Politics Between Fear and Terror
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2006-11-15 · 2:01:13 · 14,096 words
ideologycinema-art-culturepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologyliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismecology-climategeopolitics-warrevolution-violenceethicshistory
Žižek uses two 9/11 Hollywood films (United 93 and World Trade Center) as a springboard for a wide-ranging lecture on ideology, theology, and politics delivered to a Visual Arts audience. He analyzes how the films' apparent authenticity and abstention from political stance itself constitutes an ideological message, introduces the category of 'unknown knowns' (things we know but don't know we know) as the operative level of ideology today, and works through examples from Hitchcock, Stalinism, torture debates, political correctness, and global warming to elaborate how belief functions through practice rather than explicit commitment. The talk concludes with critiques of tolerance-discourse (via Wendy Brown), liberal multiculturalism, humanitarian capitalism (Bill Gates/Soros), and a defense of theoretical 'stepping back' illustrated by the Lenin joke.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The wound produced by the gap between one's immediate self and the idealized symbolic image others construct of you; invoked here self-ironically about the flattering introduction.
Fredric Jameson's term for the capacity to locate oneself within a larger socio-political totality; both 9/11 films deliberately deprive viewers of it.
For Hegel, the apparently concrete individual is actually the most abstract; the concrete is the totality of mediations that give meaning to any particular existence, invoked to critique the 9/11 films' false realism.
Žižek's thesis that disaster-movie enjoyment secretly carries a socialist fantasy of communal solidarity that emerges when competitive individualism is suspended by catastrophe.
as “surplus pleasure”
The by-product enjoyment in Hollywood catastrophe films: the true pleasure is not the spectacle of disaster but the utopian solidarity it unleashes, people forgetting competitiveness and cooperating.
as “implicit teleological justification”
The theological logic that reads catastrophes as having a deeper meaning or purpose, exactly what the Book of Job resists and what Žižek argues we must refuse in confronting disasters from 9/11 to ecology.
The fourth category missing from Rumsfeld's epistemology: things we know but don't know that we know, the operative level of ideology, unconscious prejudices that structure our practice.
The virtual symbolic order that functions as addressee of social performances, the Hays Code censors protecting a phantasmatic gaze, or Soviet citizens sending in encyclopedia pages no one is deceived by.
as “fetishist split”
The structure 'I know very well but...', used to explain why people know about ecological catastrophe yet fail to act: they know but cannot really believe it.
as “decaffeinated torture”
Sam Harris's proposal for a truth-drug that induces inner suffering invisible from outside, torture with the bad effects removed, exemplifying the postmodern logic of desire without its disturbing remainder.
as “decaffeinated Other”
The liberal-multicultural version of the other from which all disturbing otherness has been removed, like coffee without caffeine; the most racist form of tolerance.
In contrast to the liberal 'other whose story I should hear,' the neighbor is the abyss of unbearable otherness, always too close, properly monstrous, not reducible to understanding.
Fear presupposes you still have roots you are afraid to lose; terror (authentic confrontation with the abyss) is the acceptance that there is no grounding to return to, the condition of genuine emancipatory commitment.
The post-political reduction whereby genuine conflicts of inequality and exploitation are recast as problems of cultural tolerance and recognition.
as “hermeneutics of suspicion towards the universal”
The critical procedure (exemplified by Wendy Brown) that unmasks apparent universals as concealed particular interests, Žižek's critique is that it misses the opposite move: universality hidden in what appears merely particular.
as “actual universality”
Hegel's concept of universality-for-itself: not homogenization but the experience of one's particular identity as contingent, you relate to yourself as universal, your cultural form as an idiosyncratic choice.
as “charitable humanitarian capitalism”
The contemporary form (Gates, Soros) in which philanthropy has become an economic and systemic necessity, not a personal idiosyncrasy, functioning to depoliticize problems by framing them as solvable through humanitarian acts.
as “obscene supplement of power”
The unofficial obscene underside that official power not only tolerates but needs, e.g., the sexualized rituals of military communities, which sustains rather than subverts power.
Stories he reaches for 17
Bohr had a horseshoe above his door; when asked if he believed in it, he answered he didn't, but had it there because he was told it works even if you don't believe. Žižek uses this as the definitive illustration of how ideology functions today.
“Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Job refuses to accept the three theologians' attempts to provide a deeper meaning for his suffering. Žižek reads this as the model for refusing to read meaning into catastrophes, from the Holocaust to ecological crisis.
“The greatness of Job for me is that he radically resists this meaning... 'I won't be duped into accepting this logic of it has to have a deeper meaning.'”
Rumsfeld's famous three-category epistemology (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns) misses the fourth term: unknown knowns, things we know but don't know we know, which is Žižek's definition of ideology.
“The fourth term is missing... unknown knowns. Things you know but you don't know that you know them. That's ideology.”
King's speeches barely use the word 'tolerance', for him racism was a problem of inequality, exploitation, and injustice, not tolerance. Žižek uses this to argue that the shift to 'tolerance discourse' represents culturalization of politics.
“For him, racism against the blacks was not a problem of intolerance, it was the problem of inequality, exploitation, injustice.”
Žižek used vulgar insults toward Butler at a Swiss summer school, apologized unconditionally, and she said she wasn't offended and he owed her no apology, but she could only say that after receiving the apology, proving that excess gestures constitute the social bond.
“She was able to say 'You owe me no apology' only after I gave her the apology. If I were not to give her apology, it wouldn't function.”
In ex-Yugoslavia, ethnic groups had self-deprecating jokes about their stereotypes (Slovenians = misers, Bosnians = primitive, Montenegrins = lazy); exchanging these obscene jokes functioned as authentic solidarity rather than racist dismissal.
“It's not just this cold refined pseudo-tolerant racism: 'Oh I like your culture, your food.' I don't care about your culture. 'I want to hear your dirty joke.'”
In the scene where Scottie brings Madeleine home, the Hays Code blocked showing actual underwear above the kitchen sink. Žižek points out the censors were not protecting viewers (who assume underwear anyway) but the virtual gaze of the big Other.
“Whom were the Hays Code censors trying to protect? Not us. Every spectator automatically assumes that what he sees is the underwear.”
How does a Montenegrin masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in it, and waits for the earthquake, because he is too lazy to do anything himself. Told as an example of self-deprecating Yugoslav humor that functions as solidarity.
“He digs a hole in the earth, put penis into it and wait for the earthquake because he is too lazy to.”
Levi describes inmates in Auschwitz pinching their lips to appear healthier as an SS doctor decides their fate in two seconds. Žižek calls this 'disgustingly terrifying comedy' to illustrate why the Holocaust exceeds the tragic form.
“If you read this description coldly if you can, you will discover that there is something in a weird disgustingly terrifying way comic about it.”
Mao argued the atom bomb doesn't matter because even if it blew up the earth that would be a 'minor event for the solar system.' Žižek cites this as the logic of accepting terror (groundlessness) required for authentic emancipatory commitment.
“Even if the United States atom bombs... blow it the earth up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a minor event for the solar system.”
Harris proposes a drug that induces inner suffering invisible from outside as a torture-free substitute; Žižek calls it 'decaffeinated torture,' analogous to coffee without caffeine, desire with its disturbing element removed.
“What he proposes is basically decaffeinated torture... in the same way that we want coffee without caffeine, we want beer without alcohol.”
Viennese bishops privately admitted they pray the Turin Shroud is not authentic, because its verification would be terrifying, threatening biogenetic questions about Christ's paternity. Illustrates how even believers are sustained by a minimal gap between belief and its direct realization.
“They told me frankly privately: 'We pray day and night that it's not the authentic one.'”
After Beria was shot and became a non-person, Soviet encyclopedia subscribers were told to cut out his entry and glue in a new page about the Bering Strait. Whom were they deceiving? Nobody, proving the big Other as the enigmatic addressee of Stalinist ritual.
“They put Bering, Bering Pass... the continuity was perfect, seamless. Whom were they trying to deceive? Of course not the people.”
A Western teacher in a Bosnian school asks students to name images that fit Beethoven compositions. A Bosnian student names something crude that matches 'Für Elise.' The joke illustrates how Bosnian humor during the war was a mode of survival, and how the Bosnian obscene register exceeded Western pedagogical expectations.
“It's not a good joke but you will see the logic, so you don't have to laugh.”
Japanese workers are guaranteed a certain number of holiday days per year but are expected by implicit rule not to use them fully. Žižek uses this to illustrate the logic of permitted freedom you must not use.
“They have the right guaranteed to days of holiday every year. However, they are expected not to use this right in its full extent.”
The famous color-in-black-and-white sequence of the girl in red is criticized as obscene: it aestheticizes Schindler's moral conversion, which should remain mysterious, not depicted.
“For me it's something... almost in theological terms, this kind of conversion in good, in evil, they should remain a mystery at some level.”
Žižek claims that across Jurassic Park, E.T., War of the Worlds, and Schindler's List, Spielberg's underlying motive is the restoration of proper paternal authority to a failed father figure.
“E.T. is for me just a kind of a vanishing mediator... the father abandoned the family... E.T. goes home... family is re-established.”
Works invoked 20
Capital book
Cited in the Marx-to-Engels letter anecdote: Marx's plea that revolutionaries wait until he finishes it is used to defend theoretical reflection over immediate action.
Vertigo film
Hitchcock's film used as a central example: the missing-underwear scene illustrates the big Other as virtual addressee of social prohibitions.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book, briefly mentioned as the place where he cites the Niels Bohr horseshoe anecdote.
If This Is a Man book
Primo Levi's memoir: the Selekcja passage is 'arguably the best rendering memoirs' of Holocaust experience, used to illustrate the nightmarish comic quality of extreme dehumanization.
Schindler's List film
Called 'a total artistic and political failure' driven by Spielberg's paternal-authority obsession; the girl-in-red scene is criticized as obscene aestheticization of moral conversion.
Goldfinger film
Mentioned in the Q&A in a joke about Žižek's fantasy of a button to eject bad questioners.
Empire book
Negri and Hardt's book: its Deleuze-Guattari theoretical substrate is shown to be shared with IDF tactical doctrine, implying the inadequacy of this theoretical framework for genuine opposition.
The End of Faith book
Sam Harris's book: critiqued for advocating torture and for the truth-drug proposal, which Žižek calls 'decaffeinated torture' that also misses the dimension of the neighbor.
A Thousand Plateaus book
Greatly appreciated by Žižek as a work, but the IDF's use of it illustrates the political appropriability of any theoretical framework.
War of the Worlds film
Spielberg's film cited as another instance of the paternal-authority obsession, 'clearly not really about aliens, it's about Tom Cruise developing into a proper father.'
Paul Veyne's book: cited approvingly for showing that ancient Greeks believed in myths neither literally nor metaphorically but in a specific mode of virtuality.
Analyzed as a paternal-authority film: the absent father is replaced by E.T. as vanishing mediator; the film ends with family re-established under a new paternal figure.
Jurassic Park film
Cited as another Spielberg paternal-authority film: Sam Neill starts as a bad father who dismisses children and regains authority.
Leap of Faith film
'I don't like the film but the idea is nice': con-artist preacher performs a genuine miracle and is shattered by it, illustrates the unbearability of direct encounter with the Other.
Pollock film
Ed Harris film: 'not a totally bad film but one scene, death penalty.' The scene depicting Pollock's discovery of action painting (bottle tips, he realizes his method) is called obscene.
Regulating Aversion book
Wendy Brown's book: praised for its insights into tolerance discourse but criticized for remaining within a hermeneutics of suspicion that misses the Hegelian dialectical move.
United 93 film
The flight-93 film: criticized for focusing on the exception of passenger rebellion, embedding implicit theology of awakening, and obliterating political context under realistic style.
World Trade Center film
Oliver Stone's 9/11 film: criticized for the same abstraction through concreteness; its ending with an anonymous narrator spelling out the 'worst and best in people' is called 'vulgar' and 'too direct.'
Huntington's book (called 'Huntington disease'): argued to be not the opposite but the complement of Fukuyama's end-of-history, culturalized politics.
Für Elise song
Beethoven piano piece: referenced as the punchline of the Bosnian classroom joke.
People invoked 40
Primo Levi positive
His Selekcja passage from If This Is a Man is cited as a key text illustrating the comic-nightmarish quality of extreme situations that exceed tragedy.
Samuel Huntington negative
His Clash of Civilizations thesis is argued to be the complement rather than the opposite of Fukuyama, culturalized politics at the end of history. Žižek puns on 'Huntington disease.'
Udi Aloni positive
Personal friend and anti-Zionist filmmaker; told Žižek the story about the IDF academy using Deleuze-Guattari.
Mary Wollstonecraft positive
Cited as part of the history of how formal universality of human rights generated real emancipatory effects by being extended first to women.
George Soros negative
Cited alongside Gates as an exemplar of philanthropic capitalism that culturally depoliticizes social problems.
Vladimir Lenin positive
The Lenin joke (wife/mistress/library) is used to argue for theoretical reflection; also the 'learn, learn, and learn' slogan from Soviet schools.
Jacques Lacan positive
The big Other's phantasmatic gaze (Vertigo example), the structure of belief, and the neighbor as abyss are all framed in Lacanian terms.
Oliver Stone negative
Director of World Trade Center; his film is similarly critiqued for obliterating historical context under the guise of authenticity.
Wendy Brown negative
Her book Regulating Aversion is praised for its insights into how tolerance-discourse culturalizes politics, but criticized for remaining trapped in a hermeneutics of suspicion toward universality.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek says he greatly appreciates Deleuze and Guattari even as he notes that A Thousand Plateaus has been appropriated by the IDF, the appropriation doesn't make them ideologists of Zionism.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
Ironically called 'American philosopher specialized in the relationship between what we know and what we don't know'; his three-category epistemology is used as a foil to introduce the missing fourth term, unknown knowns.
Francis Fukuyama negative
End of history thesis is taken as the substrate within which the Clash of Civilizations operates, not its opposite.
Judith Butler positive
Described as a personal friend despite theoretical disagreements ('we send each other to Gulag'); the apology anecdote shows warmth and mutual respect.
Sam Harris negative
His 'The End of Faith' and truth-drug proposal are critiqued as 'decaffeinated torture' and as missing the dimension of the neighbor.
Antonio Negri negative
Cited as the main theoretical reference of a radical theory (Empire) that ultimately relies on Deleuze-Guattari, which the IDF also uses.
Jerry Falwell negative
Cited for reading 9/11 as divine punishment for American sinfulness, Žižek notes this is structurally identical to the radical Islamist position.
Homi Jehangir Bhabha negative
Respectfully disagreed with: Žižek opposes Bhabha's claim that capitalism erases cultural differences, arguing instead that capitalism produces difference while rendering particular identities contingent.
Fredric Jameson positive
His concept of 'cognitive mapping' is invoked approvingly to describe what the 9/11 films prevent viewers from achieving.
Friedrich Engels positive
Appears in the Marx-letter anecdote; described as 'bon vivant' in the joke.
Isaac Asimov positive
Doesn't like him as a writer but cites his observation that both options, being alone in the universe or having alien contact, are equally unbearable.
Félix Guattari positive
Co-cited with Deleuze; A Thousand Plateaus used by IDF is the key anecdote about theoretical appropriation.
Paul Greengrass negative
Director of United 93; his film is analyzed as ideologically complicit through its apparent realism.
Pat Robertson negative
Cited alongside Falwell for theologically interpreting catastrophes as divine punishment (also Sharon's heart attack as punishment for Gaza).
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited as one of the sublime moments of the French Revolution, receiving the Haiti delegation and declaring full equality of citizenship.
Martin Heidegger negative
His framework of life-world embeddedness (via Dreyfus's popularization) is criticized as an obstacle to confronting ecological crisis.
Contrasted with Gates/Soros: in Carnegie's era, philanthropy was a personal idiosyncrasy after profit; today it is a systemic necessity.
Bill Gates negative
Paradigm of the new necessary humanitarian capitalism in which charity is an economic necessity, not personal generosity, functioning to depoliticize problems.
Mao Zedong positive
Cited for his atom bomb text as an illustration of the logic of accepting terror over fear; Žižek notes Mao's responsibility for planned famine but finds the fearless stance philosophically instructive.
Mentioned as an example of Robertson/Falwell's hermeneutics: his heart attack was read as divine punishment for ceding Gaza.
Niels Bohr positive
The anecdote about Bohr's horseshoe is Žižek's central illustration of how ideology functions through practice rather than belief.
Paul Veyne positive
His book 'Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?' is cited approvingly to support the argument about virtualized, non-literal belief.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
His speeches' near-absence of the word 'tolerance' is noted positively, he framed racism as inequality and injustice, not tolerance failure.
Steven Spielberg negative
Criticized for an obsessive underlying motive of paternal restoration across his films; Schindler's List is called an artistic and political failure.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for demystification of false universality and the letter to Engels about Capital, but Žižek goes beyond simple Marxist hermeneutics of suspicion.
Michael Hardt negative
Co-cited with Negri as the theoretical duo behind Empire, sharing the same Deleuze-Guattari substrate appropriated by the IDF.
René Descartes positive
Cited from the Meditations: his recognition that his own culture might appear as stupid and ridiculous to others is taken as an illustration of experiencing one's particularity as contingent.
Paul the Apostle positive
Briefly invoked in passing: a 'Paulinian ecstasy' about love being what matters when the world falls apart, Žižek then critiques this interpretation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Repeatedly invoked for the concrete/abstract distinction, the death of God on the cross, actual universality as work of negativity, and the dialectical procedure of reappropriation.
Max Weber positive
Cited in the context of the historical emergence of 'profession' as a modern category presupposing contingency of one's particular social role.
Hubert Dreyfus negative
Representative of 'California Heideggerians' who claim life-world embeddedness is the antidote to technological alienation, Žižek argues this embeddedness is the ecological problem, not its cure.
What it argues
unknown knowns and the unconscious functioning of ideologycritique of 9/11 Hollywood films as ideological abstentionbelief practiced through behavior rather than held as inner convictionthe big Other as virtual addressee of social ritualsdecaffeinated ideology: multiculturalism, torture, and the Other without othernessfear vs. terror and the politics of catastrophetolerance discourse as culturalization of politics
Dialectical moves 13
“The very touch of authenticity in the two films raises the most disturbing questions — their terse realism is precisely what makes them ideological.”
