Populism as a way to disavow social antagonism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-05-24 · 2:24:54 · 18,994 words
fascism-populismcapitalismideologypsychoanalysisecology-climaterace-antisemitismliberalism-political-correctnessgeopolitics-warsexuality-genderhegel-dialecticssubjectivitycinema-art-culturephilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture on populism, arguing that it is structurally mystifying because it displaces systemic antagonisms onto pseudo-concrete enemy figures rather than confronting the structural contradictions of global capitalism. He analyses the Macron/Le Pen election as an ideological trap, discusses ecology and the Anthropocene via Sloterdijk, and extends into debates over multiculturalism, jouissance as the irreducible core of ways of life, universality, and the politics of refugees. A long Q&A follows covering psychoanalysis and politics, the unconscious as political, love, polyamory, political correctness, and cinema.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “barred Big Other”
The procedural, hollowed-out Big Other of democratic rules, a Big Other that holds even when nobody believes in it, as opposed to the substantial populist Big Other of the people.
as “post-politics”
The reduction of politics to rational technocratic administration of competing interests, which generates populism as its own shadowy supplement whenever genuine political demands cannot be articulated within it.
A paradoxical position, found in Heydrich and Breivik, that supports Israel as a containment zone for Jews while opposing Jewish presence in Europe; Žižek traces its homologous structure in contemporary pro-Muslim Islamophobia.
as “pro-Muslim Islamophobia”
The mirror image of Zionist anti-Semitism: support for authoritarian Muslim regimes abroad combined with hostility to Muslim immigrants at home, as seen in Western reactions to Erdoğan.
A new global arrangement in which market universality coexists with, and even sustains, ethnically or religiously particular authoritarian orders, abandoning Enlightenment emancipatory ideals.
Sloterdijk's concept (adopted and pushed further by Žižek) that humanity must move beyond the Hegelian logic of the state, where war is the highest ethical act, toward a civilised relation between cultures themselves.
as “Mehrwert / plus-de-jouir parallel”
Samo Tomšič's Lacanian reading of Marx that draws a strict structural parallel between surplus value (Mehrwert) and surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir), suggesting capitalism uniquely externalises a universal libidinal logic of excess.
Lacan's plus-de-jouir, an excess satisfaction that is not reducible to pleasure but is generated by the very process of approaching a goal or by the obstacle itself; illustrated by the Goebbels 'Total War' speech and the Walmart shopping ritual.
The surplus object that emerges from the production process without a clear origin, exemplified by the corpse that falls out of the assembled Ford car in Hitchcock's unshot scene.
Freud's concept of gain of pleasure, the true enjoyment comes not from achieving a goal but from the very process of approaching it, cognate with Lacanian surplus enjoyment.
The politically correct manoeuvre of speaking on behalf of imagined naive others who might be hurt by offensive speech, thereby infantilising the very groups it claims to protect.
Excessive enjoyment as the real, untranslatable core of a particular way of life, materialised in relations of authority and sexual relations, which makes peaceful multicultural coexistence structurally problematic.
as “X as lost roots / universality chance”
Žižek's reading of Malcolm X's name: X marks enslaved dispossession of roots, but instead of nostalgia (Roots/Haley), X opens the possibility of a more radical universality than rooted Europeans can achieve.
as “obscene pre-Oedipal undead subjectivity”
The subjectivity of the video-gamer who cannot die permanently and approaches failure as infinitely repeatable, a structure Žižek traces back to Tom and Jerry cartoons and the Sadean fantasy.
as “truth beyond exactitude”
The Lacanian distinction between objective correctness (knowledge) and subjective truth (position of enunciation), illustrated by pathological jealousy that remains pathological even if all the facts are confirmed.
Kant's maxim 'You can, because you must', invoked by Žižek to argue that Kantian ethics, like psychoanalysis, holds the subject radically responsible for its duty rather than allowing duty to serve as an excuse.
Lacan's claim that the unconscious is political, meaning the unconscious is not a deep interior truth but is out there in social interaction, structured by language and therefore immediately political.
Marx's concept that ideology is not a subjective illusion but a belief embedded in social practice, people can consciously disbelieve yet still act as if the illusion were true.
Robert Pfaller's notion that beliefs can function and do their work even when no individual subject holds them, the ideological illusion is outsourced to the social practice itself.
Lacan's formula that there is no sexual relationship, sexual difference is constitutively impossible to close, which the proliferation of gender identities (LGBTQ+) disavows rather than confronts.
as “the LGBTQ+ 'plus' as Object a”
Žižek reads the open-ended 'plus' appended to LGBTQ+ as a Lacanian surplus element, an indefinite remainder that signals incompleteness rather than inclusive completeness.
Lacan's ethical injunction not to give way on one's desire, cited in the context of love and castration as the condition of unconditional attachment.
Stories he reaches for 11
Niels Bohr had a horseshoe above his door; when asked why, he said he didn't believe in it, but was told it works even if you don't believe in it. Žižek uses this as the perfect model of ideology today: a practice that functions as a belief even when no individual subject subscribes to it.
“I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Žižek reads Malcolm X's retention of the name 'X' not as mourning lost African roots but as seeing in the dispossession a unique chance to develop a new, more radical universality, finding it paradoxically in Islam.
“X means: we are potentially more universal than Europeans. We have a unique chance of developing a new universality.”
A twelve-year-old Roma girl in Slovenia fled her family to avoid an arranged marriage; the Roma community representative claimed this was a central feature of their way of life. Žižek uses this to show that jouissance, not just cultural surface features, is the untranslatable core of ways of life.
“Arranged marriages are a central feature of our way of life. If you take this away from us, we may remain as doing some stupid folkloric songs and spicy cuisine whatever, but as a community we disappear.”
A patient of the British Lacanian Darian Leader made a slip at a restaurant, saying 'a bed for two' instead of 'a table for two'. Leader's non-vulgar reading: the man feared enjoying the meal too much and failing sexually later, eating was Object a, a surplus that should remain a surplus.
“Instead of a table for two, he said to the waiter, 'A bed for two please in the room.'”
Radio Yerevan 'corrects' a question about whether Rabinovich won a new car on the lottery: in principle yes, only it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him.
“In principle, it's true, only it wasn't a new car, but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.”
A friend in the US reports that families who can no longer afford to shop still go to Walmart, fill carts with goods, and abandon them at closing time. They get surplus enjoyment, the ritual pleasure of shopping, without the pleasure of actually buying anything.
“They get enjoyment, surplus enjoyment, but without the pleasure. The pleasure is the stupid pleasure of objects you buy, but the real pleasure is, of course, the very procedure.”
In the 1943 Sportpalast speech after Stalingrad, Goebbels asked the crowd whether they wanted total war, more total than they could imagine. The crowd answered yes to pure suffering, no positive promise given. Žižek reads this as the purest example of surplus enjoyment: enjoyment of suffering itself beyond any pleasure.
“Do you want total war? Do you want it, if need be, even more total and radical than we are capable of imagining it today?”
Hitchcock described to Truffaut a scene he never shot: Cary Grant walks the Ford assembly line watching a car being built piece by piece; when complete, a man opens the door and a corpse falls out. Žižek reads the corpse as objet petit a, surplus value that appears from nowhere in the production process.
“One of them opens the door of the car and out drops a corpse.”
Until 1959, Tibetan custom required lower-status people to step aside on narrow paths, lean down, and stick out their tongue in ritualized self-humiliation before lamas. The Chinese prohibited it after 1959; lamas protested the intrusion. Žižek uses this to argue for connecting emancipatory struggles across cultures rather than defending local practices wholesale.
“The poor guy should somehow lean down, look with your eyes up, and stick your tongue out. Like to enact your pure worthless stupidity.”
In the darkest part of the Škocjan caves in Slovenia, Freud encountered Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna. Žižek reads this as the staged lesson of psychoanalysis: looking deep into a person you don't find a deeper truth but a fundamental fantasy, a contingent lie masking antagonism.
“If you look really deep into a person, you don't find some deeper deep truth. You find Lueger, lüge, lie.”
In a Mexican court, a wealthy student who sexually assaulted a girl was pardoned because his lawyer argued he acted without carnal intent, he did not enjoy it sexually. Žižek reads this as a theological logic: guilt requires enjoyment; no enjoyment, no guilt.
“The defense claimed, and the judge confirmed it, that he did this without a carnal intent. He didn't sexually enjoy it, which is why he is not guilty.”
Works invoked 16
Psycho film
The murder of Detective Arbogast on the stairs is cited as an example of how Hitchcock's formal choices embody an implicit theology that Žižek analyses in his Hitchcock volume.
Mentioned as what Žižek plans to download from Pirate Bay after the talk, the seventh installment, used to illustrate Hollywood/TV dystopian knowledge of the future.
The Hunger Games film
Cited alongside Hollywood dystopias as anticipating the possible future: a new class society if nothing changes.
Identified by an audience member as Žižek's favourite work; Žižek accepts this description and notes it is now over ten years old.
Roots tv
Alex Haley's narrative of nostalgic root-recovery is contrasted unfavourably with Malcolm X's universalist gesture of embracing the loss of roots.
North by Northwest film
Hitchcock's classic used to frame the discussion of the unshot Ford assembly line scene with the corpse, Žižek's central illustration of objet petit a.
Arrival film
Called a very modest science fiction film but praised as intelligent in its manipulation of circular time.
The Name of the Rose book
Umberto Eco's novel, whose idea that laughter is inherently liberating Žižek dismisses; power also uses mockery and irony.
Malcolm X (film) film
Žižek notes that for him Malcolm X is not only Denzel Washington in the film, he has actually read his work.
Kant avec Sade essay
Lacan's essay cited for identifying that the Sadean fantasy of the indestructible victim mirrors Tom and Jerry's undead subjectivity.
Lost Highway film
Listed alongside Hitchcock and Kieślowski as one of the rare directors Žižek claims to analyse seriously in formal terms.
Sloterdijk's book on the Anthropocene and domestication of cultures; Žižek was nicely surprised by it and endorses its implicit argument as a form of communism.
The Discovery film
Paired with Arrival as a modest but intelligent science fiction film dealing with circular time.
La Logique du fantasme other
Lacan's 14th seminar, described by an audience member (and agreed by Žižek) as one of the two or three greatest Lacan seminars; covers the sexual act, male-female difference, and Diogenes.
Moonlight film
Oscar winner Žižek finds sympathetic in theme but not a great film; he criticises the politically correct climate that forbids saying so.
Alenka Zupančič's book (published in French, English, and German) praised for developing the Kant–Lacan connection in detail.
People invoked 33
His comment after the 2000 election, 'The American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said', is taken seriously as an illustration of the barred Big Other.
Described as a typical contemporary politician, radical neoliberal in economics and harsh Hindu nationalist in ideology, exemplifying the dangerous new fusion.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Member of the Slovene Lacanian Troika (with Žižek and Mladen Dolar); her book The Odd One In on Comedy and the Kant–Lacan connection is praised.
Umberto Eco negative
The Name of the Rose's idea that laughter is inherently liberating is dismissed as stupid, power also uses mockery and irony as instruments of control.
Mentioned as the pseudo-concrete Jewish figure in far-right conspiracy theories that present Muslim immigration as secretly orchestrated by Jews to destroy Western Christianity.
Marine Le Pen negative
Described as a racist populist, but one who at least addresses popular workers' discontent, unlike Macron; the choice between them was not a real choice.
Garret FitzGerald positive
Irish Prime Minister who reversed the common wisdom in an Irish parliament debate, 'this may be good enough for practice but not good enough for theory', Žižek uses the reversal to open the analysis of populism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical resource throughout: plus-de-jouir, objet petit a, il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, l'inconscient est politique, Kant avec Sade are all deployed.
Robert Pfaller positive
Described as a good friend; his notion of interpassivity, beliefs that function without anyone believing them, is deployed in the analysis of ideology.
Cited as an example of the capitalism-plus-authoritarian-tradition model; his trade protectionism inadvertently allowed China to present itself as the new agent of globalisation.
Wolfgang Streeck positive
German sociologist-economist whose theory that capitalism is already dying, but disintegrating into chaos rather than being replaced by a higher order, Žižek finds deeply and unfortunately true.
Emmanuel Macron negative
Represents establishment politics at its purest, the economic policies behind popular discontent with Europe; his victory reinstates sleep rather than defeating fascism.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for his formulation that ideological censorship today crushes hope rather than resistance; Žižek notes a minor disagreement over Badiou's historicist critique of human rights.
Cited as an example of the capitalism-plus-authoritarian-local-tradition model; Western powers congratulated him on extending authoritarian power because they prefer order there to refugees here.
Mladen Dolar positive
Named as part of the Slovene Lacanian Troika.
Malcolm X positive
Called an authentic hero and true political genius; Žižek reads his retention of X as a gesture of radical universality born from dispossession rather than nostalgic root-seeking.
Norwegian terrorist cited as an example of Zionist anti-Semitism, he supported Israel as a wall against Muslim barbarians but opposed Jewish presence in Europe.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek was nicely surprised by Sloterdijk's book Was geschah im Jahrhundert? and endorses his analysis of the Anthropocene and domestication of cultures, arguing the conclusion is implicitly communist.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Žižek disagrees with Laclau's theory of populism but credits him with one precise correct point about British Chartism, that populism targets parasitic individuals rather than the system.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Mentioned for elaborating that democracy implies a barred Big Other; later noted with mild irony for his strange involvement with Sarkozy's election campaign.
Darian Leader positive
Described as a British Lacanian (half-Lacanian, half-Kleinian); his non-vulgar reading of the 'bed for two' slip is cited approvingly to illustrate Object a.
Mentioned as the interviewer in whose conversations with Hitchcock the unshot factory scene is described.
Mentioned as the figure in far-right conspiracy theories who invited Muslim immigrants because of German guilt about the Holocaust; Žižek is describing the conspiracy, not endorsing it.
Described as 'one of the true monsters of 20th century European history'; cited because his 1936/37 text articulates Zionist anti-Semitism, support for Jewish emigration to Palestine combined with hostility to Jews in Germany.
Samo Tomšič positive
Žižek's Slovene colleague whose book on Marx and Lacan draws a strict parallel between surplus value and plus-de-jouir; Žižek does not fully agree but finds many good points.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote attributed to him is deployed as the perfect illustration of ideology functioning as practice without subjective belief.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
One of the few directors Žižek claims to analyse seriously in formal terms; the unshot Ford factory scene is used to illustrate objet petit a and surplus value.
Barack Obama positive
Žižek expresses 'a certain sympathy' and cites the Affordable Care Act as a revolutionary idea for the United States, an example of choosing the right particular struggle.
Tamer Nafar positive
Palestinian rapper/singer cited as an example of internal emancipatory struggle within Palestinian society against honour killings, evidence that struggle must be connected across cultures.
Karl Marx positive
Surplus value, commodity fetishism as objective illusion embedded in practice, and universal labour appearing as such only under capitalism are all central to the lecture.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked via Lustgewinn, the paradox of the super-ego commanding enjoyment, and the anecdote of Freud meeting Lueger in the caves.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the view that the highest ethical act of a state is heroic self-sacrifice in war, which Žižek via Sloterdijk says must now be overcome; also underlying the analysis of form vs. content in human rights.
Immanuel Kant positive
Repeatedly invoked: Du kannst denn du sollst, the categorical imperative as applicable to any rational being including aliens, late Kant on religion and freedom; Žižek defends Kant's radicalism against readings that reduce it to mere formalism.
What it argues
populism as structural mystification of systemic antagonismsurplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) as the engine of capitalism and libidinal economyjouissance as the untranslatable core of cultural ways of lifeideology functioning as its own opposite (cynical resignation as the dominant ideology)universality as internal split rather than multicultural coexistencethe Anthropocene and the impossibility of reforming capitalism through commodification of damagepsychoanalysis, truth beyond exactitude, and the political unconscious
Dialectical moves 15
“This may be good enough for practice but it is not good enough for theory.”
Fitzgerald's inversion of the theory/practice cliché is used to encapsulate populism's reversal of proper political reasoning, populism accepts pragmatic compromises that are theoretically incoherent.
“The message of Macron's victory is not 'the fascist threat awakened us' but quite the opposite: the nightmare is over, we can go to sleep again.”
What appears as an anti-fascist victory is actually the restoration of the stagnant post-politics that produces fascism as its supplement.
“Global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism.”
The dominant ideology has inverted itself: the very system responsible for the conditions generating fascism now poses as fascism's antidote.
“The predominant ideology today appears precisely as its opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias.”
Cynical resignation, 'there is no alternative', is itself the dominant ideology, presenting itself as clear-eyed realism rather than as ideology.
“The woman behind Macron is not his wife, but the proverbial Tina — there is no alternative.”
Macron's victory kills hope rather than bringing it; TINA is the true ideological operator behind the centrist consensus.
“At the very moment when we become powerful enough to affect the most basic conditions of our life, we have to accept that we are just another species on a small planet.”
Human mastery over nature in the Anthropocene paradoxically forces recognition of human finitude and dependence, power and humility coincide.
“It's not that you only enjoy it if you are guilty — rather, you are only guilty if you enjoy it, and you only enjoy it if you are guilty.”
The Mexican rape-case judge's logic is pushed to its dialectical conclusion: guilt and enjoyment are structurally co-constitutive, illustrating the Protestant logic of surplus enjoyment.
“Far from being just one among the modes of production, capitalism is the mode in which the universal human logic of surplus enjoyment openly explodes.”
Capitalism is not a contingent historical arrangement but the moment when a latent feature of all human civilisation becomes the explicit organising principle of social life.
“The moment of truth in those stupid theories that capitalism is a natural system is simply the same as Marx saying universal labor appears as such only with capitalism.”
The naturalisation of capitalism inadvertently captures a genuine insight: capitalism is the form in which a universal human structure first becomes fully visible.
“In what appears as the ultimate catastrophe — 'We are deprived of our roots' — there is a unique chance of new freedom.”
Malcolm X's gesture: the radical loss of roots is not to be mourned through nostalgic recovery but seized as the opening for a more universal subjectivity.
“Behind this apparent self-humiliation, in an inverted way, we still assert ourselves as masters.”
Left-liberal self-flagellation about European guilt covertly re-enacts European mastery by posing Europeans as the sovereign agents responsible for all third-world suffering.
“There is more truth in the form of human rights than in their content.”
Even though human rights began as class-biased bourgeois ideology, their abstract formal universality exceeded its content and opened the space for demands by women, slaves, and colonial subjects.
“Hitler's anti-Semitism would have been a pathological formation even if at the level of facts it were to be true.”
The pathology of anti-Semitism lies not in its factual falsity but in its structural function, what antagonisms does it need to obliterate by projecting them onto a scapegoat figure?
“Love is unconditional but not unlimited.”
True love requires absolute unconditional commitment but is not without constraint or castration, the limit (castration) is the very condition of the unconditionality.
“True freedom is not free choice but the assumption of what you experience as fate — you could not do otherwise, yet you are still fully responsible.”
Kantian freedom is not choosing between options but the act of necessity you own entirely as yours.
