Populism and Democracy
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-06-18 · 1:32:07 · 13,186 words
democracyideologyfascism-populismreligion-theologygeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctnesspsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturecapitalismrevolution-violenceconsciousness-mind
In this lecture-format talk (approximately 2009, around the Iranian post-election protests), Žižek ranges across several polemical targets: he defends the Iranian Green Movement as an authentically emancipatory Islamic event misread by both Western liberals and the Western left; critiques populism (contra Laclau) as a fetishistic refusal of knowledge; analyses the degradation of democratic dignity exemplified by Berlusconi and Ahmadinejad's Berlusconi-like tactics; and attacks liberal avant-garde provocation (Serrano's Piss Christ) as market-integrated pseudo-subversion. He also develops a brief analysis of the master signifier via the von Moltke anecdote, discusses Libet's neuroscience and the forced-choice structure of consumer freedom, and argues for an emancipatory reclaiming of moral dignity by the left.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The formal symbolic authority that confers legitimacy without itself possessing the knowledge that grounds its decisions, illustrated by the king who is informed he has won the battle he did not understand.
The avant-garde (and extremist) conviction that transgressing limits and going to the extreme is what makes something authentic, rejected here as ideologically integrated into market dynamics.
Implicitly operative in the talk as that which resists the symbolic mapping, e.g., the authentic emancipatory event that escapes existing ideological categories.
A singular event that belongs to a genus of which it can be the only example; used to critique avant-garde provocation (e.g. Malevich's Black Square) that can work only once and cannot be repeated or extended into a program.
Populism's structural core is not ignorance but a voluntary, willed disavowal of knowledge, the fetish gives body to the refusal to subjectively assume what one already knows.
as “subject supposed to know”
The figure onto whom knowledge is transferred by transference; here invoked to distinguish it from the populist fetish, which is a disavowal of knowledge rather than its attribution.
In Nietzschean terms, populism is reactive (driven by frustrated despair and resentment) rather than an active political position.
The standard situation in which one is free to choose only on condition of making the right choice, so that the act of choosing is an empty gesture ratifying what was already imposed.
The lost object of desire, which Žižek (following Lacan) identifies ultimately with the subject itself, what others see in me, not a knowable thing.
Lacan's formulation: the fundamental question 'Why am I what you say I am?' which for Žižek reveals that the original enigma of desire is not 'what do I want?' but 'what do others want from me?'
Foucault's concept of ongoing self-reinvention; cited as finding a 'strange echo' in postmodern consumer capitalism's demand for endless identity recreation.
Adorno's critique of Heideggerian discourse; invoked here to show how the ideology of self-reinvention and nomadic identity directly serves consumerist self-recreation.
Walter Benjamin's distinction applied to corruption: empirical law-breaking (constituted) vs. the corruption intrinsic to the democratic form itself (constituent).
The corruption intrinsic to the very form of electoral democracy, its transcendental presupposition of capitalism, as distinct from empirical or constituted corruption (law-breaking).
as “big Other”
The symbolic order that confers legitimacy; democracy functions through the big Other's sanction ('we the people are informed we won a brilliant victory').
The a priori ideological presuppositions embedded in the very form of multi-party liberal democracy that privilege certain values (market, individual, party competition) before any vote is cast.
Rare, exceptional electoral moments when the majority 'awakens' and votes against the hegemonic ideological doxa, genuine but exceptional, not structural features of democracy.
as “emancipatory Islam”
The claim that Islam has an authentic emancipatory political dimension today, not just historically, exemplified by the Mousavi movement's call to repeat the 1979 revolution's emancipatory moment against its later recuperation.
as “authoritarian capitalism”
The emerging global alternative to liberal democracy, capitalism combined with authoritarian rule, exemplified by Putin's Russia and Berlusconi's Italy, presented in culturally specific variants.
A mode of political power that simultaneously occupies both technocratic liberalism and fundamentalist populism, abolishing the alienation between citoyen and bourgeois by placing naked private interest directly in power as a reality show.
Berlusconi's 'achievement' of eliminating the classical Marxist gap between the dignity of the state and bourgeois private interest, the bourgeois directly wields power with no pretense of universality.
Stories he reaches for 2
Benjamin Libet showed brain activity precedes conscious decision by half a second; Žižek reports a further experiment where scientists could determine ten minutes before subjects became aware whether they had solved a mathematical problem. This leaves open only Libet's own Hegelian 'negativity': freedom as the power to say no/block, not to originate.
“the zero level of freedom is not to choose but to in a very Hegelian way the negativity to block”
During a Prussian battle, the king (formal commander, ignorant of what is happening) watches in confusion while General von Moltke, the true strategic mind, turns to him and says 'may I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory.' The king won without knowing it.
“may I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory”
Works invoked 12
Žižek's own book; cited for his argument that populism formally mystifies antagonism, and for his defense of the emancipatory dimension of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
The Guardian journal
Seumas Milne's article in The Guardian on the Iranian crisis is described as appalling; Žižek also says he reads it daily as a 'common idiot.'
Nixon (film) film
Oliver Stone's film; praised as an exception in Stone's generally 'fake' output for capturing Nixon's tragic fall and resisting the liberal reduction to a simple crook.
Piss Christ artwork
Serrano's photograph of a crucifix in urine; used as the paradigm of avant-garde provocation that is market-integrated and whose liberal defense is self-defeating.
Adorno's critique of Heidegger; cited for the concept that hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes the lack of fixed identity to sustain consumerist self-recreation, the existentialist 'anxiety of freedom' co-opted by the market.
The Shah of Shahs book
Kapuściński's book on the Iranian revolution; praised for isolating the psychological moment of regime collapse even if it is 'probably a fake', the anecdote of the policeman and the unmoving man.
The Simpsons tv
Chávez's banning of The Simpsons and replacement with 'shitty family Christian melodrama' is one of Žižek's complaints about him.
Badiou's book on Sarkozy; quoted at length for the distinction between de facto and constitutive corruption of democracy and democracy's representation of capitalism.
Frost/Nixon film
Žižek reports he was on Nixon's side watching it, Frost appeared as a 'cheap provocateur' while Nixon's tragic fall remained visible.
Havana Tetralogy book
Leonardo Padura's Cuban detective novels; Žižek admires that Padura depicts Cuban poverty and corruption while still living in Cuba.
Straw Dogs book
John Gray's book; cited only for the formulation 'We are forced to live as if we were free,' while Žižek notes he disagrees with Gray's general view.
On Populist Reason book
Laclau's major work on populism; Žižek disagrees with its inclusion of Tito and Mao as populists and with its claim that all antagonisms are constitutively misplaced.
People invoked 46
Putin's PR man who invited Žižek to Russia and confirmed that Putin's vulgar outbursts are entirely planned.
Richard Nixon positive
Defended as a crook who nonetheless experienced a genuine tragic fall, still maintaining the gap between ideal ambition and corrupt reality that Berlusconi has abolished. Jameson told Žižek Nixon was closest the U.S. got to socialism by social spending metrics.
Seumas Milne negative
His Guardian article on Iran is described as appalling; Žižek argues Milne's reading of the Iranian crisis as a Western-backed liberal coup mirrors exactly the reading of Zionist Israel and American conservatives.
Silvio Berlusconi positive
Analyzed at length as a historically significant political phenomenon, the embodiment of the new form of rule that abolishes the gap between bourgeois and citoyen, combines liberal technocracy and populism, and turns the state into a reality show. Italy under him is the future of the West.
Kazimir Malevich positive
Black Square cited as the paradigm of a hapax, a singular artistic gesture that works only once.
His attack on Iran was the greatest crime by human suffering metrics but was not among the charges in his trial, because U.S. complicity (satellite images, poison gas supplies) made it unprosecutable.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for Jargon of Authenticity as the concept that names how hegemonic ideology mobilizes the lack of fixed identity to sustain consumerist self-recreation.
Gianni Vattimo negative
Called 'my half friend, not theoretically, theoretically he goes to Gulag.' Elected to European Parliament, promised Žižek to declare himself a communist in Brussels. Gave Žižek the idea that Berlusconi 'abolished alienation.'
Jacques Lacan positive
Extensively deployed throughout: the subject as not-object, the hysterical question, the lost object of desire as the subject itself, the diversity of pathological subjective positions as answers to the hysterical question.
Generally disliked as 'fake embodied' but his Nixon is an exception, praised for resisting the liberal trap of portraying Nixon as simply a crooked guy and capturing a genuine tragic fall.
Implicitly present via the 'nomadic' anti-essentialist critique associated with post-structuralism, though not named directly.
Carlos Menem negative
Listed alongside Reagan as a prefiguration of Berlusconi's populist leader who undermines his own dignity.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani negative
Described as the embodiment of the corrupted Ayatollah wealth class, the new rich. Ahmadinejad's tactic is to push Mousavi toward alignment with Rafsanjani to discredit him.
Charles de Gaulle positive
His refusal to recognize France's capitulation to Germany in 1940 is held up as a paradigm of political truth held by a minority against a democratic majority: his claim to speak for 'true France' was correct even though 90% disagreed.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide positive
Briefly invoked as a model: 'do the best we can, people are mobilized', in comparison to what Mousavi represents in Iran.
Richard Rorty negative
Paired with Habermas as a label for the liberal-pluralist identity-politics candidate position Karroubi represents.
Daniel Dennett negative
His compatibilist redefinition of freedom (freedom = acting in accord with one's own nature without external obstacles) is described as 'soft cognitivist' and used as a foil for the Hegelian account of freedom as negativity.
Ryszard Kapuściński positive
Described as 'the great Polish journalist, recently deceased.' His Shah of Shahs is praised for isolating the psychological moment when a regime's power collapses before it empirically falls, probably a fake but containing a truth.
Mir-Hossein Mousavi positive
Described as an authentically emancipatory figure: architect, Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq war, advocate of nationalizations (not market liberalism), and someone who reads Žižek. His slogan 'return to the origins of the 1979 revolution' is taken seriously as a genuine emancipatory call.
Judith Butler negative
Lumped with anti-essentialist debates around identity; Žižek frames the question not as disagreement with anti-essentialism per se but as objecting to how nomadic self-questioning serves consumerism.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for his distinction between de facto and constitutive corruption of democracy, and his analysis of Sarkozy. Žižek slightly distances himself from Badiou's apparent animosity toward voting as such.
Robert Mapplethorpe negative
Described as 'simply not a very good photographer' whose friends 'in the know' all acknowledge this, and who uses extreme sexual content to mask his technical inadequacy.
Mehdi Karroubi negative
The other reformist Iranian presidential candidate, described as the 'Habermas-Rorty candidate', playing identity politics (women, Kurds, gays) in the Western liberal mode, as opposed to Mousavi's emancipatory Islamic position.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad negative
Described as an 'Iranian Berlusconi', not a naive populist but a shrewd operator using vulgarity as planned PR. Accused of massive election fraud and described as a corrupted populist distrusted even by most Ayatollahs. The Revolutionary Guard under him is a mega-corporation, not an ideological body.
Fredric Jameson positive
Gave Žižek the idea of admiring Nixon; told Žižek that Nixon's foreign policy (via Kissinger/Schultz) was the first serious attempt by the U.S. to also hear Arab voices, and that measured by social spending Nixon was the closest the U.S. came to socialism.
Mentioned as the authority behind Mousavi, Mousavi was Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq war and has the authentic Khomeini-era credentials to call for a return to 1979 revolutionary origins.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
The Jacobin privileging of virtue over the representation of private interests in democracy is cited as an anticipation of Plato's critique and as pointing to the constitutive corruption of democratic form.
Michel Foucault negative
The 'care of the self' and anti-essentialist identity politics are critiqued as finding a 'strange echo' in and being co-opted by consumer capitalism's logic of endless self-recreation. Mousavi's wife is described as a 'card-carrying Foucaultian.'
Leonardo Padura Fuentes positive
Cuban detective novelist (Havana Tetralogy) who remains in Cuba despite radically depicting poverty and corruption. Cited for the formulation 'It is horrific not to know the past and yet be able to impact on the future.'
Ernesto Laclau negative
Žižek disagrees with Laclau's On Populist Reason: objects to Laclau's inclusion of Tito and Mao as populists and to his claim that all antagonisms are constitutively misplaced. Žižek insists populism has a specific formal structure (external intruder displacing constitutive antagonism).
Andres Serrano negative
Piss Christ used as the paradigm case of avant-garde provocation that is market-integrated and whose liberal defense is self-defeating because the same rhetorical structure can justify any transgression whatsoever.
Cited for the formulation 'We are forced to live as if we were free' from Straw Dogs; Žižek uses it while noting he disagrees with Gray's general view.
Like Tito, cited as an example Laclau incorrectly includes in populism.
Walter Benjamin positive
His distinction between constituted and constituent violence is applied to the distinction between empirical corruption and the constitutive corruption of the democratic form.
Mentioned briefly as Nixon's National Security Advisor / Secretary of State in the context of U.S. attempts under Nixon to also acknowledge Arab voices.
Barack Obama negative
Criticized for his Cairo speech's 'dialogue of cultures' as displacing real political struggle with cultural tolerance; also criticized for describing the difference between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad as negligible.
Jürgen Habermas negative
See entry above under 'Jürgen Habermas.'
Vladimir Putin positive
Paired with Berlusconi as the Russian variant of authoritarian capitalism. His vulgar outbursts (circumcision threat) are planned PR, as confirmed by Gleb Pavlovsky.
Benjamin Libet positive
His neuroscientific experiments on pre-conscious decision are presented seriously; Žižek notes Libet himself defends a Hegelian-style freedom (the veto/blocking power) and presents his work as more interesting than its usual deterministic reading.
Hugo Chávez negative
Praised for distributing books and setting a new school canon, but criticized for congratulating Ahmadinejad first after the disputed election, banning The Simpsons in favor of 'shitty family Christian melodrama,' and for his alliances with Lukashenko.
Plato positive
Cited as already aware in his critique of democracy of the constitutive or second-order corruption of democratic form, the reduction of politics to negotiation of private interests.
Cited as an example of someone Laclau incorrectly classifies as a populist; Žižek's intuition is that if Tito counts as a populist, the concept has been misused.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
His reactive/active distinction (from ressentiment theory) applied to populism: populism is a reactive strategy, not an active political position.
Duplicate, see Alain Badiou entry.
Tony Blair negative
Used as an example of how democratic discontent can find no effective electoral expression: Blair was repeatedly the most unpopular person in the UK yet was re-elected, proving the inability of the democratic system to register what people really think.
Ronald Reagan negative
Identified as the first prefiguration of Berlusconi alongside Carlos Menem: a leader who plays at being as stupid as the average citizen, whose mistakes boosted his popularity, beginning the dissolution of political dignity.
What it argues
emancipatory Islam and the Iranian Green Movementpopulism as fetishistic refusal of knowledgedegradation of political dignity under Berlusconi-style rulemaster signifier and the gap between knowledge and symbolic authorityforced choice, consumer freedom, and subjective impossibility of desireavant-garde provocation as market-integrated pseudo-subversionthe authentic vs. the exceptional in democratic elections
Dialectical moves 12
“The stupidity of the master is palpable: you won, you are a genius, but you don't know it — you are just informed.”
The gap between symbolic authority (master signifier) and actual knowledge is constitutive of the master's position; the king's ignorance is not a flaw but the structural condition of his authority.
“This is how democracy works: we the people are informed in the elections that we won a brilliant victory.”
Democracy reproduces the von Moltke structure, the people are the formal sovereign but are informed of results rather than genuinely deciding; their sovereignty is retroactively confirmed by experts.
“The fetish here is exactly the inversion of the standard formula of transference: instead of the subject supposed to know, what the fetish gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge.”
Populism's fetish is not a positive object of belief but the embodiment of the will NOT to know, the inversion of psychoanalytic transference.
“It's not that people are stupid — people with a minimum of will voluntarily freely choose stupidity.”
The reversal of the condescending leftist view: the problem with populism is not the irrationality of the masses but their active, free choice to disavow knowledge.
“The very exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves that elections are not as such a medium of truth.”
The argument for electoral authenticity undermines itself: the rarity of genuine democratic moments proves they are not intrinsic to democracy but exceptional events within it.