Apparent formal anti-Hollywood authenticity is the mechanism through which deeper ideological abstraction (erasure of context) is achieved.
“These films are abstract in their very concreteness.”
Hegelian inversion: the more 'concretely' the films depict individuals, the more they erase the historical-political totality, making their realism the most abstract move possible.
“The ideological-political message of the two films resides in the very abstention from delivering the message.”
Not saying anything political is itself the most political act, the silence enacts implicit trust in government.
“What Falwell and Robertson claim — that America got what it deserved — is exactly the same as the claim of the most radical Arab Muslim fundamentalists.”
The apparent ideological opposites (American Christian right and Islamist fundamentalists) share the same theological logic of divine punishment.
“The fourth term is missing: not unknown unknowns but unknown knowns — things you know but don't know that you know. That's ideology.”
Žižek supplements Rumsfeld's epistemological schema to identify ideology's proper domain: the unconscious operative beliefs that structure practice without being consciously held.
“Of course I don't believe in it [the horseshoe], but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
This is how ideology functions today: not through inner conviction but through practices that operate regardless of belief.
“The true horror of extreme situations is that they are more tragic than tragedy.”
Real catastrophes (Holocaust, Gulag) exceed the tragic form because they strip victims of the minimum dignity that tragedy requires, which is why comedy is the more truthful aesthetic response.
“Our embeddedness in the life-world, far from being the solution to the ecological crisis, is precisely the problem.”
The Heideggerian remedy (return to embodied being-in-the-world) is the very mechanism that prevents us from taking ecological catastrophe seriously.
“An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard — this beautiful formula is wrong. Hitler's side of the story is a lie.”
The liberal-empathic formula collapses because self-narration can be ideologically false; truth is revealed in acts, not stories.
“Fear and terror are not two words for the same thing — they are exactly the opposite.”
Fear clings to a threatened ground; terror (authentic confrontation with groundlessness) is the condition of genuine emancipatory commitment.
“What began as a fake or brutally imposed imperialist ideology can be taken over and reappropriated — the dialectical procedure is more interesting than simple demystification.”
The opposite of ideological corruption is when something beginning as pure imposition becomes the genuine medium through which the oppressed articulate their grievances (e.g., Black Virgin of Guadalupe).
“Clash of Civilizations is precisely politics at the end of history — it is not the opposite of Fukuyama but his complement.”
Huntington and Fukuyama share the same post-political substrate; the apparent conflict of civilizations is just culturalized politics after the end of ideological struggle.
“The most racist thing is not a brutal John Wayne but the politically correct freak who reduces Native Americans to ecological-harmony-dancing decaffeinated others.”
Pseudo-tolerant multiculturalism that removes the disturbing otherness of the other is more deeply racist than overt hostility.
Claims 27
asserts
The 9/11 Hollywood films' ideological message resides precisely in their abstention from delivering a political message — their 'realism' is a form of ideological abstraction that obliterates historical context.United 93 and World Trade Center
asserts
Both films implicitly frame the attacks through a hidden theology: as a divine intervention or blessing in disguise that awakens moral solidarity, mirroring (inversely) the Falwell/Robertson logic.9/11 films and implicit theology
asserts
Ideology today functions primarily at the level of 'unknown knowns' — things we practice and embody without knowing we know them — not at the level of explicit belief.contemporary ideology
asserts
We never directly believe; belief is always virtualized and externalized onto the big Other, which is why even the most cynical subject is sustained by a belief they enact without consciously holding.the structure of belief
asserts
The problem with global warming is not lack of knowledge or corporate deception but a fetishist split: we know but cannot really believe it because our embodied life-world embeddedness prevents us from taking ecological data seriously.ecological crisis and ideology
rejects
Our embodied life-world embeddedness (championed by California Heideggerians like Dreyfus) is not the solution to the ecological crisis but its very cause.Heideggerian embeddedness as ecological remedy
asserts
There is no natural balance; nature is itself one big catastrophe, and the image of harmonious nature disturbed by human hubris is a human ideological projection.nature and ecology
asserts
The true horror of extreme situations (Holocaust, Gulag) is that they are 'more tragic than tragedy' — they strip victims of the minimum dignity required to play a tragic role, which is why the best Holocaust films are comedies.Holocaust representation and comedy vs. tragedy
asserts
Presenting the Holocaust as tragedy is obscene because it implies a character flaw or meaning in the victims' suffering; comedy better captures the radical incongruity of what happened.Holocaust aesthetics
asserts
The Book of Job's lesson is that we must radically resist the temptation to read meaning into catastrophes — to refuse teleological justification, including for Auschwitz, ecological disaster, and AIDS.theology, meaning, and catastrophe
asserts
What dies on the cross is not a messenger of God but God himself — crucifixion means you can no longer invoke a transcendent God who guarantees that disharmony secretly tends toward harmony.Christian theology and the death of the transcendent God
asserts
Social groups are held together not by their explicit normative rules but by the implicit metarules governing how and when to violate those rules — the 'unknown knowns' of social life.social norms and implicit rules
rejects
Political correctness is an ethical catastrophe because it tries to legalize what should function as spontaneous implicit norms — once you have to argue against rape, the battle is already lost.political correctness
asserts
The torture debate is more catastrophic than torture itself: by accepting torture as a legitimate topic of public debate, we have already conceded the most important ethical ground.torture debate
rejects
Sam Harris's 'truth drug' proposal is decaffeinated torture — torture with the bad effects removed, exemplifying the postmodern consumerist desire for everything without its disturbing remainder.Sam Harris on torture
rejects
The neighbor is not a fellow human whose story one should hear but an abyss of monstrous otherness; the liberal humanist 'understand your enemy' formula fails because the other's self-narrative can itself be a lie.liberal ethics of understanding the other
asserts
Fear in politics today is the ultimate mobilizing force for both left and right, replacing positive ideological commitments — and it is manipulated by religion to maintain meaning against the abyss.fear in contemporary politics
asserts
The Clash of Civilizations thesis is not the opposite of Fukuyama's end of history but its complement: culturalized politics at the end of history.Huntington vs. Fukuyama
reframes
Wendy Brown's critique of liberal tolerance, while correct in showing false universality, remains trapped in a hermeneutics of suspicion and misses the opposite Hegelian operation: universality that is hidden in what presents itself as merely particular.Wendy Brown's critique of tolerance
asserts
Formal universality (e.g., human rights) generates real emancipatory effects independent of its mystified content — its autonomy as appearance produces results that overflow its ideological origins.formal universality and emancipation
asserts
Capitalist universality does not homogenize cultures but produces a world in which every particular identity is experienced as contingent — a chosen way of life rather than a substantial determination.capitalism and cultural universality
rejects
The left's fake sense of urgency ('for every sentence a child died') functions to prevent thought and analysis, and ultimately serves the system by blocking theoretical reflection.left humanitarian rhetoric of urgency
asserts
Charitable humanitarian capitalism (Gates, Soros) has become a systemic economic necessity, not personal generosity, and functions to culturally depoliticize problems rather than address their structural causes.philanthropic capitalism
asserts
The Spielberg directorial obsession across films is the restoration of proper paternal authority; this framework drives Schindler's List, War of the Worlds, Jurassic Park, and E.T.Spielberg's films
rejects
Schindler's List is an artistic and political failure, with its most obscene moment being the depiction of Schindler's conversion to goodness — moral transformations should remain mysterious, not be aestheticized.Schindler's List
asserts
Deleuze and Guattari can be and have been appropriated by the Israeli Defense Forces as a conceptual toolkit for fighting the Intifada — any theory can be instrumentalized, which underscores the need for ongoing critical reflection.Deleuze-Guattari and political appropriation
asserts
Racist jokes in ex-Yugoslavia functioned not as vehicles of racist dismissal but as a mode of authentic solidarity and true interethnic contact, precisely because they abandoned the cold pseudo-tolerance of 'I respect your culture.'obscene jokes and solidarity
Quotes 18
“The four films' ideological-political message resides in the very abstention from delivering the message. This abstention is sustained by an implicit trust into one's government.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as abstention
“These two films are abstract in their very concreteness. The function of their down-to-earth depiction is not just to avoid cheap commercial spectacle, but to obliterate the historical context.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian concrete vs. abstract — ideology through realism
“The fourth term is missing: unknown knowns. Things you know but you don't know that you know them. That's ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns as ideology
“Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology functions through practice, not belief
“This man looks and acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes. That's always a shock, there always is a minimal gap.”Slavoj Žižek · the shock of genuine belief
“The true horror of extreme situations is that they are more tragic than tragedy. Tragedy still presupposes a minimum of dignity.”Slavoj Žižek · Holocaust exceeds the tragic form
“I would like to see that global harmony to which Auschwitz and Gulag contribute.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of theodicy
“What dies on the cross is not a messenger of God, it's God himself. Auschwitz is a catastrophe for God also.”Slavoj Žižek · crucifixion as end of transcendent theodicy
“What he proposes is basically decaffeinated torture, no? Like in the same way we want coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, muffins without fat — here you get even torture without the bad effect.”Slavoj Žižek · decaffeinated desire — postmodern ideology
“The neighbor is always too close if you want. The neighbor is properly monstrous. This neighbor is not the nice guy — this is decaffeinated neighbor.”Slavoj Žižek · the neighbor as abyss, not humanized other
“An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. Isn't this beautiful? Like no... Would you also say, 'Oh Hitler was our enemy because we didn't hear his story'?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of liberal empathy formula
“Fear is you still think you have some roots, some grounding, you are afraid to lose it. The solution is to accept that there is no way back.”Slavoj Žižek · fear vs. terror — the emancipatory wager
“The moment you have to argue explicitly [against rape], the battle is lost. I want to live in a society where you don't have to argue about this.”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness as ethical catastrophe
“The true catastrophe of the debate on torture is not in torture but in debate. Even if you are opposed to it, we accepted it as a topic of debate.”Slavoj Žižek · the torture debate as ideological defeat
“Clash of Civilizations is precisely politics at the end of history — it is not the opposite of Fukuyama but his complement.”Slavoj Žižek · Huntington as Fukuyama's complement
“Don't mess with appearances. Appearances have an actuality, efficiency of their own.”Slavoj Žižek · the real efficacy of ideological appearances
“True multiculturalism begins with you being able to perceive not only to respect others, but to fully experience the contingency of your own cultural legacy.”Slavoj Žižek · actual universality as experienced contingency of one's own particularity
“It's not just this cold refined pseudo-tolerant racism: 'Oh I like your culture, your food.' I don't care about your culture. 'I want to hear your dirty joke.' Like as a true solidarity.”Slavoj Žižek · obscene joke as authentic solidarity vs. decaffeinated multiculturalism
Transcript 11 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks for the kind invitation. Thanks for this nice introduction. I had only one disappointment when you said between hammer and... I thought it would be between hammer and sickle or whatever, some joke like this, no? Also, the only thing that disturbed me in this kind of introduction is all the the "one of the most provocative thinkers" and so on. Like, it's very difficult for me to identify myself to that, with that. Like, you construct a certain place and I was almost tempted to look back like who is the guy? Now, it's nice that you mention that wound because I think that you now generated that wound in me, the wound of humanity, because that wound is the gap between me in my immediate stupidity and that image of me like who is that inventive thinker and so on. Of course, we in psychoanalysis have a name for this wound, no? It's called symbolic castration. So thanks for a castrating experience. No, okay. Okay, so now, okay, enough of jokes. I already warned people that I tend to speak too long, so I will simply go on trying to read your body language, no, and or some gentle hints. Okay. Since this is Visual Arts and so on department, let me begin with two recent Hollywood productions which were released to mark the fifth anniversary of September 11th. Paul Greengrass's United sorry and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Now, the first thing that strikes the eye is that both films try to be as anti-Hollywood as possible. Both focus on the courage of ordinary people. No glamorous stars, no special effects, no big heroic gestures, just as they put it, a terse realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. However, I claim this very touch of authenticity raises some disturbing questions. The first thing that one cannot but note is how both films tell the story of an exception. United is about the only one of the four kidnapped planes in which the terrorists failed, which didn't hit its destination. World Trade Center tells the story of the two of those or so policemen, firemen who were saved from the ruins. The disaster is thus turned into a kind of triumph, most notably in United where the passengers revolted. Now, a comparison with Spielberg's Schindler's List is instructive here. Although I consider Schindler's List a total artistic and political failure, nonetheless I think that the idea to choose Schindler... ah, why a failure? We can... I shouldn't get lost in this but we can debate this later. I think that the problem is that Spielberg has one underlying fundamental motive which he repeats through practically all of his films. It's this obsession with father, a failed father who ultimately recaptures, regains his proper paternal authority. Take the one before the last one, War of the Worlds. It's clearly not really about aliens, it's about Tom Cruise developing into a proper father. And this gives us a key to practically all of them, I claim. Jurassic Park is really about Sam Neill, bad father, dismissing the two small kids, regain authority. Schindler's List, it's clearly, it's about Schindler turning from exploit... from the one who financially exploits, sees the opportunity to exploit Jews, to turning into their paternal protector. Even E.T., I claim. What happens really in E.T.? Remember that in the first scene you learn that the family is... that the father abandoned the family. This is absolutely crucial. So E.T. is for me just a kind of a vanishing mediator. Do you remember the last scene where finally that Yoda-esque creep called E.T. goes home? Do you remember that all the scientists are bad? The one who is the good one already, check it up, has his hands over the mother's shoulder. So again, paternal authority, family is re-established and so on and so on. So in spite of all these problems, and there are other mega problems... for example... no, no, we will have time, now let's do it properly. Like for me, the lowest point of Schindler's List is that Spielberg couldn't, wasn't able to resist the temptation to depict the very point when Schindler like discovers his mission, turns into a good father. You remember that famous for me, I'm sorry to tell you, too kitschy scene when he is on that small hill above the Kraków Ghetto on a horse in the morning ride, sees he sees observes the German units, SS units, special units, penetrating the Ghetto, and that famous color in a black and white film, the small girl in red and so on. At that you see it. For me, it's something, now I will talk radical atheist, almost in theological terms, this kind of conversion in good, in evil, they should remain a mystery at some level. There is something obscene, blasphemous for me in depicting them. You know, it's as if as if Spielberg here makes one step into a direction of which the lowest point is maybe... did you see with Ed Harris Pollock? It's not a totally bad film but one scene... death penalty for me. Namely, do you remember how they couldn't resist depicting the moment when this action painting is discovered? Of course, it's the usual stupidity, like a kind of a bottle of color, totally drunken Ed Harris, Pollock hits it, it turns over and then, "Oh! He discovered... that's it!" Like they couldn't resist it. That's obscene. But nonetheless, back to Schindler's List, something he did there is correct. What? The way he there focused on an exception. Why? I think that it is precisely by presenting a German who did something to help the Jews that you get over the implication that it was possible to do something, and thus effectively to condemn those who did nothing claiming it was totalitarian regime, nothing could have been done. So Spielberg, I think, was correct there to focus on exception. In United I claim, on the contrary, the focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of precisely preventing us to ask this truly pertinent question. That is to say, let me indulge in a simple mental experiment. Let me imagine both films... American... sorry, now United and World Trade Center with the same type of change. Let's imagine a film called instead of United "American That is to say, about one of the other flights where there was no redemptive moment of rebellion, they all died. Or let us imagine the same World Trade Center, only no solution at the end, they die, both of the policemen. Now, what's my point here? It's that far from in any way justifying or showing an understanding for the terrorist attack, attacks and so on, such a version would have confronted us with the true horror of the situation. You know, that would be the encounter of what was so terrifying. This would have been made us to raise the true questions. The second feature: both films, I hope you noticed this, restrain not only from taking a political stance about the events, but even from depicting their larger political context. Neither the passengers of United flight nor the policemen in World Trade Center have any kind of a grasp on the full picture. All of a sudden, they find themselves thrown into a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it. Now, this lack of what Fredric Jameson would have called cognitive mapping is crucial. Both films depict ordinary people affected by the sudden, brutal intrusion of history, this invisible Real that hurts, History with capital H, of course. All we see are the disastrous effects. So that, now I come to my point. Are you aware that, for example in the case of World Trade Center, one can easily imagine exactly the same film, just we learn at the beginning that instead of the terrorist attack, what caused the collapse of the Twin Towers would have been, I don't know, some earthquake, some explosion of of oil there or whatsoever. You can imagine exactly the same film. Or even more problematically... now, this is really an evil mental experiment, but it makes the point. Imagine the same film taking place in a big German city bombed by American bombers in the fall of '44. You know, everything stands as it is. Or, to be more actual, the same film taking place in a bombed high-rise building in Southern Beirut during the last Lebanon-Israeli conflict. That's the point. It cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as, in the last case, a subtle pro-Hezbollah terrorist propaganda and so on. What this means, now I come to my conclusion, the second one, is that the two films' ideological-political message resides in the very abstention from delivering the message. This abstention is sustained by an implicit trust into one's government. When the enemy attacks, you just have to do your duty, don't ask questions and so on. What I call the Britney Spears theory of government. Namely, I remember two years ago, by mistake, mental mistake, I watched Britney Spears' interview on MTV and asked about war in Iraq, she said, "I don't really understand it, I just know that we people simply should have trust our president" and so on. That's what I mean. Now, this brings me back to our starting point, to this concrete character of the two films, depicting ordinary people in a terse realistic mode. Any philosopher, every philosopher knows Hegel's counter-intuitive use of the opposition between abstract and concrete. In the ordinary language, abstract are general notions, as opposed to concrete, really existing singular objects and events. For Hegel, on the contrary, it is such immediate reality which is abstract. And to render it concrete means to deploy the complex universal context that gives meaning to it. For example, let's say if I were to smoke... I don't smoke, don't worry, but let's say if I were to smoke. According to the usual notion of being concrete, the concrete thing would have been simply to show me here as an individual smoking. And then, cigarettes, whatever, that that are abstract notions. For Hegel, showing just me as an individual smoking is the most abstract thing you can do. The concrete approach is to provide all the network of mediations which historical, social, which have to be here so that I can smoke. Colonization, tobacco in I think it was first used by natives in Latin America, history of colonization, then psychohistory, why do we humans need tobacco, relax, stress, work, and so on. All that has... that's what makes my abstract individuality, this stupid presence of just an entity which smokes, concrete, this concrete network. And back to the two films. Here I see the problem. They are both abstract in their very concreteness. The function of their down-to-earth depiction of concrete individuals struggling for life is, I claim, not just to avoid cheap commercial spectacle, but to obliterate the historical context. Here then is where we are, that's the second sad