enough, unfortunately, I remember it—it's a bad example—in the late 50s when the true Elvis Presley popularity exploded. In United States, some conservatives were shocked that all those movement with hips, this is return to barbarity and so on. But this was the reaction also of Soviet Union. They wrote in a total panic: "Elvis Presley means we are returning to animality, end of civilization," and so on and so on. So, I am also very critical of some aspects of LGBT and so on and so on. But I think that now—okay, I will give you an answer in a Marxist jargon. What I dislike in it was precisely that it's not really Marxism. It’s a petit bourgeois obstacle against Marxism. I think that political correctness is for me a typical petit bourgeois excess which really—uh—really tries to continue to obfuscate economic issues. And in this sense—I’m simplifying it and I will stop, not to lose time—I think that cultural Marxism—if by this we mean the culturalization of the left from late 80s onwards. This is what enabled Trump. We all know, and in Europe, because the left—this postmodern left, which is terribly afraid to be connected with real working class. They like minorities, they like whatever—uh—Third World nations and so on. And—uh—they, of course, as we all know, they neglected your own working class. That's why today—and it's a tragedy in Europe—for example, which European party did most for actual working class in Europe now? It’s horror. The—uh—Law and Justice, the Polish arch-conservative—uh—Kaczynski, the brothers, one died, party where precisely on behalf of right-wing populism, they did things that no moderate leftist today dare to do. They lowered retirement age—age. They expanded healthcare and so on. They—they made better credits for students and so on and so on. So, in this sense, for me, it was—I support them totally—but it was an obscenity of—do you remember two, three week, two, three month between before Trump was elected, the big topic in left-liberal media was how to solve the problem of toilets with—with transgender people? Do we need unite toilet? Do we need more toilets and so on and so on? I think that this total neglect of concerns of ordinary working people was a catastrophe. And that's why I like Bernie Sanders, because many intelligent people got it. He succeeded in mobilizing for the left those who otherwise would not have voted for Hillary, but maybe even for—for Donald Trump. So, okay, I didn't answer your question, but you see the— That’s great. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Um, actually, wait. So Ruth was going to—you—okay. Um, but before I forget, um, immediately after the Q&A, there's the bookstore is outside, they're selling books and Slavoj will—will sign—will sign your book. Um, just— Whatever you prefer for illiterate people: A cross or a finger. Okay, sorry, please. Okay. Please. Lady is there—wait, please. Hi. Can you talk a bit about the linkages between the rise of white nationalism in the United States and Europe? And also just to make a point—just to make a point about the left in the US: They're not only focused on minorities because many minorities are also in the working class. So they are— No, no, I totally support them. What I will say is this: There is only one implicit aspect of white supremacism—suprematism that I—I wouldn't say I like it, but that I find of use. When they claim—we should take them more literally than they take themselves—when they say: "There are other minorities, we are also an endangered minority." I know how they cheat here. I know. But that would be for me the true solution: To treat white men and so on as just another minority. I find much more dangerous the liberal stance of—I often noticed, and here it's another problem of abstraction—how false, you know, many left-liberals have this position: The further you are from white male identity, the more you are allowed to—I simplify analysis very much
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now—the more you are allowed to assert your identity. If the First Nation Native Americans do it, okay. Blacks, okay. Then—uh—Chinese still okay.
now—the more you are allowed to assert your identity. If the First Nation Native Americans do it, okay. Blacks, okay. Then—uh—Chinese still okay.