“De Gaulle's claim was not only that his voice should also be heard — his claim was that it is only he, even as a ridiculous minority, who speaks on behalf of the true France, not the majority.”
True political truth can be held by a minority against the democratic majority; the minority that speaks for universal emancipation has more legitimacy than a majority consenting to occupation.
“Far from being a Western liberal revolt, what Mousavi represents is something which totally blurs the official line of liberals versus fundamentalists.”
The Iranian protests refuse the false binary imposed by both Western media and Ahmadinejad; what emerges is a third term, emancipatory Islam, that disturbs everyone.
“Berlusconi proved that permissive liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism are two sides of the same coin — he is both at the same time.”
What appears as opposites in the political field are structurally identical; Berlusconi's achievement is to occupy both positions simultaneously, revealing their hidden unity.
“Berlusconi abolished alienation: there is no split between citoyen and bourgeois — it's bourgeois in the sense of the most primitive vulgar corruption directly in power.”
The Marxist critique of liberal democracy as alienated bourgeois interest is paradoxically 'solved' by Berlusconi, but in the worst possible way, not by overcoming the split but by eliminating the pretense of universality.
“Those in power are playing the transgression game — we shouldn't be the '68 guys who think showing Christ in urine is subversive; it's the right that plays these games now.”
The transgressive gesture has migrated from left to right; the left must reclaim dignity and moral seriousness precisely because the right has appropriated obscenity.
“You fall in love so that you don't decide to fall in love — people discovered that they are not afraid.”
The revolutionary moment of the Iranian protests is structured like falling in love: not a decision but a discovery of a state one is already in, the shift in subjective stance precedes the conscious act.
“The question of desire is not primarily 'what do I want?' but 'what do others want from me? What object do they see in me?'”
The reversal of the standard conception of desire: its enigma is not internal but external, constituted by the Other's desire, making subjectivity itself hysterical in structure.
Claims 22
asserts
Populism is structurally defined by the displacement of constitutive antagonism: it posits a proper order threatened by an external intruder rather than acknowledging an internal antagonism constitutive of the community.populism
asserts
The fetishist dimension of populism consists in a voluntary refusal of knowledge — not ignorance but a willed disavowal of what one already knows.populism and fetishism
rejects
Laclau's concept of populism is misused when it encompasses figures like Tito and Mao, because populism requires the mystification of antagonism in a specific formal way.Laclau's On Populist Reason
asserts
Electoral democracy is not in itself a medium of truth; it tends to reflect hegemonic ideological doxa, with authentic electoral events being exceptional rather than structural.democracy and elections
asserts
Multi-party liberal democracy has a transcendental frame that represents capitalism (the market economy) prior to and more fundamentally than it represents any particular electoral will.democracy and capitalism
asserts
The Iranian Green Movement of 2009 is a genuinely emancipatory event that blurs the false opposition between Western-liberal reformers and Islamist fundamentalists, representing an emancipatory dimension of Islam itself.2009 Iranian protests
rejects
The Western left's reading of the Iranian crisis as a Western-backed liberal middle-class revolt against a genuinely popular Ahmadinejad is empirically false and reveals a deep distrust of ordinary Iranian people.left-wing pro-Ahmadinejad reading of Iran
rejects
Obama's Cairo speech, by promoting a 'dialogue of cultures' instead of political struggle, is a paradigm case of ideological culturalization that displaces the real political stakes.Obama's Cairo speech and cultural dialogue
asserts
Berlusconi represents a historically significant new political form: the abolition of the gap between state dignity and bourgeois private interest, with naked personal corruption exercised directly as political power.Berlusconi and the new political form
asserts
Berlusconi and technocratic liberalism are two sides of the same coin — the permissive liberal technocrat and the fundamentalist populist are not opposites but co-constitutive.liberalism and populism
asserts
Italy under Berlusconi is a preview of what Western democracies are becoming: formally democratic but in practice emptied of real opposition, with the entire political field occupied by one figure.Italy and the future of Western democracy
rejects
Liberal avant-garde provocation (e.g. Serrano's Piss Christ) is fully integrated into market dynamics and functions as a hapax — a singular gesture that can only work once and constitutes no genuine political subversion.avant-garde provocation as subversion
rejects
The critical defense of works like Piss Christ is self-defeating because the same rhetorical structure can justify any extreme act whatsoever, including defecation on camera.liberal defense of provocative art
rejects
Truth does not lie in the extreme; the authentic is not guaranteed by transgression or going to the limit.extremism and authenticity
asserts
The left should reclaim moral dignity rather than ceding it to the right, shamelessly positioning itself as the true moral majority against right-wing obscenity in power.left-wing strategy and moral dignity
asserts
The U.S. invasion of Iraq brought more religious fundamentalism, not liberation — the best argument against military intervention is the contrast with what is happening in Iran organically.U.S. intervention in Iraq
asserts
Consumer freedom's injunction to choose is a form of terror, because the deeper question behind every choice is 'what kind of object do you want to be?' — a question to which no answer is possible.consumer choice and subjective terror
reframes
Even Dennett's compatibilist redefinition of freedom and Libet's neuroscientific findings leave open a Hegelian conception of freedom as the negativity of blocking/saying no rather than originating choice.free will and neuroscience
asserts
Foucault's anti-essentialist 'care of the self' and the postmodern valorization of nomadic identity find a strange echo in, and are co-opted by, consumerist capitalism's logic of endless self-recreation.Foucault and consumer capitalism
asserts
Chávez was right to distribute books and set a new canon; state-endorsed canons are not totalitarian but necessary, and anti-canon deconstructionism is hypocritical.Chávez's book distribution and canons
asserts
The 1979 Iranian revolution had an authentic emancipatory moment in its first years before its recuperation, and Mousavi's movement is an attempt to repeat that moment against the regime.1979 Iranian revolution
asserts
Western neocolonialism continues through direct land purchases in Africa and Asia by corporations and states, a new form of colonialism more direct than relying on local intermediaries.neocolonialism and land acquisition
Quotes 17
“The stupidity of the master is palpable in this gap between the confusion of the master figure and the objective symbolic fact that he already won a brilliant victory.”Slavoj Žižek · master signifier and gap between authority and knowledge
“We are forced to live as if we were free.”John Gray · forced choice and consumer freedom
“It is horrific not to know the past and yet be able to impact on the future.”Slavoj Žižek · opacity of our historical condition and forced decision
“The question of desire, its original enigma, is not primarily what do I want but what do others want from me. What an object do they see in me.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian desire and the hysterical question
“There is a terrorist dimension in the pressure to choose.”Slavoj Žižek · consumer choice as subjective terror
“It's not that people are stupid — people with a minimum of will voluntarily freely choose stupidity.”Slavoj Žižek · populism as voluntary disavowal
“The zero level of freedom is not to choose but to in a very Hegelian way the negativity to block.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian freedom as negativity/veto
“The elections in which from time to time against the skeptical cynical inertia the majority momentarily awakens and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion — their very exceptional status proves that elections are not as such a medium of truth.”Slavoj Žižek · democratic authenticity as exceptional not structural
“You fall in love so that you don't decide to fall in love — you discover that you are already in love. People discovered that they are not afraid.”Slavoj Žižek · the revolutionary moment as passive discovery of a changed subjective stance
“It disturbs everyone — it disturbs Islamist fundamentalists and it disturbs Western liberals. Nobody wants to recognize the emergence of authentically emancipatory democratic Islam.”Slavoj Žižek · emancipatory Islam as the impossible third term
“Berlusconi abolished alienation: there is no split between citoyen and bourgeois — it's bourgeois in the sense of the most primitive vulgar corruption directly in power.”Slavoj Žižek · Berlusconi as abolition of liberal political alienation
“He is Joker in power. You know this kind of a he-he-he crazy laughter but the machine goes on.”Slavoj Žižek · Berlusconi as Joker — madman in power while the state machine functions
“Those in power didn't even make it the proper appearance in cheating — they simply did ridiculous things.”Slavoj Žižek · Ahmadinejad election fraud so crude it violated the logic of appearances
“The minimum of populism is there is a proper order and then some external intruder — it can be Jews, it can be American imperialism — is the cause of the ruin.”Slavoj Žižek · structural definition of populism
“In this refusal to know resides the properly fetishist dimension of populism.”Slavoj Žižek · populism as fetishistic disavowal of knowledge
“I torture you, it's not about pain, it's testing the limits of pain — I want to... blah.”Slavoj Žižek · self-defeating logic of the liberal defense of transgression
“We should be defenders of basic dignity. We should shamelessly say: we are the moral majority.”Slavoj Žižek · left reclaiming moral dignity from right-wing obscenity
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I hope I will reach that point, but nonetheless I cannot avoid an immediate reaction. Don't you think that the least one can say is that we also get the opposite reaction of the Western European left, which is that Latin America is becoming at least up to a point this kind of other place of authentic revolution? I mean all decadent European leftists, the more they are, as is typical of British upper middle-class leftists, the more they like a place somewhere out there—if the ocean is in between it's all the better—where a really authentic revolution goes on. And for many of my friends, the myth is Latin America. Like, we talk here about the revolution, the revolution is going on there. Okay, we wanted to talk about it also, but nonetheless—now this will be of course a bad taste joke, no? But for me, problems with Chávez began when he—so the media reported, but I checked with my friends, he did it—from Venezuela, from Colombia, but they are there half-hostile so they are not friends of the president of Colombia. When he prohibited The Simpsons and put on a shitty family Christian melodrama. Now I know you can play the contextual game in blah blah and so on and so on, but that's not important. And I will return to Chávez unfortunately in a brief mention today. You know that he was the first, even before the local Ayatollahs did, to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for victory. Now okay, here maybe I will open a polemics today. I was appalled in today's The Guardian by—and I will try to explain why—by the text by, help me to pronounce the name, S-E-U-M-A-S, it is Seumas Milne. Basically the way he reads it. My point is that the way he reads it is exactly the way Zionist Israel and American conservatives read it. And there is a necessity in it. Okay, but I will come to this at some point. I would nonetheless like to begin with one theoretical point and one obscenity, with a kind of a praise of the people. First, let me tell you, I consider this a wonderful anecdote which tells a lot about how master signifier works and how democracy effectively works. It's one of these historical legends, this one even apparently really happened. During the crucial battle between Prussian and Austrian army, I think it was that brief war where Prussia quickly defeated Austria, imperial Austrian army, the Prussian King, who was an idiot but formally the supreme commander of the Prussian army—this was one of the last of these old-fashioned battles where down in the valley thousands are slaughtering each other but from the opposite hills commander-kings being served fresh water or whatever drinks observed the battle—so on a hill, from a nearby hill, the Prussian King was observing the battle and he looked very worried because if you just watched the battlefield it appeared a total confusion. It absolutely wasn't clear who is winning, even it looked that some Prussian troops are withdrawing. Then at his side it was the mastermind, the true mastermind of the battle, General von Moltke. Maybe some of you know he was the great Prussian strategist. He was with this detached intellectual ironic cynical gaze observing the battle and what appeared to others as a total confusion, even a retreat, when this happened he—this is a legend—he turned to the King and told him, may I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory. So this is the gap between master signifier and knowledge. The King was the master, the formal commander, totally ignorant of the meaning of what went on in the battlefield, while von Moltke embodied strategic knowledge. Although at the level of actual decisions the victory was von Moltke's, he was correct in congratulating the King on behalf of whom he was acting. The stupidity of the master is palpable in this gap between the confusion of the master figure and the objective symbolic fact that he already won a brilliant victory. I like this idea. You won, you are a genius, but you don't know it, you are just informed, what a brilliant victory and so on. This is how unfortunately if we replace King with people, this is how democracy works, that we people are informed in the elections that we won a brilliant victory. By this I don't mean to despise the people, on the contrary, I think that if we, the left, and here the example that I took of Chávez, to avoid a misunderstanding, I don't buy this standard liberal critique, like Chávez recently and it was received as something horrible by Western liberals, didn't he establish a list of I don't know sixty, one hundred books to be distributed to all school children? Well, and they are saying this is like totalitarian control. What control? Every state does this, we just don't notice it. Why not replace the standard canon with another canon? If anything, Chávez should be congratulated here for getting it correctly and rejecting this stupid politically correct deconstructionist resentment of canons. I am for canons, we should make our own canon, we need canons. It's total hypocrisy to think that you can teach, you can have educations just doing the subversive marginal things or whatever. Here I congratulate him. So would you agree or not? That would be my first. This comes, I cannot get out of it, then we go to serious things, this will be the vulgar thing. But I warn you, it will be really vulgar. You know, one of the usual attitudes of us, degenerate intellectuals, is to dismiss ordinary people as, if not stupid, conservative, too sensitive, when you have an avant-garde art performance, you know all this, all these Chapman brothers or whatever stuff, dead corpses, cows, urinating cows or whatever video of your intestines and so on. As if stupid people don't get it and as if—what I am rejecting here, I am not saying we shouldn't do this, I'm just saying that I don't buy the automatic supposition that—and this is for me the bad passion of the real—this idea that if you go over the border, you do something subversive, you force people to confront the prejudices and so on. Now I want to report to you, this is for me the model of false avant-garde arrogance, especially false because it's perfectly integrated into the dynamics of the market. I remember I was a couple of years ago in New York when it was this famous retrospective in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, I think it's on the other side in Brooklyn, Andres Serrano works '83-'93. You remember maybe the famous photograph Piss Christ, piss like urine, Christ like Jesus, which depicts a crucifix immersed in urine. It became an exhibit even in the congressional debate, all this populist stuff about whether the some US state agency should support artists such as Serrano who got a grant from the state, whose work scorns the standards of common decency, I should be, you know all this populist stuff, should be spent taxpayers' money on it and so on and so on. Predictably of course all leftist-liberals exploded at this conservative attack. Typical of the defense of Serrano was Michael Brenson's note in New York Times. I will quote it, just a couple of lines don't worry. Like Robert Mapplethorpe—incidentally to give you another example, I am totally opposed to Mapplethorpe. I think there is one rather tragic fact and many of my friends in New York who really know, their subjects supposed to know, I trust them, told me that everybody knows this, that he is simply not a very good photographer. It's as simple as that. And he tries to mask this with this whatever one guy sticking his finger into the penis of another guy, all this extreme sex stuff. So. Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Serrano struggles against inhibitions about the human body. Incidentally this is wonderful, you know whatever I do I sit here, if you are disgusted I can say ah but don't you see I struggle against the—let me go on. His use of bodily fluids is not intended to arouse disgust—this is also wonderful, you do a provocation, of course spontaneously I am disgusted, no you missed the point, it's not to disgust—but to challenge the notion of disgust where the human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Serrano's use of bodily fluids as pure provocation, of course meaning if you are stupid, but you can also believe that Mr. Serrano views them, bodily fluids, as a form of purification. The fluids make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit. I love this. In this way you can justify torture. I torture you, it's not about pain, it's testing the limits of pain, I want to re... blah. Okay. Now I will make, now comes the vulgarity, it's not yet this. A simple experiment. Because the problem with this defense I claim is that it works too well. It covers everything. Let us say, warning blinking sign vulgarity, that I were to publish a video clip on YouTube depicting in detail how I shit. How the anal hole gradually gets wider, the excremental sausage falls out, while also showing the stupidly satisfied relaxed expression of my face while the shit falls out. Then you would say bah disgusting, ah then I would hire a critic who would wrote the following. Mr. Žižek, like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Žižek struggles against inhibitions about the human body. His use of bodily excrements is not intended to arouse disgust but to challenge the notion of disgust where the human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Žižek's use of bodily excrements as pure provocation but you can also believe that Mr. Žižek views them as a form of purification. The body gets purified by ejecting excrements. The excrements make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit. I think it perfectly works. And that's the problem for me. But you see what's my problem. I don't even question if this works or not. I claim that even if such provocations work and they can, they are just that. They are what is called, I think I'm not good I'm a primitive Balkan barbarian you know ethnic cleansing rapes but I think the word is hapax, this one and only example of a genus, something that can happen only once. Like even let's take something from higher you know like Malevich that Black Square on or is it the other way around I always forget on white surface, it works only once. You cannot go on. So my my problem here is a more radical one. My problem here is that I don't think that how should I put it, truth lies in the extreme in the sense of if you present me with a certain extreme reaction, that in order to be authentic how should I put it I should go to the extreme. Like in other words and being someone who unfortunately is old enough to experience the so-called hippie sexual revolution I know this was predominant like when I was young if you didn't have sex with some animal you were considered you didn't really do it you like you know you withdrew you didn't go going to the end was the idea as if there is something authentic in it. I don't accept that. Here I'm almost on the side of ordinary people. Now you will say the problem with people is populism. Yes I agree. For reasons into which I will not go now, enough was written in this ferocious polemics, I still don't agree with Ernesto Laclau, I am more and more convinced that that populism should be rejected. Now you will say but nonetheless you speak about self-organization of the people and so on and so on. Well as I tried to prove for me to get from here to populism something more is needed and to cut a long story short this is where I see a problem with otherwise beautifully theoretically developed Ernesto Laclau's line of thought in his On Populist Reason, namely you remember how at some point if you read the book he claims he even counts figures like Yugoslav Tito and Mao Zedong as populists. I simply trust my how should I call it spontaneous intuitive notion that if they are populists then the notion is misused. I claim that it's a crucial part of populism to put it in Ernesto's own terms to mystify displace the antagonism. Now his reaction will be but all antagonisms are misplaced there is no authentic antagonism and so on and so on. No I think still we can do it not in any substantial sense like instead of class struggle I don't know what struggle not in this sense but the antagonism is in populism as I try to develop in my In Defense of Lost Causes I think is mystified in a formal way. In the sense that in order to be a populist to put it in Ernesto's own terms for populists the people does exist and it's threatened from outside. That's for me the zero level of populism. You don't you never accept to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms that there is a radical antagonism which is constitutive of community. The minimum of populism is there is a proper order often even a good old order and then some external intruder, it can be Jews it can be American imperialism whatever, is the cause of the ruin. The cause comes from the outside destroying the organic order. Which is why to put it in another way populism is always sustained I claim by some kind of frustrated despair by a cry I do not know what is going on I just have enough of it I cannot go on it must stop. An impatient outburst, a refusal to patiently understand. The exasperation at the complexity and the ensuing conviction that there must be somebody responsible for all the mess which is why an agent who is behind and explains it all is needed. Indeed it is I think in this refusal to know that resides the properly fetishist dimension of populism. Although at the purely formal level fetish involves a gesture of transference onto the object fetish, it functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference with the subject supposed to know who is again supposed to know. Here what fetish gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge. My refusal to subjectively assume what I know. So you see my point, apropos of populism I don't think people are stupid, I think people with a minimum of will voluntarily freely choose stupidity. There is always behind populism a minimum of I don't want to know even if it's not acknowledged even if it remains implicit. Or to put it now in Nietzschean terms which are here I think fully appropriate populism is a reactive strategy not an active position. Now this refusal to know confronts us with the deadlock of our as we put it society of choice. There are multiple ideological investments in the topic of choice at work today. As you probably know brain scientists point out that the freedom of choice is an illusion. We experience ourselves as free simply when we are able to act the way our organism determines us with no external obstacles thwarting our propensities. As you probably know this is the soft cognitivist Daniel Dennett redefinition of freedom. He doesn't deny freedom he just says freedom is not what you think that you can in a purely contingent way do this or that. Freedom simply means you are still determined by determined by your own immanent nature no when no obstacles prevent you to realize what you spontaneously want. Here so this is one topic one field of the topic of freedom of choice and I don't know if I already told you this but do you know how much further now went the brain science argumentation, it's quite fascinating against the freedom of the will. We all know that old story of Benjamin Libet the famous two-thirds of a second. How you know he can measure your through some neuronal whatever wave activity how he can tell already half a second before you make a totally arbitrary decision that the decision was made. So it's supposed to be a kind of a material proof that half a second before you freely decide your body already knows. A proof for some people that even when we make a totally arbitrary free decision we are not really free. Our mind just becomes aware of what our brain already decided. Now Benjamin Libet as we all know is much more interesting guy. He defends human freedom. He just thinks in a very nice Hegelian way that the zero level of freedom is not to choose but to in a very Hegelian way the negativity to block. He claims that in that half of a second you can nonetheless block say no to your decision. And that is freedom. It's a very nice theory. But unfortunately I will just tell you the paradox I don't know how to answer it, I read somewhere that now they repeated the experiment in a much more fatal way. They gave to a group of people some test mathematical whatever logical where on average you need some minutes to minutes to solve it. And the point is that the people who are doing it were asked to signal the moment they got the solution. Usually it took them minutes. All these people were wired so that it was possible to follow their brain waves whatever okay with practically percent accuracy if one is to believe the reports. From reading properly the brain waves scientists were able to say ten minutes before you become aware that you have the solution if you have a solution or not. So I mean you know what I mean. In other words even when you actively think and then all of a sudden you have this the light the bulb go going on. It really happens ten minutes earlier. So where is the freedom of thought? Okay this is one problem. Then liberal economists emphasize freedom of choice as the key ingredient of market economy. By buying things we are in a way continuously voting with our money. Then deeper existential thinkers like to deploy variations on the theme of the authentic existential choice where the very core of our being is at stake. A choice which involves a full existential engagement as opposed to the superficial choices of this or that commodity. In the Marxist version of this theme the multiplicity of choices the market bombards us with obfuscates the absence of real radical choices concerning the fundamental structure of our society. That's the standard Marxist criticism. You can choose Coke or Pepsi and so on you cannot make a more radical choice. There is however a feature which is I think all too often missing in this series. The injunction to choose when we lack even the basic cognitive coordinates to make a choice. As Leonardo Padura interesting guy incidentally you get his novels so-called Havana tetralogy Blue Red and so on he is a Cuban detective author and he is so radically critical depicting all the poverty corruption in today's Cuba that I automatically assumed oh he must live in some nice villa in the suburb of of Miami or what no he still is there. He wrote in one of his novels, it is horrific not to know the past and yet be able to impact on the future. So being compelled to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque this is our basic condition. In the standard situation of the forced choice a situation in which I am free to choose on condition that I make the right choice so that the only thing left for me to do is the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what the expert knowledge imposed me this is the standard situation. But on the contrary what if the choice really is free and is for this very reason experienced as even more frustrating? We thus find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters which will fundamentally affect our lives but without a proper foundation in knowledge. To quote otherwise I don't agree with his general view but sometimes he makes good formulations John Gray in this is I think from his Straw Dogs the quote. We have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free end of quote. So this pressure to choose involves not only the ignorance about the object of choice. We are bombarded by calls to choose without being qualified to make the appropriate choice. But even more radically the subjective impossibility to answer the question of desire. When Lacan defines the object of desire as lost his point is not simply that we never know what we desire and are condemned to the eternal search for the true object which is the void of desire as such and so on. Lacan's point is a much more radical one. The lost object is ultimately the subject itself. Subject as an object. Which means that the question of desire its original enigma is not primarily what do I want but what do others want from me. What an object do they see in me. Which is why apropos of the hysterical question why am I that name why am I what you say that I am mother teacher whatever Lacan points out that the subject as such is hysterical. He Lacan defines the subject as that which is not an object. The point being that the impossibility to identify yourself as an object to know what you are for the others is constitutive of the subject. In this way Lacan generates the entire diversity of pathological subjective positions reading this diversity as the diversity of the answers to the hysterical question. The hysteric and the obsessional enact two modalities of the question. The psychotic knows itself as the object of the other's enjoyment while the pervert posits itself as the instrument of the other's enjoyment and so on and so on. This is why I claim there is a terrorist dimension in the pressure to choose. This terror resonates for me at least even in the most innocent inquiry for example when one reserves a hotel room soft or hard pillows double bed twin beds and so on. Beneath this simple questioning is a much more radical probing. Tell me who you are what kind of an object do you want to be what would fill in the gap of your desire. This is why I think the Foucaultian referring to Michel Foucault anti-essentialist apprehension about fixed identities the incessant urge to practice the care of the self to continuously reinvent recreate oneself finds a strange echo in the dynamics of postmodern capitalism. It was of course already the good old existentialism which claimed that a man is what it makes out of itself. And existentialism linked this radical freedom to existential anxiety. But for existentialism the anxiety of experiencing one's freedom the lack of one's substantial determination was the authentic moment when the subject sees its integration into the fixity of the given ideological universe shattered. What existentialism wasn't able to envisage is what Adorno tried to encapsulate with the title of his attack on Heidegger Jargon of Authenticity. How no longer repressing it the hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes the lack of fixed identity to sustain the endless process of consumerist self-recreation. So again this is to go to these eternal already boring debates with Judith Butler and so on. This is where I find this anti-essentialist oppression you know we shouldn't be fixed to a certain identity you should recreate yourself and so on and so on. It's not the the question is not that I don't agree with it but I think that precisely this eternally dynamic nomadic self-questioning which always sustains this ambiguous anxiety. Are you ready to admit you are this this this is the level at which consumerism makes you guilty. Not in the simple sense of you never get the full enjoyment you want from the commodity but you are always supposed to tell to freely choose what you really want but of course you never can. Consumerism in a way always makes you look non-authentic. And okay against this background of the difficulty of choice populism and so on I want now to approach a little bit the question of democracy. But you Alain Badiou proposed a distinction between two types or rather levels of corruption in democracy. The de facto empirical corruption and the corruption which pertains to the very form of democracy which is the reduction of politics to the negotiation of private interests. This gap becomes visible in the rare true cases of an honest democratic politician who while fighting empirical corruption nonetheless sustains the formal space of corruption. In Walter Benjamin's terms of the distinction between constituted and constituent violence one could say that we are dealing here with the distinction between the constituted corruption empirical cases of breaking the laws and the constitutive or rather constituent corruption of the very democratic form of government. A quote from Badiou's De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? If democracy is a representation it first of all represents the general system which sustains its form. In other words the electoral democracy is only representative insofar as it is first the consensual representation of capitalism which is today renamed market economy. Such is its corruption in principle end of quote. I think that one should take these lines in the strictest transcendental sense. At the empirical level of course the multi-party liberal democracy represents mirrors registers measures the quantitative dispersion of different opinions of the people. What they think about the proposed program of the parties what they think about the candidates and so on. However prior to this empirical level and in a much more radical sense the multi-party democracy represents instantiates a certain vision of society politics and the role of the individual in it. Multi-party liberal democracy represents a very precise vision of social life in which politics is organized in parties which compete through elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus and so on and so on. One should always be aware that this transcendental frame of democracy is never neutral. It privileges certain values and practices. This non-neutrality becomes palpable in the moments of crisis or indifference. When we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people effectively want or think. This inability is signaled by anomalous phenomena like I remember the UK UK elections of In spite of the growing personal unpopularity of Tony Blair he was I remember regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK. There was no way for this discontent with Blair to find a politically effective expression. Something was obviously very wrong here. It was not that people did not know what they wanted but rather that cynical resignation prevented them to act upon it so that the result was the weird gap between what people thought and how they acted voted. It was already Plato who in his critique of democracy was fully aware of this second corruption. And this critique is also discernible in the Jacobin Robespierre and his colleagues' privileging of virtue. In democracy in the sense of representation of and the negotiation between the plurality of private interests there is no place for virtue. There is no reason nonetheless what conclusion do I draw from this to be very clear now. There is here I even slightly distinguish myself from Badiou with whom you really find some kind of an animosity to voting democratic elections as if there is something non-authentic a priori false about it. No I think there is no reason to despise democratic elections. The point is only to insist that they are not in themselves a priori an indication of truth. As a rule they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideological opinion. Let me take an example which surely is not problematic so you will not accuse me of some hidden totalitarian agenda. France in France in Even Jacques Duclos at that point the second man of the French Communist Party admitted in a private conversation that if at that point free elections were to be held in France Marshal Pétain would have won with his estimation not mine percent of the votes. When de Gaulle in his and if there is a democratic person it's de Gaulle so that you will not accuse me of quoting some crazy Stalinist claiming that he represents the true people. When de Gaulle in his historic act refused to acknowledge the capitulation of France to Germans and continued to resist he claimed not only oh my voice should also be heard Vichy does not speak for for all of France. His claim was much stronger. His claim was it is only he even if at that point in early he was a ridiculous minority that it is only he and his comrades not the Vichy regime who speaks on behalf of the true France. On behalf of the true France as such not only on behalf of the majority of the French. What he was saying was deeply true even if it was democratically not only without legitimation but clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. So you see my point here I don't despise elections all I'm saying is what there can be democratic elections which enact an let's call it pathetically event of truth. Here I go again against Badiou. The elections in which from time to time against the skeptical cynical inertia the majority momentarily awakens and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion. However the very exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves that elections are not as such a medium of truth. You know what I mean. There are authentic moments and in a way we always know when they happen. But they are exceptional. And now I come to this provocative point in contrast to many people from the left and from the right and I will try briefly to reason why. Now comes a more actual polemics. The only presupposition for you to understand it is that like all common idiots me included we read daily newspapers. I claim this is going on today in Iran. Why? And my only source is not only our friend Ali Alizadeh who when he is not here provoking me is selling himself to the media as Iranian specialist no but I have other KGB agent spies in Iran I. Why? First let's look at it I love this kind of event. What happened? I quote already in some of my old books this wonderful mystical spiritual and I use here the term in a very naive way not in any ironic way moment when you know just my old boring metaphors of of you know the cat walking along the precipices it doesn't fall down till it notices when when even if some oppressive power doesn't yet lose power those in power at some point some kind of a psychological break everybody knows it's over. Again I advise you to read a wonderful book Ryszard Kapuściński he is recently deceased the great Polish journalist Shah of Shahs where he describes he does something which is of course probably a fake but I think there is a truth in this fake. He tries to isolate this moment and he claims he found it. Some three four months before Shah empirically left the country there was there were in some suburb of Tehran some demonstrations. People gathered on an intersection. A policeman approached them and started to shout at them disperse beat it and so on. And a guy simply looked at him and did nothing. The policeman repeated the shouting the guy did nothing. The embarrassed policeman turned around and walked away. The mystery was that in a couple of hours the whole Tehran knew about it. And it was this kind of a how should I put it mystical reversal. Although battles were going on people were dying but from that point