lesson of the two films, I think, five years later. Still unable to locate September 11th into a larger narrative, to provide its cognitive mapping. But nonetheless, there is some kind of not explicit but implicit underlying cognitive mapping, and that will be now my crucial point. Did you notice how in both films celebrated for their terse realistic down-to-earth style, there is an exception also at the level of the style? A moment which violates this style. United starts with kidnappers in a motel room praying, getting ready. They look austere like some kind of angels of death. And the first shot after the title credits confirms this impression. It is a panoramic shot, the camera moves high above Manhattan in the night looking down, accompanied by the sound of the kidnappers' prayers, as if the kidnappers stroll above the city getting ready to descend on earth to ripe their harvest. Similarly, there are no direct shots of the planes hitting the towers in World Trade Center. All that we see seconds before the catastrophe, when one of the policemen is on a busy street, is an ominous shadow quickly passing over the crowd. Of course, we know from our external knowledge, the shadow of the first plane just about to hit one of the Twin Towers. These shots, I claim, confirm on both films a strange theological reverberation, as if the attacks were a kind of divine intervention. Recall what is this, but how does this implicit theology work? Recall the first reaction of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the September 11th bombings, perceiving them as a sign that God lifted up its protection of the United States because of the sinful lives of the Americans. I mean, I admire people who are ready to play this hermeneutics. Like I remember when Sharon had got a heart attack, immediately Pat... I think it was Pat Robertson, no okay, one of the two said immediately, "Yeah, it's divine punishment for giving Gaza, I think it was Gaza at that point, away to the Palestinians" and so on. Okay, so it's again the punishment for hedonist materialism, liberalism, sexuality and so on. Basically, what they claim is that the United States got what it deserved. To cut a long story short, their claim is exactly the same as the claim of the most hard radical Arab Muslim fundamentalists. What I claim is that in a hidden way United and World Trade Center tend to do the opposite but within the same field. To read the September 11th catastrophe as a blessing in disguise, as a divine intervention from above destined to awaken us from moral slumber and to bring out the best in us. World Trade Center especially ends with the off-screen words of an anonymous narrator spelling out in almost vulgar too direct way this message: "Terrible events like the Twin Towers' destruction bring out in people the worst and the best: courage, solidarity, sacrifice for community and so on. People are shown to be able to do things they would never imagine of being able." So it is as if our societies need a major catastrophe in order to resuscitate the spirit of communal solidarity. Now, this I find up to a point acceptable. In what sense? I think that the two films here implicitly refer to the... I'm ready even to go as far as to claim to the implicit utopian socialist dimension of Hollywood catastrophe films. It's my old thesis that this is the only place in Hollywood where some kind of socialist utopia in a hidden way survived. Why? I claim that you should avoid this obvious fascination with, I don't know, asteroid, comet hitting earth, this big catastrophe. The true pleasure, surplus pleasure let's call it, it's in the by-product that when confronted with a catastrophe people forget their aggressiveness, competitiveness, and there is some kind of authentic cooperation, solidarity and so on and so on. That aspect is okay. What I nonetheless find problematic is... there are two things that I find problematic. The first thing is, especially in United the way the way that nonetheless Hollywood is Hollywood, the narrative, even if it's about world-historical event, cannot resist the temptation of framing it by the logic of the creation of the couple. Like the two couples are reunited in United sorry in World Trade Center, even in United Where do we have this reference to couples or rather family? Do you remember at the... do you remember how the film of course exploits this nice tragic I admit it detail how, which is I think a fact, that most of the passengers when they knew basically that they will almost for sure die, but were still able to make a phone call... last phone call, they usually called their nearest, dearest, wife, husband, daughter, son, mother, basically telling them "I love you". Now, okay, we can go here into a kind of Paulinian referring to Saint Paul ecstasy: you see, even when the whole world is falling apart, what truly matters at that point when everything falling apart is love. I have a problem here. And to avoid any misunderstanding, some of you may take as cynical, aggressive... no, it's quite the opposite what I will say now. Why suppose that it was authentic that moment? I claim it was as a rule a lie. I can well imagine, to be very cynical, I can well imagine a situation where you are where let's say it's very cynical but you will get my point. Let's say that one of the passengers was a cheating husband, sleeping around, blah blah blah. I can well imagine him in a very sincere way convincing himself in that total panic, you know like the last moments of life to settle your accounts with God, with your nearest, to call your wife even if previously, even if to be quite cynical, all the time before the kidnapping he thought, "Oh, I will now escape my wife, the last time I've seen her, whatever," you know, to do this. So I claim that this move, this it's not what we get there is the ultimate self-idealization. It's precisely not the authentic core. It's a lie, fundamental lie. What would have been a truthful moment here? Something much more brutal, and I'm not saying I would be able to do it. Now to be cruel, but that's the point, the situation was cruel. The true ethical act for me would have been for a husband, if of course this is true, to call his wife or the wife the husband, tell him, "Listen darling, I'm about to die but since we will never see each other again, let me make it clear: our marriage was hell, I wanted to divorce you. Bam!" That would have been an act. And I'm not cynical here. Why not? Now you will say I'm cruel, I'm making fun of it. Yes, I am, but now we came to the nice point that you were kind enough to indicate about comedy and so on. You know, what is the lie? The lie is the form of tragedy itself. That is to say, I think the true horror, not only of such desperate situations but let's go a step further, of extreme situations, Gulag, Holocaust, of course, and so on, is that they are how to put it, they are more tragic than tragedy. Tragedy tragedy still presupposes a minimum of dignity. To hit a movie, for example on Holocaust, where you have a kind of a heroic confrontation, a Jew resists the Nazi in kind of... it's an obscenity. Obscenity because it give it concedes too much to the Nazis. I claim that the situation was so desperate that you were precisely deprived of the possibility of playing this tragic role. You can play a tragic role only insofar as you are left with a minimum space of dignity. Or to put it in another way: I claim that there is a deep meaning in the fact that most of the good films about Holocaust are comedies. You know, there is comedy and comedy. There is a cheap comedy, of course I don't agree with that, like making fun of the prisoners. But what is comedy at its most fundamental? It is precisely this incongruity, the radical gap between what you are and what is happening to you, one of the dimensions of the comedy. So I think the lie of a... what is tragedy? Tragedy is ultimately always the tragedy of a character, you know like Oedipus' character flaw and so on. And it's I think an obscenity in this way to present Holocaust as a tragedy. It would mean Jews should look deep into themselves, you know, what did we do, are we really, and so on and so on. No! No wonder that, and I say this with all decency because this is for me what is truly horrible in Holocaust. If you read arguably the best rendering memoirs, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man. Remember there is a wonderful, wonderful, okay it's an obscenity to say this, terrifying passage where he describes the standard, standard okay procedures. Every two months I think all the prisoners in Auschwitz were submitted to a procedure called Selekcja, selection. In the sense of they had to run naked in front of a SS doctor and they were given literally like two three seconds, doctor sometimes even quickly looked at them. His duty was to judge, are they fit enough to work a little bit more to survive or off you go to the gas chamber or what, no? And what I'm talking about is that if you read this description coldly if you can, you will discover that there is something in a weird disgustingly terrifying way comic about it, like the preparations, you know how the inmates were trying to pinch their lips to appear more red, or how they were running in a codified way to appear more healthy. This is a nightmarish ridiculous comedy. It's the same for example if you read the transcripts of the Stalinist show trials. You got my point here. I'm not saying comedy in the sense of haha it wasn't so serious, let's laugh at it. No, I'm saying comedy because it's to concede too much to call it a tragedy. Now I come to my second point. What we should even more radically resist is precisely this implicit theology insofar as it mobilizes apropos of a catastrophe the logic of implicit teleological justification. When catastrophes happen, we have to read a meaning into them. Like what accounts for this positive attitude after we leave the hall, after the two films, is precisely, "Oh, but it wasn't in vain, it did serve a deeper purpose, like to awaken us from our moral slumber and so on and so on." I think that here again as an atheist, I think we still have to learn things from my favorite piece of the Old Testament, the Book of Job. What really happens there? Okay, let's dismiss things which usually theologians try to also dismiss as kind of a remainder of some pagan tradition, this nice after-dinner talk a table talk between God and devil, you know after the drinks, the coffee, "What's that sucker Job is here and then let's make that wager" and so on. And let's concentrate on what happens. After Job is hit by calamities, what happens? The problem is precisely this one: does all of it have a meaning or not? To simplify it. You know what then happens: these three idiot friends come, three theologians, and it's not so much that they want they try to make him feel guilty. They just want to convince him that it has a deeper meaning. Like the first one does the usual theological line: God is just so if this is happening to you, you must have done something bad even if you are not aware of it. Another guy gives another version: God is it's a temptation to test your faith, whatever, but it has a meaning. And the greatness of Job for me is that he radically resists this meaning. His point is not so much, "It's not just what is happening to me, I didn't deserve it." It's I think more radical: "I won't be duped into accepting this logic of it has to have a deeper meaning." And that's I think the lesson for us today. Whenever we confront possible or actual catastrophes, ecological catastrophe, AIDS, to resist this temptation of meaning. Like AIDS, "Oh oh, something must we must have done something wrong, it's a divine..." or ecology, "Oh," to go into this New Age stuff, "you know, we disturbed the the balance, holistic balance of the universe, so nature is punishing us or whatever." It doesn't... we should resist meaning. In other words, I claim that what this legacy of Job prohibits is precisely to take refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret master who, you know, we humans work a little bit here and there, we never know what will come out of it, but we can rely on God up there, he controls everything, somehow he will take care that things will finish well. Or to go even further in this obscenity, you know that well-known theological metaphor used in traditional theology to justify or to account for evil. That what appears to us evil is like a stain on a picture. With our finite finite eyes, we are like somebody who looks at a picture... picture standing here for the universe from too close. You know, and of course if you look from two centimeters at Mona Lisa, you see just a stain. The idea being if you withdraw to a proper distance, you see how this stain contributes to global harmony. Now, I think the lesson of Judeo-Christian tradition I'm talking this as a Stalinist materialist but is for me precisely to prohibit this radically. Why? Okay, I mean just let's just replace this evil with a concrete name, Auschwitz. I mean, wouldn't it be obscene for me, disgusting, to say, "Auschwitz may appear to our finite view a catastrophe, but from a proper perspective it just contributes to global harmony"? Well, I would like to see that global harmony to which Auschwitz and Gulag contribute. For me, for example among other things, the meaning of crucifixion is precisely that God, as Hegel put it, God which is that transcendent God... what dies on the cross is not a messenger of God, it's God himself. In the sense of crucifixion means you no longer can evoke a transcendent God which somehow guarantees that... In other words, the message of crucifixion is: Auschwitz is a catastrophe for God also. God is not allowed to withdraw into this haze from which he can say, "Don't worry, withdraw, you will see the global harmony, good vibrations reverberating in this disharmony or whatever." Let me go on. But now probably you will tell me an obvious counter-argument. But when I was in the movie theater watching these films, I didn't perceive this theological dimension. It must be very implicit. Is it really there? So I agree, probably you were not fully aware. That's the point. At what level then does this implicit ideology, theological justification function? Here, out of professional solidarity, I would like to refer to a colleague, American philosopher who unfortunately, a tragic accident, lost his job a week ago. Something evil is coming, you can guess... to a well-known philosopher specialized in the relationship between what we know and what we don't know. Of course, Donald Rumsfeld. I thought you... okay. You I'm here referring to his well-known interview in September, sorry in March where he said there are known knowns, things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, things we know that we don't know. For example, I know that there are cars outside this building in a parking lot, but I don't know how many they are, and I know that I don't know this. And then, as he put it, the unknown unknowns, things which are so radically unknown they are simply another dimension that we even don't know that we don't know them. And this is the limit of American philosophy today. This is why you are in deep shit in Iraq. The fourth term is missing, if you noticed it, no? That is to say, known knowns, known unknowns, you know what you don't know, unknown unknowns, totally other. Why not the most interesting category: unknown knowns. Things you know but you don't know that you know them. That's ideology. At this level, I claim theology in those films is in those two films. It is all that let's call them unconscious prejudices or whatever that we don't even that we don't know that we know, but nonetheless they are operative. This is how our beliefs today function. And here, okay I will try to not to be too long, but here this attitude of unknown knowns I think provides the key to how ideology today functions. Of course, at the level of our explicit knowledge, we are cynics today usually, no? You don't take it seriously, I don't believe whatever, I just want to realize my ego whatever, pleasure, whatever. But I claim we believe much more, but not we in the depth of our souls. We practice, we materialize our beliefs. The best key to this predicament is for me, maybe some of you know it, I quote it in my Parallax View, this wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr, the quantum physics guy. It's an anecdote I found in a biography of Bohr where he was visited at his countryside wooden cottage house by a fellow scientist and this fellow scientist noticed something strange, that above the entrance to the house, entrance door, there was a horseshoe. In Europe, this is kind of a superstitious prop, item. The idea is that it prevents evil spirits, whatever evil, to enter the house. So the friend asked Niels Bohr, "My God, I thought you were a scientist. Do you believe in it? Why do you have this there?" Bohr gave a perfect answer: "Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." This is how ideology works today. You don't have to you don't have to believe in it. As it were, your practice you just practice belief. Which is why we can be cynical as much as you want, but there always is a belief embodied either in what you do or also a very interesting phenomenon, in you transpose belief onto another. As Lacan would have put it, the big Other believes. Now let me give you two examples on this which are one of... no, maybe even not both of them are known to you from two opposite systems: Hollywood and Stalinism. Hollywood: you saw Hitchcock's I hope you know it by heart Hitchcock's Vertigo. You know that scene after minutes into film, I think after first fake suicide attempt of Madeleine, she jumps into the water there, I mean beneath Golden Gate Bridge, Scottie brings her home and then there is a long panning shot. Scottie's room then camera moves diagonally. First it shows kitchen sink and above it her underwear, her clothes, of course he undressed her and put her into bed and then slowly it moves the camera towards the door his bedroom of his bedroom where she is. Now, that's the logic. But now do something if you have the film on DVD. Put it on freeze when it is showing the underwear above the kitchen sink, no, hanging. You will see that there is no underwear. It's just abstract pieces of cloth, towels and so on. Why? I read it in a book on Vertigo, in a French one. It's incredible. Hays Code blocked it, no? They said, "No, if you really see the underwear, this would have been a material proof that within the logic of the narrative Scottie saw Kim Novak naked. No, we won't allow this." Now, isn't there something strange about this? Because ask yourself a simple question: whom were the Hays Code censors trying to protect? Not us. Every spectator, normal spectator, automatically on the contrary automatically assumes that what he or she sees is are is the underwear. So it is as if another objectified, virtual gaze is presupposed. In Lacanian terms, this phantasmatic gaze of the big Other, and that gaze which can be eventually in our life lives perceived as the gaze of children, of the leader, the innocence of this gaze should be protected. Now let's jump for another I think even nicer example in Stalinism. '53, you know the great leader died. Okay, then at that very point the first volume of Soviet Encyclopedia appeared, I don't know which edition. The point is there were of course among other things two pages on Lavrentiy Beria, you know, KGB Stalin's henchman and so on. And it was like this: was two pages, one leaf. First a little bit of the preceding article, then Beria on the next side and then okay. The problem was that then, as befits Stalinism, half a year later in the fall or in summer, Beria was unfortunately discovered to be an English spy, shot, and so on. Okay, he become a non-person. So what happened? Something absolutely breathtaking which tells us a lot about the functioning of social order. Every subscriber of encyclopedia got a letter with a new page. He was asked to cut out the old page, send it and stuck in the new page. And they took care that the continuity was perfect. That is to say, first it was the end of the previous article entry, then you know it's nice what they did. With photos: instead of Beria, B-E-R-I-A, they put Bering, Bering Pass, you know between Alaska and Siberia. But and so that you know you put it in and the continuity was perfect, seamless. Again, the same enigma: whom were they trying to deceive? Of course not the people. The people knew it, they had to do it. So again, you have kind of a almost like in the medieval times a proof of the existence of God, a proof of the presupposed existence of the big Other, no? That's the mystery of Stalinism for me: how the most brutal regime killing people ruthlessly whatever, at the same time total panic, incredibly sensitive for appearances. As if to disturb an appearance, everything falls apart. Again, this is how beliefs function. Now let's go on. Of course, what this means is that we never what this means is I claim that we never believe. Even if you have a fully religious person, if he were to really experience God, it would have been an absolute shock for him, I claim. It's a kind of a when we believe is always a minimally virtual belief. Which is why for example I find totally consistent, I had recently two years ago, okay not so recently, a debate with bishops in Vienna and I asked them a couple of provocative questions. One was, "What's your attitude towards you know that Turin Shroud, allegedly the shroud with which Christ was covered, with bloodstains, which blah blah?" They told me frankly privately, not publicly there: "We pray day and night that it's not the authentic one." Because they told me why: that it would have been terrifying if it were to be proven. Why? Okay, the first reason they gave is a more pragmatic one. They said, "My God, shit, with all this biogenetics, you know then the question who is the father becomes an empirical one." And as one bishop told me, "What if we discover that there was some Arab or Egyptian slave there really doing it?" You know, it's they were terrified. But I think there is a more radical dimension at it. The problem is that Isaac Asimov I don't like him as a writer but he put it very nicely once. He said that there are two possibilities: either there is somebody out there, aliens, God, so that we are not alone, or we are alone. And he said, "Both options are unbearable for us." No, to really accept a radically atheist position is unimaginable. But to really encounter Another is paranoia. So you need a kind of a virtualized position which shouldn't be too directly realized. Which is why did you see a movie again, I don't like the film but the idea is nice, from '92 with Steve Martin, Leap of Faith? Of this kind of a con artist, Southern preacher, pulling these tricks healing crippled, sorry, politically correct, disabled persons and so on. And then at some point he himself is surprised by the fact that he does perform a miracle. And it totally shatters, it totally breaks him down. So I think that the first thing to notice is how there is always a minimal tension in us between belief, disbelief. We believe, but our belief is not this direct brutal realistic belief. Paul Veyne, the French historian, wrote a wonderful book called "Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?" where he proves that of course they did not literally. Like they were not so stupid as to think that if you climb to the top of the Mount Olympus you will there see I don't know Zeus fighting family fight with Hera or whatever. They did not. But also he points out very nicely, we shouldn't impute to them our metaphorical notion and claiming that no for them I don't know Zeus was just the personification of a cosmic principle or natural force or whatever. It's a very specific virtuality of belief. Which is why we have this automatic attitude that how should I put it, when you express, externalize your belief, I claim, you do it usually to get rid of it. In the sense of you know it's out there to disengage minimally