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Italians so-so. Germans
Italians so-so. Germans
Slavoj Žižek
blah, blah. But if white Protestants assert their—okay, now you will say, "But this is correct because they are de facto hegemonic," and so on. What I suspect is that nonetheless this self-humiliation, this "we renounce our identity because we know if we assert our identity it means direct racist hegemony"—there is something false in it. Because you know, I had a couple of weird experiences. For example, this really deeply marked me: Debate years ago in Missoula, Montana, where there were some politically correct white critics of white supremacy who were so brutally correcting some Native Americans
blah, blah. But if white Protestants assert their—okay, now you will say, "But this is correct because they are de facto hegemonic," and so on. What I suspect is that nonetheless this self-humiliation, this "we renounce our identity because we know if we assert our identity it means direct racist hegemony"—there is something false in it. Because you know, I had a couple of weird experiences. For example, this really deeply marked me: Debate years ago in Missoula, Montana, where there were some politically correct white critics of white supremacy who were so brutally correcting some Native Americans
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there, like: "No, you shouldn't call yourselves Indians." And then a Native American
there, like: "No, you shouldn't call yourselves Indians." And then a Native American
Slavoj Žižek
guy who became my great friend said something perfect. He said: "Sorry, I don't want to be called Native American, because it gives me horrible
guy who became my great friend said something perfect. He said: "Sorry, I don't want to be called Native American, because it gives me horrible
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associations, like I’m native nature, you are culture, or what." And he said something wonderful. He said: "I prefer to be called Indian. At least my name is a monument
associations, like I’m native nature, you are culture, or what." And he said something wonderful. He said: "I prefer to be called Indian. At least my name is a monument
Slavoj Žižek
to your white man stupidity. You know, you thought you are in India." They were—my Native American friends there—they were so sensitive against this false, patronizing elevation
to your white man stupidity. You know, you thought you are in India." They were—my Native American friends there—they were so sensitive against this false, patronizing elevation
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of them. Like, they told me—one of them used this beautiful metaphor that he also almost gets a Joseph Goebbels reaction and draws a gun when somebody praises there—you know: "We white people just exploit nature brutally while they have a more
of them. Like, they told me—one of them used this beautiful metaphor that he also almost gets a Joseph Goebbels reaction and draws a gun when somebody praises there—you know: "We white people just exploit nature brutally while they have a more
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organic attitude, dialogue with nature. Before you mine a mountain, you ask the spirits of the mountain for permission," and all that stuff. And one of them—it's a wonderful act of extreme subversion for me—one of them even wrote a text, he sent it to me, proving that Native Americans killed more buffaloes and burned more forests than all the white people together. No, you know
organic attitude, dialogue with nature. Before you mine a mountain, you ask the spirits of the mountain for permission," and all that stuff. And one of them—it's a wonderful act of extreme subversion for me—one of them even wrote a text, he sent it to me, proving that Native Americans killed more buffaloes and burned more forests than all the white people together. No, you know
Slavoj Žižek
what I’m saying. Of course they were much better, but they detected in a wonderful way this hidden—and let me conclude you with a joke which wonderfully makes this point, one of the best Jewish jokes, popular with Derrida, with all my friends. You know, in a—in a—in a synagogue—when do they meet? Saturday, I don't know when—Jews meet to talk, confess, I mean, declare themselves. So one rich merchant Jew said: "Oh god, I’m nothing, I’m nobody, I’m not worthy of your attention." Then the rabbi, big powerful figure, says: "Oh my god also, I’m nothing, I’m worthless." Then a poor Jew stands up and says: "Oh my god, I’m also nothing." And then the rich merchant stabs the rabbi and said: "Who is this guy, a nobody and he also thinks he can just say that he is nothing or whatsoever?" You see, this is what is false about those white people who just—who I'm always suspicious about how they pretend to be modest, but hidden beneath this modesty is a very arrogant position of: "We are—we renounce our particular position just to retain our grasp on universality. We can be judges of others." Otherwise, no, no, I’m here a good guy. For example, in the debates about Black Lives Matter. This is a nice example of how false, although it’s obviously correct, is the Trumpian answers: "Not Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter." No. Universality is here false. The