Claims 19
asserts
Populism is structurally mystifying because it locates social evil in a contingent intruder (the corrupt financial manipulator, the immigrant) rather than in the structural antagonisms of capitalism itself.populism
asserts
The dominant ideology today is not a positive utopian vision but cynical resignation — the claim that any attempt at radical change will end in totalitarian horror.ideology
asserts
Macron's victory did not defeat fascism but reinstated the very sterile post-political consensus that gave strength to Le Pen, allowing global capitalism to present itself as the last protection against fascism.French presidential election / Macron
rejects
The happy multicultural coexistence of different ways of life is impossible because the core of any way of life is jouissance — excessive enjoyment materialised in relations of authority and sexual relations — which cannot be simply translated or shared.multicultural coexistence
rejects
Political correctness is not a leftist strategy that goes too far; it is simply wrong, because it regulates speech rather than confronting antagonisms, and functions as a fear of the neighbour as subject of desire.political correctness
asserts
The capitalism-plus-authoritarian-tradition model (Trump/Erdoğan/Modi/China) shows that the nation-state can no longer protect workers' rights; only a new emancipatory universality at a global level can do so.nation-state strategy vs. global capitalism
reframes
The refugee crisis should be framed as a geopolitical-economic problem caused by Western neo-colonial interventions, not as a humanitarian problem of whether Europe has a wide enough heart.refugee crisis
rejects
So-called authentic pre-modern local ways of life do not exist as uncontaminated wholes; every particular way of life is already cut by its own internal antagonism and emancipatory struggle.authenticity of local ways of life / indigenism
asserts
Universality is not something above particular identities but something that traverses and splits each particular identity from within — the lesson of modernity in a good sense.universality
asserts
Capitalism is unique among modes of production because it externalises and openly exploits the universal human logic of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir / Mehrwert) that was previously latent.capitalism and surplus enjoyment
rejects
Capitalism cannot be reformed through the commodification of ecological damage — attempts to price earth, air, or women's unpaid labour simply radicalise commodification rather than limiting it.ecological taxation / commodification of externalities
asserts
The self-critical, radical tradition of European Enlightenment — exemplified by the Haitian revolution's secular republican ideals — is a genuinely universal contribution and should be defended rather than abandoned to anti-Eurocentric fashions.European Enlightenment legacy
asserts
Marx's critique of commodity fetishism identifies ideology not as subjective illusion but as an objective illusion embedded in social practice — one can disbelieve in it consciously while enacting it materially.ideology / commodity fetishism
asserts
Anti-Semitism is a pathological ideological formation regardless of the factual truth of its specific accusations, because what matters is the structural function of the Jew as a figure that displaces social antagonisms.anti-Semitism / ideology
asserts
True love is an unconditional attachment that cannot be grounded in enumerable reasons; the moment you can list reasons for loving someone, it is no longer love but 'mental housekeeping'.love
asserts
True freedom is not free choice between options but the assumption of what one experiences as fate — acting because one cannot do otherwise while remaining fully responsible.freedom and responsibility
asserts
Today's super-ego commands enjoyment rather than obedience to authority, which is why permissive societies produce more frigidity and impotence than repressive ones — Freud's paradox of the super-ego is more relevant now than in Victorian England.super-ego / Freud's contemporary relevance
asserts
British colonisers of India deliberately revived and sustained the caste system to ease colonial control, demonstrating that Western imperialism often preserved rather than destroyed local traditions.colonialism and local traditions / India
reframes
Sloterdijk's proposal for domesticating 'wild animal cultures' amounts implicitly to what must be called communism, even though Sloterdijk himself would resist the label.Sloterdijk's political proposal
Quotes 18
“The woman behind Macron is not his wife, but the proverbial Tina, the stance of there is no alternative. Macron doesn't bring hope, he kills hope.”Slavoj Žižek · TINA ideology / Macron as anti-political
“It appears precisely as its opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias. The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future, nobody believes in that, but a cynical resignation.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as its own opposite
“The main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance, but to crush hope, to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which is something like Gulag.”Slavoj Žižek · Badiou on ideological censorship
“For a Marxist, the pathological deviating misbehavior of some element is the symptom of the normal. It is an indicator of what is wrong in the very structure.”Slavoj Žižek · symptom as indicator of structural antagonism
“The core of a way of life is le réel, the real. And this way of life in its dimension of the real is materialized specifically at two levels: relations of authority and sexual relations.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance as core of ways of life
“Behind this apparent self-humiliation, in an inverted way, we still assert ourselves as masters.”Slavoj Žižek · left-liberal self-flagellation as inverted mastery
“It's not simply a question do they want to be integrated, are we really open to them? I agree them, it's false already to speak about integration because to integrate means you become part of us.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of integration discourse
“The American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said.”Slavoj Žižek · barred Big Other / democratic void (Clinton)
“X means: we are potentially more universal than Europeans. We have a unique chance of developing a new universality.”Slavoj Žižek · Malcolm X's universalist gesture
“There is more truth in the form of human rights than in their content.”Slavoj Žižek · formal universality exceeds its content
“Hitler's anti-Semitism is wrong, it's ideology, not because it is not true… it would have been a pathological formation even if at the level of facts it were to be true.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as structural, not merely factual error
“The moment you can nominate reasons for love, it's no longer love, it's mental housekeeping.”Slavoj Žižek · unconditional love vs. utilitarian calculation
“True love is the highest act of freedom which precisely for this cannot be ever experienced as a free act in the sense of free choice.”Slavoj Žižek · love as freedom beyond choice
“Love is unconditional but not unlimited.”Slavoj Žižek · love, castration, and constraint
“Today our super-ego is not 'Obey authorities,' 'Enjoy' and so on. And we have more frigidity and impotence as ever.”Slavoj Žižek · Freud's paradox of the permissive super-ego
“If you look really deep into a person, you don't find some deeper deep truth. You find Lueger, lüge, lie.”Slavoj Žižek · fundamental fantasy as contingent lie
“I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as practice without belief / interpassivity
“Plus is Lacanian Object a, you know. That you don't know what it is but you have to add it to be complete.”Slavoj Žižek · LGBTQ+ 'plus' as structurally incomplete
Transcript 70 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I am glad to be here, I am honored to be here. I'm just afraid I don't know what to expect from you or what do you expect from me. I hope you will not find the talk too boring because I wanted at least vaguely to really talk about what the title announces: populism. So I will at least begin in this vein and then we will jump from here to there and so on. So I will now first recapitulate some old stuff, namely, I still in spite of today's popularity, even leftists speak about populism as the return of the political, of the political antagonism which may give, instill new passion into our into our fossilized democracy. Why I am still opposed to populism as something dangerous? So, what is populism? Garret FitzGerald, the Irish Prime Minister twenty years ago, once turned around the common wisdom. You know as they say, this may be good for theory but it's not good enough for practice. In a debate in Irish Parliament, FitzGerald said about his opponent's proposal, this may be good enough for practice but it is not good enough for theory. This reversal best encapsulates the ambiguous position of populist politics. While it can sometimes be endorsed as part of a short-term pragmatic compromise, one should reject the notion of populism in its fundamental dimension. Why? Populism potentially tends to suspend democratic rules. Democracy, in the way this term is used today, concerns above all formal legalism. Its minimal definition of democracy is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic political game. Democracy means that whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the American presidential elections of you remember when after all the comedy Bush won over Al Gore, were effectively democratic. In spite of obvious electoral manipulations and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple of hundred of Florida votes decided who will be the president, the democratic candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after these elections, Bill Clinton made a nice comment. He said, the American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said. This comment should be taken more seriously than it was meant. Even now we don't know it, and maybe there was no substantial message behind the result of it all. I'm especially suspicious in this new animistic spirit when what the people wanted to say, or today did you notice how in economy we witness a massive return of animism? Markets are an entity which send a message, reacts with fear, and so on and so on. Jacques-Alain Miller, sorry, elaborated how democracy implies the so-called barred Big Other, symbolic substance. However, the Florida example demonstrates that nonetheless in democracy there is a Big Other, the procedural Big Other of electoral rules which should be obeyed whatever the result. And it is this Big Other, this conditional, sorry, unconditional reliance on rules that populism threatens to suspend. Which is why there is in populism always something violent, threatening for the liberal view, an open or latent pressure, a warning that if elections will be manipulated, the will of the people will have to find another way to impose itself. So even if electoral legitimization of power is respected, it is made clear that elections play a secondary role, that they serve only to confirm a political process whose substantial weight lies elsewhere. This is what gives, let's call it the thrill, to populist regimes. In them, democratic rules are never fully endorsed. There is always an uncertainty that pertains to them. A possibility always looms that these rules will be redefined, unfairly changed in the middle of the game or whatever. This aspect of populism should be, I think, fully endorsed. The problem is not this undemocratic dimension of populism, but it's populist relying on the substantial notion of the people. In populism there is a Big Other, a substantial place of truth. It's the people as the substantial agent legitimizing power. Today's populism is different from the traditional version. What distinguishes it is the opponent against which it mobilizes the people. Today we witness as we all know the rise of so-called post-politics, the growing reduction of politics proper to rational administration of conflicting interests interests. In the highly developed countries of the United States and Western Europe, populism is emerging as the inherent shadowy double of the institutionalized post-politics, as the arena in which political demands that do not fit the institutionalized space can be articulated. In this sense, there is a constitutive mystification that pertains to populism. Its basic gesture is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete enemy figure, Brussels bureaucracy, illegal immigrants, or whatsoever. So let me here quote Ernesto Laclau who developed a theory of populism. I don't agree with him, but he made one precise, correct point about British Chartism from 1840s as a form of populism. I quote Laclau, its dominant leitmotif is to situate the evils of society not in something that is inherent in the economic system but quite the opposite, in the abuse of power by parasitic and speculative groups which have control who which control political power, old corruption and so on. It was for this reason that the feature most strongly picked out in the ruling class by populists was its idleness and parasitism. End of quote. In other words, for a populist, the cause of our troubles is ultimately never the system as such, but the intruder who corrupts it. Financial manipulators, not capitalists as such, and so on. It's never a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such, but an element that doesn't play its role within the structure properly. For a Marxist on the contrary, or for a Freudian, the pathological deviating misbehavior of some element, crisis and so on, is the symptom of the normal. It is an indicator of what is wrong in the very structure. That's why what characterizes populism is always a pseudo-concrete figure which is selected as the enemy, the singular agent behind all that poses a threat to the people. For example, the pseudo-concrete populist figure of the Jew that condenses the vast multitude of anonymous forces that determine us. Jew as the enemy emerges from outside the social demands that experience themselves as frustrated. And I think today with the rise of new right-wing populism, this game of oversimplification, of pseudo-concrete figure of an enemy is reaching absurd extremes. You should follow the latest rumors, which are no longer rumors in some countries, like most of the post-communist East European countries, they are now, it's horrible, part of the public discourse. And I try to reconstruct this theory. It's the following one, I'm not kidding, it's in public, that the first premise is that there was a Holocaust, but it was organized by Jews themselves. Jews wanted to destroy Western Europe and they know that Germany is the strongest backbone of it. French are decadent, British are utilitarian, Germany is the threat. So they sacrificed millions of themselves to break morally Germany. So that Germany feels guilty for Holocaust and now Germany, Angela Merkel, that's why she invited Muslim immigrants, because she lacks the will to resist. Now then they make a step further. There is no Arab-Israeli conflict. This conflict is just staged for the West. In reality, behind chaotic Muslim refugees there is the figure of the Jew, Soros or another, because Arabs and Jews, Muslim Arabs and Jews share the same goal, to destroy Western Christianity. Now, you know what's so sad, that something like this, which was still my god, till five years ago maybe even something that maybe if you are crazy you speak in in a bar or in the evening with your crazy lunatic friends, is now part of the public discourse. I would worry about that. And I don't have time to develop more of it, but there is another sad aspect here where even some leftists get caught into this game. I developed years ago a notion which is now accepted even by all of my at least Jewish friends, the notion of Zionist anti-Semitism. It's a position which you find, I'm not kidding, already by one of the true monsters of 20th century European history, Reinhard Heydrich, you know, the father of Holocaust and so on, rather executor. He wrote, I don't have it here, I'm sorry, a crazy text in I think '36 or '37, where he said, Jews are in something like this, Jews are incredibly creative, active, dynamic people. We wish them all the best, but not here in Germany. Our conflict is not with Jews as such, but with those Jews who are invisible among us. If the Jews move to Palestine, we will give them economic help. They are wonderful creative people, we cannot wait to develop our ties with them and so on and so on. So Zionism is good if Jews go out, Jews are bad here. You find exactly the same position, you should read him, with Breivik, you know, the Norwegian guy. He said we should absolutely support Israel there, it's a wall protecting Europe from Muslim barbarians and so on, but here we have too many Jews, not here. What the sad thing that is happening now is that a similar logic is developing a propos Islam. In a homologous way, we find pro-Muslim Islamophobia with the same logic. Muslims are bad if they're here, but there we should support them, even if they're authoritarian, all the better, they will organize their lives and protect. This is why, even if they formally protested, most of the Western powers, especially the bad guys from Trump onwards, immediately, sincerely congratulated Erdoğan in winning that referendum or whatever for the extension of his authoritarian power. Again, it's the same logic. We don't want refugees here, they disturb European order, but there let them even support them, organize their order and that's the horror that is emerging today. A new obscene multiculturalism. Like, we have universality of the market, but this universality is less and less accompanied even by no matter how bourgeois distorted emancipatory universal ideals, equality, freedom, human rights, whatever. It is like Fukuyama combined with Huntington. Not clash of civilization, but peaceful coexistence of different ways of life, of course against the background of global market rule. A typical politician for me today, for example, is Modi, the Prime Minister of India. At the same time radical neoliberal in economy and rather harsh Hindu nationalist in ideology. China is doing the same, Turkey is now doing the same, and in its own way even Trump is doing the same. I think that this tendency is very dangerous. And back to my point, ah yes, I want to tell you another wonderful joke, I repeated it in a couple of times in my books, which encapsulates the best this logic of Zionist anti-Semitism. Die Presse, Austrian daily newspaper, published some twenty years ago a wonderful caricature. You see two Austrians in this almost caricatural way, neo-Nazis, hard drinking beer, and one of them holds in his hands a newspaper and points at it, in a newspaper obviously to an article critical of Israel, and says something like, you see how a perfectly rational anti-Semitism is here misused for an unfair criticism of Israel. So you see, it's the other way around. It's not you pretend just to criticize Israel but you are really anti-Semitic. It's the other way around: anti-Semitism is okay, no Jews here, but don't touch Israel. And the saddest thing is that the government of Israel more and more accepts this game. So, back to populism. The reason I'm opposed to populism is that inherently it's mystifying. Populism is not just popular mobilization against ossified bureaucratic democratic procedures, whatever. It has always this idea, pointed out nicely by that quote from Ernesto Laclau, of a basic popular unity of people and the system, threatened by just a contingent a contingent malfunction, corruption or whatever. Again, it can be international capital, against which of course we can put our bets on our own honest local bourgeoisie. It's the dangerous immigrants or whatever. So I don't have a soft spot, if you ask me, for populism. Why not? Because it's absolutely elementary for me that today the critical point, the ultimate cause of our troubles, is an imbalance or whatever, structural imbalance, antagonism, in global capitalism as such. It's not just a contingent malfunctioning here and there. So, to understand today's populism, the best example of our crisis, which can allow us this understanding, is probably I am tempted to say the weird case of the recent French presidential elections, Macron versus Marine Le Pen. Why? Let me begin with another joke that I like. They are my favorite jokes, the ones from Soviet Union, jokes about Radio Yerevan. You know, this was a legendary, there was a real Radio Yerevan, but the topic of jokes was some mystical Radio Yerevan where viewers asked listeners, sorry, asked questions and Radio Yerevan in this cold bureaucratic way answered always in the same way, "In principle, yes, but..." For example, the latest I've heard, it's a very racist one but I like it, is that, you know do you also have in Academy of Sciences, I think you distinguish regular and corresponding members, no? Regular member is more, full member, corresponding you are not yet there. And the joke is referring to some less developed Soviet Republic. Is it true that that guy from that republic was accepted, made member of their Academy of Sciences? Then a guy says, how can this happen? They asked Radio Yerevan, but how could this have happened when that guy is illiterate? Radio Yerevan answers, "In principle, it's possible because he was not made a corresponding member, but a regular member, and you have to read and write just if you correspond." It's vulgar. But another better joke. A listener asks Radio Yerevan, is it true that Rabinovich, another legendary figure of Soviet jokes, the Jew Rabinovich won a new car on lottery? The radio answers, "In principle, it's true, only it wasn't a new car, but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him." The same goes, I think, for the French presidential elections of We may ask Radio Yerevan, is it true that in a great display of anti-fascist unity, people of France elected an outsider and defeated a fascist threat to Europe? Radio Yerevan answers, "In principle, yes. Only the victorious Macron embodies Europe out of touch with ordinary people, that is to say, the very politics which gave such strength to Le Pen, and Macron is not an outsider but establishment at its purest." Of course Le Pen and Macron are not the same. The difference that separates the two is obvious. But nonetheless, the choice between the two was not the real choice. To see this, it's enough to focus on the background of the two candidates. Marine Le Pen is a racist populist, but she also addresses popular workers' discontent. Macron presents himself as tolerant, human, pro-European, but the economic policy he stands for is the main cause of the popular dissatisfaction with Europe. So the message of Macron's victory is not the fascist threat awakened us, but quite the opposite: the nightmare is over, we can go to sleep again. Macron's victory opens up the, for me at least, terrifying prospect of a future in which the same sterile, stagnant politics will go on in European Union, just every four years we will be mobilized to defeat the fascist threat. And in between we'll be able to sleep in the safe embrace of global capitalism with a human face. The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking. Global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism. And if you try to point out some of Macron's limitations, you are accused of, yes, of complicity with fascism. Since, as we are repeatedly told by big and not so big media, extreme left and extreme right are ultimately the same. They are coming together today, both are anti-Semitic, nationalist, isolationist, anti-globalist, and so on. This is I think the point of the whole operation: to make the left, which means any true alternative, disappear. The woman behind Macron is not his wife, but the proverbial Tina, the stance of there is no alternative. Macron doesn't bring hope, he kills hope. At this point we reach the supreme irony of how ideology functions today. It appears precisely as its opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias. The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future, nobody believes in that, but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how the world really is, accompanied by a warning that if you want to change it too much, only a totalitarian horror can ensue. Every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology. Alain Badiou put it in a wonderful and precise way: the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance, that is the job of repressive state apparatuses, but to crush hope, to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which is something like Gulag. So I think you should be very careful. Again, true ideologists today are not visionaries, a new order, but are this type of resigned cynics, which immediately agree with you if you say things don't function, they are corrupted, we have dangers. Then they say, "But is there any chance? Why resist? If all big plans can make things only worse," and so on and so on. And I find such a stance catastrophic. Why? Yes, there were mega problems with all attempts in the 20th century to radically change our societies. Communism ended up, the communist project the way we had it in 20th century, very badly. But I claim problems remain here. There is no future for us without some kind of radical change. Now you will say, "Okay, I'm crazy." All I can say is, "Okay, maybe I'm crazy, but I'm not alone." A well-known not even leftist, conservative liberal, Peter Sloterdijk, you know him, is here with me. I was nicely surprised reading Sloterdijk's last book, or it's no longer the last, one before the last, *Was geschah im Jahrhundert?* (What happened in the 20th century?), where Sloterdijk proposes his vision of what is to be done in 21st century, best encapsulated by the titles of the first two essays in the book. The first chapter is on the Anthropocene and the second, a wonderful title, "From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures". What does Sloterdijk mean? Anthropocene designates a new epoch in the life of our planet, as we all know, in which we humans cannot any longer rely on the Earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of our productive activity. We cannot any longer afford to ignore the side effects or collateral damage of our productivity. These side effects cannot any longer be reduced to the background of the figure of humanity. We have to accept that we live on the so-called Spaceship Earth, responsible, accountable for its conditions. So Earth is no longer the impenetrable, vast, inexhaustible background or horizon of our productive activity. It emerges as another finite object which we can inadvertently destroy or transform it to make it unlivable. This means that, and this is a nice paradox, at the very moment when we become powerful enough to affect the most basic conditions of our life, we have to accept that we are just another species on a small planet. So a new way to relate to our environment is necessary once we realize this. No longer this traditional humanist image of a heroic worker expressing his, her, their creative potentials and drawing from the inexhaustible resources of our environment, but a much more modest agent collaborating with his, her, their environment, permanently negotiating a tolerable level of safety and stability. Is the very model of ignoring this collateral damage not capitalism? What matters in capitalist reproduction is the self-enhancing circulation focused on profit and the collateral damage done to the environment is not included by definition into the costs of production. Even the attempts to take it into account, collateral damage, through taxation or whatever, cannot but misfire. There are, incidentally, you should study them, some I think totally crazy proposals to solve this with taxation. So for example, already when I was young in the 70s, some radical feminists claimed that women should get reimbursed for their unpaid work of taking care of children, cooking, maintaining home, and so on. That this should somehow we should calculate how much this is worth and every woman who does this should be given some additional salary. Or there are today similar attempts to simply calculate, it's crazy, the price of earth, of air, of water in absolute terms and then include it into the price. You know why this doesn't work? Because it amounts to a crazy ideal of total commodification. It wants to fight to fight capitalism, but the result would have been radical commodification where everything is presented as a commodity. Women's work, earth, water, whatever, whatever. It cannot but malfunction. So for Sloterdijk, in order to establish this new mode of relating to our environment, a radical politico-economic change is necessary, what Sloterdijk calls the domestication of the wild animal culture. His point is that till now, each culture disciplined or educated its members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power. But the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice. As Hegel conceptualized this, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one's life for one's nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relation between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. I think it's quite a consequence realization by Sloterdijk that the more a state is civilized in the modern sense, the more the highest ideal is to sacrifice your life in a state of war. You know, this is the old Hegel's Hegelian idea that in our everyday life we live in a relatively corrupted utilitarian, in a relatively corrupted utilitarian way. You take care of your interest, love interest, you try to earn money, whatever. But that's just a corrupted pragmatic life. From time to time, that's why for Hegel wars are necessary. From time to time you need to be reminded that you are more than an animal in search of pleasures, even if they are sublime pleasures. You need to be reminded of your highest duty, fidelity to your community, which can only happen through war, through risking your life. And as Sloterdijk says it clearly, we have to move over this. This type of logic: state power, the highest ethical act, sacrificing your life and so on. The time of this solution is over. Now, this is easy, it's easy to say this but difficult to do it. Because when it comes to "But how to do this?", and although Sloterdijk would have killed me if I were to tell him this, what he is implicitly proposing is something that I cannot but call communism. Somehow to get over the nation-state and to break out of capitalist logic of surplus of ever-expanding profit-seeking and so on and so on. It's a problem how to do it. Now you will say, but then why even try to do it? Why not simply say let's live in our world which is what it is, it's not so bad, and so on. I think it doesn't work. The crisis is coming. I agree here with Sloterdijk. Ecological crisis, refugees, political crisis, and so on and so on. The era of state, nation-states as the supreme power and implicitly ethical agency, it's over. We have to make a next step. And if not, well, in a very popular way, the German sociologist-economist, I hope he is read also here, Wolfgang Streeck, proposed a wonderful simple theory. Namely, that capitalism is already dying, changing into something else. In a very convincing way, I will not bore you with it, he demonstrates this. But he adds something which unfortunately I claim it's deeply true. From our Marxist-progressive, at least traditional Marxist standpoint, we always presuppose that the end of capitalism means that some higher, more organized force will replace it. And he says, no, what we get today is a much more pessimist prospect of capitalism just disintegrating gradually into local conflicts, lower productivity, whatever, chaos, and so on. But without prospect, any clear prospect of a new emancipatory agent replacing it with a higher level of collaboration and so on and so on. It's not things are falling apart because something new is emerging. It's not the snake is casting off the old skin because beneath it it's a new, more healthy skin. No, it's just the old is rotting away without any clear way how the new can emerge. So what provides such a force to capitalism? I don't have time to develop it. I think Jan, my friend, told me that he was here, my Slovene colleague. I don't fully agree with him, but he has many good points. Samo Tomšič, in his book on Marx and Lacan, he insists on Lacan he tries to deploy systematically out of fragments of different fragments in Lacan's work, something like Lacanian reading of critique of political