everyone those in power those out of power knew the game is basically over. And this is for me the most interesting moment. This time in between when those in power are al already dead like the cat they just have to be reminded look down there is nothing oh yes and you fall down. And again I would love to but I don't have enough data to write maybe a history of decomposition of socialism in Eastern Europe in these terms. Like when before communists have actually lost power when did it really when did people know it is over. The strange thing that I'm discovering is that it was pretty late we in ex-Yugoslavia we were even more privileged. With us retroactively it was already in the early eighties. The communists in power did some things which like were so out of touch with normal hard-line communism that we all love but that we but for example I was told I spoke with a friend from the Czech Republic recently and I asked him and he told me that it's only two-three months before you remember when German tourists East German were massively taking train to Hungary because Hungary opened borders and let them to leave to Austria. This was like my God what's going on. Some East Germans told me it was also a year before already when because it was Gorbachev Glasnost and you know all this boring Soviet propaganda their own Readers' Digest it was called Sputnik I think with the best from Soviet press. It was too much so East German communist government prohibited Sputnik in '88 and people said my God if our government is prohibiting Soviet publications what's going on. Okay so my point is that something similar my friends are telling me is did happen not even the first but the second night after elections. All of a sudden to put it in pathetic terms people decided realized you know it's this mystical act of it's like falling in love. You fall in love so that you don't decide to fall in love you discover that you are already in love. People discovered that they are not afraid. You can be beaten by police whatever but they go in hundreds of thousands and also what I like is this I was told that the way it functions it's pretty terrifying in a good sense of this sublime power of the people that much more threatening than shouting is the silence. Literally hundreds of thousands no just silently walking along the streets. And then what they do I was told it's almost a ritual. They go home climb the roofs of their houses and cry Allahu Akbar. God is great. And that's a crucial data. Why? Okay first we have this something changed people no longer fear. This Allahu Akbar combined with another thing which you get the green color. Green is Islam. This is I think what incredibly how many Western majority commentators I'm reading all the commentators they almost systematically miss it or if they take it into account they take it as a kind of a secondary manipulation. Now comes my first big news if you are idiots this is news for you otherwise not. This Mousavi people and so on this is not the Western so-called Western pro-Western liberals you know. The way the media present to us Iranians there are two basic groups. The poor primitive farmer Islamist majority manipulated by clerics, revolutionary guard, Ahmadinejad and this pro-Western upper middle-class secular educated whatever who just want to get back to a little more democratic form of what Iran was after Shah. It's another name I forgot his guy his name maybe you know who it is not Mousavi but Ka something like I have obscene association with angel it's Karroubi Karroubi whatever this the other so-called reformist candidate. He is this I say this with all viciousness he is the Habermas-Rorty candidate how should I put it no he is the Western candidate who wanted to play some stupid identity politics you know we have women we have Kurds we have gays all oppressed come your identity will be recognized. What Mousavi is doing is something totally different which is disgusting how it is. You can correct me if I'm wrong but from the majority of media it disappeared. His motto is not simply anti-freedom, his motto is return to the origins repeat the '79 revolution. And he has all the authority here. Mousavi was he practically he is a wonderful person I was told he has many wonderful qualities. Okay I cannot resist it, his main quality is he reads me. I learned that's how that's another story no he even was supposed to organize two years ago a visit by me to Iran but then another guy was co-organizing visit and a week before leaving I was told there is a slight problem one of the organizers is arrested you can come later or whatever. I like this idea of he has all the authority of Khomeini behind him. You know that the same Mousavi he is not some kind of idiotic idiotic inefficient architect he is architect by profession so even we have a link with my Tuesday's talk no. He do you know that during the entire Iran-Iraq war he was the Prime Minister. He organized economy so that it functioned. So again this guy is not an idiot. What is crucial again is that his idea is back to '79 roots creative he all the time his slogan is I am nothing it's the people creative invention of the people people will organize and so on and so on. It's incredible it's I think if we still need it I feel personally narcissistically justified when in my In Defense of Lost Causes I with all ironic criticism of Foucault I nonetheless basically accepted the line that the '79 Khomeini revolution wasn't simply a right-wing populist fundamentalist uprising. That there was for the first year or two something authentic going on. And this is what these guys are doing. They try to repeat that against later recuperation. And on the contrary it's the tactic of Ahmadinejad to push them towards Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani ex-president is the embodiment of this how should I put it the new new Ayatollah wealth how should I put it no. So so again this is the first absolutely crucial thing. What these recent events demonstrate is that the whole mapping which opposed the the this stupid bribed by Islamist work primitive fundamentalist working class like to put it in geographic terms the south of Tehran versus the upper middle class secular Westernized north part it's proven wrong. Here we have a true not Tony Blair third way. Something happened a great rebellion against the regime but on behalf of the emancipatory dimension of Islam itself. And one way of Western liberals to deal with it is to claim oh it's just a mask. They are really Western clerics exploiting because of the popularity Islam. Incidentally again they are claiming exactly the same as Ahmadinejad and his guys are claiming. I feel deeply justified because it is a proof here that there can effectively still be an emancipatory dimension in Islam. That Islam is not only in its political form either this soft Turkish pro-market Islamism or so-called Islamic fundamentalism. You know even if Western liberals praise Islam it's always some kind of a you know 10th-11th century that great era or whatever. No we don't have to look thousand years back. It's today happening the emancipatory dimension of Islam. And again that's the crucial thing to note. This movement now is those liberals even people around Khatami have a very ambiguous attitude towards it. Something new happened there. It's not the gilded spoiled middle-class youth and so on and poor workers behind Ahmadinejad. It's absolutely not true. It is a genuine emancipatory event which precisely totally blurs this official line liberals versus fundamentalists. Which is why if one takes him seriously Obama was totally wrong when he said in a very strange statement yesterday I think that the difference between the two Mousavi and Ahmadinejad is negligible. That they are both two figures of the evil both pursuing the same program. Maybe but probably it's too optimist reading what maybe happened I suspect is that I'm not sure that maybe he or some of his advisors are wise enough to know that if he were to openly support Mousavi this would be used as the proof you know for the hard-liners that it's really manipulated by the Americans and so on and so on. But what's more important is that I want to make another critique of Obama here. You remember his it is so celebrated Cairo speech stretching out the hand the hand towards Islam. I think it's one of the most disgusting stupid speeches. Instead of politics it talks about the dialogue of culture. It's a clear example of this of this tolerant culturalization. My God what goes on today in the world we don't need this kind of a trans-cultural peace. We need political struggle here political struggle there. Again there is no place in the mapping of the Cairo speech for what is going on today there. Now I come to the next point who there is more and more popular another theory which I think my Iranian friends convinced me can be clearly and empirically falsified. This idea that nonetheless they may be cheating a little bit but they couldn't have cheated so much that is today that nonetheless Ahmadinejad is more popular because with all his populism blah blah he genuinely cares for the poor he is basically a kind of a populist socialist distributing money raising lowest salaries and so on while the people behind Mousavi are these upper middle class pro-Western for market reforms and so on and so on. So this position is advocated so that nonetheless Ahmadinejad effectively won. It's interesting who advocates this position. On the one hand my beloved Fox News in the United States and Israeli Zionist media because their idea is to prove you see it's not just a matter of of election it's not only Ahmadinejad the people of Iran as such are anti-Semitic anti- and so on and so on this hard line. And some of the left. Let me just read you from today's from today's The Guardian some lines. Western media focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth, again a ridiculous mistreatment I mean if you look at the precisely at the media it's not the gilded youth which is demonstrating you see almost every woman is every at least second woman is with chador or whatever, gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority is largely invisible abroad. While Mousavi promised market reforms and privatization, more personal freedom and better relations with the West, the president increased pensions and public sector wages and handed out cheap loans. It's hardly surprising that Ahmadinejad should have a solid base among the working class. So the conclusion, if Ahmadinejad quote again was in fact the winner then there is an attempted coup going on in Tehran right now and it is being led by Mousavi and his Western backed supporters. The US is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars in covert destabilization program against Iran and so on and so on. So the reason I'm I think this is a terrifying misreading of the situation is that I think that this description of Ahmadinejad is to put it in very naive terms simply empirically wrong. That he really won maybe he cheated for a million or two. The first proof is an elementary mathematical one. In the previous presidential election the voter turnout was usually percent maybe This time it was And it's clearly reasonable to conclude that this was the protest vote mobilized. So you can get it somehow with clear mathematics that it's not that that it is because also if you look at how the electoral results were announced. It was absolute that's what my friends from Iran were telling me. This is what they found so humiliating. It's almost they told me this as an echo to what I was saying in my second architecture talk on this need for a proper appearance. They said those in power didn't even make it the proper appearance in cheating. They simply did ridiculous things like for example when they first announced election they said according to half the votes counted a certain candidate got then when all the votes were counted the same candidate got Then for example people protested well in Mousavi's own village according to the first results Ahmadinejad won. Then they said no problem we will add another half a million there so that you know like in and the first results were announced a couple of hours after after voting was finished. So again it's the very but there is another thing. Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor. He is a genuine corrupted populist distrusted even by the majority of Ayatollahs. Did you notice this that of the seven great Ayatollahs only one congratulated him till now. He what he has is not only repressive organs but also a very strong new rich class. The first thing you should learn about that I don't know how to pronounce the word revolutionary guard. You know this is not some kind of a fundamentalist working class virtue police organization. This is the greatest mega corporation in Iran. It owns owns one-third of the country. So let's be clear here. The second thing, his whole campaign was I mean he is not a naive he plays Ahmadinejad a naive, he is like I would say I would say Iranian Berlusconi. He plays all these vulgarities but he has an extremely effective PR which instructs him well how to do all this all this clownish all this clownish stuff and so on and so on. So again the paradox is that Ahmadinejad was trying to do precisely what people from the west was trying precisely to push Mousavi towards either towards this secular Habermas-style Western liberals or towards Rafsanjani the corrupted old Khomeini guard. But again what effectively happened I think is something which blurred blurred the cards. And I think it's a mega mega everyone the tragedy is how even those leftists who are still for Ahmadinejad as well as the liberal West they all misread the situation again in these terms. Western liberal Mousavi market reforms and so on. I checked it up with his people, it's strictly not true. Mousavi is for further nationalizations and so on. It's strictly not true that he is some kind of a pro-Western liberal or whatever. He is an authentically engaged engaged emancipatory the best side of Islamist. The best side of and that's what nobody wants. That's what for different you know it often happens how opponents for different reasons have the same desire. Now it's again in the interest of everyone to see the struggle. Nobody wants to recognize the emergence of authentically emancipatory democratic why not I'm proud to use the word here Islam. Islam. It disturbs everyone. It disturbs everyone it disturbs Islamists fundamentalists and it disturbs Western liberals. Because again you remember how the media were portraying Islam. It's a tremendous civil society but it's this secularized upper middle class against the background of the sea of these primitive workers primitive poor and so on or farmers whatever. First misunderstanding what farmers. I mean Iran is a normal civilized country, percent cities. Point two again this is what you see how things happen my God people precisely these poor allegedly fundamentalist people arouse and nobody wants to see it. They read it again as a kind of a liberal revolt if you are against it you say supported by the United States and so on and so on. And this is I think the most the saddest thing. This is where an event is misrecognized. This is Western cynicism at its worst. My reproach to these texts is that how what a deep distrust in Iranian people it has. A miracle happened precisely these poor people aroused, they saw through this cheap populism and so on. The again the motto is repeat the '79 revolution. And what basically we hear even from the leftists it's no. I mean the message is of this kind of support for for for Ahmadinejad is a very sad one. It is of course they wouldn't put it in these terms but it's basically wait wait wait these people are primitive, you can only deal with them in this authoritarian populist way, these people are not mature for secular or more emancipatory democracy, the only way you can mobilize them is in a fundamenta- is in a fundamentalist way. And I think this is also especially important to emphasize Iran here because I think this is the best thing that should have happened compared to American liberation of Iraq. Here we have it as in a mirror image. Iraq, you have military intervention which, okay maybe it will work now but a little bit it looks, but nonetheless one thing is clear. Iraq is now more religiously fundamentalist than it was under Saddam. One thing they did some- one thing that in spite of all horror—and I don't have any precisely as very sympathetic towards Iran and by sympathetic I mean really sympathetic. I wrote a couple of years ago a text published here and there with a terrifying title Give Iranians Nuke a Chance. Do you know this? That I was even quoted once by by Ahmadinejad as a good progressive good Western philosopher honest no? But what I was to say is that I think that you see how for everything you pay the price. How we are still paying the price for one of the greatest fiascos of Western and third world non-aligned politics. The hypocrisy of how we were reacting to Iraq-Iranian war. Nobody dared to say that it was a clear-cut case of aggression of of Iraq on Iran. Saddam simply thought okay it's a confusion there let's grab the southwestern part with all the oil. What was the reaction? Americans as we all know they were giving him satellite shots of Iranian guards plus the gases the poisonous gases to stop them because they were afraid that if Iran wins we will have Iran on the edge of Saudi Arabia and so on and so on and so on. I mean it's incredible how all of a sudden Yugoslavia all the big non-aligned nations and the West discovered the need for peace at the precise moment when Iran started to win. All of a sudden they worried maybe Iran should stop, it's not good to progress too much, they appealed to Iran not to cross the border and go to Iraq. Well why didn't they appeal a little bit earlier the other the other way around. So again here this is the true crime of the United States. This was my answer to to Saddam Hussein trial. A strange trial where his greatest crime in the sense of human suffering how many people died his attack on Iraq wasn't even among the ten points of the of the how do you call it accusation prosecution whatever against him. Why? Because United States of course were deeply were deeply involved in that. So again I think that we should especially this what happens today in Iran is the best argument against United States intervention to Iraq. It's an example of how it should happen liberation, not the way it does. There is a deep truth in the fact that the United States intervention even if in a totally naive liberal way you say why not okay maybe they will bring democracy blah blah blah. No they brought more religious fundamentalism and so on. My God do you know that in Saddam's Iraq the position of women was arguably the best among all Arab countries. Today in practically all not Arab precisely because Iranians are not Arabs let's call them Middle East Muslim countries the best the highest position of women is Iran of course of course no. I mean I had a I had a relative who worked for a Slovene business company doing deals with Iran and he told me okay because of this nonetheless still male chauvinism the boss in every big company or at the ministry is a man. But then he told me that this was literally the formula. Then you look around the second-third person who really runs the show the only person who is not an idiot is a woman and the way to do a deal is to deal with the woman. And then the boss is like this Prussian king who has to be informed that he just may I congratulate Your Majesty for just concluding a wonderful business deal or whatever no it's. So but you see so when people are telling me do I think just we should do nothing and so on no it is I think so important not to miss the moment here because we have a genuine universal emancipatory moment with even communist potentials not in the naive sense of communist goals but nonetheless in the sense of a little bit like like Aristide in Haiti let's do the best we can people are mobilized and so on and again it's so crucial to insist on this I know I'm sorry I'm repeating myself but it's so crucial to insist on this it's not Western liberals who are this this is the fundamental mystification to read this Mousavi movement as these gilded youths pro-Western liberal middle classes and so on. My God where are they then all these people of Ahmadinejad majority which supports him. Don't you know that when those in power tried to organize their own alternative demonstration they did it the way those in power do it, Milošević did the same