lesson of all dialectics is that universality has always a privileged example which embodies it in a certain historical constellation. Today, if you want universal equality in lives matter, you have to emphasize Black Lives Matter. So I’m not simplifying here. I’m just almost obsessed with this implicit—for you know, when somebody humiliates himself too much, I always find it suspicious. What's his secret profit in it? Sorry, I— Okay. Yeah, don't make me use this thing, please. All right. Next, we have—I think we have time for probably two more. Two more! But then at least allow a lady to go forward. Okay. Ruth. Okay. Not a lady. Hi. Um, thank you so much for coming here. Thank you Russell for— I see you—I see you preparing your knife when you begin in such a kind way. So please strike, yes. Okay. So I have a question about two words that you've used: Jews and Trump. Um, first of all—not—not in connection. Um, first of all you you mentioned something like Nazis and Jews and also the Jews and the Palestinians. I think maybe it would be more accurate to say Israelis and Palestinians or that rather Jews and Arabs if you're going that way. I see, that's a nice point, yeah. Thank you. And then also— One for the lady, not a lady. Um, and then the second thing is that you talked about Trump as this like ideal evil or something like that. I'm not sure what is exactly the word you used. But I agree with you that we have this tendency to say "oh Trump," right? As if like something is wrong about him and then we don't have to look at ourselves. So can you talk more about this—this—like separation of Trump from Trumpism? No, no. Sorry, I was not precise enough. I agree with you on both points. First, this ideal evil and so on. If I remember it correctly, then I think, first, we should never forget that the most depressing book that I’ve read—sorry, I’m beginning again—is a book on Nazi ethics. No, no, it's critical. A lady wrote it, I’m sorry I forgot everything, I’m old. But she asks the obvious question: "How did the Nazis themselves describe their own
what I’m saying. Of course they were much better, but they detected in a wonderful way this hidden—and let me conclude you with a joke which wonderfully makes this point, one of the best Jewish jokes, popular with Derrida, with all my friends. You know, in a—in a—in a synagogue—when do they meet? Saturday, I don't know when—Jews meet to talk, confess, I mean, declare themselves. So one rich merchant Jew said: "Oh god, I’m nothing, I’m nobody, I’m not worthy of your attention." Then the rabbi, big powerful figure, says: "Oh my god also, I’m nothing, I’m worthless." Then a poor Jew stands up and says: "Oh my god, I’m also nothing." And then the rich merchant stabs the rabbi and said: "Who is this guy, a nobody and he also thinks he can just say that he is nothing or whatsoever?" You see, this is what is false about those white people who just—who I'm always suspicious about how they pretend to be modest, but hidden beneath this modesty is a very arrogant position of: "We are—we renounce our particular position just to retain our grasp on universality. We can be judges of others." Otherwise, no, no, I’m here a good guy. For example, in the debates about Black Lives Matter. This is a nice example of how false, although it’s obviously correct, is the Trumpian answers: "Not Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter." No. Universality is here false. The lesson of all dialectics is that universality has always a privileged example which embodies it in a certain historical constellation. Today, if you want universal equality in lives matter, you have to emphasize Black Lives Matter. So I’m not simplifying here. I’m just almost obsessed with this implicit—for you know, when somebody humiliates himself too much, I always find it suspicious. What's his secret profit in it? Sorry, I— Okay. Yeah, don't make me use this thing, please. All right. Next, we have—I think we have time for probably two more. Two more! But then at least allow a lady to go forward. Okay. Ruth. Okay. Not a lady. Hi. Um, thank you so much for coming here. Thank you Russell for— I see you—I see you preparing your knife when you begin in such a kind way. So please strike, yes. Okay. So I have a question about two words that you've used: Jews and Trump. Um, first of all—not—not in connection. Um, first of all you you mentioned something like Nazis and Jews and also the Jews and the Palestinians. I think maybe it would be more accurate to say Israelis and Palestinians or that rather Jews and Arabs if you're going that way. I see, that's a nice point, yeah. Thank you. And then also— One for the lady, not a lady. Um, and then the second thing is that you talked about Trump as this like ideal evil or something like that. I'm not sure what is exactly the word you used. But I agree with you that we have this tendency to say "oh Trump," right? As if like something is wrong about him and then we don't have to look at ourselves. So can you talk more about this—this—like separation of Trump from Trumpism? No, no. Sorry, I was not precise enough. I agree with you on both points. First, this ideal evil and so on. If I remember it correctly, then I think, first, we should never forget that the most depressing book that I’ve read—sorry, I’m beginning again—is a book on Nazi ethics. No, no, it's critical. A lady wrote it, I’m sorry I forgot everything, I’m old. But she asks the obvious question: "How did the Nazis themselves describe their own