economy. And his basic point is a strict parallel between what Marx calls *Mehrwert*, surplus value, and between what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrgenuss*, surplus enjoyment. In other words, capitalism is something unique. It's not just one among the modes of production. It is what already Marx suspected: a mode of production in which some fundamental feature of the entire human civilization, precisely this logic of excess, always more, which was in a latent way always here but oppressed, rendered invisible by false stability, openly explodes. This is the moment of truth in those stupid theories that capitalism is a natural system. I'm simply saying the same as Marx when he says about labor, that universal labor appears as such, as everyday experience, only with capitalism. So what is this logic of surplus? Let me, to explain it, refer to a scene from a Hitchcock film, but a scene which Hitchcock never shot. And he was right not to do it, because it would be too direct, a little bit vulgar. Namely, in his conversations with François Truffaut, Hitchcock recalls a scene that he wanted to insert into his classic movie *North by Northwest*. Here is his description of the scene. Listen carefully. "I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant, who's the main role in the film, and one of the factory workers at the Ford automobile plant as they walk along the assembly line. Behind them, a car is being assembled piece by piece. You see everything, all components which go into a car. Finally, the car they have seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete with gas and oil, ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' One of them opens the door of the car and out drops a corpse." So, you see the point. Car was just Where did the corpse come from? I think this is what Lacan calls Object small a, the surplus object. It comes from nowhere and it's nice that don't forget if you are good Marxists that Hitchcock describes here precisely the production process. And I think this corpse is somehow the surplus value, the surplus produced here. And so this, again, would have been what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, a surplus which is totally non-substantial but comes by. And there are many paradoxes to account for this. For example, I use this, so I can repeat it here, I quote just in one of my books, a slightly obscene accident that happened to me. Once, I will not say in which country, it would be too obscene, I talked with an elder lady and, my god, it's so shameful to say this, we were kind of flirting. And probably she wanted, she had some evil intentions with me. So she told me that her last she was in her middle age but beautiful. And she told me that her last lover when he saw her naked told her that, except for one or two kilos too much, her body is perfect. And I immediately told her, just don't try to lose that one or two kilos. Because, you know, this would be maybe the best example of what Lacan calls surplus enjoyment. Look, you appear as if you have one or two kilos too much, but this ideal of beauty My god, how nice she would have been without that one or two kilos too much is strictly a retroactive effect of those one or two kilos too much. You see the point? If you take one or two kilos too much away, you don't get a perfect body, you get an ordinary body. Because the perfection is precisely a retroactive an retroactive effect of that very surplus which appears to destroy it. And this is how you should find in many movies, stories, and in real life this, let's call it function, function of Object a. And the same goes for Lacan generally for libidinal economy. Another story, which I hope you don't know it, I quote it a couple of times in my book, of the this function of the excess Object a. My friend, the British Lacanian, okay half-Lacanian, half-Kleinian, if we go into this dogmatic theological factional struggles, Darian Leader told me a wonderful story how once a patient of his told him a strange slip of tongue that he, the patient, made. He took a lady to a hotel restaurant, first to have dinner and then of course with the evil intention to take her up to a room to a bed and so on. So what happened is that when the they entered the restaurant, he made a stupid slip of tongue. Instead of a table for two, he said to the waiter, "A bed for two please in the room." Now comes the genius of Darian Leader. His reading of this was not the usual Freudian vulgar one: "Yeah, yeah, eating was just a pretext, he was already in his mind with later," but exactly the opposite. He was afraid to enjoy eating there too much and that this will then, you know, ruin even his ability to perform properly sexually afterwards. So it was a kind of ethical reminder to himself: don't enjoy eating here too much, don't forget your true duty is up there later. You see here this food, eating there, was Object a. It was that surplus, but it should just remain a surplus. If it is elevated too much into a self-goal, it's a catastrophe. In this sense, already Freud proposed a wonderful concept, I think it's close to Lacan's *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment, of *Lustgewinn*, gain of pleasure. How when you do something, you should never forget that the true enjoyment comes not from the pleasure of achieving your goal, but from the very process of approaching your goal and so on and so on. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a very sad first political example no political, sorry, everyday example from a friend of mine in United States. He told me that recently in the evening he went to Walmart, that big supermarkets, to buy something. And he noticed it was the evening close to closing time. Near the exit there were many those shopping carts full of stuff, commodities, but somebody abandoned them there. Why? He asked a salesperson there. And the salesperson told him gave him a simple explanation. People who once had enough money to do regular shopping can no longer afford it. But the ritual means to them so much that regularly families come to Walmart store and imitate the form of shopping. Fill things in, enjoy it, and then at the end they just leave the stuff there and go out. This is a nice example of how they get enjoyment, surplus enjoyment, but without the pleasure. The pleasure is the stupid pleasure of objects you buy, but the real pleasure is, of course, the very procedure. Or let me give you the most terrifying example of this surplus enjoyment. You should watch it, it's terrifying but such a supreme example of what Lacan meant by surplus enjoyment. Joseph Goebbels, you know, in '43 after Stalingrad defeat of Germany, his famous speech in Berlin called the Total War, *Totaler Krieg* speech. Why is this speech so interesting? You should listen to the words. Germans were shocked by the Stalingrad defeat. And Goebbels did a wonderful thing, wonderful in a terrifying sense, it would have been much better for him not to succeed so much. He decided, against the stupid opposition of many high-ranking Nazi people, not to downplay the catastrophe, but to emphasize it even more, to paint it in the darkest way. Let me tell you a quote Let me read you a quote. "I ask you, are you, the German nation, resolved to work ten, twelve, and if need be fourteen, sixteen hours a day if the Führer should command it and to give all, your all for victory? I ask you, do you want total war? Do you want it, if need be, even more total and radical than we are capable of imagining it today? I ask you, is your confidence in the Führer more passionate, more unshakable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him on all his path and to do whatever is necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, absolute and unlimited?" And so on and so on. I will not quote it all, but the the basic paradox is this one: what Goebbels famous twenty or how much questions to the public, which are of course all answered with a resolute "Yes, we are ready", there is no positive promise in them. It's simply he is asking them: "Do you want to suffer more? You ain't seen nothing yet of suffering. Do you want to suffer more? Do you want to suffer to such an extent that you cannot even imagine how you will suffer?" That's pleasure, surplus pleasure, as opposed sorry, surplus enjoyment, as opposed to as opposed to pleasure. And it's extremely interesting to to observe closely Goebbels speech because sorry, his face during his speech, because when he gets into this full enthusiasm, "Do you want more suffering?" and so on, his resolute fanatical face changes into a weird sort of passive pleasure. Like as if he is overwhelmed by some excessive pleasure. My last example where I find also this type of surplus pleasure. This example I warn you is much more problematic: the way we today treat refugees. The politically correct logic often mobilizes the mechanism of what one can call delegated sensitivity. Its line of argumentation is often, "I'm tough enough. I'm not hurt by sexist and racist hate speech or by making fun of the minorities. But I'm speaking for all those who may be hurt by it." The point of reference are thus the presupposed naive others, those who need protection because they may miss the irony or cannot stand attacks. It's as if I delegate the passive experience of a hurt sensitivity onto a naive other, thereby enacting the other's infantilization. That's why we should ask ourselves if political correctness is really something that belongs to the left. Is it not a strategy of defense against radical leftist demands, a way to neutralize antagonisms instead of openly openly confronting them? Many of the oppressed feel clearly how the politically correct strategy often just adds insult to injury. While oppression remains, they, the oppressed, now even have to be grateful for how liberals try to protect them. Which is why, I don't want to lose too much time, but which is why I claim that I find suspicious this ritualistic contemporary left-liberal self-flagellation. You know, we Europeans are guilty. We are the worst you can imagine. We are guilty for everything bad that happens in the third world. It must be a consequence of our of our neo-colonial destructive impact or whatever. Like, isn't it clear how behind this apparent self-humiliation, in an inverted way, we still assert ourselves as masters. We like to be masters who show our open heart, "Oh yes, let's let's receive refugees" and so on and so on, and treat refugees as a humanitarian problem instead of treating it as a central geopolitical and economic point. It's much deeper trauma of our times. It's much easier to talk about "We need more refugees, we should open ourselves to it" to "Let's finally focus on what causes these refugees, of our economic acts, of our economic neo-colonialism." Are we aware with all the humanitarian talk what is happening now in Africa? What kind of brutal neo-colonial exploitation Africa is submitted to? Are we aware that all this Middle East crisis, Iraq, Syria, was caused basically by Western by crazy Western interventions there, and so on and so on. So my god, let's start to deal with real problems. And let's, if you allow me slowly the conclusion, let's confront these problems in an open direct way, not being afraid to hurt anyone. What do I mean by this? The big problem of today of the left, especially when we witness the, let's call it contact mixture mixture of different so-called ways of life is, how to relate universal struggle for emancipation to the plurality of ways of life? Some people, I'm well aware, are even suspicious of the very notion of way of life. Like, if it doesn't relate to marginal minorities, isn't it almost a proto-fascist poison? Like, "What right do we have to speak of our way of life?" and so on and so on. But I think we should precisely to openly confront problems. What problems? It's not what I'm sometimes accused of: that I privilege European way of life to be protected from barbarian others and so on and so on. I just claim this: there is a the preferred vision today is that of a united global world with all particulars way of life thriving. Like, we some of us are from Africa, some from here, Latin America, Asia, ah why shouldn't each ethnic or religious cultural group be allowed its way of life? And not as something that threatens our identity but something that contributes to a plural rich world and so on. It is only when we in Europe, the majority, oppress the others, don't allow them to assert their identity, that they turn violent, that they withdraw into fundamentalism and so on. A, I find and we are not exempt from it, I find a problem with this vision. It's a false vision, this happy coexistence of the ways of life. Why? The first thing that psychoanalysis teaches us is that the core of a way of life, of what constitutes a specific way of life, is not simply cultural features, you know, religion, customs and so on. But precisely and we are back at Lacan what Lacan called *jouissance*. *Jouissance*, excessive enjoyment as a way to organize a social life. In Lacanian meaning of this term, *le réel*, the real. The core of a way of life is *le réel*, the real. And this way of life in its dimension of the real is materialized specifically at two levels: relations of authority and sexual relations. So it's easy, I notice this whenever I debated with leftists who accused me of racism whatever, about what do you mean by different ways of life coexisting. They all enumerated features which are all the easy ones. They should be allowed their language, their poetry, their songs, their cuisine, whatever. Yeah, yeah, but what about what? What about this? Let me give you an example and again the same holds for us but let me give you an extreme example. Some fifteen years ago and just for mentioning this example I was almost physically attacked once in England. Some fifteen years ago, a girl from Roma, Roma, the old-fashioned racist name Gypsy, a Roma community in Slovenia, twelve years old girl, escaped from her family because her father planned to marry her to his best friend in advance, arranged marriage. And she took refuge to some Slovene I don't know, healthcare center or or police, doesn't matter. Then an interesting thing happened. Representative of the Roma community said, "Wait a minute, do you respect our way of life or not? Sorry, arranged marriages are a central feature of our way of life. If you take this away from us, we may remain as doing some stupid folkloric songs and spicy cuisine whatever, but as a community we disappear." And it's the same with relations of authority. For example in India, caste system is still is to a large degree a central component of their way of life. Which is why even some of their post-colonial theorists don't want to renounce it. They just claim we have to accommodate it to today's life. But for example, when one mentioned I mentioned there, what about egalitarianism? I was immediately attacked for brutally enforcing on India imperialist Western notions or whatever. So my point is this one, that this complex of how you regulate pleasures in the same way as in bureaucracy, the pleasure of bureaucracy as we all know is not to solve problems, it's to use problems as a justification to reproduce itself indefinitely. It's the same with all these marriage regulations. The very marriage negotiation, subordination of women or whatever, is what elevates a simple biological pleasure into social *jouissance*, enjoyment. And I claim when we talk about the way the difficulty to integrate others into our way of life, it's not simply a question do they want to be integrated, are we really open to them? From their standpoint, I totally agree them, it's false already to speak about integration because to integrate means you become part of us and they are quite right to say, "Why should we become part of you?" But the problem is this one, that they feel very well, refugees, those who have problems with it, and they are right that we want to deprive them of their the real of their ethnic way of life. And again, this is a problem. In what sense? Let me give you an extreme example, which is so extreme that I like it, but it's from Mexico this time. I read in the news, the theological implications of what I will tell you now are wonderful, although terrifying. That in some small Mexican city three rich guys in their early 20s, students, brutally raped a young girl. One of them, the richest of course, he had the best lawyer, was pardoned by the judge. Now comes the horror. He was pardoned not because his lawyer tried through some sophisticated tricks to dispute any facts, no, facts were without any doubt. He admitted he in a vulgar brutal way squeezed the girl's breasts, he penetrated her with his fingers, her vagina and so on. But it's madness. Check it up, you still find this story on the web if you don't believe me, with names, everything. The defense claimed, and the judge confirmed it, that he did this without a carnal intent. He didn't sexually enjoy it, which is why he is not guilty. And he was pardoned. Now, if you excuse me but for my common sense Okay, it's very problematic what I will say but I mean it in the best pro-feminist way. Let's say if I were to rape a woman in some kind of half-sexual craving madness, it's still unexcusable. But it's, I claim, maybe one millimeter better than to rape her without any passion. Because that would be pure evil then. You know, my god, why did I do it if I even don't have the excuse of passion and so on. It's pure evil: I wanted to hurt her, suffer, humiliate and so on. So why then did the judge propose this strange solution? My idea is that the theological background, the judge's implication was that only if you enjoy it you are guilty. That was simply the underlying premise, deeply theological Christian of the judge: if you enjoy it sexually you are guilty. And the logical reversal: if you don't enjoy it, if you didn't enjoy it, you cannot be guilty. The interesting point here is that I think that we should bring this reasoning to the end. Not only if you enjoy it you are guilty, but you only enjoy it if you are guilty. I claim that and that's every what every Protestant knows. You know what's the logic. You are here on the limit. In Catholicism you can do whatever you want just if you confess it at the end of the week, no? In Protestantism as they say, you can also do whatever you want, just it's good that you feel guilty a little bit what you are doing it. You see this guilt is again a surplus enjoyment. Enjoyment of sex without guilt is just a vulgar enjoyment, but feeling guilty gives this additional twist: it's something transgressive, heroic, whatever and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that it's at this level that integration or however you call it it's difficult. Why? Ah, now I come to a more, at least a little bit, philosophical concluding point. Because I think that this vision of each of us its own, his, her, their way of life, we all contribute to one humanity, is wrong. What gets lost is universality. Universality is not something above our particular features, like we are all humanity, but, to be cynical, traditional Europe contributed to universality by patriarchal marriage, others contributed to universality by clitoridectomy or whatever, or whatever. Universality, I think that's the lesson of modernity in a good sense, universality is something that traversed, split from within every particular identity. That's why I oppose this pseudo-universalist ideas that we have local communities, Western and Eastern whatever, which are then disturbed by this bad horror of Western individualist universality whatever. It is true, of course, I'm well aware of the destructive aspects of Western universality of human rights which are not truly universal human rights and so on. But what I want to say is something else which is crucial. First, I dispute that something as authentic local pre-modern ways of life exists at all. I'm not saying they don't exist at all. I'm saying that, by Marxist dogma, every particular way of life is already cut by its own antagonism, class struggle, struggle for liberation, whatever you call it, emancipatory struggle is at work in all of them. And my second point: the way to criticize Western cultural imperialism should not be only to see it as the bad universality destroying local ways of life, but on the contrary sometimes even supporting them, manipulating with them. Let me give you a wonderful example that I experienced first-hand when I was in India. I learned there some strange things. Do you know that their caste system was already disintegrating in the century, I think it was 18th century, before British colonization of India. It was disintegrating. Their the main book, the mega bible of caste system, the so-called Laws, legal system of Manu, some stupid divinity whatever, was half forgotten. Then when the British took over India, they made a simple intelligent discovery: that it's much better for them to efficiently colonize India to maintain and even support, sustain, support the traditional caste system. Because in this way again, easier to keep them under control. The idea was that if we allow too fast modernization of India, they will get proletarians with their modern demands and so on and so on. So better to keep them in their traditional identity. And literally, in 19th century, they reprinted, propagated Laws of Manu and 19th century, the very time of British colonization of India, was a time of the revival of caste system. All intelligent colonizers were doing this. That is to say, not imposing simple Western universality. Which is why India is a wonderful case: all colonizers, big British administrators, the more they were brutal in economic exploitation of India, the more they admired the incredible spiritual depth of Indian wisdom or whatever. I mean it's wonderful to read the text of their colonizers: like, I met a simple peasant, there was more wisdom in his simple prayer than all our corrupted Western technology and so on and so on. And it's the same all around, I claim. It's the same, for example, on the West Bank, from what I know. Do you know that you do have on the West Bank some honor killings? And what we don't read in our media is how there is at least among Palestinians on the West Bank a vast social movement, young people. Tamer Nafar who has a great Palestinian rapper singer, a rock band and so on, protest against them. But strangely, Israeli occupying force don't if possible prosecute at all honor killings, because they know it's much better for Israeli neo-colonialist aims of the West Bank to keep Palestinians in their traditional mode of life. Although they complain, Palestinians are primitive and so on, their entire strategy is to do this. Or I can give you, I don't know how many other examples, to go back to my Slovene Gypsy girl example. The father said, "You are threatening our way of life." Okay, I ask you brutally, what would you have done? Whose side would you take? I'm not saying even you should be a Western liberal, I'm just saying admit the problem. And my formula is not: we in the West have the solution, it's our universal rights and so on. I'm the first to admit that there is a cultural bias on our universal rights. You know the story: they privilege a certain type of social life with individualism and so on against solidarity and so on and so on. I'm just saying the right path to do is not to oppose our universal values to particular ways of life and then to choose either more authentic particular ways of life of our empty universality, but to connect our struggle here for women's rights, gay rights, economic struggle, whatever, with their struggles. That's the only option for me. To renounce this myth of automatic authenticity of local ways of life. Let me give you, before I really conclude and believe me or not I will conclude at some point, let me give you a disgusting terrifying example from Tibet. This example was giving to me by a Tibetan himself who is otherwise brutally critical of Chinese occupation, colonization, whatever of Tibet. Do you know that till '49 or even '59 because till '59 Chinese authorities left in Tibet more or less to itself the traditional Tibetan way of life, they really intervened brutally only after '59, which is why then Dalai Lama escaped to India, you know the story. But the point is this one. Do you know that till '59 Tibet being a mountainous country, many narrow paths, there is was there a certain rule. When they walk in the opposite way on a narrow mountain path, two people who are not on of the same social status, let's say a poor farmer and a Buddhist lama monk whatever, it was strictly ritualized. The poor guy, ordinary farmer, not only should step away, withdraw, to leave to the other the free path, but even perform a certain gesture I was given a photo of it which is really ritualized disgusting self-humiliation. You should somehow lean down, look with your eyes up, and stick your tongue out. Like to enact your pure worthless stupidity. And then the Chinese prohibited it in '59 and of course the local lamas and so on says, "Brutal intrusion into our way of life" and so on and so on. My point is my rule would have been: the moment you have some local resistance to this, and it was, the tragedy of Tibet is that it wasn't a paradise before '49. It was the most brutal feudal system that you can imagine. You see, my point is not we should destroy them. My point is we have a struggle, they have a struggle, connect these struggles. It can be done. It's the only way, without our arrogance and so on and so on. In other words, I believe in universality. I think the greatest catastrophe today is that even some leftists, those who were in United Kingdom pro-Brexit and so on, believe that, since European Union is just the voice of international, sorry, instrument of international global capital, the only way to protect workers' rights is a stronger nation-state and so on and so on. I totally reject this strategy. I think that the only first capitalism no longer works like that, as I already mentioned with the example of Erdoğan, Russia, China. Today's capitalism is more and more from Trump to Erdoğan to Putin to China to India, global neoliberal capitalism, but politically supplemented by a strong autarkic local tradition. Erdoğan Muslim, Modi Hindu, Chinese their Confucian stuff and so on. So what I'm saying is that we should do what, for example, my authentic hero Malcolm X and I I did read his work. Malcolm X for me is not only Denzel Washington in the film. He is for me a model, a true genius politically. You know why? You know why did he keep this name, Malcolm X? X, of course, is the sign for lost roots. X means: through enslavement we lost our African roots. We don't have a proper family, it's X. But his genius was that he saw in this a unique chance of liberation. X means: we are potentially more universal than Europeans. We have a unique chance of developing a new universality and paradoxically one can understand why he found this universality in Islam. Okay, I don't agree him in this, but this basic gesture, to see in what appears as the ultimate catastrophe: "My god, we are deprived of our roots", a unique chance of new freedom. His solution is not the solution of those nostalgic Alex Haley *Roots* and so on stories where, oh you look for your roots in Africa, you find a tribe where your ancestors were taken from, you found your roots. No, forget your roots! Open yourself even more brutally to universality. I think this is the only solution. It has to be a global solution of new, reinvented universality. That's why I'm so suspicious of all those who praise so-called indigenism. You know, like, "Bad global capitalism, but look for local traditions to resist it." Listen, these local traditions can usually be perfectly integrated into global capitalism. Global capitalism is by definition multicultural. It needs as many as possible different cultural identities to to thrive. The only way to fight global capitalism is with new ideological political emancipatory universality. What this practically means Well, maybe another talk. Thanks very much for your patience. Okay, now we decided with the organizers that before we go with the lady into a philosophical debate, although this is not true but we will pretend that we are in a half democracy, so you will be allowed some questions. Thank you very much. Yes, I would like to pick up your point about self-flagellation and especially the persona Slavoj Žižek, the figure Slavoj Žižek that we all know from the YouTube movies. I often have the feeling that left intellectuals use this figure to do some self-flagellation and to produce some *jouissance* for themselves. What they do not do is produce a participatory democracy where they try to integrate as as many citizens as possible in solving real actual problems. And I am wondering whether you sometimes think about the discourse you produce about the easy messages you sometimes bring in those YouTube movies, how how they are used as as this self-flagellation for the left intellectual, and if you sometimes reflect on yourself and your role in this way? Okay, you're aware more than me probably that to answer properly this question it's not a matter of five minutes and so on. But I would have said that no, my position is here, I am well aware of it, very radical. I think and I openly say it, although it sounds crazy, instead of what I call self-flagellation we should proudly defend what is great in European legacy. No wonder that today it's so fashionable to be anti-Eurocentric. They are all united: Trump, Brexit, Putin, Erdoğan, everybody. Why? Because precisely today when Europe when Europe is losing its geopolitical significance, and European legacy of Enlightenment, universal rights, falsified as they were, is under threat. So I'm tired of this, as if our contribution to the world No, let's focus on what Yes, we did in Europe horrible things, but one thing in European legacy I stand for: it's this immense dimension of radical self-criticism. I don't, here comes my arrogance, I don't find this in any other, I'm sorry for this arrogant word, civilization. This radical acceptance that our way of life is contingent and so on and so on. In other words, very problematic I know, but I think that something that emerged with French Revolution, which is equality and so on and so on, is a unique event in world history with a world historical significance. My ultimate proof, if you want, here: look at the first successful slave revolt in Haiti. I think this is a mega event. Why? Because they didn't want to return to their African roots. They wanted, like France, to have a secular republic. And it's a beautiful irony to it. You know, I'm sorry if some of you know it, I repeat this well, you know who you know who was the main ideologist of Haiti revolution? Ideologist is a big word. One of the freed slaves who propagated freedom. It was a man called John Bookman. Of course, the guy who read a book. You know which was this book? Quran. So that you will not accuse me of Islamophobia or whatever. So what I am really saying is that what I really hate is this humanitarianization of problem. Do we have a wide enough heart to accept them all and so on and so on? No! The main problem is how are we Europeans co-responsible for this refugee crisis? Because what is going there, there would have been no war in Syria without investments of foreign powers: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, name them and so on. The same in Libya, the same in Iraq, with. So I think that the only chance is to move out, which doesn't mean we don't help refugees, even more than we did. But if we will not do this move from humanitarian problem, where the problem is only "They are coming, do we have open enough heart or not?", no, "Why are they coming? What can we do in economic change, in geopolitical change," and so on and so on. And we should within this context, I always get in trouble when I ask this, also ask some unpleasant questions. For example, I was in debate about this with Al Jazeera, now I again give you never did I get not even a semblance of a convincing answer: south of the crisis zone you have a couple of very rich Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Emirates. They simply don't accept immigrants. Where is their sense of Umma community and so on? I'm not blaming them because they are supported in this with the West and so on and so on. I know that there are many refugees but where? In the poor Arab countries. So I think that again, I just see red when the problem is posed in this way, "Will we be open enough to integrate them?" We should first change the topic to geopolitical-economic neo-colonialism and point two: openly establish rules with negotiation between the