and so on. They they with free cars free meals they brought from all around people and all they succeeded to do is I think some miserable something like that with all the bribery on their side and so on. No something immense is happening there. I think we should look for we should look for signs like this. Why? Because it is again so I'm not against democracy. There are authentic moments. Here yes here we should play the democratic game we should count the votes votes and so on. It is this authentic potential of democracy which is I think losing ground more and more today with the rise of so-called authoritarian capitalism. Of course we have here let's call it multicultural differences. In Russia we have capitalism with Russian values, Putin, brutal display of power and so on and so on. Let me tell you a nice data. When I visited Russia a year and a half ago I didn't know who invited me. It was Gleb Pavlovsky. I didn't know who he is. Now I learned he is the PR guy from Putin. He invited me he tried to get Badiou and so on because he wanted to give some kind of an intellectual aura to you know because all the dissidents are going to critical guys so no also we have some big names from the West and then I asked this guy a simple question. I noticed how the media reported from time to time Putin has a very vulgar brutal sexist with dirty words outburst. And usually it's perceived as you see behind all behind this polite mask this is the real brutal KGB Putin. For example the most famous example I was even a little bit shocked watching it on news is well at some press conference in the West I think in Italy a Western journalist asked him is it true something about Chechnya and so on. And you know what Putin told him. He told him maybe you should visit us in Russia and if you are not yet circumcised we have good surgeons to circumcise you and maybe we will cut it a little bit more. Like we will cut off your balls basically he told him no. And then I asked this guy Gleb Pavlovsky like are these outbursts is it true that you get here a glimpse of the true no all planned he told me. All planned all planned. Putin thinks that this is what Russian wants to see. A guy who pretend to be polite cold seduce the West but in reality you know cut the balls beat and so on all that all that popular stuff. Then we have even you know what's my I'm still more and more critical of Obama but the lesson of all these events it started with Burma sorry politically correct Myanmar now no where something we should maybe it's a very hard lesson for us leftists. But something maybe we should accept that okay maybe it remains the big enemy United States but how should I put it in the multicentric world that we are approaching I put it in this I hope you will agree very modest way. It's not always a priori necessary that the United States are the worst guy how should I put it no. For example if you take Burma Myanmar I even had a fight with with some of my leftist friends in Paris you know when there were those big Buddhist demonstrations. My some of my leftist friends in France tried to defend the military rulers and they told me basically okay it's not a democracy but isn't this still better for the decency of the people if this military regime falls we will have a cheap Westernized democracy where there will be mass child prostitution and so on and so on. Okay my reply to the guy you will not like it was a very vicious one was ah you mean it will be like Cuba today no and then he told me again ah you listen to Soviet propaganda sorry to imperialist propaganda. No I told him my imperialist propaganda is Havana itself where I was five years ago and boys I don't know why me I'm a well-known homophobe and so on but boys were offered to me like you know for ten dollars you do whatever you want with him for the whole night and so on no I mean according to official statistics there are more prostitutes now in Havana than under Batista. Okay but that's another story. What I wanted to say is that in Myanmar it's clear what happened. In the same way that we do and we should ruthlessly criticize American neocolonialism and I'm without mercy there. Like for example speaking about cannibalism there is only one after the death of this all glorious leaders Idi Amin and so on the great self-proclaimed cannibals, there is only one half self-proclaimed cannibal today in Equatorial Guinea I think no. A kind of a local dictator who let it be known when an opponent disappears he let it be known that he ate it no. And under total American protection. When they drew attention I read an interview with Condoleezza Rice under Bush he said no sorry he is an American ally we will not criticize him and so on and so on. One should be extremely brutal here and I'm far from dismissing this idea of post-colonial exploitation as false. For example numbers about Latin America tell enough. We all talk about about how much help the West is giving and so on but look at the data of I think you may maybe know it better it's around I don't know forty, fifty billions even more how much profit just the big the big Western companies effectively still extract from from Latin America, not to mention Africa and so on. Or all these other you know what's for me there are new forms of post-colonialism which are horrible. I don't think I already mentioned this to you even if I did it's worth repeating it's a terrifying story. You know what's going on today silently. Again I'm here a structuralist optimist symptoms are everywhere you cannot lie everything is in the media you just have to find it. Maybe already mentioned it to you it's crucial. You know what happened about half a year ago in Madagascar. A mega big Korean South Korean conglomerate bought to cut a long story short half of the entire arable land of the island and they will use it not even for food mostly for industrial plants. So this is then I learned and you know where I read this in New York Times but it's just a small you know they don't make too much fuss out of it but then you learn that this is a whole tendency. That even in the countries which we associate with hunger like in Somalia Western companies are now buying in some part some of this stuff, in Ethiopia in that part all around. So what big countries are becoming afraid that you know in these new conditions not enough food raw materials and now they even went they don't trust local masters to do their own colonial farming they are now directly buying it or okay leasing it for ninety-nine years and so on and so on and it's going on it's going on massively. I mean so in spite of all this I claimed we should also start to talk first a little bit about European we Europeans tend to be my in Ethiopia British companies are deep into it are buying large tracts of of course the best land and so on. Then okay along the same lines let's accept it. Myanmar Burma is a Chinese colony economic in this sense. The military junta there survive helped through China. For minerals, wood, forests and so on cutting you know China in terrible need of raw materials and food. That's that's the story and we should start talking about all this. So if you allow me to go on a little bit I would like to improvise a little bit on these new types of rulers in the West. We have Putin then we have Berlusconi. I think that it has don't laugh at me historical meaning what goes on today in Italy. I think if we want to look to see our future politically it's Italy. Italy don't underestimate Italy. No wonder that Putin and Berlusconi are personal friends. They are the same figure but just as they put it in a multicultural way each to the characteristic of his own country and so on and so on. I even remember how one of the famous problem one of the famous stupid gestures of Berlusconi was I don't know if you remember a year ago when Putin visited Berlusconi in Rome and some Russian journalist asked him is it true that you are divorcing your wife to marry some ice skating girl or whatever. Of course that next day literally that journal not only the journal lost her job but that journal was prohibited and so on. But the points then Berlusconi as if to defend his friend did something as if he is holding a machine gun like he made this gesture which was rather tasteless you know because he was protecting his Russian friends and in Russia this is not a joke. Some twenty to thirty journalists are killed per year and you don't joke with this. In Russia to say you will kill a journalist it's not a joke no. Okay so let me go on. Why is Berlusconi so interesting? The figure of Berlusconi as a human all-too-human leader is here crucial. First if our political scene is split between permissive liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism I think Berlusconi's great achievement is to prove that they are two sides of the same coin. He is both of the same at the same time. This is why and this is what really depressed me when recently I went to Torino to do propaganda for my new book and to support my half friend not theoretically theoretically he goes to Gulag but okay the one who was at communism Gianni Vattimo no stood for elections and he was elected he promised me that he will now for European that he will proclaim himself in Brussels a communist a communist member of Parliament. It's that this is what he told me and other friends in Italy it's that how Italy is effectively developing here you see it's not simply primitive Asiatic non-democratic Slavonic mentality this is what I find so horrible that in Italy we have first example in the West of slowly emerging what we still dismiss in Russia as pathology a country which formally remains democratic. You have parties freedom of the press but more and more it becomes a kind of an empty democracy in the sense that you know in advance who—incidentally that's the beauty that Ahmadinejad officially got percent which is exactly how much Berlusconi Berlusconi as now no. That is to say you know but the problem is even deeper. Vattimo told me that he spoke here of course this is Italy no now I say this with loving brutal bad taste humor. Italy is this corrupted country where they appear to be opponents they are all friends Vattimo knows Prodi knows everyone there and so on. So he told me that all this ex-center-left olive party and so on he told me that the tragic thing is that they are all in some way morally broken in the sense that Berlusconi is accepted as a fact. They pretend to fight him but you talk with people privately and they all say sorry for a decade two three we are stuck. But everyone the cynical demoralization is such that it is as if Berlusconi took the entire field you know in a normal under quotation marks Western country you have the tension between neutral technocratic liberalism and right-wing populism. The problem with Berlusconi is that he is both at the same time. He as it were occupies the entire field. So again what makes Berlusconi as a political phenomenon so interesting is the fact that he the most powerful politician in his country acts more and more shamelessly. He not only ignores or politically neutralizes legal investigations into his criminal activity to boost his private business interest he is also systematically undermining the basic dignity of the head of a state. This I think is one of the crucial phenomena. I mean did you notice it if you pull I don't don't underestimate this what goes in Italy and especially please don't read it just you know in the same racist way oh this those crazy Italians they are not serious. What is he doing? Turning the whole country the government into a reality show. You remember when his wife accused him he went on TV explaining his all this problem with photos from his orgies all that stuff and so on and so on. The dignity of classical politics is grounded in its elevation above the play of particular interests of the civil society. The idea is politics is an affair of citoyen a minimum of dignity elevated above corrupted corrupted bourgeois life. And Marxists then criticized this as an alienation politics pretends to be above universal but really serves the interests where Vattimo gave me this idea that Berlusconi got the lesson he abolished alienation. There is no split between citoyen and bourgeois. It's bourgeois in the sense of the most primitive vulgar corruption is directly in power. State power is directly exerted by a bourgeois who ruthlessly exploits it as the means to protect his economic interests who washes dirty laundry of his private marriage in the style of a vulgar reality show and so on and so on. And I think that this is in a way an expression of a more general phenomenon in politics. Here let me express but I'm not alone here the guy who gave me this thought is Fred Jameson none other than Fred Jameson let me express my sincere admiration I am not kidding for Richard Nixon. I think that he was a crook but admit it and this is the lesson I got from two films otherwise I hate Oliver Stone he is fake embodied but I like his Nixon where he precisely resisted this liberal trap of portraying Nixon as just a crooked guy and he saw some kind of almost in the very way he assumed his fall has to admit his corruption a kind of a tragic fall. He was a crook but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideal ambitions and the reality of his acts. He thus experienced Nixon a kind of authentic tragic downfall. And you know why incidentally Fred Jameson has a sympathy for Nixon. He told me that first who was it James Baker I forgot Charlie not Schultz yeah who was Nixon's foreign minister. Something like Schultz. Sorry? No no McNamara was before McNamara was Kennedy. No no no Kissinger was yeah yeah yeah but at the beginning or after was it with Ford Ford president Schultz Schultz. There was okay this was the moment when United States tried to play really a balance also this is the first time that United States tried tried to yeah hear a little bit the voice of the voice of the Arabs also and point two Fred Jameson told me you know if you measure socialism in an extremely vulgar quantified way how much percentage of a social product goes for health education and so on then I am sorry to tell you Nixon was the closest United States got to got to communism. Even if you saw the new film Frost/Nixon. Sorry I was there on Nixon's side. Frost was the way I saw it there a kind of cheap provocateur but you can see some kind of a tragic fall in Nixon. I am not saying he wasn't you got my point I am not crazy I am not saying he wasn't a crook of course he was. But in the way he was compelled to assume his being corrupted there is kind of a tragic fall with Ronald Reagan and also at the same time with Carlos Menem I noticed in Argentina. I think that Reagan and Menem are the first prefiguration of of Berlusconi. This kind of a how should I put it populist leader without dignity systematically undermining its own dignity counting on this how should I put it where and here I'm absolutely for the official leader where the leader no longer tries to embody the dignity of the state but the leader tries simply to play this kind of a identify with the mythic image of an average citizen. Although you may think that Reagan did care about his dignity yes and no he all the time played this game of I'm as stupid as you so that this is why with Reagan it started this strange phenomenon noted by John Kobject how after each talk liberal press enjoyed in showing you know counting the mistakes he made. It only boosted his his popularity. So and again you have with Reagan not to mention okay Bush is already even too too much for this. But I think that this is how Berlusconi present itself. I don't think that all this his clownish aspect this ridiculous care for private interest sexual scandals and so on I don't think this is just his private ego. This is how this is his offer of identification to Italian people which of course are not really Italian people but a ridiculous cliché of Italian people. I'm like you I'm a little bit in trouble with law I like women I'm a cheat a little bit corrupted but basically I'm a good guy like you and so on and so on. But again what even if Berlusconi is a clown without dignity perhaps we should not laugh too much at him. If you want a and with this I will unfortunately end if you want a figure for Berlusconi first I tried to play maybe you could say he is like that Kung Fu Panda but I found another better figure of Berlusconi's laughter. Imagine those obscene crazy bad guys who laugh like in in Batman or Spider-Man like Joker. He is Joker in power. You know this kind of a he-he-he crazy laughter but the machine goes on. This is something so important I think as a symbolic shift that you have the whole state machine ruthlessly functioning with a madman in power. The boss can laugh and so on and so on and this is pretty depressing. The lesson is a very sad one. And to finish again with Iran it's the same even going on in Iran. I was told by my friends that it was the same tragic split in the last debate TV debates between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Ahmadinejad was almost a Berlusconi. He made vulgar jokes he showed some you know this quick scandal totally ridiculous private documents like he showed a some obscure photocopy of a document of a wife of Mousavi who this should please you there is a family split I'm on the male side a well-known anti-feminist he is closer to my type of thought not me only I'm not his first name but yeah and his wife is a Foucaultian card-carrying Foucaultian not bad if they will be the first time inside no I can imagine later in the bed no shouting no you're Foucault fuck micro-physics of power and so on. Okay whatever I want to say that Ahmadinejad showed some diploma claiming you see your wife enrolled in academy without proper exams and you know this kind of a typical small causing small obscene scandals. The idea is that this is so sad it's the same as in Italy. When you debate with such a guy you are embarrassed out of dignity. And this is why with this to conclude I think we if we want to be still some kind of a left we shouldn't be afraid of taking over this basic topic of we are the we are no longer the '68 guy or those Serrano who think if you show Christ in urine if you swear publicly you are doing something subversive. No those in power are playing these games the same thing happened in my own country there was although the left in my country is not left they are okay but some kind of with minimal decency liberals. Something happened and it was a moment of truth of Slovene politics. Namely there was a feminist to feminist okay sorry not feminist politician a woman who defended something about gay marriages and so on and so on. And then a right-wing populist politician in the Parliament it was all televised attacked her and said maybe we should form a parliamentary inquiry call a doctor to he literally put it in this words to inspect that woman between her legs and to see if her sexual organs are normal at all like why is she doing such crazy things as defending gays. And there it gave to me a little bit of hope even in liberal left maybe. It was such a tragic moment then you it was able to see the whole of Slovene Parliament and it was so clear this cultural divide. The right half they were simply they took it as a good joke they laughed. The left it wasn't so much that they shouted and protested they were simply embarrassed you know like my God where am I and so on. And we should not be afraid to be defenders of this. This in a way opens quite many new fields for our thought. We should shamelessly even play my God isn't it sad that these disgusting obscene right-wingers each of them having mistresses and so on they call themselves moral majority. We are the moral majority and so on. We should ruthlessly appropriate all this. So again this is not my problem with Chávez playing this protector of morality. My problem is why did he nonetheless he was the first to congratulate Chávez sorry himself okay to congratulate Ahmadinejad. I think that this game will not end well for him because he plays the same game also with Lukashenko and all that stuff. This worries me a little bit. Maybe I can be easily converted maybe there is something going on that I don't know. Okay I will promise you something else since it went too long this political improvisations. Tomorrow let's do nonetheless then a little bit more of a theory. Tomorrow I will try to do really this let's forget apocalypse it's nothing new we all know we are going into shit all together. So let me do tomorrow this basic multiculturalist stuff. Thanks very much and now still we can do two minutes of democracy.