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predicament? How did they experience it," and so on? And you see some extremely false, disgusting—disgusting—but I’m not saying authentic, but almost
predicament? How did they experience it," and so on? And you see some extremely false, disgusting—disgusting—but I’m not saying authentic, but almost
Slavoj Žižek
ethical vision. They really convinced themselves that they are doing a great
ethical vision. They really convinced themselves that they are doing a great
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thing. And you know what's the most perverted thing in it? They openly admitted that they are doing horrible things. But then they gave a weird, ethical twist to it. Their logic was: "Any idiot can be good for his or her country. It takes a true hero to sacrifice
thing. And you know what's the most perverted thing in it? They openly admitted that they are doing horrible things. But then they gave a weird, ethical twist to it. Their logic was: "Any idiot can be good for his or her country. It takes a true hero to sacrifice
Slavoj Žižek
his soul to do horrible things for his country." So they made an ethical greatness out of the very horror. So in this sense, the sad fact is that evil is always by definition, or tries to be, masked as—masked as good. But what I meant, maybe I forgot, is this: In every society we have somebody who obviously offers himself or herself—usually it's himself in our societies—as easy to hate people. Like—and that's why I'm a little bit doubtful about all this liberal hatred of Trump. No, I do hate Trump. But again, as I said: Don't simply elevate him into evil, but ask yourself what went wrong with liberal consensus and so on. We have to solve the problems here. Don't be too fascinated by—by the figure—by the figure of the evil. And your first point was the—sorry, I forgot your first point. No, you answered it. No, no, but I like it even more to answer. What was her first point? Just about Jews and the way you use— Aha. It's very interesting—very interesting what you mention here. Because I agree with you that the whole point is so complex that on the other hand, I wouldn't even use the word Israelis. Because the problem is precisely how—because you know, yes, that's why I use the words Jews. Because in my simple, democratic notion, Israelis are citizens of the state of Israel. Everybody should be included. There are already in Israel, Israel—by this I mean pre-'67 Israel—there are, I think, over a million, or how much, of Palestinians and so on. So that's why for me the term Israeli is not enough. And the trick of today's Israeli politics is something extremely sad. I’m not kidding when I use the term—uh—Zionist anti-Semitism. What really worries me is how now Netanyahu is systematically making pact with European conservative leaders who are more or less even openly anti-Semitic, like Orban in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland. And the implicit deal is this one: Let your Jews come to us, but leave us free hand there. And this is an old tendency among even anti-Semitic right. I was shocked to read, for example, one of the really evil figures, Reinhard Heydrich, you know, the architect of—you know what he wrote in '36? He wrote: "Jews are a great people. We wish them all the best in Palestine. We want to help them there. We just don't want to get them to have them here." So now, today, we have more and—and you find this, for example, who was that crazy guy, you remember, Breivik? The Norwegian madman who killed young socialists. It's interesting to read—I didn't, but some friends sent me translations—his writings where he is anti-Semitic, but he says Jews are a threat only for us here. America—he said, Europe is not so dangerous because Hitler did the job of cleansing them. America and England, there are too many of them. But he said in the middle of this, we should absolutely support Israel and so on and so on. And this combination I find extremely dangerous. Dangerous today. Sorry, I— Thank you. Okay. Last question. I’m sorry, don't kill me. I’m sorry. He is guilty! The evil guy, yeah. Thank you so much for coming tonight, and also thank you Dr. Sbriglia. So, I was watching one of your *Vice* interviews earlier today, and you were mentioning how earlier with Iran—uh—there was sort of this—uh—this influence of Western liberalism on Iran, which used to be a very progressive country. And you were saying how when America basically backed all these fundamentalist government organizations, it kind of brought the country back. So I was kind of wondering what would be the ultimate solution, and do you still hold that view today? Because I think this interview is in if I believe. I'm not sure. Sorry, I’m not sure I got correctly to what I was referring. Of course, I—I referred