parties and so on and so on, out of this self-guilt and "Are we open enough to integrate them?" Well, I understand them and I agree with them, they maybe they don't want to be integrated. You know the problem is like this stupid examples that I mentioned: the Slovene Roma girl and so on. What what does it mean, coexistence of different culture? Where do we set limits and so on? Or do we set limits? How do we set limits? I'm not saying that we are right a priori, I'm just saying there is a problem in coexistence of lives. And we have the old solution which was the British Empire solution or traditional: give, allow every ethnic, religious group to remain in their way of life. I think this no longer works today. It's a problem, that's all I'm saying, that it is really a problem. And but whenever I mention way of life, I'm usually attacked as a kind of a nützlicher Idiot (useful idiot), how the idiot arguing for Marine Le Pen. But sorry, very briefly now what you mentioned about this self-flagellation and so on and so on. Well, all I can say is I can tell you from my own experience that it's not as simple as that. Listen, let me be a little bit arrogant. You mentioned YouTube, blah blah. But I'm not saying you should, but if you check a little bit my fate in the last years as so-called stupid public intellectual. Just follow how I progressively disappear from the media. Up till two years ago, I was regularly invited to contribute to Guardian. In the last two years I'm prohibited. I'm prohibited from London Review of Books. I'm prohibited from New Statesman. I'm prohibited in United States. Two years ago, Economist from, sorry, Newsweek from time to time published me. You know, all the time I heard how popular I am, the less now I simply don't have a medium to publish in United States and in England. The small exception is Independent published my Macron comment. But again, they got a terrible backlash and now because this usual way, you know, like, if you are critical of Macron, it means you support Marine Le Pen and I'm a neo-fascist and so on and so on. So all I can tell you is is that I'm a pessimist. Okay, I stop. Sorry. You already mentioned in your last sentence that this would not be in the scope of your presentation, your talk, namely how to actually damage global capitalism or influence it in some way. Like, for example, now Trump just tonight arrived in Brussels for the NATO talks and there are huge protest marches. But of course to some extent we all know that this will not really impact anything. And I'm wondering, for example, how the more traditional modes of resistance like the labor unions and strike movements and such. For example, when Macron became president there was an immediate, I forgot the location, but there was a factory that was immediately occupied and they were threatening with sabotaging and and destroying everything. For example in this way in some way the global capitalist system is in some way impacted. And when you talk about the sort of global eco-communism or eco-socialism that is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change and and some such things, do you see a positive role for those more traditional but sort of neglected things like labor unions and strikes, or is that? I do, but we have to rethink this all. I will try to be as short as possible. Look, the problem with me is this one. You know some of my friends have this idea, very simplified one: refugees are the new proletariat, they call it nomadic proletariat, and they can revitalize the European left. I find this an extremely racist position. I call it outsourcing revolutionary class. Like, you know, we have good revolutionary theory but nobody wants to do it here. Perfect, we import the revolutionary class and so on. It will not work. You know who is really my reference here: the German guy that I mentioned, he is now also popular in England, Wolfgang Streeck. Who says that, you know what's the problem? For Marx, the construction of revolutionary class worked when you have majority working class which produces wealth, is exploited, and so on and so on. Today, isn't it that to be in the traditional Marxist sense a proletarian, which means a permanent job in a factory or in a state organization... Okay, you are exploited, but you are permanently employed. It's almost a privileged position. We have most of the refugees, their secret longing is just to become probably a normal European proletarian, you know. They cannot. We have precarious workers. We have permanently unemployed. Other forms of excluded. And it's not clear to me, here I agree with the point of your question, it's a great problem. Marx saw clearly this proletarianization of society, how out of this confusion united emancipatory agent will emerge. I don't see in the near future how this could happen. So all I propose is a kind of a not utopian but very pragmatic approach. On the one hand, yes, I agree, all that we can do: workers' protections, trade unions, and so on and so on. On the other hand, for example, on the other hand everything like, sorry it's my eternal example, what Obama did in the United States, even with for him I have a certain sympathy. Okay, we have it, but they didn't have it, and now it's cancelled: healthcare reform. This was a revolutionary idea for the United States and so on. So what we should do is choose well these particular points which may appear relatively modest. Like, what is revolutionary about universal healthcare? But nonetheless, in United States this was almost a shock, and so on and so on. In Europe, I would say, but obviously I'm too utopian, some kind of why can't European modest labor parties, trade unions, get together? I know the attack will automatically be "This diminishes our competitiveness", but I think it's bluff, it's not necessary. Some minimal workers' protection in Europe, and this is my argument against Brexit. It's very interesting, a British friend of mine provided me with a list of conflicts in the last twenty years between United Kingdom government and Brussels bureaucracy. Almost all the time I'm on the side of Brussels bureaucracy. For example, Brussels bureaucracy
Thank you very much. I am glad to be here, I am honored to be here. I'm just afraid I don't know what to expect from you or what do you expect from me. I hope you will not find the talk too boring because I wanted at least vaguely to really talk about what the title announces: populism. So I will at least begin in this vein and then we will jump from here to there and so on. So I will now first recapitulate some old stuff, namely, I still in spite of today's popularity, even leftists speak about populism as the return of the political, of the political antagonism which may give, instill new passion into our into our fossilized democracy. Why I am still opposed to populism as something dangerous? So, what is populism? Garret FitzGerald, the Irish Prime Minister twenty years ago, once turned around the common wisdom. You know as they say, this may be good for theory but it's not good enough for practice. In a debate in Irish Parliament, FitzGerald said about his opponent's proposal, this may be good enough for practice but it is not good enough for theory. This reversal best encapsulates the ambiguous position of populist politics. While it can sometimes be endorsed as part of a short-term pragmatic compromise, one should reject the notion of populism in its fundamental dimension. Why? Populism potentially tends to suspend democratic rules. Democracy, in the way this term is used today, concerns above all formal legalism. Its minimal definition of democracy is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic political game. Democracy means that whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the American presidential elections of you remember when after all the comedy Bush won over Al Gore, were effectively democratic. In spite of obvious electoral manipulations and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple of hundred of Florida votes decided who will be the president, the democratic candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after these elections, Bill Clinton made a nice comment. He said, the American people have spoken, we just don't know what they said. This comment should be taken more seriously than it was meant. Even now we don't know it, and maybe there was no substantial message behind the result of it all. I'm especially suspicious in this new animistic spirit when what the people wanted to say, or today did you notice how in economy we witness a massive return of animism? Markets are an entity which send a message, reacts with fear, and so on and so on. Jacques-Alain Miller, sorry, elaborated how democracy implies the so-called barred Big Other, symbolic substance. However, the Florida example demonstrates that nonetheless in democracy there is a Big Other, the procedural Big Other of electoral rules which should be obeyed whatever the result. And it is this Big Other, this conditional, sorry, unconditional reliance on rules that populism threatens to suspend. Which is why there is in populism always something violent, threatening for the liberal view, an open or latent pressure, a warning that if elections will be manipulated, the will of the people will have to find another way to impose itself. So even if electoral legitimization of power is respected, it is made clear that elections play a secondary role, that they serve only to confirm a political process whose substantial weight lies elsewhere. This is what gives, let's call it the thrill, to populist regimes. In them, democratic rules are never fully endorsed. There is always an uncertainty that pertains to them. A possibility always looms that these rules will be redefined, unfairly changed in the middle of the game or whatever. This aspect of populism should be, I think, fully endorsed. The problem is not this undemocratic dimension of populism, but it's populist relying on the substantial notion of the people. In populism there is a Big Other, a substantial place of truth. It's the people as the substantial agent legitimizing power. Today's populism is different from the traditional version. What distinguishes it is the opponent against which it mobilizes the people. Today we witness as we all know the rise of so-called post-politics, the growing reduction of politics proper to rational administration of conflicting interests interests. In the highly developed countries of the United States and Western Europe, populism is emerging as the inherent shadowy double of the institutionalized post-politics, as the arena in which political demands that do not fit the institutionalized space can be articulated. In this sense, there is a constitutive mystification that pertains to populism. Its basic gesture is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete enemy figure, Brussels bureaucracy, illegal immigrants, or whatsoever. So let me here quote Ernesto Laclau who developed a theory of populism. I don't agree with him, but he made one precise, correct point about British Chartism from 1840s as a form of populism. I quote Laclau, its dominant leitmotif is to situate the evils of society not in something that is inherent in the economic system but quite the opposite, in the abuse of power by parasitic and speculative groups which have control who which control political power, old corruption and so on. It was for this reason that the feature most strongly picked out in the ruling class by populists was its idleness and parasitism. End of quote. In other words, for a populist, the cause of our troubles is ultimately never the system as such, but the intruder who corrupts it. Financial manipulators, not capitalists as such, and so on. It's never a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such, but an element that doesn't play its role within the structure properly. For a Marxist on the contrary, or for a Freudian, the pathological deviating misbehavior of some element, crisis and so on, is the symptom of the normal. It is an indicator of what is wrong in the very structure. That's why what characterizes populism is always a pseudo-concrete figure which is selected as the enemy, the singular agent behind all that poses a threat to the people. For example, the pseudo-concrete populist figure of the Jew that condenses the vast multitude of anonymous forces that determine us. Jew as the enemy emerges from outside the social demands that experience themselves as frustrated. And I think today with the rise of new right-wing populism, this game of oversimplification, of pseudo-concrete figure of an enemy is reaching absurd extremes. You should follow the latest rumors, which are no longer rumors in some countries, like most of the post-communist East European countries, they are now, it's horrible, part of the public discourse. And I try to reconstruct this theory. It's the following one, I'm not kidding, it's in public, that the first premise is that there was a Holocaust, but it was organized by Jews themselves. Jews wanted to destroy Western Europe and they know that Germany is the strongest backbone of it. French are decadent, British are utilitarian, Germany is the threat. So they sacrificed millions of themselves to break morally Germany. So that Germany feels guilty for Holocaust and now Germany, Angela Merkel, that's why she invited Muslim immigrants, because she lacks the will to resist. Now then they make a step further. There is no Arab-Israeli conflict. This conflict is just staged for the West. In reality, behind chaotic Muslim refugees there is the figure of the Jew, Soros or another, because Arabs and Jews, Muslim Arabs and Jews share the same goal, to destroy Western Christianity. Now, you know what's so sad, that something like this, which was still my god, till five years ago maybe even something that maybe if you are crazy you speak in in a bar or in the evening with your crazy lunatic friends, is now part of the public discourse. I would worry about that. And I don't have time to develop more of it, but there is another sad aspect here where even some leftists get caught into this game. I developed years ago a notion which is now accepted even by all of my at least Jewish friends, the notion of Zionist anti-Semitism. It's a position which you find, I'm not kidding, already by one of the true monsters of 20th century European history, Reinhard Heydrich, you know, the father of Holocaust and so on, rather executor. He wrote, I don't have it here, I'm sorry, a crazy text in I think '36 or '37, where he said, Jews are in something like this, Jews are incredibly creative, active, dynamic people. We wish them all the best, but not here in Germany. Our conflict is not with Jews as such, but with those Jews who are invisible among us. If the Jews move to Palestine, we will give them economic help. They are wonderful creative people, we cannot wait to develop our ties with them and so on and so on. So Zionism is good if Jews go out, Jews are bad here. You find exactly the same position, you should read him, with Breivik, you know, the Norwegian guy. He said we should absolutely support Israel there, it's a wall protecting Europe from Muslim barbarians and so on, but here we have too many Jews, not here. What the sad thing that is happening now is that a similar logic is developing a propos Islam. In a homologous way, we find pro-Muslim Islamophobia with the same logic. Muslims are bad if they're here, but there we should support them, even if they're authoritarian, all the better, they will organize their lives and protect. This is why, even if they formally protested, most of the Western powers, especially the bad guys from Trump onwards, immediately, sincerely congratulated Erdoğan in winning that referendum or whatever for the extension of his authoritarian power. Again, it's the same logic. We don't want refugees here, they disturb European order, but there let them even support them, organize their order and that's the horror that is emerging today. A new obscene multiculturalism. Like, we have universality of the market, but this universality is less and less accompanied even by no matter how bourgeois distorted emancipatory universal ideals, equality, freedom, human rights, whatever. It is like Fukuyama combined with Huntington. Not clash of civilization, but peaceful coexistence of different ways of life, of course against the background of global market rule. A typical politician for me today, for example, is Modi, the Prime Minister of India. At the same time radical neoliberal in economy and rather harsh Hindu nationalist in ideology. China is doing the same, Turkey is now doing the same, and in its own way even Trump is doing the same. I think that this tendency is very dangerous. And back to my point, ah yes, I want to tell you another wonderful joke, I repeated it in a couple of times in my books, which encapsulates the best this logic of Zionist anti-Semitism. Die Presse, Austrian daily newspaper, published some twenty years ago a wonderful caricature. You see two Austrians in this almost caricatural way, neo-Nazis, hard drinking beer, and one of them holds in his hands a newspaper and points at it, in a newspaper obviously to an article critical of Israel, and says something like, you see how a perfectly rational anti-Semitism is here misused for an unfair criticism of Israel. So you see, it's the other way around. It's not you pretend just to criticize Israel but you are really anti-Semitic. It's the other way around: anti-Semitism is okay, no Jews here, but don't touch Israel. And the saddest thing is that the government of Israel more and more accepts this game. So, back to populism. The reason I'm opposed to populism is that inherently it's mystifying. Populism is not just popular mobilization against ossified bureaucratic democratic procedures, whatever. It has always this idea, pointed out nicely by that quote from Ernesto Laclau, of a basic popular unity of people and the system, threatened by just a contingent a contingent malfunction, corruption or whatever. Again, it can be international capital, against which of course we can put our bets on our own honest local bourgeoisie. It's the dangerous immigrants or whatever. So I don't have a soft spot, if you ask me, for populism. Why not? Because it's absolutely elementary for me that today the critical point, the ultimate cause of our troubles, is an imbalance or whatever, structural imbalance, antagonism, in global capitalism as such. It's not just a contingent malfunctioning here and there. So, to understand today's populism, the best example of our crisis, which can allow us this understanding, is probably I am tempted to say the weird case of the recent French presidential elections, Macron versus Marine Le Pen. Why? Let me begin with another joke that I like. They are my favorite jokes, the ones from Soviet Union, jokes about Radio Yerevan. You know, this was a legendary, there was a real Radio Yerevan, but the topic of jokes was some mystical Radio Yerevan where viewers asked listeners, sorry, asked questions and Radio Yerevan in this cold bureaucratic way answered always in the same way, "In principle, yes, but..." For example, the latest I've heard, it's a very racist one but I like it, is that, you know do you also have in Academy of Sciences, I think you distinguish regular and corresponding members, no? Regular member is more, full member, corresponding you are not yet there. And the joke is referring to some less developed Soviet Republic. Is it true that that guy from that republic was accepted, made member of their Academy of Sciences? Then a guy says, how can this happen? They asked Radio Yerevan, but how could this have happened when that guy is illiterate? Radio Yerevan answers, "In principle, it's possible because he was not made a corresponding member, but a regular member, and you have to read and write just if you correspond." It's vulgar. But another better joke. A listener asks Radio Yerevan, is it true that Rabinovich, another legendary figure of Soviet jokes, the Jew Rabinovich won a new car on lottery? The radio answers, "In principle, it's true, only it wasn't a new car, but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him." The same goes, I think, for the French presidential elections of We may ask Radio Yerevan, is it true that in a great display of anti-fascist unity, people of France elected an outsider and defeated a fascist threat to Europe? Radio Yerevan answers, "In principle, yes. Only the victorious Macron embodies Europe out of touch with ordinary people, that is to say, the very politics which gave such strength to Le Pen, and Macron is not an outsider but establishment at its purest." Of course Le Pen and Macron are not the same. The difference that separates the two is obvious. But nonetheless, the choice between the two was not the real choice. To see this, it's enough to focus on the background of the two candidates. Marine Le Pen is a racist populist, but she also addresses popular workers' discontent. Macron presents himself as tolerant, human, pro-European, but the economic policy he stands for is the main cause of the popular dissatisfaction with Europe. So the message of Macron's victory is not the fascist threat awakened us, but quite the opposite: the nightmare is over, we can go to sleep again. Macron's victory opens up the, for me at least, terrifying prospect of a future in which the same sterile, stagnant politics will go on in European Union, just every four years we will be mobilized to defeat the fascist threat. And in between we'll be able to sleep in the safe embrace of global capitalism with a human face. The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking. Global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism. And if you try to point out some of Macron's limitations, you are accused of, yes, of complicity with fascism. Since, as we are repeatedly told by big and not so big media, extreme left and extreme right are ultimately the same. They are coming together today, both are anti-Semitic, nationalist, isolationist, anti-globalist, and so on. This is I think the point of the whole operation: to make the left, which means any true alternative, disappear. The woman behind Macron is not his wife, but the proverbial Tina, the stance of there is no alternative. Macron doesn't bring hope, he kills hope. At this point we reach the supreme irony of how ideology functions today. It appears precisely as its opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias. The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future, nobody believes in that, but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how the world really is, accompanied by a warning that if you want to change it too much, only a totalitarian horror can ensue. Every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology. Alain Badiou put it in a wonderful and precise way: the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance, that is the job of repressive state apparatuses, but to crush hope, to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which is something like Gulag. So I think you should be very careful. Again, true ideologists today are not visionaries, a new order, but are this type of resigned cynics, which immediately agree with you if you say things don't function, they are corrupted, we have dangers. Then they say, "But is there any chance? Why resist? If all big plans can make things only worse," and so on and so on. And I find such a stance catastrophic. Why? Yes, there were mega problems with all attempts in the 20th century to radically change our societies. Communism ended up, the communist project the way we had it in 20th century, very badly. But I claim problems remain here. There is no future for us without some kind of radical change. Now you will say, "Okay, I'm crazy." All I can say is, "Okay, maybe I'm crazy, but I'm not alone." A well-known not even leftist, conservative liberal, Peter Sloterdijk, you know him, is here with me. I was nicely surprised reading Sloterdijk's last book, or it's no longer the last, one before the last, *Was geschah im Jahrhundert?* (What happened in the 20th century?), where Sloterdijk proposes his vision of what is to be done in 21st century, best encapsulated by the titles of the first two essays in the book. The first chapter is on the Anthropocene and the second, a wonderful title, "From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures". What does Sloterdijk mean? Anthropocene designates a new epoch in the life of our planet, as we all know, in which we humans cannot any longer rely on the Earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of our productive activity. We cannot any longer afford to ignore the side effects or collateral damage of our productivity. These side effects cannot any longer be reduced to the background of the figure of humanity. We have to accept that we live on the so-called Spaceship Earth, responsible, accountable for its conditions. So Earth is no longer the impenetrable, vast, inexhaustible background or horizon of our productive activity. It emerges as another finite object which we can inadvertently destroy or transform it to make it unlivable. This means that, and this is a nice paradox, at the very moment when we become powerful enough to affect the most basic conditions of our life, we have to accept that we are just another species on a small planet. So a new way to relate to our environment is necessary once we realize this. No longer this traditional humanist image of a heroic worker expressing his, her, their creative potentials and drawing from the inexhaustible resources of our environment, but a much more modest agent collaborating with his, her, their environment, permanently negotiating a tolerable level of safety and stability. Is the very model of ignoring this collateral damage not capitalism? What matters in capitalist reproduction is the self-enhancing circulation focused on profit and the collateral damage done to the environment is not included by definition into the costs of production. Even the attempts to take it into account, collateral damage, through taxation or whatever, cannot but misfire. There are, incidentally, you should study them, some I think totally crazy proposals to solve this with taxation. So for example, already when I was young in the 70s, some radical feminists claimed that women should get reimbursed for their unpaid work of taking care of children, cooking, maintaining home, and so on. That this should somehow we should calculate how much this is worth and every woman who does this should be given some additional salary. Or there are today similar attempts to simply calculate, it's crazy, the price of earth, of air, of water in absolute terms and then include it into the price. You know why this doesn't work? Because it amounts to a crazy ideal of total commodification. It wants to fight to fight capitalism, but the result would have been radical commodification where everything is presented as a commodity. Women's work, earth, water, whatever, whatever. It cannot but malfunction. So for Sloterdijk, in order to establish this new mode of relating to our environment, a radical politico-economic change is necessary, what Sloterdijk calls the domestication of the wild animal culture. His point is that till now, each culture disciplined or educated its members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power. But the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice. As Hegel conceptualized this, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one's life for one's nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relation between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. I think it's quite a consequence realization by Sloterdijk that the more a state is civilized in the modern sense, the more the highest ideal is to sacrifice your life in a state of war. You know, this is the old Hegel's Hegelian idea that in our everyday life we live in a relatively corrupted utilitarian, in a relatively corrupted utilitarian way. You take care of your interest, love interest, you try to earn money, whatever. But that's just a corrupted pragmatic life. From time to time, that's why for Hegel wars are necessary. From time to time you need to be reminded that you are more than an animal in search of pleasures, even if they are sublime pleasures. You need to be reminded of your highest duty, fidelity to your community, which can only happen through war, through risking your life. And as Sloterdijk says it clearly, we have to move over this. This type of logic: state power, the highest ethical act, sacrificing your life and so on. The time of this solution is over. Now, this is easy, it's easy to say this but difficult to do it. Because when it comes to "But how to do this?", and although Sloterdijk would have killed me if I were to tell him this, what he is implicitly proposing is something that I cannot but call communism. Somehow to get over the nation-state and to break out of capitalist logic of surplus of ever-expanding profit-seeking and so on and so on. It's a problem how to do it. Now you will say, but then why even try to do it? Why not simply say let's live in our world which is what it is, it's not so bad, and so on. I think it doesn't work. The crisis is coming. I agree here with Sloterdijk. Ecological crisis, refugees, political crisis, and so on and so on. The era of state, nation-states as the supreme power and implicitly ethical agency, it's over. We have to make a next step. And if not, well, in a very popular way, the German sociologist-economist, I hope he is read also here, Wolfgang Streeck, proposed a wonderful simple theory. Namely, that capitalism is already dying, changing into something else. In a very convincing way, I will not bore you with it, he demonstrates this. But he adds something which unfortunately I claim it's deeply true. From our Marxist-progressive, at least traditional Marxist standpoint, we always presuppose that the end of capitalism means that some higher, more organized force will replace it. And he says, no, what we get today is a much more pessimist prospect of capitalism just disintegrating gradually into local conflicts, lower productivity, whatever, chaos, and so on. But without prospect, any clear prospect of a new emancipatory agent replacing it with a higher level of collaboration and so on and so on. It's not things are falling apart because something new is emerging. It's not the snake is casting off the old skin because beneath it it's a new, more healthy skin. No, it's just the old is rotting away without any clear way how the new can emerge. So what provides such a force to capitalism? I don't have time to develop it. I think Jan, my friend, told me that he was here, my Slovene colleague. I don't fully agree with him, but he has many good points. Samo Tomšič, in his book on Marx and Lacan, he insists on Lacan he tries to deploy systematically out of fragments of different fragments in Lacan's work, something like Lacanian reading of critique of political economy. And his basic point is a strict parallel between what Marx calls *Mehrwert*, surplus value, and between what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrgenuss*, surplus enjoyment. In other words, capitalism is something unique. It's not just one among the modes of production. It is what already Marx suspected: a mode of production in which some fundamental feature of the entire human civilization, precisely this logic of excess, always more, which was in a latent way always here but oppressed, rendered invisible by false stability, openly explodes. This is the moment of truth in those stupid theories that capitalism is a natural system. I'm simply saying the same as Marx when he says about labor, that universal labor appears as such, as everyday experience, only with capitalism. So what is this logic of surplus? Let me, to explain it, refer to a scene from a Hitchcock film, but a scene which Hitchcock never shot. And he was right not to do it, because it would be too direct, a little bit vulgar. Namely, in his conversations with François Truffaut, Hitchcock recalls a scene that he wanted to insert into his classic movie *North by Northwest*. Here is his description of the scene. Listen carefully. "I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant, who's the main role in the film, and one of the factory workers at the Ford automobile plant as they walk along the assembly line. Behind them, a car is being assembled piece by piece. You see everything, all components which go into a car. Finally, the car they have seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete with gas and oil, ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' One of them opens the door of the car and out drops a corpse." So, you see the point. Car was just Where did the corpse come from? I think this is what Lacan calls Object small a, the surplus object. It comes from nowhere and it's nice that don't forget if you are good Marxists that Hitchcock describes here precisely the production process. And I think this corpse is somehow the surplus value, the surplus produced here. And so this, again, would have been what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, a surplus which is totally non-substantial but comes by. And there are many paradoxes to account for this. For example, I use this, so I can repeat it here, I quote just in one of my books, a slightly obscene accident that happened to me. Once, I will not say in which country, it would be too obscene, I talked with an elder lady and, my god, it's so shameful to say this, we were kind of flirting. And probably she wanted, she had some evil intentions with me. So she told me that her last she was in her middle age but beautiful. And she told me that her last lover when he saw her naked told her that, except for one or two kilos too much, her body is perfect. And I immediately told her, just don't try to lose that one or two kilos. Because, you know, this would be maybe the best example of what Lacan calls surplus enjoyment. Look, you appear as if you have one or two kilos too much, but this ideal of beauty My god, how nice she would have been without that one or two kilos too much is strictly a retroactive effect of those one or two kilos too much. You see the point? If you take one or two kilos too much away, you don't get a perfect body, you get an ordinary body. Because the perfection is precisely a retroactive an retroactive effect of that very surplus which appears to destroy it. And this is how you should find in many movies, stories, and in real life this, let's call it function, function of Object a. And the same goes for Lacan generally for libidinal economy. Another story, which I hope you don't know it, I quote it a couple of times in my book, of the this function of the excess Object a. My friend, the British Lacanian, okay half-Lacanian, half-Kleinian, if we go into this dogmatic theological factional struggles, Darian Leader told me a wonderful story how once a patient of his told him a strange slip of tongue that he, the patient, made. He took a lady to a hotel restaurant, first to have dinner and then of course with the evil intention to take her up to a room to a bed and so on. So what happened is that when the they entered the restaurant, he made a stupid slip of tongue. Instead of a table for two, he said to the waiter, "A bed for two please in the room." Now comes the genius of Darian Leader. His reading of this was not the usual Freudian vulgar one: "Yeah, yeah, eating was just a pretext, he was already in his mind with later," but exactly the opposite. He was afraid to enjoy eating there too much and that this will then, you know, ruin even his ability to perform properly sexually afterwards. So it was a kind of ethical reminder to himself: don't enjoy eating here too much, don't forget your true duty is up there later. You see here this food, eating there, was Object a. It was that surplus, but it should just remain a surplus. If it is elevated too much into a self-goal, it's a catastrophe. In this sense, already Freud proposed a wonderful concept, I think it's close to Lacan's *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment, of *Lustgewinn*, gain of pleasure. How when you do something, you should never forget that the true enjoyment comes not from the pleasure of achieving your goal, but from the very process of approaching your goal and so on and so on. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a very sad first political example no political, sorry, everyday example from a friend of mine in United States. He told me that recently in the evening he went to Walmart, that big supermarkets, to buy something. And he noticed it was the evening close to closing time. Near the exit there were many those shopping carts full of stuff, commodities, but somebody abandoned them there. Why? He asked a salesperson there. And the salesperson told him gave him a simple explanation. People who once had enough money to do regular shopping can no longer afford it. But the ritual means to them so much that regularly families come to Walmart store and imitate the form of shopping. Fill things in, enjoy it, and then at the end they just leave the stuff there and go out. This is a nice example of how they get enjoyment, surplus enjoyment, but without the pleasure. The pleasure is the stupid pleasure of objects you buy, but the real pleasure is, of course, the very procedure. Or let me give you the most terrifying example of this surplus enjoyment. You should watch it, it's terrifying but such a supreme example of what Lacan meant by surplus enjoyment. Joseph Goebbels, you know, in '43 after Stalingrad defeat of Germany, his famous speech in Berlin called the Total War, *Totaler Krieg* speech. Why is this speech so interesting? You should listen to the words. Germans were shocked by the Stalingrad defeat. And Goebbels did a wonderful thing, wonderful in a terrifying sense, it would have been much better for him not to succeed so much. He decided, against the stupid opposition of many high-ranking Nazi people, not to downplay the catastrophe, but to emphasize it even more, to paint it in the darkest way. Let me tell you a quote Let me read you a quote. "I ask you, are you, the German nation, resolved to work ten, twelve, and if need be fourteen, sixteen hours a day if the Führer should command it and to give all, your all for victory? I ask you, do you want total war? Do you want it, if need be, even more total and radical than we are capable of imagining it today? I ask you, is your confidence in the Führer more passionate, more unshakable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him on all his path and to do whatever is necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, absolute and unlimited?" And so on and so on. I will not quote it all, but the the basic paradox is this one: what Goebbels famous twenty or how much questions to the public, which are of course all answered with a resolute "Yes, we are ready", there is no positive promise in them. It's simply he is asking them: "Do you want to suffer more? You ain't seen nothing yet of suffering. Do you want to suffer more? Do you want to suffer to such an extent that you cannot even imagine how you will suffer?" That's pleasure, surplus pleasure, as opposed sorry, surplus enjoyment, as opposed to as opposed to pleasure. And it's extremely interesting to to observe closely Goebbels speech because sorry, his face during his speech, because when he gets into this full enthusiasm, "Do you want more suffering?" and so on, his resolute fanatical face changes into a weird sort of passive pleasure. Like as if he is overwhelmed by some excessive pleasure. My last example where I find also this type of surplus pleasure. This example I warn you is much more problematic: the way we today treat refugees. The politically correct logic often mobilizes the mechanism of what one can call delegated sensitivity. Its line of argumentation is often, "I'm tough enough. I'm not hurt by sexist and racist hate speech or by making fun of the minorities. But I'm speaking for all those who may be hurt by it." The point of reference are thus the presupposed naive others, those who need protection because they may miss the irony or cannot stand attacks. It's as if I delegate the passive experience of a hurt sensitivity onto a naive other, thereby enacting the other's infantilization. That's why we should ask ourselves if political correctness is really something that belongs to the left. Is it not a strategy of defense against radical leftist demands, a way to neutralize antagonisms instead of openly openly confronting them? Many of the oppressed feel clearly how the politically correct strategy often just adds insult to injury. While oppression remains, they, the oppressed, now even have to be grateful for how liberals try to protect them. Which is why, I don't want to lose too much time, but which is why I claim that I find suspicious this ritualistic contemporary left-liberal self-flagellation. You know, we Europeans are guilty. We are the worst you can imagine. We are guilty for everything bad that happens in the third world. It must be a consequence of our of our neo-colonial destructive impact or whatever. Like, isn't it clear how behind this apparent self-humiliation, in an inverted way, we still assert ourselves as masters. We like to be masters who show our open heart, "Oh yes, let's let's receive refugees" and so on and so on, and treat refugees as a humanitarian problem instead of treating it as a central geopolitical and economic point. It's much deeper trauma of our times. It's much easier to talk about "We need more refugees, we should open ourselves to it" to "Let's finally focus on what causes these refugees, of our economic acts, of our economic neo-colonialism." Are we aware with all the humanitarian talk what is happening now in Africa? What kind of brutal neo-colonial exploitation Africa is submitted to? Are we aware that all this Middle East crisis, Iraq, Syria, was caused basically by Western by crazy Western interventions there, and so on and so on. So my god, let's start to deal with real problems. And let's, if you allow me slowly the conclusion, let's confront these problems in an open direct way, not being afraid to hurt anyone. What do I mean by this? The big problem of today of the left, especially when we witness the, let's call it contact mixture mixture of different so-called ways of life is, how to relate universal struggle for emancipation to the plurality of ways of life? Some people, I'm well aware, are even suspicious of the very notion of way of life. Like, if it doesn't relate to marginal minorities, isn't it almost a proto-fascist poison? Like, "What right do we have to speak of our way of life?" and so on and so on. But I think we should precisely to openly confront problems. What problems? It's not what I'm sometimes accused of: that I privilege European way of life to be protected from barbarian others and so on and so on. I just claim this: there is a the preferred vision today is that of a united global world with all particulars way of life thriving. Like, we some of us are from Africa, some from here, Latin America, Asia, ah why shouldn't each ethnic or religious cultural group be allowed its way of life? And not as something that threatens our identity but something that contributes to a plural rich world and so on. It is only when we in Europe, the majority, oppress the others, don't allow them to assert their identity, that they turn violent, that they withdraw into fundamentalism and so on. A, I find and we are not exempt from it, I find a problem with this vision. It's a false vision, this happy coexistence of the ways of life. Why? The first thing that psychoanalysis teaches us is that the core of a way of life, of what constitutes a specific way of life, is not simply cultural features, you know, religion, customs and so on. But precisely and we are back at Lacan what Lacan called *jouissance*. *Jouissance*, excessive enjoyment as a way to organize a social life. In Lacanian meaning of this term, *le réel*, the real. The core of a way of life is *le réel*, the real. And this way of life in its dimension of the real is materialized specifically at two levels: relations of authority and sexual relations. So it's easy, I notice this whenever I debated with leftists who accused me of racism whatever, about what do you mean by different ways of life coexisting. They all enumerated features which are all the easy ones. They should be allowed their language, their poetry, their songs, their cuisine, whatever. Yeah, yeah, but what about what? What about this? Let me give you an example and again the same holds for us but let me give you an extreme example. Some fifteen years ago and just for mentioning this example I was almost physically attacked once in England. Some fifteen years ago, a girl from Roma, Roma, the old-fashioned racist name Gypsy, a Roma community in Slovenia, twelve years old girl, escaped from her family because her father planned to marry her to his best friend in advance, arranged marriage. And she took refuge to some Slovene I don't know, healthcare center or or police, doesn't matter. Then an interesting thing happened. Representative of the Roma community said, "Wait a minute, do you respect our way of life or not? Sorry, arranged marriages are a central feature of our way of life. If you take this away from us, we may remain as doing some stupid folkloric songs and spicy cuisine whatever, but as a community we disappear." And it's the same with relations of authority. For example in India, caste system is still is to a large degree a central component of their way of life. Which is why even some of their post-colonial theorists don't want to renounce it. They just claim we have to accommodate it to today's life. But for example, when one mentioned I mentioned there, what about egalitarianism? I was immediately attacked for brutally enforcing on India imperialist Western notions or whatever. So my point is this one, that this complex of how you regulate pleasures in the same way as in bureaucracy, the pleasure of bureaucracy as we all know is not to solve problems, it's to use problems as a justification to reproduce itself indefinitely. It's the same with all these marriage regulations. The very marriage negotiation, subordination of women or whatever, is what elevates a simple biological pleasure into social *jouissance*, enjoyment. And I claim when we talk about the way the difficulty to integrate others into our way of life, it's not simply a question do they want to be integrated, are we really open to them? From their standpoint, I totally agree them, it's false already to speak about integration because to integrate means you become part of us and they are quite right to say, "Why should we become part of you?" But the problem is this one, that they feel very well, refugees, those who have problems with it, and they are right that we want to deprive them of their the real of their ethnic way of life. And again, this is a problem. In what sense? Let me give you an extreme example, which is so extreme that I like it, but it's from Mexico this time. I read in the news, the theological implications of what I will tell you now are wonderful, although terrifying. That in some small Mexican city three rich guys in their early 20s, students, brutally raped a young girl. One of them, the richest of course, he had the best lawyer, was pardoned by the judge. Now comes the horror. He was pardoned not because his lawyer tried through some sophisticated tricks to dispute any facts, no, facts were without any doubt. He admitted he in a vulgar brutal way squeezed the girl's breasts, he penetrated her with his fingers, her vagina and so on. But it's madness. Check it up, you still find this story on the web if you don't believe me, with names, everything. The defense claimed, and the judge confirmed it, that he did this without a carnal intent. He didn't sexually enjoy it, which is why he is not guilty. And he was pardoned. Now, if you excuse me but for my common sense Okay, it's very problematic what I will say but I mean it in the best pro-feminist way. Let's say if I were to rape a woman in some kind of half-sexual craving madness, it's still unexcusable. But it's, I claim, maybe one millimeter better than to rape her without any passion. Because that would be pure evil then. You know, my god, why did I do it if I even don't have the excuse of passion and so on. It's pure evil: I wanted to hurt her, suffer, humiliate and so on. So why then did the judge propose this strange solution? My idea is that the theological background, the judge's implication was that only if you enjoy it you are guilty. That was simply the underlying premise, deeply theological Christian of the judge: if you enjoy it sexually you are guilty. And the logical reversal: if you don't enjoy it, if you didn't enjoy it, you cannot be guilty. The interesting point here is that I think that we should bring this reasoning to the end. Not only if you enjoy it you are guilty, but you only enjoy it if you are guilty. I claim that and that's every what every Protestant knows. You know what's the logic. You are here on the limit. In Catholicism you can do whatever you want just if you confess it at the end of the week, no? In Protestantism as they say, you can also do whatever you want, just it's good that you feel guilty a little bit what you are doing it. You see this guilt is again a surplus enjoyment. Enjoyment of sex without guilt is just a vulgar enjoyment, but feeling guilty gives this additional twist: it's something transgressive, heroic, whatever and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that it's at this level that integration or however you call it it's difficult. Why? Ah, now I come to a more, at least a little bit, philosophical concluding point. Because I think that this vision of each of us its own, his, her, their way of life, we all contribute to one humanity, is wrong. What gets lost is universality. Universality is not something above our particular features, like we are all humanity, but, to be cynical, traditional Europe contributed to universality by patriarchal marriage, others contributed to universality by clitoridectomy or whatever, or whatever. Universality, I think that's the lesson of modernity in a good sense, universality is something that traversed, split from within every particular identity. That's why I oppose this pseudo-universalist ideas that we have local communities, Western and Eastern whatever, which are then disturbed by this bad horror of Western individualist universality whatever. It is true, of course, I'm well aware of the destructive aspects of Western universality of human rights which are not truly universal human rights and so on. But what I want to say is something else which is crucial. First, I dispute that something as authentic local pre-modern ways of life exists at all. I'm not saying they don't exist at all. I'm saying that, by Marxist dogma, every particular way of life is already cut by its own antagonism, class struggle, struggle for liberation, whatever you call it, emancipatory struggle is at work in all of them. And my second point: the way to criticize Western cultural imperialism should not be only to see it as the bad universality destroying local ways of life, but on the contrary sometimes even supporting them, manipulating with them. Let me give you a wonderful example that I experienced first-hand when I was in India. I learned there some strange things. Do you know that their caste system was already disintegrating in the century, I think it was 18th century, before British colonization of India. It was disintegrating. Their the main book, the mega bible of caste system, the so-called Laws, legal system of Manu, some stupid divinity whatever, was half forgotten. Then when the British took over India, they made a simple intelligent discovery: that it's much better for them to efficiently colonize India to maintain and even support, sustain, support the traditional caste system. Because in this way again, easier to keep them under control. The idea was that if we allow too fast modernization of India, they will get proletarians with their modern demands and so on and so on. So better to keep them in their traditional identity. And literally, in 19th century, they reprinted, propagated Laws of Manu and 19th century, the very time of British colonization of India, was a time of the revival of caste system. All intelligent colonizers were doing this. That is to say, not imposing simple Western universality. Which is why India is a wonderful case: all colonizers, big British administrators, the more they were brutal in economic exploitation of India, the more they admired the incredible spiritual depth of Indian wisdom or whatever. I mean it's wonderful to read the text of their colonizers: like, I met a simple peasant, there was more wisdom in his simple prayer than all our corrupted Western technology and so on and so on. And it's the same all around, I claim. It's the same, for example, on the West Bank, from what I know. Do you know that you do have on the West Bank some honor killings? And what we don't read in our media is how there is at least among Palestinians on the West Bank a vast social movement, young people. Tamer Nafar who has a great Palestinian rapper singer, a rock band and so on, protest against them. But strangely, Israeli occupying force don't if possible prosecute at all honor killings, because they know it's much better for Israeli neo-colonialist aims of the West Bank to keep Palestinians in their traditional mode of life. Although they complain, Palestinians are primitive and so on, their entire strategy is to do this. Or I can give you, I don't know how many other examples, to go back to my Slovene Gypsy girl example. The father said, "You are threatening our way of life." Okay, I ask you brutally, what would you have done? Whose side would you take? I'm not saying even you should be a Western liberal, I'm just saying admit the problem. And my formula is not: we in the West have the solution, it's our universal rights and so on. I'm the first to admit that there is a cultural bias on our universal rights. You know the story: they privilege a certain type of social life with individualism and so on against solidarity and so on and so on. I'm just saying the right path to do is not to oppose our universal values to particular ways of life and then to choose either more authentic particular ways of life of our empty universality, but to connect our struggle here for women's rights, gay rights, economic struggle, whatever, with their struggles. That's the only option for me. To renounce this myth of automatic authenticity of local ways of life. Let me give you, before I really conclude and believe me or not I will conclude at some point, let me give you a disgusting terrifying example from Tibet. This example was giving to me by a Tibetan himself who is otherwise brutally critical of Chinese occupation, colonization, whatever of Tibet. Do you know that till '49 or even '59 because till '59 Chinese authorities left in Tibet more or less to itself the traditional Tibetan way of life, they really intervened brutally only after '59, which is why then Dalai Lama escaped to India, you know the story. But the point is this one. Do you know that till '59 Tibet being a mountainous country, many narrow paths, there is was there a certain rule. When they walk in the opposite way on a narrow mountain path, two people who are not on of the same social status, let's say a poor farmer and a Buddhist lama monk whatever, it was strictly ritualized. The poor guy, ordinary farmer, not only should step away, withdraw, to leave to the other the free path, but even perform a certain gesture I was given a photo of it which is really ritualized disgusting self-humiliation. You should somehow lean down, look with your eyes up, and stick your tongue out. Like to enact your pure worthless stupidity. And then the Chinese prohibited it in '59 and of course the local lamas and so on says, "Brutal intrusion into our way of life" and so on and so on. My point is my rule would have been: the moment you have some local resistance to this, and it was, the tragedy of Tibet is that it wasn't a paradise before '49. It was the most brutal feudal system that you can imagine. You see, my point is not we should destroy them. My point is we have a struggle, they have a struggle, connect these struggles. It can be done. It's the only way, without our arrogance and so on and so on. In other words, I believe in universality. I think the greatest catastrophe today is that even some leftists, those who were in United Kingdom pro-Brexit and so on, believe that, since European Union is just the voice of international, sorry, instrument of international global capital, the only way to protect workers' rights is a stronger nation-state and so on and so on. I totally reject this strategy. I think that the only first capitalism no longer works like that, as I already mentioned with the example of Erdoğan, Russia, China. Today's capitalism is more and more from Trump to Erdoğan to Putin to China to India, global neoliberal capitalism, but politically supplemented by a strong autarkic local tradition. Erdoğan Muslim, Modi Hindu, Chinese their Confucian stuff and so on. So what I'm saying is that we should do what, for example, my authentic hero Malcolm X and I I did read his work. Malcolm X for me is not only Denzel Washington in the film. He is for me a model, a true genius politically. You know why? You know why did he keep this name, Malcolm X? X, of course, is the sign for lost roots. X means: through enslavement we lost our African roots. We don't have a proper family, it's X. But his genius was that he saw in this a unique chance of liberation. X means: we are potentially more universal than Europeans. We have a unique chance of developing a new universality and paradoxically one can understand why he found this universality in Islam. Okay, I don't agree him in this, but this basic gesture, to see in what appears as the ultimate catastrophe: "My god, we are deprived of our roots", a unique chance of new freedom. His solution is not the solution of those nostalgic Alex Haley *Roots* and so on stories where, oh you look for your roots in Africa, you find a tribe where your ancestors were taken from, you found your roots. No, forget your roots! Open yourself even more brutally to universality. I think this is the only solution. It has to be a global solution of new, reinvented universality. That's why I'm so suspicious of all those who praise so-called indigenism. You know, like, "Bad global capitalism, but look for local traditions to resist it." Listen, these local traditions can usually be perfectly integrated into global capitalism. Global capitalism is by definition multicultural. It needs as many as possible different cultural identities to to thrive. The only way to fight global capitalism is with new ideological political emancipatory universality. What this practically means Well, maybe another talk. Thanks very much for your patience. Okay, now we decided with the organizers that before we go with the lady into a philosophical debate, although this is not true but we will pretend that we are in a half democracy, so you will be allowed some questions. Thank you very much. Yes, I would like to pick up your point about self-flagellation and especially the persona Slavoj Žižek, the figure Slavoj Žižek that we all know from the YouTube movies. I often have the feeling that left intellectuals use this figure to do some self-flagellation and to produce some *jouissance* for themselves. What they do not do is produce a participatory democracy where they try to integrate as as many citizens as possible in solving real actual problems. And I am wondering whether you sometimes think about the discourse you produce about the easy messages you sometimes bring in those YouTube movies, how how they are used as as this self-flagellation for the left intellectual, and if you sometimes reflect on yourself and your role in this way? Okay, you're aware more than me probably that to answer properly this question it's not a matter of five minutes and so on. But I would have said that no, my position is here, I am well aware of it, very radical. I think and I openly say it, although it sounds crazy, instead of what I call self-flagellation we should proudly defend what is great in European legacy. No wonder that today it's so fashionable to be anti-Eurocentric. They are all united: Trump, Brexit, Putin, Erdoğan, everybody. Why? Because precisely today when Europe when Europe is losing its geopolitical significance, and European legacy of Enlightenment, universal rights, falsified as they were, is under threat. So I'm tired of this, as if our contribution to the world No, let's focus on what Yes, we did in Europe horrible things, but one thing in European legacy I stand for: it's this immense dimension of radical self-criticism. I don't, here comes my arrogance, I don't find this in any other, I'm sorry for this arrogant word, civilization. This radical acceptance that our way of life is contingent and so on and so on. In other words, very problematic I know, but I think that something that emerged with French Revolution, which is equality and so on and so on, is a unique event in world history with a world historical significance. My ultimate proof, if you want, here: look at the first successful slave revolt in Haiti. I think this is a mega event. Why? Because they didn't want to return to their African roots. They wanted, like France, to have a secular republic. And it's a beautiful irony to it. You know, I'm sorry if some of you know it, I repeat this well, you know who you know who was the main ideologist of Haiti revolution? Ideologist is a big word. One of the freed slaves who propagated freedom. It was a man called John Bookman. Of course, the guy who read a book. You know which was this book? Quran. So that you will not accuse me of Islamophobia or whatever. So what I am really saying is that what I really hate is this humanitarianization of problem. Do we have a wide enough heart to accept them all and so on and so on? No! The main problem is how are we Europeans co-responsible for this refugee crisis? Because what is going there, there would have been no war in Syria without investments of foreign powers: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, name them and so on. The same in Libya, the same in Iraq, with. So I think that the only chance is to move out, which doesn't mean we don't help refugees, even more than we did. But if we will not do this move from humanitarian problem, where the problem is only "They are coming, do we have open enough heart or not?", no, "Why are they coming? What can we do in economic change, in geopolitical change," and so on and so on. And we should within this context, I always get in trouble when I ask this, also ask some unpleasant questions. For example, I was in debate about this with Al Jazeera, now I again give you never did I get not even a semblance of a convincing answer: south of the crisis zone you have a couple of very rich Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Emirates. They simply don't accept immigrants. Where is their sense of Umma community and so on? I'm not blaming them because they are supported in this with the West and so on and so on. I know that there are many refugees but where? In the poor Arab countries. So I think that again, I just see red when the problem is posed in this way, "Will we be open enough to integrate them?" We should first change the topic to geopolitical-economic neo-colonialism and point two: openly establish rules with negotiation between the parties and so on and so on, out of this self-guilt and "Are we open enough to integrate them?" Well, I understand them and I agree with them, they maybe they don't want to be integrated. You know the problem is like this stupid examples that I mentioned: the Slovene Roma girl and so on. What what does it mean, coexistence of different culture? Where do we set limits and so on? Or do we set limits? How do we set limits? I'm not saying that we are right a priori, I'm just saying there is a problem in coexistence of lives. And we have the old solution which was the British Empire solution or traditional: give, allow every ethnic, religious group to remain in their way of life. I think this no longer works today. It's a problem, that's all I'm saying, that it is really a problem. And but whenever I mention way of life, I'm usually attacked as a kind of a nützlicher Idiot (useful idiot), how the idiot arguing for Marine Le Pen. But sorry, very briefly now what you mentioned about this self-flagellation and so on and so on. Well, all I can say is I can tell you from my own experience that it's not as simple as that. Listen, let me be a little bit arrogant. You mentioned YouTube, blah blah. But I'm not saying you should, but if you check a little bit my fate in the last years as so-called stupid public intellectual. Just follow how I progressively disappear from the media. Up till two years ago, I was regularly invited to contribute to Guardian. In the last two years I'm prohibited. I'm prohibited from London Review of Books. I'm prohibited from New Statesman. I'm prohibited in United States. Two years ago, Economist from, sorry, Newsweek from time to time published me. You know, all the time I heard how popular I am, the less now I simply don't have a medium to publish in United States and in England. The small exception is Independent published my Macron comment. But again, they got a terrible backlash and now because this usual way, you know, like, if you are critical of Macron, it means you support Marine Le Pen and I'm a neo-fascist and so on and so on. So all I can tell you is is that I'm a pessimist. Okay, I stop. Sorry. You already mentioned in your last sentence that this would not be in the scope of your presentation, your talk, namely how to actually damage global capitalism or influence it in some way. Like, for example, now Trump just tonight arrived in Brussels for the NATO talks and there are huge protest marches. But of course to some extent we all know that this will not really impact anything. And I'm wondering, for example, how the more traditional modes of resistance like the labor unions and strike movements and such. For example, when Macron became president there was an immediate, I forgot the location, but there was a factory that was immediately occupied and they were threatening with sabotaging and and destroying everything. For example in this way in some way the global capitalist system is in some way impacted. And when you talk about the sort of global eco-communism or eco-socialism that is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change and and some such things, do you see a positive role for those more traditional but sort of neglected things like labor unions and strikes, or is that? I do, but we have to rethink this all. I will try to be as short as possible. Look, the problem with me is this one. You know some of my friends have this idea, very simplified one: refugees are the new proletariat, they call it nomadic proletariat, and they can revitalize the European left. I find this an extremely racist position. I call it outsourcing revolutionary class. Like, you know, we have good revolutionary theory but nobody wants to do it here. Perfect, we import the revolutionary class and so on. It will not work. You know who is really my reference here: the German guy that I mentioned, he is now also popular in England, Wolfgang Streeck. Who says that, you know what's the problem? For Marx, the construction of revolutionary class worked when you have majority working class which produces wealth, is exploited, and so on and so on. Today, isn't it that to be in the traditional Marxist sense a proletarian, which means a permanent job in a factory or in a state organization... Okay, you are exploited, but you are permanently employed. It's almost a privileged position. We have most of the refugees, their secret longing is just to become probably a normal European proletarian, you know. They cannot. We have precarious workers. We have permanently unemployed. Other forms of excluded. And it's not clear to me, here I agree with the point of your question, it's a great problem. Marx saw clearly this proletarianization of society, how out of this confusion united emancipatory agent will emerge. I don't see in the near future how this could happen. So all I propose is a kind of a not utopian but very pragmatic approach. On the one hand, yes, I agree, all that we can do: workers' protections, trade unions, and so on and so on. On the other hand, for example, on the other hand everything like, sorry it's my eternal example, what Obama did in the United States, even with for him I have a certain sympathy. Okay, we have it, but they didn't have it, and now it's cancelled: healthcare reform. This was a revolutionary idea for the United States and so on. So what we should do is choose well these particular points which may appear relatively modest. Like, what is revolutionary about universal healthcare? But nonetheless, in United States this was almost a shock, and so on and so on. In Europe, I would say, but obviously I'm too utopian, some kind of why can't European modest labor parties, trade unions, get together? I know the attack will automatically be "This diminishes our competitiveness", but I think it's bluff, it's not necessary. Some minimal workers' protection in Europe, and this is my argument against Brexit. It's very interesting, a British friend of mine provided me with a list of conflicts in the last twenty years between United Kingdom government and Brussels bureaucracy. Almost all the time I'm on the side of Brussels bureaucracy. For example, Brussels bureaucracy