yourself. Like isn't it that we are often surprised when somebody who professes a belief and then you discover, "My God, but this guy really believes"? I think this old Marx Brothers' joke holds: a version of, you know, with Marx Brothers it's looks like an idiot. This man looks and acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes. That's always a shock, there always is a minimal gap. And this gap is crucial, even in our most actual problems. Let's take global warming. What really happens there? Why don't we act? I think that it's too simple to rely just on this leftist paranoia in the sense of, "You know oh the big companies multinational are deceiving us, blah blah." No, I think and it's also not that we cannot be certain. We know, but I claim we don't believe it. It's this fetishist split: I know very well but... What do I mean? We know, you cannot deny I think that the scientific data are convincing enough. But what happens? Let's say you read a report, you know, but then you go out. You see the stars, the sun, flowers, animals, you cannot believe that this, you know, we are embedded beings, part of this life world. You cannot really believe that this can be shattered. You know but you cannot believe it. Which is why one differ one I think problematic maybe for some of you conclusion from this. Which is why I totally disagree with those especially let's call them California Heideggerians like Hubert Dreyfus and so on. Those who claim that in order that the root of ecological problems is our alienation in this attitude of scientific technological manipulation which presupposes some kind of disembodied abstract subjectivity and that we should accept how this scientific technological manipulative attitude of technological domination over nature is just a secondary byproduct or alienation of the original embeddedness in our life world. I claim that that embeddedness far from being a solution is precisely the problem. The problem in the sense that this is what ultimately prevents us from taking seriously ecological crisis. Which is why I think if we are to take it seriously, we should precisely do this faithful step and unlearn or somehow try to very difficult to do to step outside this our most elementary embeddedness in a life world. We should adopt some kind of a virtual abstract existence which is for me even a kind of freedom. I will return to this later. So let me go on. At what level does this embeddedness, which of course is an ideological complex determined by all those unknown knowns implicit beliefs, function? Ah, now we come to the next specification. Let me talk a little bit about... because there we find this unknown knowns this implicit rules. How social groups work. Okay, let's of course every social group from family to I don't know what is usually identified by its normative structure, a set of rules that you have to obey which determine which identify you as member of that group. But I claim that things are always for theoretical reasons that Lacanian psychoanalysis can easily explain a little bit more complex. We never simply have rules and then you obey them you are in, you don't obey them you make a social mistake you are out. The problem is that if you obey rules if you simply radically obey rules, you appear an absolute idiot you are out. Which is why incidentally they are no longer fashionable all those courses of, you know, learning to behave as a gentleman, as a lady in the old times were counterproductive. You appeared as an idiot. Because to be truly a gentleman, it's not simply to obey the rules of being a gentleman, it's to know in what way to violate those rules. What does this mean? Imagine a social prohibition. I claim that if you are normal, and we are, the first question you ask yourself when somebody tells you, "Oh this is prohibited" is, "But what does he mean by it? Is it really literally prohibited or is it implicitly do it but do it discreetly, or it is even a call to violate it?" You know, especially with sexual prohibitions, you never know where you are. How should I put it, no? The greatest if you take seriously a demand in an erotic exchange you may appear the greatest idiot. But even more problematic I think and interesting is the opposite example. Not something is prohibited but the metarule tells you it's secretly a call to do it but in a certain way. The opposite example of you are allowed, permitted to do something, but you are given a freedom of choice but on condition that you don't use it. On condition that you do not do what you are permitted. And again, let me give you a couple of example examples to make this logic clear. Recently I spoke with a Japanese friend who told me that in Japan workers have the right guaranteed usual workers fully employed to days of holiday every year. However, my friend quickly added, they are expected not to use this right in its full extent. The implicit rule is not to take more than days. So, European idiot as I was, I tell them, "Okay, but why don't you then simply put it directly, it's He told me, "I don't understand anything, I'm an idiot." And he was right. Because although this excess may appear nonsensical, that's true communication. Communication means this empty gestures. You know what I mean? Let me give you two other examples or even three from daily life that you must know. I don't know if it's with you in my country this ritual: if I and some close friend of mine, if we are engaged in a competition for some scholarship, post, whatever. And let's say he wins. It's a ritual for him to tell me, "You know, I know that you really deserve this post so I will step down." But I'm expected to say, "No thanks. No no, you can have it." Now you will say it's an empty exchange. What's the result of it? It is the social link, friendship or whatever. Or even a more vulgar example: when you, if you are poor and a rich friend, whatever person older invites you to a restaurant. It's absolutely clear to both of you that he will pay. But isn't there a structural necessity of this short ritual where you insist a little bit that you will pay, but then but then I hope you don't make the mistake I made years ago. I insisted a little bit too long and then the friend said, "Okay, pay if you want." No, okay. But let me give you a much more refined example which happened to me, it's very traumatic for me, this summer in a Swiss resort, some kind of stupid summer school to corrupt intellectuals where I was there with among others my good friend although we theoretically hate each other, send each other to Gulag and so on, but personally we are friends, Judith Butler. And we were once in a normal conversation and then I did something I must admit it. Don't be afraid, nothing against her, I am the bad guy here absolutely. I used some very vulgar words, you know. I called her a degenerate freak and so on. I thought this is humor. Okay, it's a very weird humor but I don't know why I did it. Maybe my defense should have been, you know, that creepy evangelical guy Haggard or what, no, this kind of there is a dark side of myself I'm fighting it but cannot dominate it. Okay, so I saw that I did something terribly wrong. So I called her later and sincerely apologized, absolutely, unconditionally, with none of this none of this John Kerry or whoever tricks: "No if somebody felt offended then..." You know. Then she did something very nice. She told me something like, "Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn't offended. I knew you didn't mean it. So really you owe me no apology." She was very sincere in this. But you got my point. My point is that she was able to say, "You owe me no apology," only after I gave her the apology. If I were not to give her apology, it wouldn't function. This excess is the excess of these implicit rules. And I claim everything hangs on these implicit rules. Our entire how should I call it, ethical substance hangs on these implicit rules which are crucial but cannot be directly normativized or even worse penalized. This I think is for me at least one of the problems of political correctness, that the way I see it, it tends to legalize what precisely should function as this kind of spontaneous set of rules. And that's I think an ethical catastrophe. Because the moment you have to do it, the battle is already lost. You know what I mean? For example, it's obscene to say, "I oppose rape" in our societies, hopefully I'm glad that it is, and then to give arguments. I want to live in a society where you don't have to argue about this. Where simply if somebody claims women should be allowed to rape, I don't know, he appears a jerk, an idiot, or you know what I mean. The moment you have to argue explicitly, the battle is lost. Which is why this accounts I think from for one of the ethical tragedies today for me. That what I found so horrible, many people misunderstood me here, about the debates on torture now, "Should we torture terrorists?" and so on. It's not so much torture as such... no, I'm opposed to it, don't misunderstand me. But to be very frank the field is open in the sense of in some crazy situation, let's be melodramatic in this cheap sense, you know, some evil guys have my small daughter they are beating her and I catch one of these guys. In despair I cannot look you into the eye and guarantee that I wouldn't torture the guy. But I think the true catastrophe of the debate on torture is not in torture but in debate. Even if you are opposed to it, it's that we accepted it as a topic of debate. So what goes wrong here in the debate on torture? There is a book, Sam Harris, The End of Faith, published I think about a year ago by and which was a New York Times bestseller who which advocates torture. And now a little bit of this: why what is wrong in the book? Many things, it advocates torture. It's based on among other things it advocates torture. It's based on a very crude analogy with evolutionary logic. It claims that what prevents us from torturing people it's a kind of ethical illusion which is similar to the moon illusion. In the sense of you know we know now that moon is not a small object that we see but a much larger object. In the same way in ethics we do not yet know that we are not yet able at the level of our ethical gut feeling to take into account the fact that suffering of those we don't see who are far away matters much more than the suffering of somebody here. If we were to set our rules properly, then we should be not only able but it even would have been our duty if you can prevent much greater suffering of others to torture somebody who is here. Then Sam Harris allows for the point that we cannot get out of this illusion which is for him as he puts it in slightly cynical term, a neurological evolutionary illusion. He imagines a truth pill, a drug. That was his solution for our sensitivities: to develop a drug which you give it to the terrorist, injection, pill, and then the terrorist for the external view seems just to fall asleep, but internally it's a total nightmare but you cannot detect it outside, no? And then he awakens after half an hour and my God confesses that he killed his mother, whatever, everything. And he thinks that would have been the solution. I have problems here. The first problem is that this what he proposes is basically decaffeinated torture, no? Like in the same way, and that's our let's call it postmodern ideological condition, in the same way that we want coffee without caffeine, we want I don't know beer without alcohol, muffins without fat and so on, here you get even torture without the bad effect, like decaffeinated torture. And we get everything here. This is expanded on all domains like I claim that one of the weak points, failures of the usual liberal multiculturalism is that it's again a decaffeinated multiculturalism. The other yes, but a decaffeinated other. Like the most racist thing for me, I prefer a brutal John Wayne claiming Indians Native Americans were barbarians to this, you know, if you listen to some politically correct freaks: Native Americans with kind of you know people dancing their ecological dances obsessed with harmony and balance and so on. That's racism at its worst. So that's my first problem. My second problem is a very cynical one. KGB already did it. I read in the history of KGB that Serbsky Institute which was the psychiatric wing of KGB, in the '60s and '70s developed some strange okay medicine, not medicine. They injected to arrested dissidents near heart in the heart region some liquid which again from the outside you just appear to doze off a little bit, from the inside it was nightmare as if you are prevented breathing and so on. It was the thing. But something more radically is at work here. Which dimension is lost when you treat your the other people the way Sam Harris proposes? I claim that the dimension of what in Judeo-Christian tradition is called neighbor. And I'm an atheist, I'm not now using it in any mystical term or religious even but simply in the term of the abyss of the other's personality, of this intensity of being too close to the other in this his her abyss of the other's desire and so on. There is something nightmarish in being confronted by this abyss of the other. Which is why the neighbor is always too close if you want, no? The neighbor is it's not only it's not physical proximity as Sam Harris thinks, the neighbor is always too close, he always has to be moved a little bit further away. So this neighbor is properly monstrous. This neighbor is not the nice guy, this is decaffeinated neighbor, you know the nice guy with whom you share your experiences and so on. Which is why my first my further crazy conclusion. Which is why I radically oppose this standard notion of we should understand each other in the sense of if you we should all tell each other our stories and then we will understand each other. Or as a poetic saying goes: an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. Isn't this beautiful? Like no, I just objectified you, I should see your side. I am opposed to this. Why? Because okay, let's again make a simple mental experiment. Let's replace enemy with Hitler. Would you also say, "Oh Hitler was our enemy because we didn't hear his story" or whatever? No. I mean there the presupposition of this is that the stories that people are telling themselves about themselves are truth. No, they can be lies, I think. Hitler did horrible things. The truth is in what he did and the story his side of the story as it were is his side of the story is a lie here. So again, I just wanted to draw attention to this that neighbor is not this the other whom I should understand. No, neighbor is the abyss of otherness. The other, the neighbor himself or herself is trying to escape from this abyss by telling himself stories about himself. And now I come finally to this fear. Because I claim that the fear which predominates in today's politics is ultimately the fear of the neighbor, formulated as a defense against potential victimization or harassment. That is to say, did you notice how today in our post-ideological era where people no longer believe, you cannot mobilize them for some higher cause, the only way to truly mobilize people, to introduce passion into politics is to mobilize or to refer to fear. Left also, not only right. Unfortunately, fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of excessive state control, fear of ecological catastrophes, fear of harassment, and so on and so on and so on. It's fear. Fear, which is the point. And again, this fear I think is manipulated in nice way, in exclusive way by religion. Religion precisely prohibits you to keep to maintain some kind of meaning so that this fear doesn't overwhelm you. And I claim that even ecology unfortunately functions in this way as fear, fear of losing some kind of grounding. As if there is nature, we disturb the balance, fear is let's not disturb it too much, let's return to it. I claim that this is the worst environmental ideology. I claim that the first the ABC to truly confront ecological crisis is to confront fully the fact that there is no nature. No, I mean I'm a materialist, there is, but what I'm saying is that that this our spontaneous notion of nature as some kind of balanced holistic whatever exchange which is then disturbed by human intervention is false. There are nature is one big catastrophe. Nature is not balanced in itself. I claim that this image of nature as opposed to human hubris is precisely human projection at its worst. So I think the only way to overcome this fear... I will not have time obviously I spoke to some to develop it all but the only way to overcome this fear is through for me fear and terror are not two words for the same thing, are exactly the opposite. Fear is you still think you have some roots, some grounding, you are afraid to lose it. The solution is to accept that there is no way back. In the sense of you have nowhere to return. There is no natural balance or whatsoever. That is to say that in a way we accept the abyss of our freedom. Or as he put it, he here being Mao Zedong, and I don't have any specific ethico-political love for Mao Zedong. We know enough now how for example the famine of late '50s was planned. They coolly accepted million people to die in order to be able to export food to Russia and so on. But nonetheless, there is something which incredibly attracted me in how Mao Zedong in his famous text from "Why the Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the American Atom Bomb", how he justifies there this lack of fear. It's not what we usually some of us who still remember, you are many of you are young, you don't probably know that you know years ago there was still politics, there were students organized as left, you know this was fairy tales, another era. Okay, at that point and the usual version was that so what, United States can bomb us, we have a billion people, they can kill half a billion, there still is half a billion. No it wasn't this. Let's read Mao. He goes on beyond them and says, I quote him: "But even if the United States atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it the earth up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a minor event for the solar system." So you see the madness of Mao. Now the question is from where does he talk? Like "Oh so what, the worth, sorry the earth disappears. But we live in a universe, who cares?" It's I claim that although this is of course madness, but I claim that a minimum of this madness, sorry, a minimum of this madness is present in every authentic fight for struggle or whatever. You must go to this fearless point of accepting terror. Now, I was told that I can talk as long as I want, but I warn the organizers that my friends call me Fidel, no, so like it can go on. So I know that you have limits, so let me maybe just conclude by at least reporting you on what I wanted to develop. What I wanted to develop is I don't have time unfortunately something about how this fear relates to violence, why violence is such a topic in the form of harassment and so on for us today, and then the crucial point: I wanted to go into problematizing the very notion of tolerance in a critical dialogue with Wendy Brown, her wonderful last book Regulating Aversion. Of course, the first thing to note here it's a simple observation which I like from Wendy which is: are we aware how today we tend to perceive as problems of tolerance or intolerance problems conflicts which years ago were not perceived as problems of tolerance. For example, remember the big moment of struggle against racism, Martin Luther King. Look his speeches. He barely uses I think, I made this experiment on internet, I downloaded some of his speeches and then search "tolerance", "intolerance", it's practically absent, the very word. For him, racism against the blacks was not a problem of intolerance, it was the problem of inequality, exploitation, injustice, and so on. So the first question is why do we today formulate or perceive these problems as problems of tolerance? I think it has something, quite a lot, to do with what we may call the culturalization of politics. That is to say, we all accept basically this post-political reduction of politics to post-politics, experts administration, compromises and so on. So that then because of this all the remaining sources of conflict are perceived as cultural conflicts. Which is why I claim there is no opposition between Fukuyama and the guy who spread around Huntington disease, and it's appropriately called Huntington, that is to say Clash of Civilizations. I claim that Clash of Civilizations is precisely politics at the end of history, culturalized politics. Okay. Now, Wendy Brown in a detailed criticism tries to undermine this liberal position. Convincing as she is, I have a whole series of problems there with her account. Let me go just to the crucial problem that I see with her. The problem is that I think of course her criticism is the standard one. It is that we in the West have this liberal notion of what... ah it's very interesting how she develops it and she is right here. It's that what is our definition of barbarian, fundamentalist barbarian? It's to cut a long story short, pure culture. That is to say barbarians are those who are fully identified to their culture. To be civilized means precisely not to be fully one's culture. It means you know this minimum liberal freedom: I can step in, out. Culture is no longer a substantial determination of our life. It is one of the ways of life which you can enter exit and so on. So of course then it's easy for Wendy to show how although liberalism presents itself as above particular cultures, it effectively privileges a certain culture, our culture. For example, this notion of choice, way of life and so on, privileges individual competitiveness against social solidarity and so on and so on which are features of a certain culture. But there is something else that to conclude if you give me literally just a couple of minutes. There is something else which is more crucial here I think. I think her crucial limitation, the way I see it, is that her procedure of critique of ideology remains that of a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the universal. That is to say her basic formula is: what is sold to us what ruling the ruling ideology is selling us and appears as universal, universal human rights and so on, you know this standard logic. Universality is false universality. What is really beneath it are particular interests, like you know human rights only appear to be universal human rights. In reality, they are, you know the story, the rights of male, white, Western, individualist, capitalist individuals. So it's this simple traditional Marxist demystification of false universality. I have and I think it's crucial to insist today on this. I have two problems here, if you just allow to conclude me. The first problem, even if it is a false mask, if there is a thing to be learned from theory of ideology is that don't mess with appearances. Appearances have an actuality, efficiency of their own. Let's take precisely human rights. Yes, it's absolutely true they are mystification of blah blah, but nonetheless their formal autonomy even if it's an appearance generates results of their own. Like of course they were at the beginning only human rights of white men but as you know how the story then goes: Mary Wollstonecraft, then women said, "Why not also us?" Then I think a the most noble moment of French Revolution, the Haiti Revolution. When blacks asserted, "Why not us?" and I think it was the heroic moment of of Robespierre, people of Jacobins that they fully accepted this. I think it's truly one of the sublime moments of French Revolution when the Haiti delegation came and Robespierre received them and said, "Look at them. There is absolutely no difference between them and us, we are both fully citizens of the French Republic" and all that stuff and so on and so on. This was something. So again, what Wendy Brown underestimates a little bit is how even illusion can produce very real emancipatory effects. In other words, it's easy to play the