his soul to do horrible things for his country." So they made an ethical greatness out of the very horror. So in this sense, the sad fact is that evil is always by definition, or tries to be, masked as—masked as good. But what I meant, maybe I forgot, is this: In every society we have somebody who obviously offers himself or herself—usually it's himself in our societies—as easy to hate people. Like—and that's why I'm a little bit doubtful about all this liberal hatred of Trump. No, I do hate Trump. But again, as I said: Don't simply elevate him into evil, but ask yourself what went wrong with liberal consensus and so on. We have to solve the problems here. Don't be too fascinated by—by the figure—by the figure of the evil. And your first point was the—sorry, I forgot your first point. No, you answered it. No, no, but I like it even more to answer. What was her first point? Just about Jews and the way you use— Aha. It's very interesting—very interesting what you mention here. Because I agree with you that the whole point is so complex that on the other hand, I wouldn't even use the word Israelis. Because the problem is precisely how—because you know, yes, that's why I use the words Jews. Because in my simple, democratic notion, Israelis are citizens of the state of Israel. Everybody should be included. There are already in Israel, Israel—by this I mean pre-'67 Israel—there are, I think, over a million, or how much, of Palestinians and so on. So that's why for me the term Israeli is not enough. And the trick of today's Israeli politics is something extremely sad. I’m not kidding when I use the term—uh—Zionist anti-Semitism. What really worries me is how now Netanyahu is systematically making pact with European conservative leaders who are more or less even openly anti-Semitic, like Orban in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland. And the implicit deal is this one: Let your Jews come to us, but leave us free hand there. And this is an old tendency among even anti-Semitic right. I was shocked to read, for example, one of the really evil figures, Reinhard Heydrich, you know, the architect of—you know what he wrote in '36? He wrote: "Jews are a great people. We wish them all the best in Palestine. We want to help them there. We just don't want to get them to have them here." So now, today, we have more and—and you find this, for example, who was that crazy guy, you remember, Breivik? The Norwegian madman who killed young socialists. It's interesting to read—I didn't, but some friends sent me translations—his writings where he is anti-Semitic, but he says Jews are a threat only for us here. America—he said, Europe is not so dangerous because Hitler did the job of cleansing them. America and England, there are too many of them. But he said in the middle of this, we should absolutely support Israel and so on and so on. And this combination I find extremely dangerous. Dangerous today. Sorry, I— Thank you. Okay. Last question. I’m sorry, don't kill me. I’m sorry. He is guilty! The evil guy, yeah. Thank you so much for coming tonight, and also thank you Dr. Sbriglia. So, I was watching one of your *Vice* interviews earlier today, and you were mentioning how earlier with Iran—uh—there was sort of this—uh—this influence of Western liberalism on Iran, which used to be a very progressive country. And you were saying how when America basically backed all these fundamentalist government organizations, it kind of brought the country back. So I was kind of wondering what would be the ultimate solution, and do you still hold that view today? Because I think this interview is in if I believe. I'm not sure. Sorry, I’m not sure I got correctly to what I was referring. Of course, I—I referred
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to that Mossadegh and so on, when America organized
to that Mossadegh and so on, when America organized
Slavoj Žižek
a coup d'état, bringing Shah back in full power. And it’s absolutely
a coup d'état, bringing Shah back in full power. And it’s absolutely
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clear today, at least
clear today, at least
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we know, that Mossadegh was just a moderate leftist,
we know, that Mossadegh was just a moderate leftist,
Slavoj Žižek
social-democratic nationalist. He wasn't
social-democratic nationalist. He wasn't
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a Soviet spy or whatever. And the idea is that this brought in the—the imbalance. No, what shocked me morally—that's why I still have some sympathy for Iran. Listen, let's go to our preferred topic, human rights
a Soviet spy or whatever. And the idea is that this brought in the—the imbalance. No, what shocked me morally—that's why I still have some sympathy for Iran. Listen, let's go to our preferred topic, human rights
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and so on. Iran
and so on. Iran
Slavoj Žižek
is still much better
is still much better
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than Saudi Arabia and some other
than Saudi Arabia and some other
Slavoj Žižek
countries.
countries.
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First, beneath this rather superficial oppression, Iran has an incredible intellectual life. They were so stupid—you will see the irony—to translate even of my books there and so on. I mean, there, it's a—intellectual life.
First, beneath this rather superficial oppression, Iran has an incredible intellectual life. They were so stupid—you will see the irony—to translate even of my books there and so on. I mean, there, it's a—intellectual life.