unknown
wanted to impose some
wanted to impose some
Slavoj Žižek
ecological limits of energy use, Tony Blair opposed it: "It diminishes our competitiveness." Then again, Brussels bureaucracy wanted to impose some minimal workers' rights, a minimum
ecological limits of energy use, Tony Blair opposed it: "It diminishes our competitiveness." Then again, Brussels bureaucracy wanted to impose some minimal workers' rights, a minimum
unknown
of holidays per year and a maximum of working hours per week. United Kingdom
of holidays per year and a maximum of working hours per week. United Kingdom
Slavoj Žižek
government opposed it: "It diminishes our competitiveness," and so on and so on. I think that we should
government opposed it: "It diminishes our competitiveness," and so on and so on. I think that we should
unknown
shamelessly engage in
shamelessly engage in
Slavoj Žižek
all these particular struggles,
all these particular struggles,
unknown
but at the same time just getting ready. Getting ready in what sense? I am a pessimist if you ask me. I think there will be ecological and other catastrophes. Don't be afraid that they will not come, they will come. And for that point we should be ready. But at the same time, I agree with you, definitely we should not just as many pseudo-radical leftists claim just sit back and wait for the big revolution to come. No, if you just wait it will
but at the same time just getting ready. Getting ready in what sense? I am a pessimist if you ask me. I think there will be ecological and other catastrophes. Don't be afraid that they will not come, they will come. And for that point we should be ready. But at the same time, I agree with you, definitely we should not just as many pseudo-radical leftists claim just sit back and wait for the big revolution to come. No, if you just wait it will
unknown
never come. But we should be getting ready because really, I'm too much of a pessimist in the sense that some of my friends, liberals, are telling me, "But listen, nonetheless with all our crises, liberal capitalism, at least in Western Europe, it still works. Why don't we just resign to it, no?" I claim no. It can it may appear to work, but it's approaching its end. You can see it. Ecology, it's clear that we will need larger than state organizations and so on to cope with the problem. My god, financing, it's clear where system is dying. Look, even me who am in economy more or less an idiot, I got the basic point of how again and again, this is a tragedy of European Union, they are throwing it hundreds of billions of dollars into revitalizing economy. But what happens is that these hundreds
never come. But we should be getting ready because really, I'm too much of a pessimist in the sense that some of my friends, liberals, are telling me, "But listen, nonetheless with all our crises, liberal capitalism, at least in Western Europe, it still works. Why don't we just resign to it, no?" I claim no. It can it may appear to work, but it's approaching its end. You can see it. Ecology, it's clear that we will need larger than state organizations and so on to cope with the problem. My god, financing, it's clear where system is dying. Look, even me who am in economy more or less an idiot, I got the basic point of how again and again, this is a tragedy of European Union, they are throwing it hundreds of billions of dollars into revitalizing economy. But what happens is that these hundreds
Slavoj Žižek
of billions get lost and enter privatized in this place with fictitious capital, and the more they are throwing this imaginary sums of money, of real money, economy remains stagnant. So we have a problem here. We have a problem with intellectual property. It simply resists private property. It will not be able to contain it. I'm saying this because after this talk I know what I will download from Pirate Bay this evening. It will be the seventh installment of *Handmaid's Tale*, so that you know if you want that serious. Or refugees and so on, we need more organization there. I mean, I sincerely believe that this idea that we live in relatively normal times it's totally wrong, things are changing. The main result of Trump's stupidity is already here. It is that it was a beautiful paradox. You remember two weeks ago China imposed itself, offered itself as the new agent of globalization. They got it correctly that America is now too protectionist. So again, we are not even aware how fast things are changing. And up to a point we can just passively follow it. In the long term, if we do nothing, where will we arrive? Hollywood knows it in its dystopias. Something like *Hunger Games* and so on. A new class society. Favorite work, Žižekian work, is the *Pervert's Guide to Cinema*, which at this point is over ten years old. You've mentioned *The Handmaid's Tale*, you just mentioned Hollywood and its futuristic knowledge. Is there any movie or film you've come across in the decade past which you think is worth mentioning or perhaps demonstrates what we've discussed this evening? Well, I will disappoint you here. My what first let me confess something. I'm very self-critical here. Whenever I deal with films, I try to be honest, I think that at least of it is just exploiting simply narratives to make some ideological or even philosophical point. Very rarely do I really, by really I mean in a formal way, analyze a film, because the true message of the film for me is always in a form. That's why the only way where was I serious in my analysis: Hitchcock, Kieślowski, maybe a little bit David Lynch, *Lost Highway*, and maybe a little bit Tarkovsky. All other stuff is just using films. But if you ask me where am I now, I can just give you two indications. First, although this is a fashionable thing today, but I tend to agree with it, that it's as if to put in idealist Hegelian terms, the world spirit is moving from films to TV series. And I think quite interesting things, maybe more than in cinema, are happening there. I'm even ready to go so far as to say even in video games. Are you aware how important they are? Do you know that already some three years ago, I think, more money is turned around in video games than in entire cinema and TV industry? And it would be extremely interesting, I don't have time now, to analyze the how should I call it, the new type of subjectivity, I call it this obscene pre-Oedipal undead subjectivity that is the subjectivity of a gamer, of a game player. By this pre-Oedipal perverse subjectivity I mean the first model for me is here, you remember what's the magic of Tom and Jerry cartoons? Constant catastrophes, the mouse is cut in sliced into pieces, run over by a rollover. In the next scene it you cannot die. Always you return. And as Lacan pointed out in *Kant avec Sade*, exactly the same feature you find in in Sadean fantasy. Juliette is tortured again and again, always survives. And it's something the same in video games. I know, I'm watching my son playing them, you know. Like, you die again and again, you say and now you will say this is fantasy. It's not as simple as that. Because I've seen some of my friends assuming the same and dead, undead, obscene attitude already also in their love life. I try with this girl, I die, it's a fiasco. No problem, I try again, you know. This false infiniti So here things happen. Point two, which films are today My tastes are very strange. For example, lately I did like two very modest, they are not even good, science fiction films. Did you see them? *Arrival* and *The Discovery*, which are very intelligent in their manipulation of this circular sense sense of time and so on and so on. No, my tastes are much more my tastes are much more modest here. I'm just sad in the sense of this politically correct obsession of Hollywood, for example. I'm all for gay rights, black rights, but sorry to tell you something for which people started to shout at me when I was recently in New York. *Moonlight*, you saw it, the Oscar winner. It's good, I sympathize with it, don't tell me that it's a great film. And the problem is that almost in academic circles in United States you are not allowed to say it. The moment you say it, "Ah, homophobic, racist," and so on and so on. So I had a luck that two black friends were with me who thought that this movie is a total shit and then they immediately agreed with me. You know what I mean? Like, cinema here I agree with you if you told me before that you are a formalist, you know. Like, look at Hitchcock. Maybe he is overestimated, but Hitchcock's art is not in the story, it's in how the camera moves, in how the Hitchcock volume that I edited, I tried to develop an entire implicit theology from how the second murder in *Psycho*, the murder on the stairs of Detective Arbogast, is shot and so on. That's for me the magic of cinema. Cinematic art begins when you have a certain story and official ideology, but the texture of the film counteracts it, tells literally renders like embodies not explicitly articulates another ideology. So I'm not a pessimist here. I also think a good thing about TV series is that they are a worldwide phenomenon. It's not just Hollywood. You have the Latin American telenovelas example, you have Korea, Far East series and so on and so on. In this sense I even like cultural globalization. It's not it's on the contrary a great blow to the simple hegemony of
of billions get lost and enter privatized in this place with fictitious capital, and the more they are throwing this imaginary sums of money, of real money, economy remains stagnant. So we have a problem here. We have a problem with intellectual property. It simply resists private property. It will not be able to contain it. I'm saying this because after this talk I know what I will download from Pirate Bay this evening. It will be the seventh installment of *Handmaid's Tale*, so that you know if you want that serious. Or refugees and so on, we need more organization there. I mean, I sincerely believe that this idea that we live in relatively normal times it's totally wrong, things are changing. The main result of Trump's stupidity is already here. It is that it was a beautiful paradox. You remember two weeks ago China imposed itself, offered itself as the new agent of globalization. They got it correctly that America is now too protectionist. So again, we are not even aware how fast things are changing. And up to a point we can just passively follow it. In the long term, if we do nothing, where will we arrive? Hollywood knows it in its dystopias. Something like *Hunger Games* and so on. A new class society. Favorite work, Žižekian work, is the *Pervert's Guide to Cinema*, which at this point is over ten years old. You've mentioned *The Handmaid's Tale*, you just mentioned Hollywood and its futuristic knowledge. Is there any movie or film you've come across in the decade past which you think is worth mentioning or perhaps demonstrates what we've discussed this evening? Well, I will disappoint you here. My what first let me confess something. I'm very self-critical here. Whenever I deal with films, I try to be honest, I think that at least of it is just exploiting simply narratives to make some ideological or even philosophical point. Very rarely do I really, by really I mean in a formal way, analyze a film, because the true message of the film for me is always in a form. That's why the only way where was I serious in my analysis: Hitchcock, Kieślowski, maybe a little bit David Lynch, *Lost Highway*, and maybe a little bit Tarkovsky. All other stuff is just using films. But if you ask me where am I now, I can just give you two indications. First, although this is a fashionable thing today, but I tend to agree with it, that it's as if to put in idealist Hegelian terms, the world spirit is moving from films to TV series. And I think quite interesting things, maybe more than in cinema, are happening there. I'm even ready to go so far as to say even in video games. Are you aware how important they are? Do you know that already some three years ago, I think, more money is turned around in video games than in entire cinema and TV industry? And it would be extremely interesting, I don't have time now, to analyze the how should I call it, the new type of subjectivity, I call it this obscene pre-Oedipal undead subjectivity that is the subjectivity of a gamer, of a game player. By this pre-Oedipal perverse subjectivity I mean the first model for me is here, you remember what's the magic of Tom and Jerry cartoons? Constant catastrophes, the mouse is cut in sliced into pieces, run over by a rollover. In the next scene it you cannot die. Always you return. And as Lacan pointed out in *Kant avec Sade*, exactly the same feature you find in in Sadean fantasy. Juliette is tortured again and again, always survives. And it's something the same in video games. I know, I'm watching my son playing them, you know. Like, you die again and again, you say and now you will say this is fantasy. It's not as simple as that. Because I've seen some of my friends assuming the same and dead, undead, obscene attitude already also in their love life. I try with this girl, I die, it's a fiasco. No problem, I try again, you know. This false infiniti So here things happen. Point two, which films are today My tastes are very strange. For example, lately I did like two very modest, they are not even good, science fiction films. Did you see them? *Arrival* and *The Discovery*, which are very intelligent in their manipulation of this circular sense sense of time and so on and so on. No, my tastes are much more my tastes are much more modest here. I'm just sad in the sense of this politically correct obsession of Hollywood, for example. I'm all for gay rights, black rights, but sorry to tell you something for which people started to shout at me when I was recently in New York. *Moonlight*, you saw it, the Oscar winner. It's good, I sympathize with it, don't tell me that it's a great film. And the problem is that almost in academic circles in United States you are not allowed to say it. The moment you say it, "Ah, homophobic, racist," and so on and so on. So I had a luck that two black friends were with me who thought that this movie is a total shit and then they immediately agreed with me. You know what I mean? Like, cinema here I agree with you if you told me before that you are a formalist, you know. Like, look at Hitchcock. Maybe he is overestimated, but Hitchcock's art is not in the story, it's in how the camera moves, in how the Hitchcock volume that I edited, I tried to develop an entire implicit theology from how the second murder in *Psycho*, the murder on the stairs of Detective Arbogast, is shot and so on. That's for me the magic of cinema. Cinematic art begins when you have a certain story and official ideology, but the texture of the film counteracts it, tells literally renders like embodies not explicitly articulates another ideology. So I'm not a pessimist here. I also think a good thing about TV series is that they are a worldwide phenomenon. It's not just Hollywood. You have the Latin American telenovelas example, you have Korea, Far East series and so on and so on. In this sense I even like cultural globalization. It's not it's on the contrary a great blow to the simple hegemony of
unknown
United
United
Slavoj Žižek
States. Did you notice for example in detective novels that I like. The result of cultural globalization is now that it's no longer American, British, and maybe French detective
States. Did you notice for example in detective novels that I like. The result of cultural globalization is now that it's no longer American, British, and maybe French detective
unknown
novels. You have now Italians, Germans, Chinese whatever. Not to mention my god you, no you Belgians are not, you are not yet at the level of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, you know, of detective novels. I think that there are definitely that paradoxical globalization means that also smaller nations get their chance. I would like to put the blame on others. No, you wanted it and I agree with you in this sense. Because I've been dealing with German idealism with the father of it, Kant, most of the time, the students know that, and because I've been doing a little bit of psychoanalysis, I told you that. And I must say
novels. You have now Italians, Germans, Chinese whatever. Not to mention my god you, no you Belgians are not, you are not yet at the level of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, you know, of detective novels. I think that there are definitely that paradoxical globalization means that also smaller nations get their chance. I would like to put the blame on others. No, you wanted it and I agree with you in this sense. Because I've been dealing with German idealism with the father of it, Kant, most of the time, the students know that, and because I've been doing a little bit of psychoanalysis, I told you that. And I must say
unknown
that what I did in psychoanalysis had an effect on what is for me philosophy. It had really a subversive effect, my own analysis, my practice as an analyst and it fundamentally changed my position in relation to what it is to know, what what is the drive to know? And I I'm in a little bit of a turmoil today in the sense that it's a
that what I did in psychoanalysis had an effect on what is for me philosophy. It had really a subversive effect, my own analysis, my practice as an analyst and it fundamentally changed my position in relation to what it is to know, what what is the drive to know? And I I'm in a little bit of a turmoil today in the sense that it's a
Slavoj Žižek
bit of an open question for me of what can be philosophy after the subversion of psychoanalysis. That's not immediately clear to me. So I want to address questions in this sense, the place of the philosopher after the subversion and place of the psychoanalyst in the kind of emancipatory dynamics we know. But let me begin with with the question of form because I found it nice what you said tonight, namely that the dimension of critique... I think indeed that the the one of the important things you did is to show that there's a kind of thread from Kant, German idealism to psychoanalysis. Few people see that and it's a quite logical thread. And it has to has to do, I think, with the dimension of criticism, with the dimension also of universality. Now, let's come to the question of universality and of form. Because what happened with modernity, modern sciences is, let's say a focus on form, a focus on legalization and on formalization, mathematization. And you know the work of Badiou, Lacan also is stressing enormously the role of formalization. And for instance Lacan takes up what Plato says in the *Meno* on where Plato promises to deal with the issue of value, and people are annoyed because actually he's dealing with what he calls the idea of the idea and then he talks about numbers. So in order to address the question of value of what is an ethical position, let's say, we need formalization. And so that's one thing I don't see you immediately to focus like Badiou does on or Lacan does, on formalization. So that's perhaps a small question of why is that not your focus? And in what sense it can be related to writing? Because if we if we address the question of universality, the dream of modern sciences was to write the book of nature in mathematical terms, in universal terms. The formalist approach of the modern sciences was purely formalist. So do we need a new mathematical writing? That is actually what the Lacan is proposing, perhaps other forms of writing. So that's the first issue in relation to form. The second issue is more in relation to the the universal declaration of human rights. I found in in one of your interviews, you came back to it tonight, you said that you you find that that principle has now potentially a subversive role to play. And you repeated it this evening. It sounds as if now it has a special subversive role to play and it's not immediately clear to me what the formal aspect of it is. It makes me think of what Kant says, while that we are humans, what we are that's another question, so the distinction between that and what. But are you aware of this weird jump to aliens that Kant makes when he claims that his categorical imperative is not limited to humans, but to every intelligent life it will if it will be found on another planet? That's wonderful that I find in Kant, I mean. Sorry, please go on. But my question was that, what what Can you say anything yeah, my god yes. Let's go back to the public because you ask such difficult questions, I mean it's for another talk. Let me go like this. You know that I always find first Kant, sorry not Lacan not ambiguous here but much more delicate. On the one hand and that's the greatness of Lacan, he totally rejects this traditional idea of putting the Freudian unconscious along the line of Schopenhauer, Lebenswelt, all those irrationalists and so on and so on. It has nothing to do with this as Lacan puts it emphatically, the Freudian subject, the subject of the unconscious, is the Cartesian cogito. It's a very clear statement. And so here I think Lacan is radically opposed to all those immersion in Lebenswelt, life world, you know, all those simple oppositions. A Cartesian subject, sorry, Cartesian subject is too abstract, rational, we should never forget that we are part of a certain living world and so on and so on. No, but for Lacan unconscious is on the side, if you want, of rational abstraction against life world. Unconscious is some drive which destabilizes our the stability of our life world and so on. But you know how if we were really to go into this topic, my starting point would have been this one. Lacan says yes, the subject of the unconscious is Cartesian cogito, modern science. But you know, I'm sure better than we, that at the same time Lacan says that the discourse of science is based on on *Verwerfung*, foreclosure, which is not a good translation, but let's call it naively exclusion of subject. And he he means in this, I think, relatively simple way that scientific statements they exclude truth as a factor. By truth, I mean the truth of your position of enunciation. Whatever your unconscious overdetermination, a scientific statement should be repeatable, valid for whoever announces it and so on and so on. While for Lacan, nonetheless, the dimension of psychoanalysis is, in this sense, the dimension of subjective truth, not the dimension of objective exactitude. I think here about I'm sorry if some of you know this example, I know sure that you know it, it's one of my favorite Lacan's small observations. When he says I don't know where, but I know he says it somewhere, a wonderful thing that I apply to politics: that unfortunately this has some kind of a male chauvinist twist, but that if a husband is pathologically, excessively jealous of his wife,
bit of an open question for me of what can be philosophy after the subversion of psychoanalysis. That's not immediately clear to me. So I want to address questions in this sense, the place of the philosopher after the subversion and place of the psychoanalyst in the kind of emancipatory dynamics we know. But let me begin with with the question of form because I found it nice what you said tonight, namely that the dimension of critique... I think indeed that the the one of the important things you did is to show that there's a kind of thread from Kant, German idealism to psychoanalysis. Few people see that and it's a quite logical thread. And it has to has to do, I think, with the dimension of criticism, with the dimension also of universality. Now, let's come to the question of universality and of form. Because what happened with modernity, modern sciences is, let's say a focus on form, a focus on legalization and on formalization, mathematization. And you know the work of Badiou, Lacan also is stressing enormously the role of formalization. And for instance Lacan takes up what Plato says in the *Meno* on where Plato promises to deal with the issue of value, and people are annoyed because actually he's dealing with what he calls the idea of the idea and then he talks about numbers. So in order to address the question of value of what is an ethical position, let's say, we need formalization. And so that's one thing I don't see you immediately to focus like Badiou does on or Lacan does, on formalization. So that's perhaps a small question of why is that not your focus? And in what sense it can be related to writing? Because if we if we address the question of universality, the dream of modern sciences was to write the book of nature in mathematical terms, in universal terms. The formalist approach of the modern sciences was purely formalist. So do we need a new mathematical writing? That is actually what the Lacan is proposing, perhaps other forms of writing. So that's the first issue in relation to form. The second issue is more in relation to the the universal declaration of human rights. I found in in one of your interviews, you came back to it tonight, you said that you you find that that principle has now potentially a subversive role to play. And you repeated it this evening. It sounds as if now it has a special subversive role to play and it's not immediately clear to me what the formal aspect of it is. It makes me think of what Kant says, while that we are humans, what we are that's another question, so the distinction between that and what. But are you aware of this weird jump to aliens that Kant makes when he claims that his categorical imperative is not limited to humans, but to every intelligent life it will if it will be found on another planet? That's wonderful that I find in Kant, I mean. Sorry, please go on. But my question was that, what what Can you say anything yeah, my god yes. Let's go back to the public because you ask such difficult questions, I mean it's for another talk. Let me go like this. You know that I always find first Kant, sorry not Lacan not ambiguous here but much more delicate. On the one hand and that's the greatness of Lacan, he totally rejects this traditional idea of putting the Freudian unconscious along the line of Schopenhauer, Lebenswelt, all those irrationalists and so on and so on. It has nothing to do with this as Lacan puts it emphatically, the Freudian subject, the subject of the unconscious, is the Cartesian cogito. It's a very clear statement. And so here I think Lacan is radically opposed to all those immersion in Lebenswelt, life world, you know, all those simple oppositions. A Cartesian subject, sorry, Cartesian subject is too abstract, rational, we should never forget that we are part of a certain living world and so on and so on. No, but for Lacan unconscious is on the side, if you want, of rational abstraction against life world. Unconscious is some drive which destabilizes our the stability of our life world and so on. But you know how if we were really to go into this topic, my starting point would have been this one. Lacan says yes, the subject of the unconscious is Cartesian cogito, modern science. But you know, I'm sure better than we, that at the same time Lacan says that the discourse of science is based on on *Verwerfung*, foreclosure, which is not a good translation, but let's call it naively exclusion of subject. And he he means in this, I think, relatively simple way that scientific statements they exclude truth as a factor. By truth, I mean the truth of your position of enunciation. Whatever your unconscious overdetermination, a scientific statement should be repeatable, valid for whoever announces it and so on and so on. While for Lacan, nonetheless, the dimension of psychoanalysis is, in this sense, the dimension of subjective truth, not the dimension of objective exactitude. I think here about I'm sorry if some of you know this example, I know sure that you know it, it's one of my favorite Lacan's small observations. When he says I don't know where, but I know he says it somewhere, a wonderful thing that I apply to politics: that unfortunately this has some kind of a male chauvinist twist, but that if a husband is pathologically, excessively jealous of his wife,
unknown
afraid that
afraid that
Slavoj Žižek
she is sleeping around with other men, and even if it's proven
she is sleeping around with other men, and even if it's proven
unknown
that all his
that all his
unknown
suspicions are true, his jealousy
suspicions are true, his jealousy
Slavoj Žižek
is still pathological.