game of demystification or corruption. Something that was originally authentic gets commercialized, exploited and so on and so on. Like you can say in I don't know maybe not quite in the case of jazz, gospels originally black protest, oh then commercial recording, blah blah. But I think what is much more interesting for a dialectical analysis is the opposite procedure. It is when something that began as a fake or brutally imposed imperialist blah blah colonialist ideology is taken over recontextualized reappropriated. Like Christianity, Mexico, you know the story, the Black Virgin of Guadalupe. Isn't this precisely the moment when Christianity was no longer simply the ideology of colonizers but was partially at least appropriated by the colonized to articulate their grievances? The second point is even more crucial here and this is I think where the true disagreement between me and Wendy Brown lies. I claim that this is only one aspect, this hermeneutics of suspicion where you denounce universality you discover particular interests. But the basic lesson of Hegel, of Marx, of all those guys whom I I'm an outdated dinosaur still like, is that there is an even more crucial perhaps opposite operation. Not you perceive yourself ideologically as advocating universal rights but you mystify the situation you really privilege your position. But you perceive yourself as only pursuing following your particular view, goals, notions, but you are what you are unaware is precisely the universal dimension of what you are doing. It's you get the point? It's the exact opposite: it's the universality of your acts which is hidden, which escapes you. And I think in this sense when we analyze capitalism, it's absolutely wrong to focus only on this so-called Eurocentric aspect and claim, "Oh it appears universal, it's really Eurocentric and so on and so on." No, I think that capitalism is effectively universal. Not only in the vulgar sense that that we have capitalism can be combined with Buddhism, with Hinduism, with Catholicism, Protestantism, whatever. But something much more radical. Actual universality is not part of this stupid game: how do I know when I say something universal that it's really universal and so on? It's a much more mysterious, how should I put it, concrete event: it's that what Hegel calls actual universality, universality for itself, which means that you relate to yourself as universal. For example, to give you the most obvious example. Of course people always in the division of labor almost always did different things. In medieval society they did not all they were not all serfs, you know there were serfs, farmers, there were knights, there were priests, there were guild members, artisans and so on. But nonetheless, we know the story, Max Weber and so on, it is stupid and wrong to say that if you ask a knight a knight, "What's your profession?" Even for him to say "My profession is to be a knight," it's stupid. The notion of profession presupposes this modern space of contingency where what you are in your particular identity is something ultimately contingent up to a point depending on your choice. Which means that you yourself do not identify yourself with your particular role and so on. You yourself perceive yourself as if the core of your being is universal and the particular way of life, form of your existence is ultimately contingent. And I think that this element is crucial. And I think this element is not only the element of universality present in capitalism but it's even a very positive element. I claim that true multiculturalism, authentic, or however we call it, begins with you being able to perceive not only to respect others, that for me always a fake. The catch is: are you able to fully experience, endorse, assume the contingency of your own cultural legacy? That you do, you know as Descartes put it in a wonderful way in his I think Meditations on First Philosophy that first he thought "Oh how stupid are other civilizations, Persians, Arabs, Jews and so on." But then he asked himself a question, "My God, but if I look at myself through other's eyes, do not I also appear to myself maybe my way of life must also appear to others as a stupid, ridiculous and so on?" And you see the catch here. The catch is not, "Oh but did was he really able to perceive himself through the other eyes?" The catch is just that he experienced his own particular determination as something ultimately contingent. In this sense universality is as Hegel would have put it, a work of negativity. The universality of capitalism is what? It's not that we will all eat hamburgers. Here I respectfully agree for example with Homi Bhabha who claims capitalism in culture universalizes erases differences. No, I claim. Capitalism emphasizes difference. World capitalism does not mean we will all eat hamburgers. It means to each of us his her their own way of life but way of life precisely experienced as not our total determination but as our particular way of life. That's capitalist universality at work. In the sense that for example if you are a Hindu or a Jew or what, being a Jew is no longer the fundamental determination of your being. It's something you do in the afternoon, but in the morning you work on the market or whatever. Like it's you know, it's this transubstantiation of what in traditional society is your substantial determination into a contingent idiosyncrasy of the way of life. So I talk very long, so just to conclude, what does this universality mean politically? Just to conclude, I cannot restrain from concluding with another dirty joke of course. I claim that what bothers me politically today is that a kind of a fake sense of urgency pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse. One of the indications of this fake sense of urgency is do notice this a certain for me I find it disgusting rhetoric of immediate references. Like if I were to be like that, I would then talk like this: "Are you aware that for every word that I used here in this time, children died of hunger in Africa?" or "For every sentence that I said here, a woman was raped on our streets." It's true but so what? First, so what of course is horrible that this happens. But by so what I mean what is the function of such references? I claim to prevent us to think. This false urgency means: don't think, don't analyze, do it. No wonder that
Thanks for the kind invitation. Thanks for this nice introduction. I had only one disappointment when you said between hammer and... I thought it would be between hammer and sickle or whatever, some joke like this, no? Also, the only thing that disturbed me in this kind of introduction is all the the "one of the most provocative thinkers" and so on. Like, it's very difficult for me to identify myself to that, with that. Like, you construct a certain place and I was almost tempted to look back like who is the guy? Now, it's nice that you mention that wound because I think that you now generated that wound in me, the wound of humanity, because that wound is the gap between me in my immediate stupidity and that image of me like who is that inventive thinker and so on. Of course, we in psychoanalysis have a name for this wound, no? It's called symbolic castration. So thanks for a castrating experience. No, okay. Okay, so now, okay, enough of jokes. I already warned people that I tend to speak too long, so I will simply go on trying to read your body language, no, and or some gentle hints. Okay. Since this is Visual Arts and so on department, let me begin with two recent Hollywood productions which were released to mark the fifth anniversary of September 11th. Paul Greengrass's United sorry and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Now, the first thing that strikes the eye is that both films try to be as anti-Hollywood as possible. Both focus on the courage of ordinary people. No glamorous stars, no special effects, no big heroic gestures, just as they put it, a terse realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. However, I claim this very touch of authenticity raises some disturbing questions. The first thing that one cannot but note is how both films tell the story of an exception. United is about the only one of the four kidnapped planes in which the terrorists failed, which didn't hit its destination. World Trade Center tells the story of the two of those or so policemen, firemen who were saved from the ruins. The disaster is thus turned into a kind of triumph, most notably in United where the passengers revolted. Now, a comparison with Spielberg's Schindler's List is instructive here. Although I consider Schindler's List a total artistic and political failure, nonetheless I think that the idea to choose Schindler... ah, why a failure? We can... I shouldn't get lost in this but we can debate this later. I think that the problem is that Spielberg has one underlying fundamental motive which he repeats through practically all of his films. It's this obsession with father, a failed father who ultimately recaptures, regains his proper paternal authority. Take the one before the last one, War of the Worlds. It's clearly not really about aliens, it's about Tom Cruise developing into a proper father. And this gives us a key to practically all of them, I claim. Jurassic Park is really about Sam Neill, bad father, dismissing the two small kids, regain authority. Schindler's List, it's clearly, it's about Schindler turning from exploit... from the one who financially exploits, sees the opportunity to exploit Jews, to turning into their paternal protector. Even E.T., I claim. What happens really in E.T.? Remember that in the first scene you learn that the family is... that the father abandoned the family. This is absolutely crucial. So E.T. is for me just a kind of a vanishing mediator. Do you remember the last scene where finally that Yoda-esque creep called E.T. goes home? Do you remember that all the scientists are bad? The one who is the good one already, check it up, has his hands over the mother's shoulder. So again, paternal authority, family is re-established and so on and so on. So in spite of all these problems, and there are other mega problems... for example... no, no, we will have time, now let's do it properly. Like for me, the lowest point of Schindler's List is that Spielberg couldn't, wasn't able to resist the temptation to depict the very point when Schindler like discovers his mission, turns into a good father. You remember that famous for me, I'm sorry to tell you, too kitschy scene when he is on that small hill above the Kraków Ghetto on a horse in the morning ride, sees he sees observes the German units, SS units, special units, penetrating the Ghetto, and that famous color in a black and white film, the small girl in red and so on. At that you see it. For me, it's something, now I will talk radical atheist, almost in theological terms, this kind of conversion in good, in evil, they should remain a mystery at some level. There is something obscene, blasphemous for me in depicting them. You know, it's as if as if Spielberg here makes one step into a direction of which the lowest point is maybe... did you see with Ed Harris Pollock? It's not a totally bad film but one scene... death penalty for me. Namely, do you remember how they couldn't resist depicting the moment when this action painting is discovered? Of course, it's the usual stupidity, like a kind of a bottle of color, totally drunken Ed Harris, Pollock hits it, it turns over and then, "Oh! He discovered... that's it!" Like they couldn't resist it. That's obscene. But nonetheless, back to Schindler's List, something he did there is correct. What? The way he there focused on an exception. Why? I think that it is precisely by presenting a German who did something to help the Jews that you get over the implication that it was possible to do something, and thus effectively to condemn those who did nothing claiming it was totalitarian regime, nothing could have been done. So Spielberg, I think, was correct there to focus on exception. In United I claim, on the contrary, the focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of precisely preventing us to ask this truly pertinent question. That is to say, let me indulge in a simple mental experiment. Let me imagine both films... American... sorry, now United and World Trade Center with the same type of change. Let's imagine a film called instead of United "American That is to say, about one of the other flights where there was no redemptive moment of rebellion, they all died. Or let us imagine the same World Trade Center, only no solution at the end, they die, both of the policemen. Now, what's my point here? It's that far from in any way justifying or showing an understanding for the terrorist attack, attacks and so on, such a version would have confronted us with the true horror of the situation. You know, that would be the encounter of what was so terrifying. This would have been made us to raise the true questions. The second feature: both films, I hope you noticed this, restrain not only from taking a political stance about the events, but even from depicting their larger political context. Neither the passengers of United flight nor the policemen in World Trade Center have any kind of a grasp on the full picture. All of a sudden, they find themselves thrown into a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it. Now, this lack of what Fredric Jameson would have called cognitive mapping is crucial. Both films depict ordinary people affected by the sudden, brutal intrusion of history, this invisible Real that hurts, History with capital H, of course. All we see are the disastrous effects. So that, now I come to my point. Are you aware that, for example in the case of World Trade Center, one can easily imagine exactly the same film, just we learn at the beginning that instead of the terrorist attack, what caused the collapse of the Twin Towers would have been, I don't know, some earthquake, some explosion of of oil there or whatsoever. You can imagine exactly the same film. Or even more problematically... now, this is really an evil mental experiment, but it makes the point. Imagine the same film taking place in a big German city bombed by American bombers in the fall of '44. You know, everything stands as it is. Or, to be more actual, the same film taking place in a bombed high-rise building in Southern Beirut during the last Lebanon-Israeli conflict. That's the point. It cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as, in the last case, a subtle pro-Hezbollah terrorist propaganda and so on. What this means, now I come to my conclusion, the second one, is that the two films' ideological-political message resides in the very abstention from delivering the message. This abstention is sustained by an implicit trust into one's government. When the enemy attacks, you just have to do your duty, don't ask questions and so on. What I call the Britney Spears theory of government. Namely, I remember two years ago, by mistake, mental mistake, I watched Britney Spears' interview on MTV and asked about war in Iraq, she said, "I don't really understand it, I just know that we people simply should have trust our president" and so on. That's what I mean. Now, this brings me back to our starting point, to this concrete character of the two films, depicting ordinary people in a terse realistic mode. Any philosopher, every philosopher knows Hegel's counter-intuitive use of the opposition between abstract and concrete. In the ordinary language, abstract are general notions, as opposed to concrete, really existing singular objects and events. For Hegel, on the contrary, it is such immediate reality which is abstract. And to render it concrete means to deploy the complex universal context that gives meaning to it. For example, let's say if I were to smoke... I don't smoke, don't worry, but let's say if I were to smoke. According to the usual notion of being concrete, the concrete thing would have been simply to show me here as an individual smoking. And then, cigarettes, whatever, that that are abstract notions. For Hegel, showing just me as an individual smoking is the most abstract thing you can do. The concrete approach is to provide all the network of mediations which historical, social, which have to be here so that I can smoke. Colonization, tobacco in I think it was first used by natives in Latin America, history of colonization, then psychohistory, why do we humans need tobacco, relax, stress, work, and so on. All that has... that's what makes my abstract individuality, this stupid presence of just an entity which smokes, concrete, this concrete network. And back to the two films. Here I see the problem. They are both abstract in their very concreteness. The function of their down-to-earth depiction of concrete individuals struggling for life is, I claim, not just to avoid cheap commercial spectacle, but to obliterate the historical context. Here then is where we are, that's the second sad lesson of the two films, I think, five years later. Still unable to locate September 11th into a larger narrative, to provide its cognitive mapping. But nonetheless, there is some kind of not explicit but implicit underlying cognitive mapping, and that will be now my crucial point. Did you notice how in both films celebrated for their terse realistic down-to-earth style, there is an exception also at the level of the style? A moment which violates this style. United starts with kidnappers in a motel room praying, getting ready. They look austere like some kind of angels of death. And the first shot after the title credits confirms this impression. It is a panoramic shot, the camera moves high above Manhattan in the night looking down, accompanied by the sound of the kidnappers' prayers, as if the kidnappers stroll above the city getting ready to descend on earth to ripe their harvest. Similarly, there are no direct shots of the planes hitting the towers in World Trade Center. All that we see seconds before the catastrophe, when one of the policemen is on a busy street, is an ominous shadow quickly passing over the crowd. Of course, we know from our external knowledge, the shadow of the first plane just about to hit one of the Twin Towers. These shots, I claim, confirm on both films a strange theological reverberation, as if the attacks were a kind of divine intervention. Recall what is this, but how does this implicit theology work? Recall the first reaction of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the September 11th bombings, perceiving them as a sign that God lifted up its protection of the United States because of the sinful lives of the Americans. I mean, I admire people who are ready to play this hermeneutics. Like I remember when Sharon had got a heart attack, immediately Pat... I think it was Pat Robertson, no okay, one of the two said immediately, "Yeah, it's divine punishment for giving Gaza, I think it was Gaza at that point, away to the Palestinians" and so on. Okay, so it's again the punishment for hedonist materialism, liberalism, sexuality and so on. Basically, what they claim is that the United States got what it deserved. To cut a long story short, their claim is exactly the same as the claim of the most hard radical Arab Muslim fundamentalists. What I claim is that in a hidden way United and World Trade Center tend to do the opposite but within the same field. To read the September 11th catastrophe as a blessing in disguise, as a divine intervention from above destined to awaken us from moral slumber and to bring out the best in us. World Trade Center especially ends with the off-screen words of an anonymous narrator spelling out in almost vulgar too direct way this message: "Terrible events like the Twin Towers' destruction bring out in people the worst and the best: courage, solidarity, sacrifice for community and so on. People are shown to be able to do things they would never imagine of being able." So it is as if our societies need a major catastrophe in order to resuscitate the spirit of communal solidarity. Now, this I find up to a point acceptable. In what sense? I think that the two films here implicitly refer to the... I'm ready even to go as far as to claim to the implicit utopian socialist dimension of Hollywood catastrophe films. It's my old thesis that this is the only place in Hollywood where some kind of socialist utopia in a hidden way survived. Why? I claim that you should avoid this obvious fascination with, I don't know, asteroid, comet hitting earth, this big catastrophe. The true pleasure, surplus pleasure let's call it, it's in the by-product that when confronted with a catastrophe people forget their aggressiveness, competitiveness, and there is some kind of authentic cooperation, solidarity and so on and so on. That aspect is okay. What I nonetheless find problematic is... there are two things that I find problematic. The first thing is, especially in United the way the way that nonetheless Hollywood is Hollywood, the narrative, even if it's about world-historical event, cannot resist the temptation of framing it by the logic of the creation of the couple. Like the two couples are reunited in United sorry in World Trade Center, even in United Where do we have this reference to couples or rather family? Do you remember at the... do you remember how the film of course exploits this nice tragic I admit it detail how, which is I think a fact, that most of the passengers when they knew basically that they will almost for sure die, but were still able to make a phone call... last phone call, they usually called their nearest, dearest, wife, husband, daughter, son, mother, basically telling them "I love you". Now, okay, we can go here into a kind of Paulinian referring to Saint Paul ecstasy: you see, even when the whole world is falling apart, what truly matters at that point when everything falling apart is love. I have a problem here. And to avoid any misunderstanding, some of you may take as cynical, aggressive... no, it's quite the opposite what I will say now. Why suppose that it was authentic that moment? I claim it was as a rule a lie. I can well imagine, to be very cynical, I can well imagine a situation where you are where let's say it's very cynical but you will get my point. Let's say that one of the passengers was a cheating husband, sleeping around, blah blah blah. I can well imagine him in a very sincere way convincing himself in that total panic, you know like the last moments of life to settle your accounts with God, with your nearest, to call your wife even if previously, even if to be quite cynical, all the time before the kidnapping he thought, "Oh, I will now escape my wife, the last time I've seen her, whatever," you know, to do this. So I claim that this move, this it's not what we get there is the ultimate self-idealization. It's precisely not the authentic core. It's a lie, fundamental lie. What would have been a truthful moment here? Something much more brutal, and I'm not saying I would be able to do it. Now to be cruel, but that's the point, the situation was cruel. The true ethical act for me would have been for a husband, if of course this is true, to call his wife or the wife the husband, tell him, "Listen darling, I'm about to die but since we will never see each other again, let me make it clear: our marriage was hell, I wanted to divorce you. Bam!" That would have been an act. And I'm not cynical here. Why not? Now you will say I'm cruel, I'm making fun of it. Yes, I am, but now we came to the nice point that you were kind enough to indicate about comedy and so on. You know, what is the lie? The lie is the form of tragedy itself. That is to say, I think the true horror, not only of such desperate situations but let's go a step further, of extreme situations, Gulag, Holocaust, of course, and so on, is that they are how to put it, they are more tragic than tragedy. Tragedy tragedy still presupposes a minimum of dignity. To hit a movie, for example on Holocaust, where you have a kind of a heroic confrontation, a Jew resists the Nazi in kind of... it's an obscenity. Obscenity because it give it concedes too