Slavoj Žižek
And—and again, it's so hypocritical. Like, I think one of the greatest obscenity was when the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia said that it's time for Iran to accept basic democratic standards. I mean, statements like this make me an atheist. Because if there were to be God, he should have with a lightning strike death Saudi. So you know what I mean, like—and also, I remember—I am old enough, unfortunately, I remember it—the Iraqi attack on Iran. The hypocrisy of almost the entire world. As long as Iran was losing, they were silent. United States openly supported, we now know, Iraq. They were giving to Saddam, not only poisonous gases, but even satellite images of where Iranian troops are. United States only protested when Saddam used these gases against Kurds, against his own people, and so on. And again, the public opinion started to worry—even in the West, with non-aligned countries—only when Iraq started to lose. To withdraw. Then they said, "oh my god, we need peace" and so on and so on. This is why I wrote a text then, which is a little bit crazy, I admit it. But which, for some point, rendered me very popular, even in the ruling circles. I learned in Iran. The title was in English "Give Iranians Nukes, Iranian Nukes a Chance." You know, today as today's situation, I simply—I’m such a pessimist. You don't know who is telling lies, who is manipulating who about the present
And—and again, it's so hypocritical. Like, I think one of the greatest obscenity was when the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia said that it's time for Iran to accept basic democratic standards. I mean, statements like this make me an atheist. Because if there were to be God, he should have with a lightning strike death Saudi. So you know what I mean, like—and also, I remember—I am old enough, unfortunately, I remember it—the Iraqi attack on Iran. The hypocrisy of almost the entire world. As long as Iran was losing, they were silent. United States openly supported, we now know, Iraq. They were giving to Saddam, not only poisonous gases, but even satellite images of where Iranian troops are. United States only protested when Saddam used these gases against Kurds, against his own people, and so on. And again, the public opinion started to worry—even in the West, with non-aligned countries—only when Iraq started to lose. To withdraw. Then they said, "oh my god, we need peace" and so on and so on. This is why I wrote a text then, which is a little bit crazy, I admit it. But which, for some point, rendered me very popular, even in the ruling circles. I learned in Iran. The title was in English "Give Iranians Nukes, Iranian Nukes a Chance." You know, today as today's situation, I simply—I’m such a pessimist. You don't know who is telling lies, who is manipulating who about the present
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conflicts.
conflicts.
Slavoj Žižek
I’m just saying that—are we aware what is happening in the Middle East? That a new—ironically called it—Axis of Evil is forming. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel. They are already openly collaborating. Are you aware that now it's no longer done secretly? Saudi Arabian military and security officers regularly go to Israel to confer. Israel—Saudi Arabia was even already three, four years ago putting pressure on Israel to bomb—uh—Iran, and so on. So the situation—I simply don't know enough about the—about the situation. I still—where I am still a naive guy is: You remember that Green Revolution after the elections? I was very involved into that one. Making statements, supporting them. The guy against Ahmadinejad, who was cheated out, although he probably won the elections. And—uh—I remember that at that point there was a big attack on me that I am a direct agent of the CIA, that they are paying me to make these statements. And in my cynical attitude—but I didn't, it’s too crazy, I’m so self-destructive—I wanted to make, write a public letter to CIA, like: "I am supposed to be your paid agent. Well, fuck it, here is my bank account. Where are the millions you can send me?" No, but again, you see, I—I try to be modest. It's so difficult in today's mess to orient ourselves, because often it’s horrible when a concrete
I’m just saying that—are we aware what is happening in the Middle East? That a new—ironically called it—Axis of Evil is forming. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel. They are already openly collaborating. Are you aware that now it's no longer done secretly? Saudi Arabian military and security officers regularly go to Israel to confer. Israel—Saudi Arabia was even already three, four years ago putting pressure on Israel to bomb—uh—Iran, and so on. So the situation—I simply don't know enough about the—about the situation. I still—where I am still a naive guy is: You remember that Green Revolution after the elections? I was very involved into that one. Making statements, supporting them. The guy against Ahmadinejad, who was cheated out, although he probably won the elections. And—uh—I remember that at that point there was a big attack on me that I am a direct agent of the CIA, that they are paying me to make these statements. And in my cynical attitude—but I didn't, it’s too crazy, I’m so self-destructive—I wanted to make, write a public letter to CIA, like: "I am supposed to be your paid agent. Well, fuck it, here is my bank account. Where are the millions you can send me?" No, but again, you see, I—I try to be modest. It's so difficult in today's mess to orient ourselves, because often it’s horrible when a concrete