is still pathological.
unknown
You see, this is the dimension of truth beyond exactitude. The example that I always take here is that of I'm sorry if some of you know it, I repeat myself, that of anti-Semitism. Let's say I debate with someone in Germany in '35 about Jews. I am try to defend Jews, my anti-Semitic (not friend, of course) blames them. If we if I accept the debate at the
You see, this is the dimension of truth beyond exactitude. The example that I always take here is that of I'm sorry if some of you know it, I repeat myself, that of anti-Semitism. Let's say I debate with someone in Germany in '35 about Jews. I am try to defend Jews, my anti-Semitic (not friend, of course) blames them. If we if I accept the debate at the
Slavoj Žižek
level of facts, I've already sold my soul to the devil, I claim. Because at the level of fact the result will be that we both exaggerate a little bit, truth is somewhere in the middle. Look, my friend says Jews are exploiting Germans. Well, in some formal sense this was true, there were also poor Jews but there were rich Jews who were exploiting Germans. Then my friend says Jews are seducing German girls. Well all I can say is I hope they do, and the other way around, and so on. I'm sure it's at some level true. But you see my point? My point is that Hitler's anti-Semitism is wrong, it's ideology, not because it is not true, of course it's not. To go to the end in my madness, it would have been a pathological formation even if at the level of facts it were to be true. Because what makes it pathological is not its truth or not, but the reason why does Hitler need a figure of the Jew to assert its identity? And this is not a question of knowledge in the sense of are Jews really like that. It's why does Hitler, for what pathological reason, does Hitler or to put it in the terms of the title of my talk what antagonisms does Hitler need to obliterate that are projected into the figure of the Jew. So all this for Lacan, although he oscillates a little bit, for Lacan truth is I don't see how this dimension of reference, to put it in Lacanian terms, to subject of enunciation, my truth position, this is a dimension which doesn't fit science. When Lacan says that subject of psychoanalysis is subject of science, he I think simply means, as you said correctly, this subject which is desubstantialized. You know what's so deep about Freud? It's once story I think I mentioned it in one of my old books, I'm sure you don't know it, which is a beautiful story. The best anecdote that happened to Freud. In Slovenia I don't want to sound as tourist guide but we have one caves in the south, not Postojna caves, they are with the train subterranean kitsch. But another so-called Škocjan caves, which are wild, deep, they are terrifying. And you know that we discovered now that literally it's not a joke, Dante visited those caves in South Slovenia and there he got the idea of hell, of inferno. Okay, but what I want to say is that something incredible happened there. In the darkest part of a cave he saw a dark figure, a man approaching him. And for a moment he thought it's a vision, madness. Then he recognized the man. You know who was? Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic populist mayor of Vienna. And Freud was totally shocked and I can see why. He got there staged the deepest lesson of his teaching, which is that if you look really deep into a person, you don't find in the Jungian or New Age style some deeper deep truth. You find Lueger, lüge, lie. You find a fundamental fantasy which is a lie, a contingent lie masking antagonism and so on and so on. But if I may return it, I would like to make one point why I like Kant so much. Would you agree? I've written about it that first in what does really Kantian revolution ethical revolution consist? It's not simply in just in formalism. It's in something much more radical. When Kant says *Du kannst, denn du sollst* (You can, because you must). It I think Kant is really very radical here. He knew that as Lacan would have put it, there is no Big Other. In what sense? Kant is usually read as a fetishist of duty. You must do your duty, whatever. No, no, no. Kant is even worse but in a good sense. Kant's point is not Let's say I have to do something which will hurt you, but I think it's my duty. And then hypocritically I tell you, "Sorry, but I have to do it, it's my duty." You cannot even use duty as an excuse for duty. You are not only obliged to do your duty, responsible for it, but you should also fully stand behind what is your duty. You cannot say "This is my duty, I cannot help it." You are responsible for your duty. That's Kant's modernity because in previous substantialist ethics, duty it's up there, imposed by God whatever, and your duty is to do your duty. And that's the same in psychoanalysis. Sorry, in *ne pas céder sur son désir*, c'est ça. Precisely, this is wonderful. No, no, what I want to say is that just they get it that you know Freud although you know all that bullshit but it can also be misinterpreted. Lacan can be misinterpreted in the sense that when he says
level of facts, I've already sold my soul to the devil, I claim. Because at the level of fact the result will be that we both exaggerate a little bit, truth is somewhere in the middle. Look, my friend says Jews are exploiting Germans. Well, in some formal sense this was true, there were also poor Jews but there were rich Jews who were exploiting Germans. Then my friend says Jews are seducing German girls. Well all I can say is I hope they do, and the other way around, and so on. I'm sure it's at some level true. But you see my point? My point is that Hitler's anti-Semitism is wrong, it's ideology, not because it is not true, of course it's not. To go to the end in my madness, it would have been a pathological formation even if at the level of facts it were to be true. Because what makes it pathological is not its truth or not, but the reason why does Hitler need a figure of the Jew to assert its identity? And this is not a question of knowledge in the sense of are Jews really like that. It's why does Hitler, for what pathological reason, does Hitler or to put it in the terms of the title of my talk what antagonisms does Hitler need to obliterate that are projected into the figure of the Jew. So all this for Lacan, although he oscillates a little bit, for Lacan truth is I don't see how this dimension of reference, to put it in Lacanian terms, to subject of enunciation, my truth position, this is a dimension which doesn't fit science. When Lacan says that subject of psychoanalysis is subject of science, he I think simply means, as you said correctly, this subject which is desubstantialized. You know what's so deep about Freud? It's once story I think I mentioned it in one of my old books, I'm sure you don't know it, which is a beautiful story. The best anecdote that happened to Freud. In Slovenia I don't want to sound as tourist guide but we have one caves in the south, not Postojna caves, they are with the train subterranean kitsch. But another so-called Škocjan caves, which are wild, deep, they are terrifying. And you know that we discovered now that literally it's not a joke, Dante visited those caves in South Slovenia and there he got the idea of hell, of inferno. Okay, but what I want to say is that something incredible happened there. In the darkest part of a cave he saw a dark figure, a man approaching him. And for a moment he thought it's a vision, madness. Then he recognized the man. You know who was? Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic populist mayor of Vienna. And Freud was totally shocked and I can see why. He got there staged the deepest lesson of his teaching, which is that if you look really deep into a person, you don't find in the Jungian or New Age style some deeper deep truth. You find Lueger, lüge, lie. You find a fundamental fantasy which is a lie, a contingent lie masking antagonism and so on and so on. But if I may return it, I would like to make one point why I like Kant so much. Would you agree? I've written about it that first in what does really Kantian revolution ethical revolution consist? It's not simply in just in formalism. It's in something much more radical. When Kant says *Du kannst, denn du sollst* (You can, because you must). It I think Kant is really very radical here. He knew that as Lacan would have put it, there is no Big Other. In what sense? Kant is usually read as a fetishist of duty. You must do your duty, whatever. No, no, no. Kant is even worse but in a good sense. Kant's point is not Let's say I have to do something which will hurt you, but I think it's my duty. And then hypocritically I tell you, "Sorry, but I have to do it, it's my duty." You cannot even use duty as an excuse for duty. You are not only obliged to do your duty, responsible for it, but you should also fully stand behind what is your duty. You cannot say "This is my duty, I cannot help it." You are responsible for your duty. That's Kant's modernity because in previous substantialist ethics, duty it's up there, imposed by God whatever, and your duty is to do your duty. And that's the same in psychoanalysis. Sorry, in *ne pas céder sur son désir*, c'est ça. Precisely, this is wonderful. No, no, what I want to say is that just they get it that you know Freud although you know all that bullshit but it can also be misinterpreted. Lacan can be misinterpreted in the sense that when he says
unknown
unconscious is the discourse of the other, as if you think, "Oh fuck it, what can I do, the other
unconscious is the discourse of the other, as if you think, "Oh fuck it, what can I do, the other
Slavoj Žižek
speaks through me." No! You are
speaks through me." No! You are
unknown
decentered but you are still radically responsible for it. You cannot ever in psychoanalysis evoke your unconscious as deculpabilizing you. "No, no, sorry, I couldn't help it, it's my unconscious." And the other is personified much too quickly. The other is also the body in in Lacan. Sorry, the other is also the body? Yeah, yeah. But again, we think of it as the other This
decentered but you are still radically responsible for it. You cannot ever in psychoanalysis evoke your unconscious as deculpabilizing you. "No, no, sorry, I couldn't help it, it's my unconscious." And the other is personified much too quickly. The other is also the body in in Lacan. Sorry, the other is also the body? Yeah, yeah. But again, we think of it as the other This
unknown
was never
was never
unknown
clear to me, which body, you know? Because can we have biological body? We have
clear to me, which body, you know? Because can we have biological body? We have
unknown
phantasmatic body and so on, you know? Yeah the thing that that is something that you have to appropriate, that is out there. But when I just answer very briefly the last of your question, I agree with you concerning human rights, you know. There is a certain all too easy Marxist pseudo-Marxist historicist critique which says, oh human rights are just a ideological universality and That's what Badiou says. What? And that's Badiou's viewpoint? Alain Badiou's? And I have minor misunderstanding with him here. And the you know then the usual Marxist historicist bullshit: they always mask particular interests and so on and so on. No! The first thing and that's where you quoted me correctly, precisely because they are formal human rights, even if it's true in the beginning they were class-biased, but from the very beginning with their very abstract form, they opened up the space. Look, you know the story. It was immediately Mary Wollstonecraft: "We also women should be included." It was blacks in Haiti: "We should be included." So paradoxically, as a good Hegelian I would say this: there is more truth in the form of human rights than in their content. Okay, thank you. Good. You are my Rosa Luxemburg. I agree with you, okay. Um, another question. Please. Um, I'm quite into *La Logique du fantasme* (The Logic of Fantasy) these days. Lacan's 14th I envy you, I would like to disintegrate. Yes, it's it's one of two three greatest Lacan. Yes, yes. If you want to know something about the sexual act you should read it. It really is And about the difference male-female because lots of things are being said these days about it. We will perhaps come back to it. But at one point Lacan says talks about Diogenes, it's a difficult name to pronounce, um and I don't I would rather not enter into the debate on cynical reason, that's not my point. But what he's saying is that um you know Diogenes, the philosopher with the barrel who masturbates in public and asks Alexander the Great yeah to move away because he is sun shadow shadow that he doesn't see the sun, yeah. So Lacan says um he Diogenes is an example of the fact that sexual pleasure is the sexual act is purely related to pleasure. And Lacan is arguing that um that's not what the sexual act is about. The satisfaction it brings is not pleasure, or it's that's not the purpose of it for human beings, for speaking beings. Yeah. So he says, "There's a price to pay for Diogenes," he
phantasmatic body and so on, you know? Yeah the thing that that is something that you have to appropriate, that is out there. But when I just answer very briefly the last of your question, I agree with you concerning human rights, you know. There is a certain all too easy Marxist pseudo-Marxist historicist critique which says, oh human rights are just a ideological universality and That's what Badiou says. What? And that's Badiou's viewpoint? Alain Badiou's? And I have minor misunderstanding with him here. And the you know then the usual Marxist historicist bullshit: they always mask particular interests and so on and so on. No! The first thing and that's where you quoted me correctly, precisely because they are formal human rights, even if it's true in the beginning they were class-biased, but from the very beginning with their very abstract form, they opened up the space. Look, you know the story. It was immediately Mary Wollstonecraft: "We also women should be included." It was blacks in Haiti: "We should be included." So paradoxically, as a good Hegelian I would say this: there is more truth in the form of human rights than in their content. Okay, thank you. Good. You are my Rosa Luxemburg. I agree with you, okay. Um, another question. Please. Um, I'm quite into *La Logique du fantasme* (The Logic of Fantasy) these days. Lacan's 14th I envy you, I would like to disintegrate. Yes, it's it's one of two three greatest Lacan. Yes, yes. If you want to know something about the sexual act you should read it. It really is And about the difference male-female because lots of things are being said these days about it. We will perhaps come back to it. But at one point Lacan says talks about Diogenes, it's a difficult name to pronounce, um and I don't I would rather not enter into the debate on cynical reason, that's not my point. But what he's saying is that um you know Diogenes, the philosopher with the barrel who masturbates in public and asks Alexander the Great yeah to move away because he is sun shadow shadow that he doesn't see the sun, yeah. So Lacan says um he Diogenes is an example of the fact that sexual pleasure is the sexual act is purely related to pleasure. And Lacan is arguing that um that's not what the sexual act is about. The satisfaction it brings is not pleasure, or it's that's not the purpose of it for human beings, for speaking beings. Yeah. So he says, "There's a price to pay for Diogenes," he
Slavoj Žižek
says. Um, the price to pay is that he is not in desire, Diogenes. And he's not in politics. So I found He's not in? In politics. Yeah, yeah. So that connection between desire and politics is interesting. Brings me to a phrase of a friend, a psychoanalyst who who died a couple of years ago but who always said to me, "*La pointe fine du discours est politique*" (the fine point of discourse is political). So when you
says. Um, the price to pay is that he is not in desire, Diogenes. And he's not in politics. So I found He's not in? In politics. Yeah, yeah. So that connection between desire and politics is interesting. Brings me to a phrase of a friend, a psychoanalyst who who died a couple of years ago but who always said to me, "*La pointe fine du discours est politique*" (the fine point of discourse is political). So when you
unknown
sharpen your discourse, and that is what you do in an psychoanalysis,
sharpen your discourse, and that is what you do in an psychoanalysis,
Slavoj Žižek
um it becomes political immediately. So um frankly when you ended your lecture, it's yeah the catastrophe is near, we have to do something, it sounds a little bit like that. I almost immediately have the reflex of as a psychoanalyst, one by one. And there's lots of work to be done. I mean you have to produce the lack. Um, the lack is not something you observe, you don't observe it, you produce it, yeah yeah. And the the dynamics of producing it that brings you somewhere as to your position in the world, which has to be a desiring position and is immediately a political position. In in that seminar Lacan also says that *l'inconscient est politique* (the unconscious is political). He doesn't say *la politique est inconsciente*, *l'inconscient est politique*. And I think he means the same thing, that when you let it speak it's immediately in it, the other is included of course in the in the structure of language that is the unconscious. So... Oh, this is again another complex question. I would put it like this. First, yes you are absolutely right. *L'inconscient est politique*, it's not the same as politics is unconscious. Politics is unconscious, it's pure Jungian bullshit, no? It means political games are really grounded in some deep unconscious archetypes and so on and so on. While as you indicated, unconscious is political means that unconscious is not some kind of a arche-deep truth in me but is something precisely it's almost I'm tempted to say to quote here *X-Files*: "the truth is out there." It's out there in social interaction, it's embodied there. And that's in what sense then it is political? The only way I can read it is although I had great problems with him in the sense of the Laclau discursive struggle and so on that political means for me at its most fundamental dimension not in the sense that usually we speak of psychoanalytic politics in the sense of for which party are we? Although we find here some sad examples like Jacques-Alain Miller in one before last election being engaged pro-Sarkozy and so on, strange things are going on. But what political in the sense that it's an act of as you would have put it producing new master signifiers, negotiable strategic decision. It's not objective knowledge that you just discover there. And so this would be my first point about unconscious is political. And in this sense I'm even tempted, I develop this in many of my books, to read and I always like it more and more, the most traditional part of Marxism: Marx's logic of commodity fetishism. What Marx is saying there, he is not saying the usual stupidity, we are in so far as we participate in the market we are caught in commodity fetishism, we don't see that commodities are just networks of social relations. No, Marx says something wonderful. Fetishism or ideology generally for Marx is not things are really like that but they appear to you in a distorted way. No! Marx is saying something much more refined: that one thing is how you experience things at the level of your consciousness. Another thing is how things really are, but there is a third thing: all the illusions that even if you don't believe in them, you practice them, they are embodied in your practice. For Marx commodity fetishism is not some like Marx himself gives this example, a typical bourgeois subject is not some mystic theological mystic. Usually utilitarian pragmatic: "What is money? Piece of paper gives me blah blah." But so where is commodity fetishism? It's not deep in you, it's an illusion embedded in how you interact on the market. It's out there. It's a wonderful theory of something can be an illusion which structures your practice even if you don't believe in this illusion. There are as my good friend the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller developed in his wonderful notion of interpassivity, there are beliefs into which nobody believes and they still function as beliefs. And this is crucial for me of how ideology today functions. Do you allow me to say a joke which it's not a joke, it's an anecdote of Niels Bohr? You heard it probably here, I use it times. Okay, it's a perfect example. I will use it 51st time. About Niels Bohr, you know the story. He had a house in the Danish countryside and above the house, farmer's house for weekend trips, was a horseshoe, superstitious item preventing evil spirits to enter. And then a friend visited him there said, "But why do you have that horseshoe above the entrance? Are you crazy? Do you believe in it?" And Niels Bohr answers, "I'm not crazy, of course I'm a scientist, I don't believe in it." Then a friend asks him, "But why do you have it there? This superstitious item preventing allegedly evil spirits?" and Bohr gave Niels Bohr gave a perfect answer. He said, "I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's our ideology today. You don't have to believe in it but you in your materiality you practice a belief. This here I see a perfect link between Marx but just to conclude sorry briefly that human rights point, no? It's also you know Marx is not just a historicist who says everything is historical-relative. His greatest point about capitalism is that it's more universal than we think. World market is for Marx Marx a practice of universality. Marx is not this primitive historicist who says, you know. So I will not go into it, we developed this and also my good friend the other Slovene Lacanian Alenka Zupančič, he is the greatest of our Stalinist Slovene Troika: me, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič. She published in French, in English, in German a book *The Odd One In: On Comedy* (*Kant avec Lacan*), where yes, she goes in detail into this in what sense, as Lacan puts it very clearly, that if you look to this you were I think alluding, that if you look at the starting point in European history of ideas out of which Freudian psychoanalysis grew, it was not some kind of Nietzsche, Lebensphilosophie, it was Kant's *Critique of Practical Reason*. And she develops this in a wonderful way. Sorry, I talk too much.
um it becomes political immediately. So um frankly when you ended your lecture, it's yeah the catastrophe is near, we have to do something, it sounds a little bit like that. I almost immediately have the reflex of as a psychoanalyst, one by one. And there's lots of work to be done. I mean you have to produce the lack. Um, the lack is not something you observe, you don't observe it, you produce it, yeah yeah. And the the dynamics of producing it that brings you somewhere as to your position in the world, which has to be a desiring position and is immediately a political position. In in that seminar Lacan also says that *l'inconscient est politique* (the unconscious is political). He doesn't say *la politique est inconsciente*, *l'inconscient est politique*. And I think he means the same thing, that when you let it speak it's immediately in it, the other is included of course in the in the structure of language that is the unconscious. So... Oh, this is again another complex question. I would put it like this. First, yes you are absolutely right. *L'inconscient est politique*, it's not the same as politics is unconscious. Politics is unconscious, it's pure Jungian bullshit, no? It means political games are really grounded in some deep unconscious archetypes and so on and so on. While as you indicated, unconscious is political means that unconscious is not some kind of a arche-deep truth in me but is something precisely it's almost I'm tempted to say to quote here *X-Files*: "the truth is out there." It's out there in social interaction, it's embodied there. And that's in what sense then it is political? The only way I can read it is although I had great problems with him in the sense of the Laclau discursive struggle and so on that political means for me at its most fundamental dimension not in the sense that usually we speak of psychoanalytic politics in the sense of for which party are we? Although we find here some sad examples like Jacques-Alain Miller in one before last election being engaged pro-Sarkozy and so on, strange things are going on. But what political in the sense that it's an act of as you would have put it producing new master signifiers, negotiable strategic decision. It's not objective knowledge that you just discover there. And so this would be my first point about unconscious is political. And in this sense I'm even tempted, I develop this in many of my books, to read and I always like it more and more, the most traditional part of Marxism: Marx's logic of commodity fetishism. What Marx is saying there, he is not saying the usual stupidity, we are in so far as we participate in the market we are caught in commodity fetishism, we don't see that commodities are just networks of social relations. No, Marx says something wonderful. Fetishism or ideology generally for Marx is not things are really like that but they appear to you in a distorted way. No! Marx is saying something much more refined: that one thing is how you experience things at the level of your consciousness. Another thing is how things really are, but there is a third thing: all the illusions that even if you don't believe in them, you practice them, they are embodied in your practice. For Marx commodity fetishism is not some like Marx himself gives this example, a typical bourgeois subject is not some mystic theological mystic. Usually utilitarian pragmatic: "What is money? Piece of paper gives me blah blah." But so where is commodity fetishism? It's not deep in you, it's an illusion embedded in how you interact on the market. It's out there. It's a wonderful theory of something can be an illusion which structures your practice even if you don't believe in this illusion. There are as my good friend the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller developed in his wonderful notion of interpassivity, there are beliefs into which nobody believes and they still function as beliefs. And this is crucial for me of how ideology today functions. Do you allow me to say a joke which it's not a joke, it's an anecdote of Niels Bohr? You heard it probably here, I use it times. Okay, it's a perfect example. I will use it 51st time. About Niels Bohr, you know the story. He had a house in the Danish countryside and above the house, farmer's house for weekend trips, was a horseshoe, superstitious item preventing evil spirits to enter. And then a friend visited him there said, "But why do you have that horseshoe above the entrance? Are you crazy? Do you believe in it?" And Niels Bohr answers, "I'm not crazy, of course I'm a scientist, I don't believe in it." Then a friend asks him, "But why do you have it there? This superstitious item preventing allegedly evil spirits?" and Bohr gave Niels Bohr gave a perfect answer. He said, "I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's our ideology today. You don't have to believe in it but you in your materiality you practice a belief. This here I see a perfect link between Marx but just to conclude sorry briefly that human rights point, no? It's also you know Marx is not just a historicist who says everything is historical-relative. His greatest point about capitalism is that it's more universal than we think. World market is for Marx Marx a practice of universality. Marx is not this primitive historicist who says, you know. So I will not go into it, we developed this and also my good friend the other Slovene Lacanian Alenka Zupančič, he is the greatest of our Stalinist Slovene Troika: me, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič. She published in French, in English, in German a book *The Odd One In: On Comedy* (*Kant avec Lacan*), where yes, she goes in detail into this in what sense, as Lacan puts it very clearly, that if you look to this you were I think alluding, that if you look at the starting point in European history of ideas out of which Freudian psychoanalysis grew, it was not some kind of Nietzsche, Lebensphilosophie, it was Kant's *Critique of Practical Reason*. And she develops this in a wonderful way. Sorry, I talk too much.