much to the Nazis. I claim that the situation was so desperate that you were precisely deprived of the possibility of playing this tragic role. You can play a tragic role only insofar as you are left with a minimum space of dignity. Or to put it in another way: I claim that there is a deep meaning in the fact that most of the good films about Holocaust are comedies. You know, there is comedy and comedy. There is a cheap comedy, of course I don't agree with that, like making fun of the prisoners. But what is comedy at its most fundamental? It is precisely this incongruity, the radical gap between what you are and what is happening to you, one of the dimensions of the comedy. So I think the lie of a... what is tragedy? Tragedy is ultimately always the tragedy of a character, you know like Oedipus' character flaw and so on. And it's I think an obscenity in this way to present Holocaust as a tragedy. It would mean Jews should look deep into themselves, you know, what did we do, are we really, and so on and so on. No! No wonder that, and I say this with all decency because this is for me what is truly horrible in Holocaust. If you read arguably the best rendering memoirs, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man. Remember there is a wonderful, wonderful, okay it's an obscenity to say this, terrifying passage where he describes the standard, standard okay procedures. Every two months I think all the prisoners in Auschwitz were submitted to a procedure called Selekcja, selection. In the sense of they had to run naked in front of a SS doctor and they were given literally like two three seconds, doctor sometimes even quickly looked at them. His duty was to judge, are they fit enough to work a little bit more to survive or off you go to the gas chamber or what, no? And what I'm talking about is that if you read this description coldly if you can, you will discover that there is something in a weird disgustingly terrifying way comic about it, like the preparations, you know how the inmates were trying to pinch their lips to appear more red, or how they were running in a codified way to appear more healthy. This is a nightmarish ridiculous comedy. It's the same for example if you read the transcripts of the Stalinist show trials. You got my point here. I'm not saying comedy in the sense of haha it wasn't so serious, let's laugh at it. No, I'm saying comedy because it's to concede too much to call it a tragedy. Now I come to my second point. What we should even more radically resist is precisely this implicit theology insofar as it mobilizes apropos of a catastrophe the logic of implicit teleological justification. When catastrophes happen, we have to read a meaning into them. Like what accounts for this positive attitude after we leave the hall, after the two films, is precisely, "Oh, but it wasn't in vain, it did serve a deeper purpose, like to awaken us from our moral slumber and so on and so on." I think that here again as an atheist, I think we still have to learn things from my favorite piece of the Old Testament, the Book of Job. What really happens there? Okay, let's dismiss things which usually theologians try to also dismiss as kind of a remainder of some pagan tradition, this nice after-dinner talk a table talk between God and devil, you know after the drinks, the coffee, "What's that sucker Job is here and then let's make that wager" and so on. And let's concentrate on what happens. After Job is hit by calamities, what happens? The problem is precisely this one: does all of it have a meaning or not? To simplify it. You know what then happens: these three idiot friends come, three theologians, and it's not so much that they want they try to make him feel guilty. They just want to convince him that it has a deeper meaning. Like the first one does the usual theological line: God is just so if this is happening to you, you must have done something bad even if you are not aware of it. Another guy gives another version: God is it's a temptation to test your faith, whatever, but it has a meaning. And the greatness of Job for me is that he radically resists this meaning. His point is not so much, "It's not just what is happening to me, I didn't deserve it." It's I think more radical: "I won't be duped into accepting this logic of it has to have a deeper meaning." And that's I think the lesson for us today. Whenever we confront possible or actual catastrophes, ecological catastrophe, AIDS, to resist this temptation of meaning. Like AIDS, "Oh oh, something must we must have done something wrong, it's a divine..." or ecology, "Oh," to go into this New Age stuff, "you know, we disturbed the the balance, holistic balance of the universe, so nature is punishing us or whatever." It doesn't... we should resist meaning. In other words, I claim that what this legacy of Job prohibits is precisely to take refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret master who, you know, we humans work a little bit here and there, we never know what will come out of it, but we can rely on God up there, he controls everything, somehow he will take care that things will finish well. Or to go even further in this obscenity, you know that well-known theological metaphor used in traditional theology to justify or to account for evil. That what appears to us evil is like a stain on a picture. With our finite finite eyes, we are like somebody who looks at a picture... picture standing here for the universe from too close. You know, and of course if you look from two centimeters at Mona Lisa, you see just a stain. The idea being if you withdraw to a proper distance, you see how this stain contributes to global harmony. Now, I think the lesson of Judeo-Christian tradition I'm talking this as a Stalinist materialist but is for me precisely to prohibit this radically. Why? Okay, I mean just let's just replace this evil with a concrete name, Auschwitz. I mean, wouldn't it be obscene for me, disgusting, to say, "Auschwitz may appear to our finite view a catastrophe, but from a proper perspective it just contributes to global harmony"? Well, I would like to see that global harmony to which Auschwitz and Gulag contribute. For me, for example among other things, the meaning of crucifixion is precisely that God, as Hegel put it, God which is that transcendent God... what dies on the cross is not a messenger of God, it's God himself. In the sense of crucifixion means you no longer can evoke a transcendent God which somehow guarantees that... In other words, the message of crucifixion is: Auschwitz is a catastrophe for God also. God is not allowed to withdraw into this haze from which he can say, "Don't worry, withdraw, you will see the global harmony, good vibrations reverberating in this disharmony or whatever." Let me go on. But now probably you will tell me an obvious counter-argument. But when I was in the movie theater watching these films, I didn't perceive this theological dimension. It must be very implicit. Is it really there? So I agree, probably you were not fully aware. That's the point. At what level then does this implicit ideology, theological justification function? Here, out of professional solidarity, I would like to refer to a colleague, American philosopher who unfortunately, a tragic accident, lost his job a week ago. Something evil is coming, you can guess... to a well-known philosopher specialized in the relationship between what we know and what we don't know. Of course, Donald Rumsfeld. I thought you... okay. You I'm here referring to his well-known interview in September, sorry in March where he said there are known knowns, things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, things we know that we don't know. For example, I know that there are cars outside this building in a parking lot, but I don't know how many they are, and I know that I don't know this. And then, as he put it, the unknown unknowns, things which are so radically unknown they are simply another dimension that we even don't know that we don't know them. And this is the limit of American philosophy today. This is why you are in deep shit in Iraq. The fourth term is missing, if you noticed it, no? That is to say, known knowns, known unknowns, you know what you don't know, unknown unknowns, totally other. Why not the most interesting category: unknown knowns. Things you know but you don't know that you know them. That's ideology. At this level, I claim theology in those films is in those two films. It is all that let's call them unconscious prejudices or whatever that we don't even that we don't know that we know, but nonetheless they are operative. This is how our beliefs today function. And here, okay I will try to not to be too long, but here this attitude of unknown knowns I think provides the key to how ideology today functions. Of course, at the level of our explicit knowledge, we are cynics today usually, no? You don't take it seriously, I don't believe whatever, I just want to realize my ego whatever, pleasure, whatever. But I claim we believe much more, but not we in the depth of our souls. We practice, we materialize our beliefs. The best key to this predicament is for me, maybe some of you know it, I quote it in my Parallax View, this wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr, the quantum physics guy. It's an anecdote I found in a biography of Bohr where he was visited at his countryside wooden cottage house by a fellow scientist and this fellow scientist noticed something strange, that above the entrance to the house, entrance door, there was a horseshoe. In Europe, this is kind of a superstitious prop, item. The idea is that it prevents evil spirits, whatever evil, to enter the house. So the friend asked Niels Bohr, "My God, I thought you were a scientist. Do you believe in it? Why do you have this there?" Bohr gave a perfect answer: "Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." This is how ideology works today. You don't have to you don't have to believe in it. As it were, your practice you just practice belief. Which is why we can be cynical as much as you want, but there always is a belief embodied either in what you do or also a very interesting phenomenon, in you transpose belief onto another. As Lacan would have put it, the big Other believes. Now let me give you two examples on this which are one of... no, maybe even not both of them are known to you from two opposite systems: Hollywood and Stalinism. Hollywood: you saw Hitchcock's I hope you know it by heart Hitchcock's Vertigo. You know that scene after minutes into film, I think after first fake suicide attempt of Madeleine, she jumps into the water there, I mean beneath Golden Gate Bridge, Scottie brings her home and then there is a long panning shot. Scottie's room then camera moves diagonally. First it shows kitchen sink and above it her underwear, her clothes, of course he undressed her and put her into bed and then slowly it moves the camera towards the door his bedroom of his bedroom where she is. Now, that's the logic. But now do something if you have the film on DVD. Put it on freeze when it is showing the underwear above the kitchen sink, no, hanging. You will see that there is no underwear. It's just abstract pieces of cloth, towels and so on. Why? I read it in a book on Vertigo, in a French one. It's incredible. Hays Code blocked it, no? They said, "No, if you really see the underwear, this would have been a material proof that within the logic of the narrative Scottie saw Kim Novak naked. No, we won't allow this." Now, isn't there something strange about this? Because ask yourself a simple question: whom were the Hays Code censors trying to protect? Not us. Every spectator, normal spectator, automatically on the contrary automatically assumes that what he or she sees is are is the underwear. So it is as if another objectified, virtual gaze is presupposed. In Lacanian terms, this phantasmatic gaze of the big Other, and that gaze which can be eventually in our life lives perceived as the gaze of children, of the leader, the innocence of this gaze should be protected. Now let's jump for another I think even nicer example in Stalinism. '53, you know the great leader died. Okay, then at that very point the first volume of Soviet Encyclopedia appeared, I don't know which edition. The point is there were of course among other things two pages on Lavrentiy Beria, you know, KGB Stalin's henchman and so on. And it was like this: was two pages, one leaf. First a little bit of the preceding article, then Beria on the next side and then okay. The problem was that then, as befits Stalinism, half a year later in the fall or in summer, Beria was unfortunately discovered to be an English spy, shot, and so on. Okay, he become a non-person. So what happened? Something absolutely breathtaking which tells us a lot about the functioning of social order. Every subscriber of encyclopedia got a letter with a new page. He was asked to cut out the old page, send it and stuck in the new page. And they took care that the continuity was perfect. That is to say, first it was the end of the previous article entry, then you know it's nice what they did. With photos: instead of Beria, B-E-R-I-A, they put Bering, Bering Pass, you know between Alaska and Siberia. But and so that you know you put it in and the continuity was perfect, seamless. Again, the same enigma: whom were they trying to deceive? Of course not the people. The people knew it, they had to do it. So again, you have kind of a almost like in the medieval times a proof of the existence of God, a proof of the presupposed existence of the big Other, no? That's the mystery of Stalinism for me: how the most brutal regime killing people ruthlessly whatever, at the same time total panic, incredibly sensitive for appearances. As if to disturb an appearance, everything falls apart. Again, this is how beliefs function. Now let's go on. Of course, what this means is that we never what this means is I claim that we never believe. Even if you have a fully religious person, if he were to really experience God, it would have been an absolute shock for him, I claim. It's a kind of a when we believe is always a minimally virtual belief. Which is why for example I find totally consistent, I had recently two years ago, okay not so recently, a debate with bishops in Vienna and I asked them a couple of provocative questions. One was, "What's your attitude towards you know that Turin Shroud, allegedly the shroud with which Christ was covered, with bloodstains, which blah blah?" They told me frankly privately, not publicly there: "We pray day and night that it's not the authentic one." Because they told me why: that it would have been terrifying if it were to be proven. Why? Okay, the first reason they gave is a more pragmatic one. They said, "My God, shit, with all this biogenetics, you know then the question who is the father becomes an empirical one." And as one bishop told me, "What if we discover that there was some Arab or Egyptian slave there really doing it?" You know, it's they were terrified. But I think there is a more radical dimension at it. The problem is that Isaac Asimov I don't like him as a writer but he put it very nicely once. He said that there are two possibilities: either there is somebody out there, aliens, God, so that we are not alone, or we are alone. And he said, "Both options are unbearable for us." No, to really accept a radically atheist position is unimaginable. But to really encounter Another is paranoia. So you need a kind of a virtualized position which shouldn't be too directly realized. Which is why did you see a movie again, I don't like the film but the idea is nice, from '92 with Steve Martin, Leap of Faith? Of this kind of a con artist, Southern preacher, pulling these tricks healing crippled, sorry, politically correct, disabled persons and so on. And then at some point he himself is surprised by the fact that he does perform a miracle. And it totally shatters, it totally breaks him down. So I think that the first thing to notice is how there is always a minimal tension in us between belief, disbelief. We believe, but our belief is not this direct brutal realistic belief. Paul Veyne, the French historian, wrote a wonderful book called "Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?" where he proves that of course they did not literally. Like they were not so stupid as to think that if you climb to the top of the Mount Olympus you will there see I don't know Zeus fighting family fight with Hera or whatever. They did not. But also he points out very nicely, we shouldn't impute to them our metaphorical notion and claiming that no for them I don't know Zeus was just the personification of a cosmic principle or natural force or whatever. It's a very specific virtuality of belief. Which is why we have this automatic attitude that how should I put it, when you express, externalize your belief, I claim, you do it usually to get rid of it. In the sense of you know it's out there to disengage minimally yourself. Like isn't it that we are often surprised when somebody who professes a belief and then you discover, "My God, but this guy really believes"? I think this old Marx Brothers' joke holds: a version of, you know, with Marx Brothers it's looks like an idiot. This man looks and acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes. That's always a shock, there always is a minimal gap. And this gap is crucial, even in our most actual problems. Let's take global warming. What really happens there? Why don't we act? I think that it's too simple to rely just on this leftist paranoia in the sense of, "You know oh the big companies multinational are deceiving us, blah blah." No, I think and it's also not that we cannot be certain. We know, but I claim we don't believe it. It's this fetishist split: I know very well but... What do I mean? We know, you cannot deny I think that the scientific data are convincing enough. But what happens? Let's say you read a report, you know, but then you go out. You see the stars, the sun, flowers, animals, you cannot believe that this, you know, we are embedded beings, part of this life world. You cannot really believe that this can be shattered. You know but you cannot believe it. Which is why one differ one I think problematic maybe for some of you conclusion from this. Which is why I totally disagree with those especially let's call them California Heideggerians like Hubert Dreyfus and so on. Those who claim that in order that the root of ecological problems is our alienation in this attitude of scientific technological manipulation which presupposes some kind of disembodied abstract subjectivity and that we should accept how this scientific technological manipulative attitude of technological domination over nature is just a secondary byproduct or alienation of the original embeddedness in our life world. I claim that that embeddedness far from being a solution is precisely the problem. The problem in the sense that this is what ultimately prevents us from taking seriously ecological crisis. Which is why I think if we are to take it seriously, we should precisely do this faithful step and unlearn or somehow try to very difficult to do to step outside this our most elementary embeddedness in a life world. We should adopt some kind of a virtual abstract existence which is for me even a kind of freedom. I will return to this later. So let me go on. At what level does this embeddedness, which of course is an ideological complex determined by all those unknown knowns implicit beliefs, function? Ah, now we come to the next specification. Let me talk a little bit about... because there we find this unknown knowns this implicit rules. How social groups work. Okay, let's of course every social group from family to I don't know what is usually identified by its normative structure, a set of rules that you have to obey which determine which identify you as member of that group. But I claim that things are always for theoretical reasons that Lacanian psychoanalysis can easily explain a little bit more complex. We never simply have rules and then you obey them you are in, you don't obey them you make a social mistake you are out. The problem is that if you obey rules if you simply radically obey rules, you appear an absolute idiot you are out. Which is why incidentally they are no longer fashionable all those courses of, you know, learning to behave as a gentleman, as a lady in the old times were counterproductive. You appeared as an idiot. Because to be truly a gentleman, it's not simply to obey the rules of being a gentleman, it's to know in what way to violate those rules. What does this mean? Imagine a social prohibition. I claim that if you are normal, and we are, the first question you ask yourself when somebody tells you, "Oh this is prohibited" is, "But what does he mean by it? Is it really literally prohibited or is it implicitly do it but do it discreetly, or it is even a call to violate it?" You know, especially with sexual prohibitions, you never know where you are. How should I put it, no? The greatest if you take seriously a demand in an erotic exchange you may appear the greatest idiot. But even more problematic I think and interesting is the opposite example. Not something is prohibited but the metarule tells you it's secretly a call to do it but in a certain way. The opposite example of you are allowed, permitted to do something, but you are given a freedom of choice but on condition that you don't use it. On condition that you do not do what you are permitted. And again, let me give you a couple of example examples to make this logic clear. Recently I spoke with a Japanese friend who told me that in Japan workers have the right guaranteed usual workers fully employed to days of holiday every year. However, my friend quickly added, they are expected not to use this right in its full extent. The implicit rule is not to take more than days. So, European idiot as I was, I tell them, "Okay, but why don't you then simply put it directly, it's He told me, "I don't understand anything, I'm an idiot." And he was right. Because although this excess may appear nonsensical, that's true communication. Communication means this empty gestures. You know what I mean? Let me give you two other examples or even three from daily life that you must know. I don't know if it's with you in my country this ritual: if I and some close friend of mine, if we are engaged in a competition for some scholarship, post, whatever. And let's say he wins. It's a ritual for him to tell me, "You know, I know that you really deserve this post so I will step down." But I'm expected to say, "No thanks. No no, you can have it." Now you will say it's an empty exchange. What's the result of it? It is the social link, friendship or whatever. Or even a more vulgar example: when you, if you are poor and a rich friend, whatever person older invites you to a restaurant. It's absolutely clear to both of you that he will pay. But isn't there a structural necessity of this short ritual where you insist a little bit that you will pay, but then but then I hope you don't make the mistake I made years ago. I insisted a little bit too long and then the friend said, "Okay, pay if you want." No, okay. But let me give you a much more refined example which happened to me, it's very traumatic for me, this summer in a Swiss resort, some kind of stupid summer school to corrupt intellectuals where I was there with among others my good friend although we theoretically hate each other, send each other to Gulag and so on, but personally we are friends, Judith Butler. And we were once in a normal conversation and then I did something I must admit it. Don't be afraid, nothing against her, I am the bad guy here absolutely. I used some very vulgar words, you know. I called her a degenerate freak and so on. I thought this is humor. Okay, it's a very weird humor but I don't know why I did it. Maybe my defense should have been, you know, that creepy evangelical guy Haggard or what, no, this kind of there is a dark side of myself I'm fighting it but cannot dominate it. Okay, so I saw that I did something terribly