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local
local
Slavoj Žižek
case where
case where
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you see who is right is then co-opted into an international coalition which is not a good one. And—uh—the situation is so complex. But again, I have a great sympathy not only—you know that even in—Iranians are great people. Even in philosophy there, they have a couple of from 7th, 8th century till 16th century, they have a couple of incredibly productive, top
you see who is right is then co-opted into an international coalition which is not a good one. And—uh—the situation is so complex. But again, I have a great sympathy not only—you know that even in—Iranians are great people. Even in philosophy there, they have a couple of from 7th, 8th century till 16th century, they have a couple of incredibly productive, top
Slavoj Žižek
Muslim philosophers. Not to mention—not to mention cinema and so on. I mean, it’s a lit—but don't lose hope. Not only there, but—let me tell you something to conclude. It’s wonderful. You know, even if I die, I will go there. I almost naively cried when friends told me. I have a couple of friends—a German, a Scandinavian, Swedish guy—who have some kind of a English-language theater of all the places, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Nobody likes them—neither the Americans nor the Taliban. But they get some money from European Union, and they told me incredible news that in a country where nothing functions, total corruption, danger, there is among the young generation such an intellectual thirst. First, you probably don't know the name Goran Therborn, a Swedish old Marxist. They invited him to Kabul. They thought, you know, jerks will come. At his first talk, people came. Rumors spread. At his—at his last talk, people come. And people who wanted to debate Frankfurt School, Adorno and so on. It’s a—and in the other city close, that Bamiyan, you know, where Taliban bombed those statues. It’s a city totally encircled by Taliban. So you have to fly there if you want to survive. But he also went there, in this small city. people came. Young people. I mean, I have faith in this. I think there are intellectual miracles which are awaiting us. We should end on that positive note, because— Sorry. Thank you. Well— Wait, wait, wait! You know when you are dying, usually just before you die it goes up, looks better and then bum, no? I prefer this image. Okay. No, well, because—okay. The bookstore—they—they have to close the table in minutes. So if you—so if you want to buy a book—uh—they're right outside, but they have to leave at But—Slavoj will sign—will sign books. Um, I think we should just— At least he is honest and mentions this closing, because you know which is the usual excuse when they want to cut short the debate of the leftists? I mean, they always evoke, "there are some cleaning ladies who are waiting," so if we go on we are oppressing the working class. At least you are honest. Well, thanks—thanks again
Muslim philosophers. Not to mention—not to mention cinema and so on. I mean, it’s a lit—but don't lose hope. Not only there, but—let me tell you something to conclude. It’s wonderful. You know, even if I die, I will go there. I almost naively cried when friends told me. I have a couple of friends—a German, a Scandinavian, Swedish guy—who have some kind of a English-language theater of all the places, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Nobody likes them—neither the Americans nor the Taliban. But they get some money from European Union, and they told me incredible news that in a country where nothing functions, total corruption, danger, there is among the young generation such an intellectual thirst. First, you probably don't know the name Goran Therborn, a Swedish old Marxist. They invited him to Kabul. They thought, you know, jerks will come. At his first talk, people came. Rumors spread. At his—at his last talk, people come. And people who wanted to debate Frankfurt School, Adorno and so on. It’s a—and in the other city close, that Bamiyan, you know, where Taliban bombed those statues. It’s a city totally encircled by Taliban. So you have to fly there if you want to survive. But he also went there, in this small city. people came. Young people. I mean, I have faith in this. I think there are intellectual miracles which are awaiting us. We should end on that positive note, because— Sorry. Thank you. Well— Wait, wait, wait! You know when you are dying, usually just before you die it goes up, looks better and then bum, no? I prefer this image. Okay. No, well, because—okay. The bookstore—they—they have to close the table in minutes. So if you—so if you want to buy a book—uh—they're right outside, but they have to leave at But—Slavoj will sign—will sign books. Um, I think we should just— At least he is honest and mentions this closing, because you know which is the usual excuse when they want to cut short the debate of the leftists? I mean, they always evoke, "there are some cleaning ladies who are waiting," so if we go on we are oppressing the working class. At least you are honest. Well, thanks—thanks again
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to Slavoj.
to Slavoj.
Slavoj Žižek
So.
So.