unknown
I think I think
I think I think
Slavoj Žižek
we're near the end. I wanted to ask The last blow. You know what I deserve now? Hollywood final No, I'm going to ask you a question about love. I told you. Love! Oh my god. You! Yes. But I just want to make two small remarks. First, on I wanted to ask you a question about euthanasia, I will not do that because we agreed with you, we talked in the car. I am against euthanasia in the cases where causality the reason for despair is clearly purely psychic or how you But the words
we're near the end. I wanted to ask The last blow. You know what I deserve now? Hollywood final No, I'm going to ask you a question about love. I told you. Love! Oh my god. You! Yes. But I just want to make two small remarks. First, on I wanted to ask you a question about euthanasia, I will not do that because we agreed with you, we talked in the car. I am against euthanasia in the cases where causality the reason for despair is clearly purely psychic or how you But the words
unknown
you used in relation to Sloterdijk in my opinion
you used in relation to Sloterdijk in my opinion
Slavoj Žižek
are applicable what is at work here now in Belgium in the case of mental suffering alone is cynical resignation and an ideology of
are applicable what is at work here now in Belgium in the case of mental suffering alone is cynical resignation and an ideology of
unknown
good death. And that's really
good death. And that's really
Slavoj Žižek
very very problematic. That I agree, I totally agree, I agree. Then second thing, we will not discuss it tonight but I would like to do that another time is the gender issue that I had the gender issue, yeah yeah you mean all
very very problematic. That I agree, I totally agree, I agree. Then second thing, we will not discuss it tonight but I would like to do that another time is the gender issue that I had the gender issue, yeah yeah you mean all
unknown
this sexes,
this sexes,
Slavoj Žižek
LGBT plus. Did you notice the nice ideology of plus? The list is never complete, so now the finally established formula is LGBTQ plus. Yes. And for me plus is Lacanian Object a, you know. That you don't know what it is but you have to add it to be complete. Sorry, I interrupted you please. Well, the I we are not going but I had a slogan actually that was brought to me by my colleague from Brussels, Ariane Baza, who says in relation to the distinctions, she she says distinctions but no difference. Yeah exactly, yes. It's a clear case of to put it in Lacan's term of the disavowal of *il n'y a pas de rapport
LGBT plus. Did you notice the nice ideology of plus? The list is never complete, so now the finally established formula is LGBTQ plus. Yes. And for me plus is Lacanian Object a, you know. That you don't know what it is but you have to add it to be complete. Sorry, I interrupted you please. Well, the I we are not going but I had a slogan actually that was brought to me by my colleague from Brussels, Ariane Baza, who says in relation to the distinctions, she she says distinctions but no difference. Yeah exactly, yes. It's a clear case of to put it in Lacan's term of the disavowal of *il n'y a pas de rapport
unknown
sexuel* (there is no
sexuel* (there is no
Slavoj Žižek
sexual relationship) of sexual
sexual relationship) of sexual
unknown
difference as impossible. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Because you know what's
difference as impossible. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Because you know what's
Slavoj Žižek
the I mean to be clear at practical
the I mean to be clear at practical
unknown
level, I know I met some of them and they are much more intelligent than this fashionable characters fighting for sexes: really suffering transgender people. You know why they are authentic? Because they know that their tragic position of not finding sexual identity is just an extreme effect of a lack of identity which pertains to sexuality as such according to Lacan. This is what Lacan means by *il n'y a pas de
level, I know I met some of them and they are much more intelligent than this fashionable characters fighting for sexes: really suffering transgender people. You know why they are authentic? Because they know that their tragic position of not finding sexual identity is just an extreme effect of a lack of identity which pertains to sexuality as such according to Lacan. This is what Lacan means by *il n'y a pas de
Slavoj Žižek
rapport sexuel*. And that's one of my problems with this categorization: that you have now identities, men, human, butch, bigender,
rapport sexuel*. And that's one of my problems with this categorization: that you have now identities, men, human, butch, bigender,
unknown
trigender, transgender, whatever. And it is as if if we add enough categories then "Oh, I'm that. I will be happy to find my identity." That doesn't work. And goes with it the idea that by naming it and it it installs a kind of political correctness that is terrorist, I think. No, no, I tend to agree because that's why I don't think as some benevolent critics of political correctness claim that political correctness goes too far, it's too no, it doesn't go too far, it's simply wrong. Not wrong in the sense that I'm more radical here in the sense that there is no sexism, there is no repression all that exist and we should fight it without mercy and so on. But there is something fundamentally false in the politically correct way of fighting this. Way as if through regulation of speech what political correctness wants to achieve through regulation of speech is for me deeply not only counter-productive but it's really a how should I put it isn't it and here it brings us back even to Diogenes and so on. Wouldn't you agree that political correctness is basically a fear of the neighbor as such, neighbor as the real neighbor sex being and so on? Because that's why I always found suspicious the term harassment. Harassment basically means "Don't come too near to me, you annoy me." You know,
trigender, transgender, whatever. And it is as if if we add enough categories then "Oh, I'm that. I will be happy to find my identity." That doesn't work. And goes with it the idea that by naming it and it it installs a kind of political correctness that is terrorist, I think. No, no, I tend to agree because that's why I don't think as some benevolent critics of political correctness claim that political correctness goes too far, it's too no, it doesn't go too far, it's simply wrong. Not wrong in the sense that I'm more radical here in the sense that there is no sexism, there is no repression all that exist and we should fight it without mercy and so on. But there is something fundamentally false in the politically correct way of fighting this. Way as if through regulation of speech what political correctness wants to achieve through regulation of speech is for me deeply not only counter-productive but it's really a how should I put it isn't it and here it brings us back even to Diogenes and so on. Wouldn't you agree that political correctness is basically a fear of the neighbor as such, neighbor as the real neighbor sex being and so on? Because that's why I always found suspicious the term harassment. Harassment basically means "Don't come too near to me, you annoy me." You know,
Slavoj Žižek
it's this basic I was accused of this, you know. Like, in America United States it can be madness, you know. You look a woman look, if I were to do this at some campus, you would be able to accuse me of visual rape. So I was accused of all possible rapes already: not of a real rape, but of visual rape, verbal rape, I don't know what. But I got it, that's why also there is another enigma that interests me so much: fear of smoking. I don't smoke, probably it's true all that they say, but this obsession, which is very selective, just with smoking. I cannot resist laughing at this paradox: how the same of my American leftist friends who oppose smoking fanatically I was at a party once where, ooh, smoking, they should be prohibited. And then they distributed opium or crack at the end of the party. Like, that's not a problem, you know. And especially this passive it's really this annoyance of "You know that it's dangerous, how could you enjoy so openly?" and so on. It's an extreme desire of regulation behind it and the fear of the other as subject of desire. And that's the problem of political correctness. Some intelligent feminists in the United States made a wonderful observation. They claimed that are we aware that in the standard process of erotic game, seduction and so on, it doesn't go that the whole sorry for this name charm of seduction is that one, sometimes man, sometimes a woman and that's good at least here we have equality of sexes, you have this intense erotic game and then somebody as they say has to make a gesture, open. And then at that point you risk. Either the other will accept it or it will proclaim that it was harassment or whatever. And this intelligent feminist said that can we imagine purely political sex without this element of harassment? Yes, pure prostitution contract and so on. That's the sad thing that some feminists know: that the only way that you do it in this totally correct way is through although even this can be eroticized. The best advice that I heard from a doctor, it's so deeply true I claim against impotence (and I wasn't the one who had this problem), was this one. Don't follow this oriental pseudo-oriental bullshit, don't think, just do it spontaneously. No! Turn it into bureaucratic procedure. You have a lover you cannot do it, sit down and make a bureaucratic plan. After three minutes and a half you stick my I will stick my finger there. Then you will kiss me there. And then there is a debate. She said, "No, I want to stick my finger there already at two minutes and a half." Then you have a debate and then one solution is that after a debate why don't we simply go to bed or whatever and it works, I can promise you. It works this, you know, like so that's almost I would say the only thing that I like about political correctness: that in a weird way it can be re-eroticized ironically. And it works in a wonderful way. Everything can be re-eroticized. Now you will not escape that question of love, of course. We will end with that. Is it I I think you are a romanticist. Absolutely. Correct. Are you a formal romanticist? Absolutely. Okay. In theory, everything. A rebellious romanticist? Rebellious what is Yes, in principle, no I'm not now giving you a Radio Yerevan answer. I'm just saying that the world rebellion and resistance, you should know this, is so misused today, you know. It's part of the ruling game. That's why I hate, for example, although I was there, but supporting my friend Venice Biennale, did did these big Biennales visual arts. They are fully part of capitalist machinery, but it's part of the game that you proclaim that you fight capitalism and self-critically you proclaim that you know we are totally manipulated by capital and so on and so on. So just I'm very suspicious of this, you know, using too much but rebellion in this basic sense, yes, absolutely. Romantic, yes, absolutely. Because the opposite of romantic is for me cynical, not cynical in a romantic
it's this basic I was accused of this, you know. Like, in America United States it can be madness, you know. You look a woman look, if I were to do this at some campus, you would be able to accuse me of visual rape. So I was accused of all possible rapes already: not of a real rape, but of visual rape, verbal rape, I don't know what. But I got it, that's why also there is another enigma that interests me so much: fear of smoking. I don't smoke, probably it's true all that they say, but this obsession, which is very selective, just with smoking. I cannot resist laughing at this paradox: how the same of my American leftist friends who oppose smoking fanatically I was at a party once where, ooh, smoking, they should be prohibited. And then they distributed opium or crack at the end of the party. Like, that's not a problem, you know. And especially this passive it's really this annoyance of "You know that it's dangerous, how could you enjoy so openly?" and so on. It's an extreme desire of regulation behind it and the fear of the other as subject of desire. And that's the problem of political correctness. Some intelligent feminists in the United States made a wonderful observation. They claimed that are we aware that in the standard process of erotic game, seduction and so on, it doesn't go that the whole sorry for this name charm of seduction is that one, sometimes man, sometimes a woman and that's good at least here we have equality of sexes, you have this intense erotic game and then somebody as they say has to make a gesture, open. And then at that point you risk. Either the other will accept it or it will proclaim that it was harassment or whatever. And this intelligent feminist said that can we imagine purely political sex without this element of harassment? Yes, pure prostitution contract and so on. That's the sad thing that some feminists know: that the only way that you do it in this totally correct way is through although even this can be eroticized. The best advice that I heard from a doctor, it's so deeply true I claim against impotence (and I wasn't the one who had this problem), was this one. Don't follow this oriental pseudo-oriental bullshit, don't think, just do it spontaneously. No! Turn it into bureaucratic procedure. You have a lover you cannot do it, sit down and make a bureaucratic plan. After three minutes and a half you stick my I will stick my finger there. Then you will kiss me there. And then there is a debate. She said, "No, I want to stick my finger there already at two minutes and a half." Then you have a debate and then one solution is that after a debate why don't we simply go to bed or whatever and it works, I can promise you. It works this, you know, like so that's almost I would say the only thing that I like about political correctness: that in a weird way it can be re-eroticized ironically. And it works in a wonderful way. Everything can be re-eroticized. Now you will not escape that question of love, of course. We will end with that. Is it I I think you are a romanticist. Absolutely. Correct. Are you a formal romanticist? Absolutely. Okay. In theory, everything. A rebellious romanticist? Rebellious what is Yes, in principle, no I'm not now giving you a Radio Yerevan answer. I'm just saying that the world rebellion and resistance, you should know this, is so misused today, you know. It's part of the ruling game. That's why I hate, for example, although I was there, but supporting my friend Venice Biennale, did did these big Biennales visual arts. They are fully part of capitalist machinery, but it's part of the game that you proclaim that you fight capitalism and self-critically you proclaim that you know we are totally manipulated by capital and so on and so on. So just I'm very suspicious of this, you know, using too much but rebellion in this basic sense, yes, absolutely. Romantic, yes, absolutely. Because the opposite of romantic is for me cynical, not cynical in a romantic
unknown
way. But
way. But
Slavoj Žižek
every power
every power
unknown
is cynical. For
is cynical. For
Slavoj Žižek
example,
example,
unknown
I was opposed already when I was young to Umberto Eco's *The Name of the Rose*.
I was opposed already when I was young to Umberto Eco's *The Name of the Rose*.
Slavoj Žižek
This stupid idea that laughter as such has a liberating effect. It can have. But my god, didn't he ever see this cynical laughter
This stupid idea that laughter as such has a liberating effect. It can have. But my god, didn't he ever see this cynical laughter
unknown
of those in power, how they mock you. I mean, my formative experience in very modest dissident activity was once I witnessed a years ago, a small dissident
of those in power, how they mock you. I mean, my formative experience in very modest dissident activity was once I witnessed a years ago, a small dissident
Slavoj Žižek
meeting, some victim protesting in a very pathetic way. And one we later discovered secret
meeting, some victim protesting in a very pathetic way. And one we later discovered secret
unknown
agent of the secret police of the party did
agent of the secret police of the party did
unknown
something ingenious. He didn't confront
something ingenious. He didn't confront
Slavoj Žižek
her as a harsh politician, "How dare you say this treason." He imitated her, this poor woman who was protesting, mocked her, making fun and ruined her performance. My deep experience is how intelligent power uses mockery, irony, laughter. It's much more efficient. Even now, maybe you did it two days ago, I read on Google news or whatever I don't know, that new American alt-right now is discovering irony and jokes to promote their agenda. So I don't buy this too much of oh, a little bit laughter liberates and so on. No, no, no. I'm in this sense romantic: sometimes you have to risk this good pathetic romantic passionate attachment
her as a harsh politician, "How dare you say this treason." He imitated her, this poor woman who was protesting, mocked her, making fun and ruined her performance. My deep experience is how intelligent power uses mockery, irony, laughter. It's much more efficient. Even now, maybe you did it two days ago, I read on Google news or whatever I don't know, that new American alt-right now is discovering irony and jokes to promote their agenda. So I don't buy this too much of oh, a little bit laughter liberates and so on. No, no, no. I'm in this sense romantic: sometimes you have to risk this good pathetic romantic passionate attachment
unknown
and it's the irony which is on the side of power. Yeah. And transgressive. Yeah,
and it's the irony which is on the side of power. Yeah. And transgressive. Yeah,
Slavoj Žižek
yeah. Okay, thank you very much. Where is love? You didn't ask me about love. No, because what I wanted to say is that now I will shock you, the last statement. You know it's now fashionable to say polyamory, you know. A guy can love more than one human being whatever. I doubt it. You know why? Because love in this case is this pragmatic utilitarian love: I love you for this reason, I need another man for another reason, another woman for that reason. But for me real passionate love, and it still exists, it's much more unconditional. It's not that I love you for some reasons. It's simply I love you because, sorry for this pathetics, I cannot imagine living without you. Is this radical impossibility and here you cannot play: "I cannot live without you because of your legs, I cannot live without you because of your eyes" and so on. It must be this unconditional aspect. Isn't it clear that the moment you can nominate reasons for love, it's no longer love, it's mental housekeeping, you know. This type of love is you have sorry imaginary women you have nice eyes and legs, you have nice breasts and hands and then I made a list, "Oh, her list is better, I will love you." No! This is why I claim for structural reasons and Lacan knew it, he mentions this, true love is the highest act of freedom which precisely for this cannot be ever experienced as a free act in the sense of free choice. It's not "Oh my god, I will now freely fall in love for you." No. True love is precisely all of a sudden you discover you already are desperately in love. It's never the present moment "Now I will fall in love" or whatsoever. You see, this German idealists knew this. Kant, in his my favorite Kant is the late one *Religon*, religion within the he describes there this structure, he has a wonderful speculative formulation of how this eternal transcendental free acts with you which you always experience as necessary, you know. True freedom is not I go to a pastry and choose chocolate or strawberry cake. True freedom is, let me give you a pathetic example (sorry for the pathetic), my country's occupied, I decide to fight the aggressor. You don't decide as a free choice. You decide to risk your love your life because you feel that simply you cannot do otherwise. That you couldn't look yourself into the mirror you would be too tortured. You know, this is my much more refined point of which Kant was aware. True freedom is to assume what you
yeah. Okay, thank you very much. Where is love? You didn't ask me about love. No, because what I wanted to say is that now I will shock you, the last statement. You know it's now fashionable to say polyamory, you know. A guy can love more than one human being whatever. I doubt it. You know why? Because love in this case is this pragmatic utilitarian love: I love you for this reason, I need another man for another reason, another woman for that reason. But for me real passionate love, and it still exists, it's much more unconditional. It's not that I love you for some reasons. It's simply I love you because, sorry for this pathetics, I cannot imagine living without you. Is this radical impossibility and here you cannot play: "I cannot live without you because of your legs, I cannot live without you because of your eyes" and so on. It must be this unconditional aspect. Isn't it clear that the moment you can nominate reasons for love, it's no longer love, it's mental housekeeping, you know. This type of love is you have sorry imaginary women you have nice eyes and legs, you have nice breasts and hands and then I made a list, "Oh, her list is better, I will love you." No! This is why I claim for structural reasons and Lacan knew it, he mentions this, true love is the highest act of freedom which precisely for this cannot be ever experienced as a free act in the sense of free choice. It's not "Oh my god, I will now freely fall in love for you." No. True love is precisely all of a sudden you discover you already are desperately in love. It's never the present moment "Now I will fall in love" or whatsoever. You see, this German idealists knew this. Kant, in his my favorite Kant is the late one *Religon*, religion within the he describes there this structure, he has a wonderful speculative formulation of how this eternal transcendental free acts with you which you always experience as necessary, you know. True freedom is not I go to a pastry and choose chocolate or strawberry cake. True freedom is, let me give you a pathetic example (sorry for the pathetic), my country's occupied, I decide to fight the aggressor. You don't decide as a free choice. You decide to risk your love your life because you feel that simply you cannot do otherwise. That you couldn't look yourself into the mirror you would be too tortured. You know, this is my much more refined point of which Kant was aware. True freedom is to assume what you
unknown
experience as your fate in the sense of you cannot do it otherwise,
experience as your fate in the sense of you cannot do it otherwise,
Slavoj Žižek
but you are still
but you are still
unknown
responsible,
responsible,
Slavoj Žižek
it's still your free act. Hmm. And just one sentence to end because it's late and if you still want to sign your books: love is unconditional but not unlimited. Absolutely correct, yes. And that's the exercise, I think, of a psychoanalysis. Yeah. It is *ne pas céder sur son désir* and castration. Absolutely. And the paradox, nice paradox of Lacan, is that this is not kind of a not even it appears as a paradox but in reality no, castration is a condition of being uncondition in this sense, no? No, no, Lacan has here and I hope we agree, I'm sorry we don't have time to go into that, precisely people usually say yes, Freud had its actuality years ago with Victorian England but not today. No! Today is the true time of Freud. Because Freud's paradox from the beginning was not you want to do some sex acts but because of internalized paternal authority you cannot. No! Freud's paradox was from the beginning the paradox of super-ego. Like, precisely when you allow desire without constraints, desire itself sabotages itself. And this is what is happening today. Our super-ego today is not "Obey authorities," "Enjoy" and so on. And we have more frigidity and impotence as ever. And the Kantian
it's still your free act. Hmm. And just one sentence to end because it's late and if you still want to sign your books: love is unconditional but not unlimited. Absolutely correct, yes. And that's the exercise, I think, of a psychoanalysis. Yeah. It is *ne pas céder sur son désir* and castration. Absolutely. And the paradox, nice paradox of Lacan, is that this is not kind of a not even it appears as a paradox but in reality no, castration is a condition of being uncondition in this sense, no? No, no, Lacan has here and I hope we agree, I'm sorry we don't have time to go into that, precisely people usually say yes, Freud had its actuality years ago with Victorian England but not today. No! Today is the true time of Freud. Because Freud's paradox from the beginning was not you want to do some sex acts but because of internalized paternal authority you cannot. No! Freud's paradox was from the beginning the paradox of super-ego. Like, precisely when you allow desire without constraints, desire itself sabotages itself. And this is what is happening today. Our super-ego today is not "Obey authorities," "Enjoy" and so on. And we have more frigidity and impotence as ever. And the Kantian
unknown
way
way
Slavoj Žižek
of saying it is "The constraint is the possibility." Yeah. That's the light dove of Kant. That's why I also am on poly for against polyamory. Because ideologists of of polyamory try to present their choice as more wealth in your life. Like, why just one person? It can be more, it liberates you. No! As you said very nicely, the constraint is what gives strength to your Is the possibility. That's within the constraint is all the That very much. Thank you very much. I'm so sad that we cannot go on to this like in Chinese Cultural Revolution they have this tortures, they shouted at you for two days. I would like to have a debate like you in this intensity. Thank you very much! Thank you very much. Let me tell you as an old hardline communist (it's my old
of saying it is "The constraint is the possibility." Yeah. That's the light dove of Kant. That's why I also am on poly for against polyamory. Because ideologists of of polyamory try to present their choice as more wealth in your life. Like, why just one person? It can be more, it liberates you. No! As you said very nicely, the constraint is what gives strength to your Is the possibility. That's within the constraint is all the That very much. Thank you very much. I'm so sad that we cannot go on to this like in Chinese Cultural Revolution they have this tortures, they shouted at you for two days. I would like to have a debate like you in this intensity. Thank you very much! Thank you very much. Let me tell you as an old hardline communist (it's my old
unknown
joke, I'm
joke, I'm
Slavoj Žižek
sorry if you know it), save the applause. When we hardline communists will take power,
sorry if you know it), save the applause. When we hardline communists will take power,
unknown
you
you
Slavoj Žižek
will have to applaud. But until then save the applause. Thank you.
will have to applaud. But until then save the applause. Thank you.