wrong. So I called her later and sincerely apologized, absolutely, unconditionally, with none of this none of this John Kerry or whoever tricks: "No if somebody felt offended then..." You know. Then she did something very nice. She told me something like, "Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn't offended. I knew you didn't mean it. So really you owe me no apology." She was very sincere in this. But you got my point. My point is that she was able to say, "You owe me no apology," only after I gave her the apology. If I were not to give her apology, it wouldn't function. This excess is the excess of these implicit rules. And I claim everything hangs on these implicit rules. Our entire how should I call it, ethical substance hangs on these implicit rules which are crucial but cannot be directly normativized or even worse penalized. This I think is for me at least one of the problems of political correctness, that the way I see it, it tends to legalize what precisely should function as this kind of spontaneous set of rules. And that's I think an ethical catastrophe. Because the moment you have to do it, the battle is already lost. You know what I mean? For example, it's obscene to say, "I oppose rape" in our societies, hopefully I'm glad that it is, and then to give arguments. I want to live in a society where you don't have to argue about this. Where simply if somebody claims women should be allowed to rape, I don't know, he appears a jerk, an idiot, or you know what I mean. The moment you have to argue explicitly, the battle is lost. Which is why this accounts I think from for one of the ethical tragedies today for me. That what I found so horrible, many people misunderstood me here, about the debates on torture now, "Should we torture terrorists?" and so on. It's not so much torture as such... no, I'm opposed to it, don't misunderstand me. But to be very frank the field is open in the sense of in some crazy situation, let's be melodramatic in this cheap sense, you know, some evil guys have my small daughter they are beating her and I catch one of these guys. In despair I cannot look you into the eye and guarantee that I wouldn't torture the guy. But I think the true catastrophe of the debate on torture is not in torture but in debate. Even if you are opposed to it, it's that we accepted it as a topic of debate. So what goes wrong here in the debate on torture? There is a book, Sam Harris, The End of Faith, published I think about a year ago by and which was a New York Times bestseller who which advocates torture. And now a little bit of this: why what is wrong in the book? Many things, it advocates torture. It's based on among other things it advocates torture. It's based on a very crude analogy with evolutionary logic. It claims that what prevents us from torturing people it's a kind of ethical illusion which is similar to the moon illusion. In the sense of you know we know now that moon is not a small object that we see but a much larger object. In the same way in ethics we do not yet know that we are not yet able at the level of our ethical gut feeling to take into account the fact that suffering of those we don't see who are far away matters much more than the suffering of somebody here. If we were to set our rules properly, then we should be not only able but it even would have been our duty if you can prevent much greater suffering of others to torture somebody who is here. Then Sam Harris allows for the point that we cannot get out of this illusion which is for him as he puts it in slightly cynical term, a neurological evolutionary illusion. He imagines a truth pill, a drug. That was his solution for our sensitivities: to develop a drug which you give it to the terrorist, injection, pill, and then the terrorist for the external view seems just to fall asleep, but internally it's a total nightmare but you cannot detect it outside, no? And then he awakens after half an hour and my God confesses that he killed his mother, whatever, everything. And he thinks that would have been the solution. I have problems here. The first problem is that this what he proposes is basically decaffeinated torture, no? Like in the same way, and that's our let's call it postmodern ideological condition, in the same way that we want coffee without caffeine, we want I don't know beer without alcohol, muffins without fat and so on, here you get even torture without the bad effect, like decaffeinated torture. And we get everything here. This is expanded on all domains like I claim that one of the weak points, failures of the usual liberal multiculturalism is that it's again a decaffeinated multiculturalism. The other yes, but a decaffeinated other. Like the most racist thing for me, I prefer a brutal John Wayne claiming Indians Native Americans were barbarians to this, you know, if you listen to some politically correct freaks: Native Americans with kind of you know people dancing their ecological dances obsessed with harmony and balance and so on. That's racism at its worst. So that's my first problem. My second problem is a very cynical one. KGB already did it. I read in the history of KGB that Serbsky Institute which was the psychiatric wing of KGB, in the '60s and '70s developed some strange okay medicine, not medicine. They injected to arrested dissidents near heart in the heart region some liquid which again from the outside you just appear to doze off a little bit, from the inside it was nightmare as if you are prevented breathing and so on. It was the thing. But something more radically is at work here. Which dimension is lost when you treat your the other people the way Sam Harris proposes? I claim that the dimension of what in Judeo-Christian tradition is called neighbor. And I'm an atheist, I'm not now using it in any mystical term or religious even but simply in the term of the abyss of the other's personality, of this intensity of being too close to the other in this his her abyss of the other's desire and so on. There is something nightmarish in being confronted by this abyss of the other. Which is why the neighbor is always too close if you want, no? The neighbor is it's not only it's not physical proximity as Sam Harris thinks, the neighbor is always too close, he always has to be moved a little bit further away. So this neighbor is properly monstrous. This neighbor is not the nice guy, this is decaffeinated neighbor, you know the nice guy with whom you share your experiences and so on. Which is why my first my further crazy conclusion. Which is why I radically oppose this standard notion of we should understand each other in the sense of if you we should all tell each other our stories and then we will understand each other. Or as a poetic saying goes: an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. Isn't this beautiful? Like no, I just objectified you, I should see your side. I am opposed to this. Why? Because okay, let's again make a simple mental experiment. Let's replace enemy with Hitler. Would you also say, "Oh Hitler was our enemy because we didn't hear his story" or whatever? No. I mean there the presupposition of this is that the stories that people are telling themselves about themselves are truth. No, they can be lies, I think. Hitler did horrible things. The truth is in what he did and the story his side of the story as it were is his side of the story is a lie here. So again, I just wanted to draw attention to this that neighbor is not this the other whom I should understand. No, neighbor is the abyss of otherness. The other, the neighbor himself or herself is trying to escape from this abyss by telling himself stories about himself. And now I come finally to this fear. Because I claim that the fear which predominates in today's politics is ultimately the fear of the neighbor, formulated as a defense against potential victimization or harassment. That is to say, did you notice how today in our post-ideological era where people no longer believe, you cannot mobilize them for some higher cause, the only way to truly mobilize people, to introduce passion into politics is to mobilize or to refer to fear. Left also, not only right. Unfortunately, fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of excessive state control, fear of ecological catastrophes, fear of harassment, and so on and so on and so on. It's fear. Fear, which is the point. And again, this fear I think is manipulated in nice way, in exclusive way by religion. Religion precisely prohibits you to keep to maintain some kind of meaning so that this fear doesn't overwhelm you. And I claim that even ecology unfortunately functions in this way as fear, fear of losing some kind of grounding. As if there is nature, we disturb the balance, fear is let's not disturb it too much, let's return to it. I claim that this is the worst environmental ideology. I claim that the first the ABC to truly confront ecological crisis is to confront fully the fact that there is no nature. No, I mean I'm a materialist, there is, but what I'm saying is that that this our spontaneous notion of nature as some kind of balanced holistic whatever exchange which is then disturbed by human intervention is false. There are nature is one big catastrophe. Nature is not balanced in itself. I claim that this image of nature as opposed to human hubris is precisely human projection at its worst. So I think the only way to overcome this fear... I will not have time obviously I spoke to some to develop it all but the only way to overcome this fear is through for me fear and terror are not two words for the same thing, are exactly the opposite. Fear is you still think you have some roots, some grounding, you are afraid to lose it. The solution is to accept that there is no way back. In the sense of you have nowhere to return. There is no natural balance or whatsoever. That is to say that in a way we accept the abyss of our freedom. Or as he put it, he here being Mao Zedong, and I don't have any specific ethico-political love for Mao Zedong. We know enough now how for example the famine of late '50s was planned. They coolly accepted million people to die in order to be able to export food to Russia and so on. But nonetheless, there is something which incredibly attracted me in how Mao Zedong in his famous text from "Why the Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the American Atom Bomb", how he justifies there this lack of fear. It's not what we usually some of us who still remember, you are many of you are young, you don't probably know that you know years ago there was still politics, there were students organized as left, you know this was fairy tales, another era. Okay, at that point and the usual version was that so what, United States can bomb us, we have a billion people, they can kill half a billion, there still is half a billion. No it wasn't this. Let's read Mao. He goes on beyond them and says, I quote him: "But even if the United States atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it the earth up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a minor event for the solar system." So you see the madness of Mao. Now the question is from where does he talk? Like "Oh so what, the worth, sorry the earth disappears. But we live in a universe, who cares?" It's I claim that although this is of course madness, but I claim that a minimum of this madness, sorry, a minimum of this madness is present in every authentic fight for struggle or whatever. You must go to this fearless point of accepting terror. Now, I was told that I can talk as long as I want, but I warn the organizers that my friends call me Fidel, no, so like it can go on. So I know that you have limits, so let me maybe just conclude by at least reporting you on what I wanted to develop. What I wanted to develop is I don't have time unfortunately something about how this fear relates to violence, why violence is such a topic in the form of harassment and so on for us today, and then the crucial point: I wanted to go into problematizing the very notion of tolerance in a critical dialogue with Wendy Brown, her wonderful last book Regulating Aversion. Of course, the first thing to note here it's a simple observation which I like from Wendy which is: are we aware how today we tend to perceive as problems of tolerance or intolerance problems conflicts which years ago were not perceived as problems of tolerance. For example, remember the big moment of struggle against racism, Martin Luther King. Look his speeches. He barely uses I think, I made this experiment on internet, I downloaded some of his speeches and then search "tolerance", "intolerance", it's practically absent, the very word. For him, racism against the blacks was not a problem of intolerance, it was the problem of inequality, exploitation, injustice, and so on. So the first question is why do we today formulate or perceive these problems as problems of tolerance? I think it has something, quite a lot, to do with what we may call the culturalization of politics. That is to say, we all accept basically this post-political reduction of politics to post-politics, experts administration, compromises and so on. So that then because of this all the remaining sources of conflict are perceived as cultural conflicts. Which is why I claim there is no opposition between Fukuyama and the guy who spread around Huntington disease, and it's appropriately called Huntington, that is to say Clash of Civilizations. I claim that Clash of Civilizations is precisely politics at the end of history, culturalized politics. Okay. Now, Wendy Brown in a detailed criticism tries to undermine this liberal position. Convincing as she is, I have a whole series of problems there with her account. Let me go just to the crucial problem that I see with her. The problem is that I think of course her criticism is the standard one. It is that we in the West have this liberal notion of what... ah it's very interesting how she develops it and she is right here. It's that what is our definition of barbarian, fundamentalist barbarian? It's to cut a long story short, pure culture. That is to say barbarians are those who are fully identified to their culture. To be civilized means precisely not to be fully one's culture. It means you know this minimum liberal freedom: I can step in, out. Culture is no longer a substantial determination of our life. It is one of the ways of life which you can enter exit and so on. So of course then it's easy for Wendy to show how although liberalism presents itself as above particular cultures, it effectively privileges a certain culture, our culture. For example, this notion of choice, way of life and so on, privileges individual competitiveness against social solidarity and so on and so on which are features of a certain culture. But there is something else that to conclude if you give me literally just a couple of minutes. There is something else which is more crucial here I think. I think her crucial limitation, the way I see it, is that her procedure of critique of ideology remains that of a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the universal. That is to say her basic formula is: what is sold to us what ruling the ruling ideology is selling us and appears as universal, universal human rights and so on, you know this standard logic. Universality is false universality. What is really beneath it are particular interests, like you know human rights only appear to be universal human rights. In reality, they are, you know the story, the rights of male, white, Western, individualist, capitalist individuals. So it's this simple traditional Marxist demystification of false universality. I have and I think it's crucial to insist today on this. I have two problems here, if you just allow to conclude me. The first problem, even if it is a false mask, if there is a thing to be learned from theory of ideology is that don't mess with appearances. Appearances have an actuality, efficiency of their own. Let's take precisely human rights. Yes, it's absolutely true they are mystification of blah blah, but nonetheless their formal autonomy even if it's an appearance generates results of their own. Like of course they were at the beginning only human rights of white men but as you know how the story then goes: Mary Wollstonecraft, then women said, "Why not also us?" Then I think a the most noble moment of French Revolution, the Haiti Revolution. When blacks asserted, "Why not us?" and I think it was the heroic moment of of Robespierre, people of Jacobins that they fully accepted this. I think it's truly one of the sublime moments of French Revolution when the Haiti delegation came and Robespierre received them and said, "Look at them. There is absolutely no difference between them and us, we are both fully citizens of the French Republic" and all that stuff and so on and so on. This was something. So again, what Wendy Brown underestimates a little bit is how even illusion can produce very real emancipatory effects. In other words, it's easy to play the game of demystification or corruption. Something that was originally authentic gets commercialized, exploited and so on and so on. Like you can say in I don't know maybe not quite in the case of jazz, gospels originally black protest, oh then commercial recording, blah blah. But I think what is much more interesting for a dialectical analysis is the opposite procedure. It is when something that began as a fake or brutally imposed imperialist blah blah colonialist ideology is taken over recontextualized reappropriated. Like Christianity, Mexico, you know the story, the Black Virgin of Guadalupe. Isn't this precisely the moment when Christianity was no longer simply the ideology of colonizers but was partially at least appropriated by the colonized to articulate their grievances? The second point is even more crucial here and this is I think where the true disagreement between me and Wendy Brown lies. I claim that this is only one aspect, this hermeneutics of suspicion where you denounce universality you discover particular interests. But the basic lesson of Hegel, of Marx, of all those guys whom I I'm an outdated dinosaur still like, is that there is an even more crucial perhaps opposite operation. Not you perceive yourself ideologically as advocating universal rights but you mystify the situation you really privilege your position. But you perceive yourself as only pursuing following your particular view, goals, notions, but you are what you are unaware is precisely the universal dimension of what you are doing. It's you get the point? It's the exact opposite: it's the universality of your acts which is hidden, which escapes you. And I think in this sense when we analyze capitalism, it's absolutely wrong to focus only on this so-called Eurocentric aspect and claim, "Oh it appears universal, it's really Eurocentric and so on and so on." No, I think that capitalism is effectively universal. Not only in the vulgar sense that that we have capitalism can be combined with Buddhism, with Hinduism, with Catholicism, Protestantism, whatever. But something much more radical. Actual universality is not part of this stupid game: how do I know when I say something universal that it's really universal and so on? It's a much more mysterious, how should I put it, concrete event: it's that what Hegel calls actual universality, universality for itself, which means that you relate to yourself as universal. For example, to give you the most obvious example. Of course people always in the division of labor almost always did different things. In medieval society they did not all they were not all serfs, you know there were serfs, farmers, there were knights, there were priests, there were guild members, artisans and so on. But nonetheless, we know the story, Max Weber and so on, it is stupid and wrong to say that if you ask a knight a knight, "What's your profession?" Even for him to say "My profession is to be a knight," it's stupid. The notion of profession presupposes this modern space of contingency where what you are in your particular identity is something ultimately contingent up to a point depending on your choice. Which means that you yourself do not identify yourself with your particular role and so on. You yourself perceive yourself as if the core of your being is universal and the particular way of life, form of your existence is ultimately contingent. And I think that this element is crucial. And I think this element is not only the element of universality present in capitalism but it's even a very positive element. I claim that true multiculturalism, authentic, or however we call it, begins with you being able to perceive not only to respect others, that for me always a fake. The catch is: are you able to fully experience, endorse, assume the contingency of your own cultural legacy? That you do, you know as Descartes put it in a wonderful way in his I think Meditations on First Philosophy that first he thought "Oh how stupid are other civilizations, Persians, Arabs, Jews and so on." But then he asked himself a question, "My God, but if I look at myself through other's eyes, do not I also appear to myself maybe my way of life must also appear to others as a stupid, ridiculous and so on?" And you see the catch here. The catch is not, "Oh but did was he really able to perceive himself through the other eyes?" The catch is just that he experienced his own particular determination as something ultimately contingent. In this sense universality is as Hegel would have put it, a work of negativity. The universality of capitalism is what? It's not that we will all eat hamburgers. Here I respectfully agree for example with Homi Bhabha who claims capitalism in culture universalizes erases differences. No, I claim. Capitalism emphasizes difference. World capitalism does not mean we will all eat hamburgers. It means to each of us his her their own way of life but way of life precisely experienced as not our total determination but as our particular way of life. That's capitalist universality at work. In the sense that for example if you are a Hindu or a Jew or what, being a Jew is no longer the fundamental determination of your being. It's something you do in the afternoon, but in the morning you work on the market or whatever. Like it's you know, it's this transubstantiation of what in traditional society is your substantial determination into a contingent idiosyncrasy of the way of life. So I talk very long, so just to conclude, what does this universality mean politically? Just to conclude, I cannot restrain from concluding with another dirty joke of course. I claim that what bothers me politically today is that a kind of a fake sense of urgency pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse. One of the indications of this fake sense of urgency is do notice this a certain for me I find it disgusting rhetoric of immediate references. Like if I were to be like that, I would then talk like this: "Are you aware that for every word that I used here in this time, children died of hunger in Africa?" or "For every sentence that I said here, a woman was raped on our streets." It's true but so what? First, so what of course is horrible that this happens. But by so what I mean what is the function of such references? I claim to prevent us to think. This false urgency means: don't think, don't analyze, do it. No wonder that
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today
today
Slavoj Žižek
Bill
Bill
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Gates is saying this. When I was young there was still this anti-capitalist discourse: "Oh they live up there in their ivory tower, they don't see the suffering." Did
Gates is saying this. When I was young there was still this anti-capitalist discourse: "Oh they live up there in their ivory tower, they don't see the suffering." Did
Slavoj Žižek
you notice how
you notice how
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today when for reasons that I cannot explain now, charity is the fundamental mode, I think it's strictly it's no longer even ideology it's not as in the times of Andrew Carnegie, you know, that you still first have everything and then you give half away and then you are the greatest