Thanks very much. I hope I will reach that point, but nonetheless I cannot avoid an immediate reaction. Don't you think that the least one can say is that we also get the opposite reaction of the Western European left, which is that Latin America is becoming at least up to a point this kind of other place of authentic revolution? I mean all decadent European leftists, the more they are, as is typical of British upper middle-class leftists, the more they like a place somewhere out there—if the ocean is in between it's all the better—where a really authentic revolution goes on. And for many of my friends, the myth is Latin America. Like, we talk here about the revolution, the revolution is going on there. Okay, we wanted to talk about it also, but nonetheless—now this will be of course a bad taste joke, no? But for me, problems with Chávez began when he—so the media reported, but I checked with my friends, he did it—from Venezuela, from Colombia, but they are there half-hostile so they are not friends of the president of Colombia. When he prohibited The Simpsons and put on a shitty family Christian melodrama. Now I know you can play the contextual game in blah blah and so on and so on, but that's not important. And I will return to Chávez unfortunately in a brief mention today. You know that he was the first, even before the local Ayatollahs did, to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for victory. Now okay, here maybe I will open a polemics today. I was appalled in today's The Guardian by—and I will try to explain why—by the text by, help me to pronounce the name, S-E-U-M-A-S, it is Seumas Milne. Basically the way he reads it. My point is that the way he reads it is exactly the way Zionist Israel and American conservatives read it. And there is a necessity in it. Okay, but I will come to this at some point. I would nonetheless like to begin with one theoretical point and one obscenity, with a kind of a praise of the people. First, let me tell you, I consider this a wonderful anecdote which tells a lot about how master signifier works and how democracy effectively works. It's one of these historical legends, this one even apparently really happened. During the crucial battle between Prussian and Austrian army, I think it was that brief war where Prussia quickly defeated Austria, imperial Austrian army, the Prussian King, who was an idiot but formally the supreme commander of the Prussian army—this was one of the last of these old-fashioned battles where down in the valley thousands are slaughtering each other but from the opposite hills commander-kings being served fresh water or whatever drinks observed the battle—so on a hill, from a nearby hill, the Prussian King was observing the battle and he looked very worried because if you just watched the battlefield it appeared a total confusion. It absolutely wasn't clear who is winning, even it looked that some Prussian troops are withdrawing. Then at his side it was the mastermind, the true mastermind of the battle, General von Moltke. Maybe some of you know he was the great Prussian strategist. He was with this detached intellectual ironic cynical gaze observing the battle and what appeared to others as a total confusion, even a retreat, when this happened he—this is a legend—he turned to the King and told him, may I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory. So this is the gap between master signifier and knowledge. The King was the master, the formal commander, totally ignorant of the meaning of what went on in the battlefield, while von Moltke embodied strategic knowledge. Although at the level of actual decisions the victory was von Moltke's, he was correct in congratulating the King on behalf of whom he was acting. The stupidity of the master is palpable in this gap between the confusion of the master figure and the objective symbolic fact that he already won a brilliant victory. I like this idea. You won, you are a genius, but you don't know it, you are just informed, what a brilliant victory and so on. This is how unfortunately if we replace King with people, this is how democracy works, that we people are informed in the elections that we won a brilliant victory. By this I don't mean to despise the people, on the contrary, I think that if we, the left, and here the example that I took of Chávez, to avoid a misunderstanding, I don't buy this standard liberal critique, like Chávez recently and it was received as something horrible by Western liberals, didn't he establish a list of I don't know sixty, one hundred books to be distributed to all school children? Well, and they are saying this is like totalitarian control. What control? Every state does this, we just don't notice it. Why not replace the standard canon with another canon? If anything, Chávez should be congratulated here for getting it correctly and rejecting this stupid politically correct deconstructionist resentment of canons. I am for canons, we should make our own canon, we need canons. It's total hypocrisy to think that you can teach, you can have educations just doing the subversive marginal things or whatever. Here I congratulate him. So would you agree or not? That would be my first. This comes, I cannot get out of it, then we go to serious things, this will be the vulgar thing. But I warn you, it will be really vulgar. You know, one of the usual attitudes of us, degenerate intellectuals, is to dismiss ordinary people as, if not stupid, conservative, too sensitive, when you have an avant-garde art performance, you know all this, all these Chapman brothers or whatever stuff, dead corpses, cows, urinating cows or whatever video of your intestines and so on. As if stupid people don't get it and as if—what I am rejecting here, I am not saying we shouldn't do this, I'm just saying that I don't buy the automatic supposition that—and this is for me the bad passion of the real—this idea that if you go over the border, you do something subversive, you force people to confront the prejudices and so on. Now I want to report to you, this is for me the model of false avant-garde arrogance, especially false because it's perfectly integrated into the dynamics of the market. I remember I was a couple of years ago in New York when it was this famous retrospective in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, I think it's on the other side in Brooklyn, Andres Serrano works '83-'93. You remember maybe the famous photograph Piss Christ, piss like urine, Christ like Jesus, which depicts a crucifix immersed in urine. It became an exhibit even in the congressional debate, all this populist stuff about whether the some US state agency should support artists such as Serrano who got a grant from the state, whose work scorns the standards of common decency, I should be, you know all this populist stuff, should be spent taxpayers' money on it and so on and so on. Predictably of course all leftist-liberals exploded at this conservative attack. Typical of the defense of Serrano was Michael Brenson's note in New York Times. I will quote it, just a couple of lines don't worry. Like Robert Mapplethorpe—incidentally to give you another example, I am totally opposed to Mapplethorpe. I think there is one rather tragic fact and many of my friends in New York who really know, their subjects supposed to know, I trust them, told me that everybody knows this, that he is simply not a very good photographer. It's as simple as that. And he tries to mask this with this whatever one guy sticking his finger into the penis of another guy, all this extreme sex stuff. So. Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Serrano struggles against inhibitions about the human body. Incidentally this is wonderful, you know whatever I do I sit here, if you are disgusted I can say ah but don't you see I struggle against the—let me go on. His use of bodily fluids is not intended to arouse disgust—this is also wonderful, you do a provocation, of course spontaneously I am disgusted, no you missed the point, it's not to disgust—but to challenge the notion of disgust where the human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Serrano's use of bodily fluids as pure provocation, of course meaning if you are stupid, but you can also believe that Mr. Serrano views them, bodily fluids, as a form of purification. The fluids make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit. I love this. In this way you can justify torture. I torture you, it's not about pain, it's testing the limits of pain, I want to re... blah. Okay. Now I will make, now comes the vulgarity, it's not yet this. A simple experiment. Because the problem with this defense I claim is that it works too well. It covers everything. Let us say, warning blinking sign vulgarity, that I were to publish a video clip on YouTube depicting in detail how I shit. How the anal hole gradually gets wider, the excremental sausage falls out, while also showing the stupidly satisfied relaxed expression of my face while the shit falls out. Then you would say bah disgusting, ah then I would hire a critic who would wrote the following. Mr. Žižek, like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Žižek struggles against inhibitions about the human body. His use of bodily excrements is not intended to arouse disgust but to challenge the notion of disgust where the human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Žižek's use of bodily excrements as pure provocation but you can also believe that Mr. Žižek views them as a form of purification. The body gets purified by ejecting excrements. The excrements make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit. I think it perfectly works. And that's the problem for me. But you see what's my problem. I don't even question if this works or not. I claim that even if such provocations work and they can, they are just that. They are what is called, I think I'm not good I'm a primitive Balkan barbarian you know ethnic cleansing rapes but I think the word is hapax, this one and only example of a genus, something that can happen only once. Like even let's take something from higher you know like Malevich that Black Square on or is it the other way around I always forget on white surface, it works only once. You cannot go on. So my my problem here is a more radical one. My problem here is that I don't think that how should I put it, truth lies in the extreme in the sense of if you present me with a certain extreme reaction, that in order to be authentic how should I put it I should go to the extreme. Like in other words and being someone who unfortunately is old enough to experience the so-called hippie sexual revolution I know this was predominant like when I was young if you didn't have sex with some animal you were considered you didn't really do it you like you know you withdrew you didn't go going to the end was the idea as if there is something authentic in it. I don't accept that. Here I'm almost on the side of ordinary people. Now you will say the problem with people is populism. Yes I agree. For reasons into which I will not go now, enough was written in this ferocious polemics, I still don't agree with Ernesto Laclau, I am more and more convinced that that populism should be rejected. Now you will say but nonetheless you speak about self-organization of the people and so on and so on. Well as I tried to prove for me to get from here to populism something more is needed and to cut a long story short this is where I see a problem with otherwise beautifully theoretically developed Ernesto Laclau's line of thought in his On Populist Reason, namely you remember how at some point if you read the book he claims he even counts figures like Yugoslav Tito and Mao Zedong as populists. I simply trust my how should I call it spontaneous intuitive notion that if they are populists then the notion is misused. I claim that it's a crucial part of populism to put it in Ernesto's own terms to mystify displace the antagonism. Now his reaction will be but all antagonisms are misplaced there is no authentic antagonism and so on and so on. No I think still we can do it not in any substantial sense like instead of class struggle I don't know what struggle not in this sense but the antagonism is in populism as I try to develop in my In Defense of Lost Causes I think is mystified in a formal way. In the sense that in order to be a populist to put it in Ernesto's own terms for populists the people does exist and it's threatened from outside. That's for me the zero level of populism. You don't you never accept to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms that there is a radical antagonism which is constitutive of community. The minimum of populism is there is a proper order often even a good old order and then some external intruder, it can be Jews it can be American imperialism whatever, is the cause of the ruin. The cause comes from the outside destroying the organic order. Which is why to put it in another way populism is always sustained I claim by some kind of frustrated despair by a cry I do not know what is going on I just have enough of it I cannot go on it must stop. An impatient outburst, a refusal to patiently understand. The exasperation at the complexity and the ensuing conviction that there must be somebody responsible for all the mess which is why an agent who is behind and explains it all is needed. Indeed it is I think in this refusal to know that resides the properly fetishist dimension of populism. Although at the purely formal level fetish involves a gesture of transference onto the object fetish, it functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference with the subject supposed to know who is again supposed to know. Here what fetish gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge. My refusal to subjectively assume what I know. So you see my point, apropos of populism I don't think people are stupid, I think people with a minimum of will voluntarily freely choose stupidity. There is always behind populism a minimum of I don't want to know even if it's not acknowledged even if it remains implicit. Or to put it now in Nietzschean terms which are here I think fully appropriate populism is a reactive strategy not an active position. Now this refusal to know confronts us with the deadlock of our as we put it society of choice. There are multiple ideological investments in the topic of choice at work today. As you probably know brain scientists point out that the freedom of choice is an illusion. We experience ourselves as free simply when we are able to act the way our organism determines us with no external obstacles thwarting our propensities. As you probably know this is the soft cognitivist Daniel Dennett redefinition of freedom. He doesn't deny freedom he just says freedom is not what you think that you can in a purely contingent way do this or that. Freedom simply means you are still determined by determined by your own immanent nature no when no obstacles prevent you to realize what you spontaneously want. Here so this is one topic one field of the topic of freedom of choice and I don't know if I already told you this but do you know how much further now went the brain science argumentation, it's quite fascinating against the freedom of the will. We all know that old story of Benjamin Libet the famous two-thirds of a second. How you know he can measure your through some neuronal whatever wave activity how he can tell already half a second before you make a totally arbitrary decision that the decision was made. So it's supposed to be a kind of a material proof that half a second before you freely decide your body already knows. A proof for some people that even when we make a totally arbitrary free decision we are not really free. Our mind just becomes aware of what our brain already decided. Now Benjamin Libet as we all know is much more interesting guy. He defends human freedom. He just thinks in a very nice Hegelian way that the zero level of freedom is not to choose but to in a very Hegelian way the negativity to block. He claims that in that half of a second you can nonetheless block say no to your decision. And that is freedom. It's a very nice theory. But unfortunately I will just tell you the paradox I don't know how to answer it, I read somewhere that now they repeated the experiment in a much more fatal way. They gave to a group of people some test mathematical whatever logical where on average you need some minutes to minutes to solve it. And the point is that the people who are doing it were asked to signal the moment they got the solution. Usually it took them minutes. All these people were wired so that it was possible to follow their brain waves whatever okay with practically percent accuracy if one is to believe the reports. From reading properly the brain waves scientists were able to say ten minutes before you become aware that you have the solution if you have a solution or not. So I mean you know what I mean. In other words even when you actively think and then all of a sudden you have this the light the bulb go going on. It really happens ten minutes earlier. So where is the freedom of thought? Okay this is one problem. Then liberal economists emphasize freedom of choice as the key ingredient of market economy. By buying things we are in a way continuously voting with our money. Then deeper existential thinkers like to deploy variations on the theme of the authentic existential choice where the very core of our being is at stake. A choice which involves a full existential engagement as opposed to the superficial choices of this or that commodity. In the Marxist version of this theme the multiplicity of choices the market bombards us with obfuscates the absence of real radical choices concerning the fundamental structure of our society. That's the standard Marxist criticism. You can choose Coke or Pepsi and so on you cannot make a more radical choice. There is however a feature which is I think all too often missing in this series. The injunction to choose when we lack even the basic cognitive coordinates to make a choice. As Leonardo Padura interesting guy incidentally you get his novels so-called Havana tetralogy Blue Red and so on he is a Cuban detective author and he is so radically critical depicting all the poverty corruption in today's Cuba that I automatically assumed oh he must live in some nice villa in the suburb of of Miami or what no he still is there. He wrote in one of his novels, it is horrific not to know the past and yet be able to impact on the future. So being compelled to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque this is our basic condition. In the standard situation of the forced choice a situation in which I am free to choose on condition that I make the right choice so that the only thing left for me to do is the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what the expert knowledge imposed me this is the standard situation. But on the contrary what if the choice really is free and is for this very reason experienced as even more frustrating? We thus find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters which will fundamentally affect our lives but without a proper foundation in knowledge. To quote otherwise I don't agree with his general view but sometimes he makes good formulations John Gray in this is I think from his Straw Dogs the quote. We have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free end of quote. So this pressure to choose involves not only the ignorance about the object of choice. We are bombarded by calls to choose without being qualified to make the appropriate choice. But even more radically the subjective impossibility to answer the question of desire. When Lacan defines the object of desire as lost his point is not simply that we never know what we desire and are condemned to the eternal search for the true object which is the void of desire as such and so on. Lacan's point is a much more radical one. The lost object is ultimately the subject itself. Subject as an object. Which means that the question of desire its original enigma is not primarily what do I want but what do others want from me. What an object do they see in me. Which is why apropos of the hysterical question why am I that name why am I what you say that I am mother teacher whatever Lacan points out that the subject as such is hysterical. He Lacan defines the subject as that which is not an object. The point being that the impossibility to identify yourself as an object to know what you are for the others is constitutive of the subject. In this way Lacan generates the entire diversity of pathological subjective positions reading this diversity as the diversity of the answers to the hysterical question. The hysteric and the obsessional enact two modalities of the question. The psychotic knows itself as the object of the other's enjoyment while the pervert posits itself as the instrument of the other's enjoyment and so on and so on. This is why I claim there is a terrorist dimension in the pressure to choose. This terror resonates for me at least even in the most innocent inquiry for example when one reserves a hotel room soft or hard pillows double bed twin beds and so on. Beneath this simple questioning is a much more radical probing. Tell me who you are what kind of an object do you want to be what would fill in the gap of your desire. This is why I think the Foucaultian referring to Michel Foucault anti-essentialist apprehension about fixed identities the incessant urge to practice the care of the self to continuously reinvent recreate oneself finds a strange echo in the dynamics of postmodern capitalism. It was of course already the good old existentialism which claimed that a man is what it makes out of itself. And existentialism linked this radical freedom to existential anxiety. But for existentialism the anxiety of experiencing one's freedom the lack of one's substantial determination was the authentic moment when the subject sees its integration into the fixity of the given ideological universe shattered. What existentialism wasn't able to envisage is what Adorno tried to encapsulate with the title of his attack on Heidegger Jargon of Authenticity. How no longer repressing it the hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes the lack of fixed identity to sustain the endless process of consumerist self-recreation. So again this is to go to these eternal already boring debates with Judith Butler and so on. This is where I find this anti-essentialist oppression you know we shouldn't be fixed to a certain identity you should recreate yourself and so on and so on. It's not the the question is not that I don't agree with it but I think that precisely this eternally dynamic nomadic self-questioning which always sustains this ambiguous anxiety. Are you ready to admit you are this this this is the level at which consumerism makes you guilty. Not in the simple sense of you never get the full enjoyment you want from the commodity but you are always supposed to tell to freely choose what you really want but of course you never can. Consumerism in a way always makes you look non-authentic. And okay against this background of the difficulty of choice populism and so on I want now to approach a little bit the question of democracy. But you Alain Badiou proposed a distinction between two types or rather levels of corruption in democracy. The de facto empirical corruption and the corruption which pertains to the very form of democracy which is the reduction of politics to the negotiation of private interests. This gap becomes visible in the rare true cases of an honest democratic politician who while fighting empirical corruption nonetheless sustains the formal space of corruption. In Walter Benjamin's terms of the distinction between constituted and constituent violence one could say that we are dealing here with the distinction between the constituted corruption empirical cases of breaking the laws and the constitutive or rather constituent corruption of the very democratic