today when for reasons that I cannot explain now, charity is the fundamental mode, I think it's strictly it's no longer even ideology it's not as in the times of Andrew Carnegie, you know, that you still first have everything and then you give half away and then you are the greatest
Slavoj Žižek
humanitarian. In the days of Andrew Carnegie it was still a personal idiosyncrasy. I think that today through figures like Bill Gates, Soros and so on, it's becoming a necessity, even an economic necessity. I claim that it's one of the keys to what is going on today is this necessity of this charitable humanitarian activity which precisely further pushes or asserts this cultural depoliticization, how should I put it, no? Problems are resolvable not through politics proper but through but through humanitarian acts. So because of this I claim one should absolutely how should I put it, precisely if one wants really to confront the problems, to retain how to call it, cold blood or what. Not to get lost in this "Oh my God isn't it decadent I'm here at the university spending years and out there people are dying and so on and so on." One should be a Marxist here. Which kind of Marxist? I would say a Marxist and a Leninist. With these two jokes I will end up. I read simply I was simply recently reading some a letter, wonderful one of Marx to Engels in Where as you may know for some time it looked Paris Commune and so on, it was a total illusion of course, but it looked to them that there will immediately be explode an all-European revolution. So then Marx write to Engels a very desperate letter like, "My God, can't they wait? They want the revolution, I haven't yet finished my Capital and so on," no? That's an attitude that we shouldn't be afraid of. So we should gather the courage to step back. That's what that's what the ruling ideology today that's what it is afraid of. Which is why they always support all these charitable things blah blah blah but not the let's call it abstract social reflection. In other words, let me conclude, now really conclude with a joke that I use somewhere in my work but will give a new twist to it, a well-known joke from my youth on Lenin. You know, maybe you know it, when I was young, still a communist country, and we had almost in all of the classes, I remember in elementary school, this Lenin's answer when he was asked to give an advice to young people what should they do, no? It was "learn, learn, and learn," no? And it was in our school, "learn, learn, and learn, Lenin" and so on. This slogan was all-present. It's the background of the joke. The joke is what? Is kind of imaginary joke of a situation where Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked what would they prefer to have: a wife or a mistress? Marx answers: wife. He was we all know more conservative... okay, of course this didn't prevent him from having an illegitimate child with his servant, but that's another story, he pretended to be. Engels more bon vivant said: a mistress. Then Lenin to everyone's surprise says, "I want both. Wife and mistress." Now this was a shock, Lenin was supposed to be you know totally ascetic and so on. What is it, was he a hidden pervert? No, Lenin then they ask him, "But why? Wouldn't this take too much of your revolutionary time? Where is the revolution?" Lenin said, "No no no, precisely. The point is that I can tell to my wife that I have to be with the mistress and tell to the mistress that I have to be with my wife." And then they ask him, "Okay, but what do you do?" Now you got the point: Lenin answers you "learn, learn, and learn." And I think that's what we should sometimes do. If by wife we mean job, official, recognized activity, if by mistress we mean this protesting, but this immediate non-reflective active protesting. We should maybe play a little bit of this: step back, learn, learn and learn. There are situations in which we really in the long term do much more to how should I put it, to help positive potential changes in this way than in a too direct engagement. If the engagement is too direct, it can in a way that we are not aware of how should I put it, serve the system. For example, to conclude, now I will lie but it's two minutes, it's such a nice anecdote that I cannot resist telling it. Maybe some of you know it. If there is a radical theory today popular, the just the theoretical reference of Negri and Hardt, Empire and so on, it's Deleuze-Guattari, no? Ah, this summer I was in Israel. There and in Ramallah also of course helping my friend Udi Aloni to do some propaganda for his anti-Zionist film. But there he told me a story, my friend Udi Aloni, which was such a shock to me, I thought first it's a kind of a bad joke, you know like they want me to appear an idiot whatever. But then no, he took me to one of the offices and my God they showed me books. So if this what I will tell you now is a lie, then we live in a in a Truman Show world, you know what I mean, they should have organized part of Israeli army should be included. Namely, to cut a long story short, Israeli Defense Forces have an academy. This academy tries to theorize how to fight Intifada, how to fight what they perceive as Palestinian terrorism and so on. You know what is one of their main, and by this I mean really one of their main, like not just mentioned in a footnote but substantially referred to
humanitarian. In the days of Andrew Carnegie it was still a personal idiosyncrasy. I think that today through figures like Bill Gates, Soros and so on, it's becoming a necessity, even an economic necessity. I claim that it's one of the keys to what is going on today is this necessity of this charitable humanitarian activity which precisely further pushes or asserts this cultural depoliticization, how should I put it, no? Problems are resolvable not through politics proper but through but through humanitarian acts. So because of this I claim one should absolutely how should I put it, precisely if one wants really to confront the problems, to retain how to call it, cold blood or what. Not to get lost in this "Oh my God isn't it decadent I'm here at the university spending years and out there people are dying and so on and so on." One should be a Marxist here. Which kind of Marxist? I would say a Marxist and a Leninist. With these two jokes I will end up. I read simply I was simply recently reading some a letter, wonderful one of Marx to Engels in Where as you may know for some time it looked Paris Commune and so on, it was a total illusion of course, but it looked to them that there will immediately be explode an all-European revolution. So then Marx write to Engels a very desperate letter like, "My God, can't they wait? They want the revolution, I haven't yet finished my Capital and so on," no? That's an attitude that we shouldn't be afraid of. So we should gather the courage to step back. That's what that's what the ruling ideology today that's what it is afraid of. Which is why they always support all these charitable things blah blah blah but not the let's call it abstract social reflection. In other words, let me conclude, now really conclude with a joke that I use somewhere in my work but will give a new twist to it, a well-known joke from my youth on Lenin. You know, maybe you know it, when I was young, still a communist country, and we had almost in all of the classes, I remember in elementary school, this Lenin's answer when he was asked to give an advice to young people what should they do, no? It was "learn, learn, and learn," no? And it was in our school, "learn, learn, and learn, Lenin" and so on. This slogan was all-present. It's the background of the joke. The joke is what? Is kind of imaginary joke of a situation where Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked what would they prefer to have: a wife or a mistress? Marx answers: wife. He was we all know more conservative... okay, of course this didn't prevent him from having an illegitimate child with his servant, but that's another story, he pretended to be. Engels more bon vivant said: a mistress. Then Lenin to everyone's surprise says, "I want both. Wife and mistress." Now this was a shock, Lenin was supposed to be you know totally ascetic and so on. What is it, was he a hidden pervert? No, Lenin then they ask him, "But why? Wouldn't this take too much of your revolutionary time? Where is the revolution?" Lenin said, "No no no, precisely. The point is that I can tell to my wife that I have to be with the mistress and tell to the mistress that I have to be with my wife." And then they ask him, "Okay, but what do you do?" Now you got the point: Lenin answers you "learn, learn, and learn." And I think that's what we should sometimes do. If by wife we mean job, official, recognized activity, if by mistress we mean this protesting, but this immediate non-reflective active protesting. We should maybe play a little bit of this: step back, learn, learn and learn. There are situations in which we really in the long term do much more to how should I put it, to help positive potential changes in this way than in a too direct engagement. If the engagement is too direct, it can in a way that we are not aware of how should I put it, serve the system. For example, to conclude, now I will lie but it's two minutes, it's such a nice anecdote that I cannot resist telling it. Maybe some of you know it. If there is a radical theory today popular, the just the theoretical reference of Negri and Hardt, Empire and so on, it's Deleuze-Guattari, no? Ah, this summer I was in Israel. There and in Ramallah also of course helping my friend Udi Aloni to do some propaganda for his anti-Zionist film. But there he told me a story, my friend Udi Aloni, which was such a shock to me, I thought first it's a kind of a bad joke, you know like they want me to appear an idiot whatever. But then no, he took me to one of the offices and my God they showed me books. So if this what I will tell you now is a lie, then we live in a in a Truman Show world, you know what I mean, they should have organized part of Israeli army should be included. Namely, to cut a long story short, Israeli Defense Forces have an academy. This academy tries to theorize how to fight Intifada, how to fight what they perceive as Palestinian terrorism and so on. You know what is one of their main, and by this I mean really one of their main, like not just mentioned in a footnote but substantially referred to
unknown
as source of concept, theoretical references... Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, A
as source of concept, theoretical references... Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, A
Slavoj Žižek
Thousand Plateaus. Namely, they conceptualize all their
Thousand Plateaus. Namely, they conceptualize all their
unknown
fight
fight
Slavoj Žižek
against Intifada as the problem of nomadic warriors, restructuring space, multitude. It's unbelievable how the structure is the reference to Deleuze-Guattari. What does follow from it? Not I'm not an idiot, I greatly appreciate Deleuze and Guattari. It's not that oh you see Deleuze and Guattari really ideologists of Zionist imperialism or what. I'm just saying that everything practically can be appropriated. By this I don't mean that we should become paranoiac and do nothing. No, the rules are here much more refined. Something one of the lessons that I learned is that sometimes you can do something minor, small, just and although it may not appear a big thing, it has a much more explosive effect than kind of a brutal big opposition. It's never... so but to know this you must learn, learn and learn. Thank you very much. Discussions. You know just I warn you: did you see James Bond, Goldfinger? You know that famous scene, the car, where James Bond can press the button and... that's my dream of a truly democratic discussion. To have this kind of a of a plan of this hall with buttons and if you ask me a bad question I press the button you go out and then... unfortunately, unfortunately you are not... okay. Sorry, please. Ah you. Was there any... please. I am myopic so be brutal. Otherwise I will not see you and then I can be accused of racism, sexism, speciesism, whatever. Okay, sorry, please. I just wanted to say that in the version of anecdote about Lenin which I remember from my kind of childhood in Russia, it's even stronger which I think may maybe supports your point. So Lenin says, "Okay, you know, you tell mistress you go to a wife, you tell wife you go to a mistress, and what you actually do, you go to the library and learn, learn and study." Ah, it's this, aha. Ah you see, but I I think I totally accept because what I like is how how should I put it, when you find the same matrix of the joke, but there can be an for example, this will be very vulgar but I... for example, I will prove you how much more vulgar we Slovenians are. We Slovenians have the same joke as the Jews, the structure. A kind of incestuous joke on you know, the son asks his mother what is Oedipus complex, mommy, no? I think if I remember it correctly, the Jewish jokes goes like mother says some of this wordplay, Oedipus Schmedipus, it doesn't matter just that you love me, no or something like that, no? We Slovenians have a it's not even funny, an incredibly more vulgar version. It's brutal. It's son asks the mother, "Mommy, what is Oedipus complex?" You know what the mother answers? "Shut up and go on fucking" and so on. Like you you know what I mean, like I like when you nothing that's the big lesson of my real socialism like experience. You can always go a little bit further make it more... which is why I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this because you know here at this level I changed my position a little bit. For a long time I tended to dismiss this dimension of obscene joke as not only not subversive, but as how should I put it, the ultimate support of power. What always fascinated me is how the discourse of power not only tolerated but needed some kind of obscene supplement. We can go at this through all possible levels, for example military community, you know officially it's discipline, but every military community has its own obscene sexualized usually rituals or whatever. And far from... this is not a kind of a return of the repressed in the sense of it undermines power. No, it's really the ultimate support, it sustains power, no? But I think that there also is a way to mobilize this obscene dimension in a more emancipatory way, like my own experience, ex-Yugoslavia. If there was no racism, if things function more at less more or less till early '80s, I claim quite seriously that one of the main of main, one of important ingredients were dirty racist jokes. I almost wanted to it's okay you risk a lot to write an article like a plea for more racist jokes and so on. I claim that of course they are as a rule racist, but there are situations where racist jokes can function not as a means of racist dismissal of the other but on on the contrary, as means of true contact. Like I exchange an obscenity with you which means it's not just this cold refined pseudo-tolerant racism: "Oh I like your culture, your food." I don't care about your culture. "I want to hear your dirty joke." You know what I mean? Like as a true solidarity. And this is how it functions in ex-Yugoslavia how it functioned. It was incredible how each nation was identified by a certain racist cliché. But instead of fighting it, it was ironically fully assumed and then we Slovenians were making joke at our own expense, huh? And then when I meet a member of another Yugoslav nation, Montenegrin, Serb, Bosnian, we were simply telling each other jokes about ourselves mostly. As a kind of exchange of solidarity. For example, we Slovenians were supposed to be misers, no, thrifty, never spend money, no? And we had a whole series of jokes about ourselves. Then Bosnians are supposed to be coming but in this primitive way, like sexually obsessed, primitive, like farmers. Montenegrins are lazy, absolutely lazy. And they have wonderful jokes about themselves like you to understand this one you also must know that for Montenegrins Montenegro is an earthquake territory, really, no? So, "How does a Montenegrin guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, put penis into it and wait for the earthquake because he is too lazy to" and so on. Bosnians, they are the most sublime and the golden era of these jokes, Bosnian jokes, was precisely the war. Jokes about them, that's how they survived. For example, all you have to know here, I warn you this one is a little bit vulgar although not too much, it's still political... it's you know Beethoven and you know this his extremely famous short piano piece, Für Elise, for Eliza. You know it's heard all, no? Okay. It's not a good joke but you will see the logic, so you don't have to laugh. It's that they even what I like in this joke is that they make fun of these you know Western teachers who came there to enlighten them, made them... so the joke is that at some high school they have a new teacher from the West who said, "No longer this traditional drilling, I'm a modern teacher I will teach you in a creative way. So today it's Beethoven and we'll do it creatively, not simply learn by heart but each of you should tell me one idea, image, person, whatever, and then name a Beethoven composition that fits it." So first a girl stands up and says, "Bambi, forest, stream, beautiful animals." "What is?"
against Intifada as the problem of nomadic warriors, restructuring space, multitude. It's unbelievable how the structure is the reference to Deleuze-Guattari. What does follow from it? Not I'm not an idiot, I greatly appreciate Deleuze and Guattari. It's not that oh you see Deleuze and Guattari really ideologists of Zionist imperialism or what. I'm just saying that everything practically can be appropriated. By this I don't mean that we should become paranoiac and do nothing. No, the rules are here much more refined. Something one of the lessons that I learned is that sometimes you can do something minor, small, just and although it may not appear a big thing, it has a much more explosive effect than kind of a brutal big opposition. It's never... so but to know this you must learn, learn and learn. Thank you very much. Discussions. You know just I warn you: did you see James Bond, Goldfinger? You know that famous scene, the car, where James Bond can press the button and... that's my dream of a truly democratic discussion. To have this kind of a of a plan of this hall with buttons and if you ask me a bad question I press the button you go out and then... unfortunately, unfortunately you are not... okay. Sorry, please. Ah you. Was there any... please. I am myopic so be brutal. Otherwise I will not see you and then I can be accused of racism, sexism, speciesism, whatever. Okay, sorry, please. I just wanted to say that in the version of anecdote about Lenin which I remember from my kind of childhood in Russia, it's even stronger which I think may maybe supports your point. So Lenin says, "Okay, you know, you tell mistress you go to a wife, you tell wife you go to a mistress, and what you actually do, you go to the library and learn, learn and study." Ah, it's this, aha. Ah you see, but I I think I totally accept because what I like is how how should I put it, when you find the same matrix of the joke, but there can be an for example, this will be very vulgar but I... for example, I will prove you how much more vulgar we Slovenians are. We Slovenians have the same joke as the Jews, the structure. A kind of incestuous joke on you know, the son asks his mother what is Oedipus complex, mommy, no? I think if I remember it correctly, the Jewish jokes goes like mother says some of this wordplay, Oedipus Schmedipus, it doesn't matter just that you love me, no or something like that, no? We Slovenians have a it's not even funny, an incredibly more vulgar version. It's brutal. It's son asks the mother, "Mommy, what is Oedipus complex?" You know what the mother answers? "Shut up and go on fucking" and so on. Like you you know what I mean, like I like when you nothing that's the big lesson of my real socialism like experience. You can always go a little bit further make it more... which is why I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this because you know here at this level I changed my position a little bit. For a long time I tended to dismiss this dimension of obscene joke as not only not subversive, but as how should I put it, the ultimate support of power. What always fascinated me is how the discourse of power not only tolerated but needed some kind of obscene supplement. We can go at this through all possible levels, for example military community, you know officially it's discipline, but every military community has its own obscene sexualized usually rituals or whatever. And far from... this is not a kind of a return of the repressed in the sense of it undermines power. No, it's really the ultimate support, it sustains power, no? But I think that there also is a way to mobilize this obscene dimension in a more emancipatory way, like my own experience, ex-Yugoslavia. If there was no racism, if things function more at less more or less till early '80s, I claim quite seriously that one of the main of main, one of important ingredients were dirty racist jokes. I almost wanted to it's okay you risk a lot to write an article like a plea for more racist jokes and so on. I claim that of course they are as a rule racist, but there are situations where racist jokes can function not as a means of racist dismissal of the other but on on the contrary, as means of true contact. Like I exchange an obscenity with you which means it's not just this cold refined pseudo-tolerant racism: "Oh I like your culture, your food." I don't care about your culture. "I want to hear your dirty joke." You know what I mean? Like as a true solidarity. And this is how it functions in ex-Yugoslavia how it functioned. It was incredible how each nation was identified by a certain racist cliché. But instead of fighting it, it was ironically fully assumed and then we Slovenians were making joke at our own expense, huh? And then when I meet a member of another Yugoslav nation, Montenegrin, Serb, Bosnian, we were simply telling each other jokes about ourselves mostly. As a kind of exchange of solidarity. For example, we Slovenians were supposed to be misers, no, thrifty, never spend money, no? And we had a whole series of jokes about ourselves. Then Bosnians are supposed to be coming but in this primitive way, like sexually obsessed, primitive, like farmers. Montenegrins are lazy, absolutely lazy. And they have wonderful jokes about themselves like you to understand this one you also must know that for Montenegrins Montenegro is an earthquake territory, really, no? So, "How does a Montenegrin guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, put penis into it and wait for the earthquake because he is too lazy to" and so on. Bosnians, they are the most sublime and the golden era of these jokes, Bosnian jokes, was precisely the war. Jokes about them, that's how they survived. For example, all you have to know here, I warn you this one is a little bit vulgar although not too much, it's still political... it's you know Beethoven and you know this his extremely famous short piano piece, Für Elise, for Eliza. You know it's heard all, no? Okay. It's not a good joke but you will see the logic, so you don't have to laugh. It's that they even what I like in this joke is that they make fun of these you know Western teachers who came there to enlighten them, made them... so the joke is that at some high school they have a new teacher from the West who said, "No longer this traditional drilling, I'm a modern teacher I will teach you in a creative way. So today it's Beethoven and we'll do it creatively, not simply learn by heart but each of you should tell me one idea, image, person, whatever, and then name a Beethoven composition that fits it." So first a girl stands up and says, "Bambi, forest, stream, beautiful animals." "What is?"