form of government. A quote from Badiou's De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? If democracy is a representation it first of all represents the general system which sustains its form. In other words the electoral democracy is only representative insofar as it is first the consensual representation of capitalism which is today renamed market economy. Such is its corruption in principle end of quote. I think that one should take these lines in the strictest transcendental sense. At the empirical level of course the multi-party liberal democracy represents mirrors registers measures the quantitative dispersion of different opinions of the people. What they think about the proposed program of the parties what they think about the candidates and so on. However prior to this empirical level and in a much more radical sense the multi-party democracy represents instantiates a certain vision of society politics and the role of the individual in it. Multi-party liberal democracy represents a very precise vision of social life in which politics is organized in parties which compete through elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus and so on and so on. One should always be aware that this transcendental frame of democracy is never neutral. It privileges certain values and practices. This non-neutrality becomes palpable in the moments of crisis or indifference. When we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people effectively want or think. This inability is signaled by anomalous phenomena like I remember the UK UK elections of In spite of the growing personal unpopularity of Tony Blair he was I remember regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK. There was no way for this discontent with Blair to find a politically effective expression. Something was obviously very wrong here. It was not that people did not know what they wanted but rather that cynical resignation prevented them to act upon it so that the result was the weird gap between what people thought and how they acted voted. It was already Plato who in his critique of democracy was fully aware of this second corruption. And this critique is also discernible in the Jacobin Robespierre and his colleagues' privileging of virtue. In democracy in the sense of representation of and the negotiation between the plurality of private interests there is no place for virtue. There is no reason nonetheless what conclusion do I draw from this to be very clear now. There is here I even slightly distinguish myself from Badiou with whom you really find some kind of an animosity to voting democratic elections as if there is something non-authentic a priori false about it. No I think there is no reason to despise democratic elections. The point is only to insist that they are not in themselves a priori an indication of truth. As a rule they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideological opinion. Let me take an example which surely is not problematic so you will not accuse me of some hidden totalitarian agenda. France in France in Even Jacques Duclos at that point the second man of the French Communist Party admitted in a private conversation that if at that point free elections were to be held in France Marshal Pétain would have won with his estimation not mine percent of the votes. When de Gaulle in his and if there is a democratic person it's de Gaulle so that you will not accuse me of quoting some crazy Stalinist claiming that he represents the true people. When de Gaulle in his historic act refused to acknowledge the capitulation of France to Germans and continued to resist he claimed not only oh my voice should also be heard Vichy does not speak for for all of France. His claim was much stronger. His claim was it is only he even if at that point in early he was a ridiculous minority that it is only he and his comrades not the Vichy regime who speaks on behalf of the true France. On behalf of the true France as such not only on behalf of the majority of the French. What he was saying was deeply true even if it was democratically not only without legitimation but clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. So you see my point here I don't despise elections all I'm saying is what there can be democratic elections which enact an let's call it pathetically event of truth. Here I go again against Badiou. The elections in which from time to time against the skeptical cynical inertia the majority momentarily awakens and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion. However the very exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves that elections are not as such a medium of truth. You know what I mean. There are authentic moments and in a way we always know when they happen. But they are exceptional. And now I come to this provocative point in contrast to many people from the left and from the right and I will try briefly to reason why. Now comes a more actual polemics. The only presupposition for you to understand it is that like all common idiots me included we read daily newspapers. I claim this is going on today in Iran. Why? And my only source is not only our friend Ali Alizadeh who when he is not here provoking me is selling himself to the media as Iranian specialist no but I have other KGB agent spies in Iran I. Why? First let's look at it I love this kind of event. What happened? I quote already in some of my old books this wonderful mystical spiritual and I use here the term in a very naive way not in any ironic way moment when you know just my old boring metaphors of of you know the cat walking along the precipices it doesn't fall down till it notices when when even if some oppressive power doesn't yet lose power those in power at some point some kind of a psychological break everybody knows it's over. Again I advise you to read a wonderful book Ryszard Kapuściński he is recently deceased the great Polish journalist Shah of Shahs where he describes he does something which is of course probably a fake but I think there is a truth in this fake. He tries to isolate this moment and he claims he found it. Some three four months before Shah empirically left the country there was there were in some suburb of Tehran some demonstrations. People gathered on an intersection. A policeman approached them and started to shout at them disperse beat it and so on. And a guy simply looked at him and did nothing. The policeman repeated the shouting the guy did nothing. The embarrassed policeman turned around and walked away. The mystery was that in a couple of hours the whole Tehran knew about it. And it was this kind of a how should I put it mystical reversal. Although battles were going on people were dying but from that point everyone those in power those out of power knew the game is basically over. And this is for me the most interesting moment. This time in between when those in power are al already dead like the cat they just have to be reminded look down there is nothing oh yes and you fall down. And again I would love to but I don't have enough data to write maybe a history of decomposition of socialism in Eastern Europe in these terms. Like when before communists have actually lost power when did it really when did people know it is over. The strange thing that I'm discovering is that it was pretty late we in ex-Yugoslavia we were even more privileged. With us retroactively it was already in the early eighties. The communists in power did some things which like were so out of touch with normal hard-line communism that we all love but that we but for example I was told I spoke with a friend from the Czech Republic recently and I asked him and he told me that it's only two-three months before you remember when German tourists East German were massively taking train to Hungary because Hungary opened borders and let them to leave to Austria. This was like my God what's going on. Some East Germans told me it was also a year before already when because it was Gorbachev Glasnost and you know all this boring Soviet propaganda their own Readers' Digest it was called Sputnik I think with the best from Soviet press. It was too much so East German communist government prohibited Sputnik in '88 and people said my God if our government is prohibiting Soviet publications what's going on. Okay so my point is that something similar my friends are telling me is did happen not even the first but the second night after elections. All of a sudden to put it in pathetic terms people decided realized you know it's this mystical act of it's like falling in love. You fall in love so that you don't decide to fall in love you discover that you are already in love. People discovered that they are not afraid. You can be beaten by police whatever but they go in hundreds of thousands and also what I like is this I was told that the way it functions it's pretty terrifying in a good sense of this sublime power of the people that much more threatening than shouting is the silence. Literally hundreds of thousands no just silently walking along the streets. And then what they do I was told it's almost a ritual. They go home climb the roofs of their houses and cry Allahu Akbar. God is great. And that's a crucial data. Why? Okay first we have this something changed people no longer fear. This Allahu Akbar combined with another thing which you get the green color. Green is Islam. This is I think what incredibly how many Western majority commentators I'm reading all the commentators they almost systematically miss it or if they take it into account they take it as a kind of a secondary manipulation. Now comes my first big news if you are idiots this is news for you otherwise not. This Mousavi people and so on this is not the Western so-called Western pro-Western liberals you know. The way the media present to us Iranians there are two basic groups. The poor primitive farmer Islamist majority manipulated by clerics, revolutionary guard, Ahmadinejad and this pro-Western upper middle-class secular educated whatever who just want to get back to a little more democratic form of what Iran was after Shah. It's another name I forgot his guy his name maybe you know who it is not Mousavi but Ka something like I have obscene association with angel it's Karroubi Karroubi whatever this the other so-called reformist candidate. He is this I say this with all viciousness he is the Habermas-Rorty candidate how should I put it no he is the Western candidate who wanted to play some stupid identity politics you know we have women we have Kurds we have gays all oppressed come your identity will be recognized. What Mousavi is doing is something totally different which is disgusting how it is. You can correct me if I'm wrong but from the majority of media it disappeared. His motto is not simply anti-freedom, his motto is return to the origins repeat the '79 revolution. And he has all the authority here. Mousavi was he practically he is a wonderful person I was told he has many wonderful qualities. Okay I cannot resist it, his main quality is he reads me. I learned that's how that's another story no he even was supposed to organize two years ago a visit by me to Iran but then another guy was co-organizing visit and a week before leaving I was told there is a slight problem one of the organizers is arrested you can come later or whatever. I like this idea of he has all the authority of Khomeini behind him. You know that the same Mousavi he is not some kind of idiotic idiotic inefficient architect he is architect by profession so even we have a link with my Tuesday's talk no. He do you know that during the entire Iran-Iraq war he was the Prime Minister. He organized economy so that it functioned. So again this guy is not an idiot. What is crucial again is that his idea is back to '79 roots creative he all the time his slogan is I am nothing it's the people creative invention of the people people will organize and so on and so on. It's incredible it's I think if we still need it I feel personally narcissistically justified when in my In Defense of Lost Causes I with all ironic criticism of Foucault I nonetheless basically accepted the line that the '79 Khomeini revolution wasn't simply a right-wing populist fundamentalist uprising. That there was for the first year or two something authentic going on. And this is what these guys are doing. They try to repeat that against later recuperation. And on the contrary it's the tactic of Ahmadinejad to push them towards Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani ex-president is the embodiment of this how should I put it the new new Ayatollah wealth how should I put it no. So so again this is the first absolutely crucial thing. What these recent events demonstrate is that the whole mapping which opposed the the this stupid bribed by Islamist work primitive fundamentalist working class like to put it in geographic terms the south of Tehran versus the upper middle class secular Westernized north part it's proven wrong. Here we have a true not Tony Blair third way. Something happened a great rebellion against the regime but on behalf of the emancipatory dimension of Islam itself. And one way of Western liberals to deal with it is to claim oh it's just a mask. They are really Western clerics exploiting because of the popularity Islam. Incidentally again they are claiming exactly the same as Ahmadinejad and his guys are claiming. I feel deeply justified because it is a proof here that there can effectively still be an emancipatory dimension in Islam. That Islam is not only in its political form either this soft Turkish pro-market Islamism or so-called Islamic fundamentalism. You know even if Western liberals praise Islam it's always some kind of a you know 10th-11th century that great era or whatever. No we don't have to look thousand years back. It's today happening the emancipatory dimension of Islam. And again that's the crucial thing to note. This movement now is those liberals even people around Khatami have a very ambiguous attitude towards it. Something new happened there. It's not the gilded spoiled middle-class youth and so on and poor workers behind Ahmadinejad. It's absolutely not true. It is a genuine emancipatory event which precisely totally blurs this official line liberals versus fundamentalists. Which is why if one takes him seriously Obama was totally wrong when he said in a very strange statement yesterday I think that the difference between the two Mousavi and Ahmadinejad is negligible. That they are both two figures of the evil both pursuing the same program. Maybe but probably it's too optimist reading what maybe happened I suspect is that I'm not sure that maybe he or some of his advisors are wise enough to know that if he were to openly support Mousavi this would be used as the proof you know for the hard-liners that it's really manipulated by the Americans and so on and so on. But what's more important is that I want to make another critique of Obama here. You remember his it is so celebrated Cairo speech stretching out the hand the hand towards Islam. I think it's one of the most disgusting stupid speeches. Instead of politics it talks about the dialogue of culture. It's a clear example of this of this tolerant culturalization. My God what goes on today in the world we don't need this kind of a trans-cultural peace. We need political struggle here political struggle there. Again there is no place in the mapping of the Cairo speech for what is going on today there. Now I come to the next point who there is more and more popular another theory which I think my Iranian friends convinced me can be clearly and empirically falsified. This idea that nonetheless they may be cheating a little bit but they couldn't have cheated so much that is today that nonetheless Ahmadinejad is more popular because with all his populism blah blah he genuinely cares for the poor he is basically a kind of a populist socialist distributing money raising lowest salaries and so on while the people behind Mousavi are these upper middle class pro-Western for market reforms and so on and so on. So this position is advocated so that nonetheless Ahmadinejad effectively won. It's interesting who advocates this position. On the one hand my beloved Fox News in the United States and Israeli Zionist media because their idea is to prove you see it's not just a matter of of election it's not only Ahmadinejad the people of Iran as such are anti-Semitic anti- and so on and so on this hard line. And some of the left. Let me just read you from today's from today's The Guardian some lines. Western media focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth, again a ridiculous mistreatment I mean if you look at the precisely at the media it's not the gilded youth which is demonstrating you see almost every woman is every at least second woman is with chador or whatever, gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority is largely invisible abroad. While Mousavi promised market reforms and privatization, more personal freedom and better relations with the West, the president increased pensions and public sector wages and handed out cheap loans. It's hardly surprising that Ahmadinejad should have a solid base among the working class. So the conclusion, if Ahmadinejad quote again was in fact the winner then there is an attempted coup going on in Tehran right now and it is being led by Mousavi and his Western backed supporters. The US is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars in covert destabilization program against Iran and so on and so on. So the reason I'm I think this is a terrifying misreading of the situation is that I think that this description of Ahmadinejad is to put it in very naive terms simply empirically wrong. That he really won maybe he cheated for a million or two. The first proof is an elementary mathematical one. In the previous presidential election the voter turnout was usually percent maybe This time it was And it's clearly reasonable to conclude that this was the protest vote mobilized. So you can get it somehow with clear mathematics that it's not that that it is because also if you look at how the electoral results were announced. It was absolute that's what my friends from Iran were telling me. This is what they found so humiliating. It's almost they told me this as an echo to what I was saying in my second architecture talk on this need for a proper appearance. They said those in power didn't even make it the proper appearance in cheating. They simply did ridiculous things like for example when they first announced election they said according to half the votes counted a certain candidate got then when all the votes were counted the same candidate got Then for example people protested well in Mousavi's own village according to the first results Ahmadinejad won. Then they said no problem we will add another half a million there so that you know like in and the first results were announced a couple of hours after after voting was finished. So again it's the very but there is another thing. Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor. He is a genuine corrupted populist distrusted even by the majority of Ayatollahs. Did you notice this that of the seven great Ayatollahs only one congratulated him till now. He what he has is not only repressive organs but also a very strong new rich class. The first thing you should learn about that I don't know how to pronounce the word revolutionary guard. You know this is not some kind of a fundamentalist working class virtue police organization. This is the greatest mega corporation in Iran. It owns owns one-third of the country. So let's be clear here. The second thing, his whole campaign was I mean he is not a naive he plays Ahmadinejad a naive, he is like I would say I would say Iranian Berlusconi. He plays all these vulgarities but he has an extremely effective PR which instructs him well how to do all this all this clownish all this clownish stuff and so on and so on. So again the paradox is that Ahmadinejad was trying to do precisely what people from the west was trying precisely to push Mousavi towards either towards this secular Habermas-style Western liberals or towards Rafsanjani the corrupted old Khomeini guard. But again what effectively happened I think is something which blurred blurred the cards. And I think it's a mega mega everyone the tragedy is how even those leftists who are still for Ahmadinejad as well as the liberal West they all misread the situation again in these terms. Western liberal Mousavi market reforms and so on. I checked it up with his people, it's strictly not true. Mousavi is for further nationalizations and so on. It's strictly not true that he is some kind of a pro-Western liberal or whatever. He is an authentically engaged engaged emancipatory the best side of Islamist. The best side of and that's what nobody wants. That's what for different you know it often happens how opponents for different reasons have the same desire. Now it's again in the interest of everyone to see the struggle. Nobody wants to recognize the emergence of authentically emancipatory democratic why not I'm proud to use the word here Islam. Islam. It disturbs everyone. It disturbs everyone it disturbs Islamists fundamentalists and it disturbs Western liberals. Because again you remember how the media were portraying Islam. It's a tremendous civil society but it's this secularized upper middle class against the background of the sea of these primitive workers primitive poor and so on or farmers whatever. First misunderstanding what farmers. I mean Iran is a normal civilized country, percent cities. Point two again this is what you see how things happen my God people precisely these poor allegedly fundamentalist people arouse and nobody wants to see it. They read it again as a kind of a liberal revolt if you are against it you say supported by the United States and so on and so on. And this is I think the most the saddest thing. This is where an event is misrecognized. This is Western cynicism at its worst. My reproach to these texts is that how what a deep distrust in Iranian people it has. A miracle happened precisely these poor people aroused, they saw through this cheap populism and so on. The again the motto is repeat the '79 revolution. And what basically we hear even from the leftists it's no. I mean the message is of this kind of support for for for Ahmadinejad is a very sad one. It is of course they wouldn't put it in these terms but it's basically wait wait wait these people are primitive, you can only deal with them in this authoritarian populist way, these people are not mature for secular or more emancipatory democracy, the only way you can mobilize them is in a fundamenta- is in a fundamentalist way. And I think this is also especially important to emphasize Iran here because I think this is the best thing that should have happened compared to American liberation of Iraq. Here we have it as in a mirror image. Iraq, you have military intervention which, okay maybe it will work now but a little bit it looks, but nonetheless one thing is clear. Iraq is now more religiously fundamentalist than it was under Saddam. One thing they did some- one thing that in spite of all horror—and I don't have any precisely as very sympathetic towards Iran and by sympathetic I mean really sympathetic. I wrote a couple of years ago a text published here and there with a terrifying title Give Iranians Nuke a Chance. Do you know this? That I was even quoted once by by Ahmadinejad as a good progressive good Western philosopher honest no? But what I was to say is that I think that you see how for everything you pay the price. How we are still paying the price for one of the greatest fiascos of Western and third world non-aligned politics. The hypocrisy of how we were reacting to Iraq-Iranian war. Nobody dared to say that it was a clear-cut case of aggression of of Iraq on Iran. Saddam simply thought okay it's a confusion there let's grab the southwestern part with all the oil. What was the reaction? Americans as we all know they were giving him satellite shots of Iranian guards plus the gases the poisonous gases to stop them because they were afraid that if Iran wins we will have Iran on the edge of Saudi Arabia and so on and so on and so on. I mean it's incredible how all of a sudden Yugoslavia all the big non-aligned nations and the West discovered the need for peace at the precise moment when Iran started to win. All of a sudden they worried maybe Iran should stop, it's not good to progress too much, they appealed to Iran not to cross the border and go to Iraq. Well why didn't they appeal a little bit earlier the other the other way around. So again here this is the true crime of the United States. This was my answer to to Saddam Hussein trial. A strange trial where his greatest crime in the sense of human suffering how many people died his attack on Iraq wasn't even among the ten points of the of the how do you call it accusation prosecution whatever against him. Why? Because United States of course were deeply were deeply involved in that. So again I think that we should especially this what happens today in Iran is the best argument against United States intervention to Iraq. It's an example of how it should happen liberation, not the way it does. There is a deep truth in the fact that the United States intervention even if in a totally naive liberal way you say why not okay maybe they will bring democracy blah blah blah. No they brought more religious fundamentalism and so on. My God do you know that in Saddam's Iraq the position of women was arguably the best among all Arab countries. Today in practically all not Arab precisely because Iranians are not Arabs let's call them Middle East Muslim countries the best the highest position of women is Iran of course of course no. I mean I had a I had a relative who worked for a Slovene business company doing deals with Iran and he told me okay because of this nonetheless still male chauvinism the boss in every big company or at the ministry is a man. But then he told me that this was literally the formula. Then you look around the second-third person who really runs the show the only person who is not an idiot is a woman and the way to do a deal is to deal with the woman. And then the boss is like this Prussian king who has to be informed that he just may I congratulate Your Majesty for just concluding a wonderful business deal or whatever no it's. So but you see so when people are telling me do I think just we should do nothing and so on no it is I think so important not to miss the moment here because we have a genuine universal emancipatory moment with even communist potentials not in the naive sense of communist goals but nonetheless in the sense of a little bit like like Aristide in Haiti let's do the best we can people are mobilized and so on and again it's so crucial to insist on this I know I'm sorry I'm repeating myself but it's so crucial to insist on this it's not Western liberals who are this this is the fundamental mystification to read this Mousavi movement as these gilded youths pro-Western liberal middle classes and so on. My God where are they then all these people of Ahmadinejad majority which supports him. Don't you know that when those in power tried to organize their own alternative demonstration they did it the way those in power do it, Milošević did the same and so on. They they with free cars free meals they brought from all around people and all they succeeded to do is I think some miserable something like that with all the bribery on their side and so on. No something immense is happening there. I think we should look for we should look for signs like this. Why? Because it is again so I'm not against democracy. There are authentic moments. Here yes here we should play the democratic game we should count the votes votes and so on. It is this authentic potential of democracy which is I think losing ground more and more today with the rise of so-called authoritarian capitalism. Of course we have here let's call it multicultural differences. In Russia we have capitalism with Russian values, Putin, brutal display of power and so on and so on. Let me tell you a nice data. When I visited Russia a year and a half ago I didn't know who invited me. It was Gleb Pavlovsky. I didn't know who he is. Now I learned he is the PR guy from Putin. He invited me he tried to get Badiou and so on because he wanted to give some kind of an intellectual aura to you know because all the dissidents are going to critical guys so no also we have some big names from the West and then I asked this guy a simple question. I noticed how the media reported from time to time Putin has a very vulgar brutal sexist with dirty words outburst. And usually it's perceived as you see behind all behind this polite mask this is the real brutal KGB Putin. For example the most famous example I was even a little bit shocked watching it on news is well at some press conference in the West I think in Italy a Western journalist asked him is it true something about Chechnya and so on. And you know what Putin told him. He told him maybe you should visit us in Russia and if you are not yet circumcised we have good surgeons to circumcise you and maybe we will cut it a little bit more. Like we will cut off your balls basically he told him no. And then I asked this guy Gleb Pavlovsky like are these outbursts is it true that you get here a glimpse of the true no all planned he told me. All planned all planned. Putin thinks that this is what Russian wants to see. A guy who pretend to be polite cold seduce the West but in reality you know cut the balls beat and so on all that all that popular stuff. Then we have even you know what's my I'm still more and more critical of Obama but the lesson of all these events it started with Burma sorry politically correct Myanmar now no where something we should maybe it's a very hard lesson for us leftists. But something maybe we should accept that okay maybe it remains the big enemy United States but how should I put it in the multicentric world that we are approaching I put it in this I hope you will agree very modest way. It's not always a priori necessary that the United States are the worst guy how should I put it no. For example if you take Burma Myanmar I even had a fight with with some of my leftist friends in Paris you know when there were those big Buddhist demonstrations. My some of my leftist friends in France tried to defend the military rulers and they told me basically okay it's not a democracy but isn't this still better for the decency of the people if this military regime falls we will have a cheap Westernized democracy where there will be mass child prostitution and so on and so on. Okay my reply to the guy you will not like it was a very vicious one was ah you mean it will be like Cuba today no and then he told me again ah you listen to Soviet propaganda sorry to imperialist propaganda. No I told him my imperialist propaganda is Havana itself where I was five years ago and boys I don't know why me I'm a well-known homophobe and so on but boys were offered to me like you know for ten dollars you do whatever you want with him for the whole night and so on no I mean according to official statistics there are more prostitutes now in Havana than under Batista. Okay but that's another story. What I wanted to say is that in Myanmar it's clear what happened. In the same way that we do and we should ruthlessly criticize American neocolonialism and I'm without mercy there. Like for example speaking about cannibalism there is only one after the death of this all glorious leaders Idi Amin and so on the great self-proclaimed cannibals, there is only one half self-proclaimed cannibal today in Equatorial Guinea I think no. A kind of a local dictator who let it be known when an opponent disappears he let it be known that he ate it no. And under total American protection. When they drew attention I read an interview with Condoleezza Rice under Bush he said no sorry he is an American ally we will not criticize him and so on and so on. One should be extremely brutal here and I'm far from dismissing this idea of post-colonial exploitation as false. For example numbers about Latin America tell enough. We all talk about about how much help the West is giving and so on but look at the data of I think you may maybe know it better it's around I don't know forty, fifty billions even more how much profit just the big the big Western companies effectively still extract from from Latin America, not to mention Africa and so on. Or all these other you know what's for me there are new forms of post-colonialism which are horrible. I don't think I already mentioned this to you even if I did it's worth repeating it's a terrifying story. You know what's going on today silently. Again I'm here a structuralist optimist symptoms are everywhere you cannot lie everything is in the media you just have to find it. Maybe already mentioned it to you it's crucial. You know what happened about half a year ago in Madagascar. A mega big Korean South Korean conglomerate bought to cut a long story short half of the entire arable land of the island and they will use it not even for food mostly for industrial plants. So this is then I learned and you know where I read this in New York Times but it's just a small you know they don't make too much fuss out of it but then you learn that this is a whole tendency. That even in the countries which we associate with hunger like in Somalia Western companies are now buying in some part some of this stuff, in Ethiopia in that part all around. So what big countries are becoming afraid that you know in these new conditions not enough food raw materials and now they even went they don't trust local masters to do their own colonial farming they are now directly buying it or okay leasing it for ninety-nine years and so on and so on and it's going on it's going on massively. I mean so in spite of all this I claimed we should also start to talk first a little bit about European we Europeans tend to be my in Ethiopia British companies are deep into it are buying large tracts of of course the best land and so on. Then okay along the same lines let's accept it. Myanmar Burma is a Chinese colony economic in this sense. The military junta there survive helped through China. For minerals, wood, forests and so on cutting you know China in terrible need of raw materials and food. That's that's the story and we should start talking about all this. So if you allow me to go on a little bit I would like to improvise a little bit on these new types of rulers in the West. We have Putin then we have Berlusconi. I think that it has don't laugh at me historical meaning what goes on today in Italy. I think if we want to look to see our future politically it's Italy. Italy don't underestimate Italy. No wonder that Putin and Berlusconi are personal friends. They are the same figure but just as they put it in a multicultural way each to the characteristic of his own country and so on and so on. I even remember how one of the famous problem one of the famous stupid gestures of Berlusconi was I don't know if you remember a year ago when Putin visited Berlusconi in Rome and some Russian journalist asked him is it true that you are divorcing your wife to marry some ice skating girl or whatever. Of course that next day literally that journal not only the journal lost her job but that journal was prohibited and so on. But the points then Berlusconi as if to defend his friend did something as if he is holding a machine gun like he made this gesture which was rather tasteless you know because he was protecting his Russian friends and in Russia this is not a joke. Some twenty to thirty journalists are killed per year and you don't joke with this. In Russia to say you will kill a journalist it's not a joke no. Okay so let me go on. Why is Berlusconi so interesting? The figure of Berlusconi as a human all-too-human leader is here crucial. First if our political scene is split between permissive liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism I think Berlusconi's great achievement is to prove that they are two sides of the same coin. He is both of the same at the same time. This is why and this is what really depressed me when recently I went to Torino to do propaganda for my new book and to support my half friend not theoretically theoretically he goes to Gulag but okay the one who was at communism Gianni Vattimo no stood for elections and he was elected he promised me that he will now for European that he will proclaim himself in Brussels a communist a communist member of Parliament. It's that this is what he told me and other friends in Italy it's that how Italy is effectively developing here you see it's not simply primitive Asiatic non-democratic Slavonic mentality this is what I find so horrible that in Italy we have first example in the West of slowly emerging what we still dismiss in Russia as pathology a country which formally remains democratic. You have parties freedom of the press but more and more it becomes a kind of an empty democracy in the sense that you know in advance who—incidentally that's the beauty that Ahmadinejad officially got percent which is exactly how much Berlusconi Berlusconi as now no. That is to say you know but the problem is even deeper. Vattimo told me that he spoke here of course this is Italy no now I say this with loving brutal bad taste humor. Italy is this corrupted country where they appear to be opponents they are all friends Vattimo knows Prodi knows everyone there and so on. So he told me that all this ex-center-left olive party and so on he told me that the tragic thing is that they are all in some way morally broken in the sense that Berlusconi is accepted as a fact. They pretend to fight him but you talk with people privately and they all say sorry for a decade two three we are stuck. But everyone the cynical demoralization is such that it is as if Berlusconi took the entire field you know in a normal under quotation marks Western country you have the tension between neutral technocratic liberalism and right-wing populism. The problem with Berlusconi is that he is both at the same time. He as it were occupies the entire field. So again what makes Berlusconi as a political phenomenon so interesting is the fact that he the most powerful politician in his country acts more and more shamelessly. He not only ignores or politically neutralizes legal investigations into his criminal activity to boost his private business interest he is also systematically undermining the basic dignity of the head of a state. This I think is one of the crucial phenomena. I mean did you notice it if you pull I don't don't underestimate this what goes in Italy and especially please don't read it just you know in the same racist way oh this those crazy Italians they are not serious. What is he doing? Turning the whole country the government into a reality show. You remember when his wife accused him he went on TV explaining his all this problem with photos from his orgies all that stuff and so on and so on. The dignity of classical politics is grounded in its elevation above the play of particular interests of the civil society. The idea is politics is an affair of citoyen a minimum of dignity elevated above corrupted corrupted bourgeois life. And Marxists then criticized this as an alienation politics pretends to be above universal but really serves the interests where Vattimo gave me this idea that Berlusconi got the lesson he abolished alienation. There is no split between citoyen and bourgeois. It's bourgeois in the sense of the most primitive vulgar corruption is directly in power. State power is directly exerted by a bourgeois who ruthlessly exploits it as the means to protect his economic interests who washes dirty laundry of his private marriage in the style of a vulgar reality show and so on and so on. And I think that this is in a way an expression of a more general phenomenon in politics. Here let me express but I'm not alone here the guy who gave me this thought is Fred Jameson none other than Fred Jameson let me express my sincere admiration I am not kidding for Richard Nixon. I think that he was a crook but admit it and this is the lesson I got from two films otherwise I hate Oliver Stone he is fake embodied but I like his Nixon where he precisely resisted this liberal trap of portraying Nixon as just a crooked guy and he saw some kind of almost in the very way he assumed his fall has to admit his corruption a kind of a tragic fall. He was a crook but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideal ambitions and the reality of his acts. He thus experienced Nixon a kind of authentic tragic downfall. And you know why incidentally Fred Jameson has a sympathy for Nixon. He told me that first who was it James Baker I forgot Charlie not Schultz yeah who was Nixon's foreign minister. Something like Schultz. Sorry? No no McNamara was before McNamara was Kennedy. No no no Kissinger was yeah yeah yeah but at the beginning or after was it with Ford Ford president Schultz Schultz. There was okay this was the moment when United States tried to play really a balance also this is the first time that United States tried tried to yeah hear a little bit the voice of the voice of the Arabs also and point two Fred Jameson told me you know if you measure socialism in an extremely vulgar quantified way how much percentage of a social product goes for health education and so on then I am sorry to tell you Nixon was the closest United States got to got to communism. Even if you saw the new film Frost/Nixon. Sorry I was there on Nixon's side. Frost was the way I saw it there a kind of cheap provocateur but you can see some kind of a tragic fall in Nixon. I am not saying he wasn't you got my point I am not crazy I am not saying he wasn't a crook of course he was. But in the way he was compelled to assume his being corrupted there is kind of a tragic fall with Ronald Reagan and also at the same time with Carlos Menem I noticed in Argentina. I think that Reagan and Menem are the first prefiguration of of Berlusconi. This kind of a how should I put it populist leader without dignity systematically undermining its own dignity counting on this how should I put it where and here I'm absolutely for the official leader where the leader no longer tries to embody the dignity of the state but the leader tries simply to play this kind of a identify with the mythic image of an average citizen. Although you may think that Reagan did care about his dignity yes and no he all the time played this game of I'm as stupid as you so that this is why with Reagan it started this strange phenomenon noted by John Kobject how after each talk liberal press enjoyed in showing you know counting the mistakes he made. It only boosted his his popularity. So and again you have with Reagan not to mention okay Bush is already even too too much for this. But I think that this is how Berlusconi present itself. I don't think that all this his clownish aspect this ridiculous care for private interest sexual scandals and so on I don't think this is just his private ego. This is how this is his offer of identification to Italian people which of course are not really Italian people but a ridiculous cliché of Italian people. I'm like you I'm a little bit in trouble with law I like women I'm a cheat a little bit corrupted but basically I'm a good guy like you and so on and so on. But again what even if Berlusconi is a clown without dignity perhaps we should not laugh too much at him. If you want a and with this I will unfortunately end if you want a figure for Berlusconi first I tried to play maybe you could say he is like that Kung Fu Panda but I found another better figure of Berlusconi's laughter. Imagine those obscene crazy bad guys who laugh like in in Batman or Spider-Man like Joker. He is Joker in power. You know this kind of a he-he-he crazy laughter but the machine goes on. This is something so important I think as a symbolic shift that you have the whole state machine ruthlessly functioning with a madman in power. The boss can laugh and so on and so on and this is pretty depressing. The lesson is a very sad one. And to finish again with Iran it's the same even going on in Iran. I was told by my friends that it was the same tragic split in the last debate TV debates between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Ahmadinejad was almost a Berlusconi. He made vulgar jokes he showed some you know this quick scandal totally ridiculous private documents like he showed a some obscure photocopy of a document of a wife of Mousavi who this should please you there is a family split I'm on the male side a well-known anti-feminist he is closer to my type of thought not me only I'm not his first name but yeah and his wife is a Foucaultian card-carrying Foucaultian not bad if they will be the first time inside no I can imagine later in the bed no shouting no you're Foucault fuck micro-physics of power and so on. Okay whatever I want to say that Ahmadinejad showed some diploma claiming you see your wife enrolled in academy without proper exams and you know this kind of a typical small causing small obscene scandals. The idea is that this is so sad it's the same as in Italy. When you debate with such a guy you are embarrassed out of dignity. And this is why with this to conclude I think we if we want to be still some kind of a left we shouldn't be afraid of taking over this basic topic of we are the we are no longer the '68 guy or those Serrano who think if you show Christ in urine if you swear publicly you are doing something subversive. No those in power are playing these games the same thing happened in my own country there was although the left in my country is not left they are okay but some kind of with minimal decency liberals. Something happened and it was a moment of truth of Slovene politics. Namely there was a feminist to feminist okay sorry not feminist politician a woman who defended something about gay marriages and so on and so on. And then a right-wing populist politician in the Parliament it was all televised attacked her and said maybe we should form a parliamentary inquiry call a doctor to he literally put it in this words to inspect that woman between her legs and to see if her sexual organs are normal at all like why is she doing such crazy things as defending gays. And there it gave to me a little bit of hope even in liberal left maybe. It was such a tragic moment then you it was able to see the whole of Slovene Parliament and it was so clear this cultural divide. The right half they were simply they took it as a good joke they laughed. The left it wasn't so much that they shouted and protested they were simply embarrassed you know like my God where am I and so on. And we should not be afraid to be defenders of this. This in a way opens quite many new fields for our thought. We should shamelessly even play my God isn't it sad that these disgusting obscene right-wingers each of them having mistresses and so on they call themselves moral majority. We are the moral majority and so on. We should ruthlessly appropriate all this. So again this is not my problem with Chávez playing this protector of morality. My problem is why did he nonetheless he was the first to congratulate Chávez sorry himself okay to congratulate Ahmadinejad. I think that this game will not end well for him because he plays the same game also with Lukashenko and all that stuff. This worries me a little bit. Maybe I can be easily converted maybe there is something going on that I don't know. Okay I will promise you something else since it went too long this political improvisations. Tomorrow let's do nonetheless then a little bit more of a theory. Tomorrow I will try to do really this let's forget apocalypse it's nothing new we all know we are going into shit all together. So let me do tomorrow this basic multiculturalist stuff. Thanks very much and now still we can do two minutes of democracy.