Power, Betrayal and Brexit
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-07-02 · 1:04:28 · 8,046 words
ideologycinema-art-culturepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsfascism-populismdemocracygeopolitics-warcapitalismliberalism-political-correctnessreligion-theology
Žižek delivers a lecture at the Southbank Centre on Wagner, power, and Brexit, anchored in an analysis of the Ring cycle and Parsifal. He argues that in Wagner evil originates from within the community (Wotan/Alberich as two faces of the same obscenity) rather than from an external intruder, and uses this to diagnose modern power as exercised through the public display of castration and weakness rather than through regal insignia. He then turns to Brexit as a case study in ideological false consciousness, arguing that both Remain and Leave were 'both worse,' and closes by mapping the bewildered crowd at the end of Götterdämmerung onto the contemporary political situation.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Wagner's contrast between Wotan (white Alb) and Alberich (black Alb) as two sides of the same coin of power driven by renounced love, used by Žižek to map the duality of political leader and subterranean capitalist.
Absolute fidelity unto death to one's cause or master, embodied by Hagen; a teleological suspension of everyday morality in the name of loyalty.
as “teleological suspension of morality”
The rightist logic whereby committing a crime 'for your country' is presented as the harder, more heroic act than noble self-sacrifice, enabling the dirty work of power.
The figure of the father who appears as a nightmarish, undead enjoyment-entity rather than a dignified symbolic authority; instantiated in Wagner by both Alberich and Titurel as contrasting modes.
The gap opened between what a person immediately is and the symbolic mandate/insignia that confers authority on them; for Lacan, the very condition of entering the symbolic order.
For Lacan, an insignia or mask attached to the body as an incoherent supplement that confers authority, rather than an expression of natural virility; an organ without a body.
The modern reversal whereby rulers openly display weakness and ordinariness so that this very self-debasement becomes the instrument through which limitless power is exercised.
The 'I know very well, but nonetheless' structure by which belief persists in practice despite conscious knowledge to the contrary.
as “cynicism as hegemonic ideology”
Today's dominant ideological form in which disavowal no longer relies on a fetish object but on knowledge itself, one accepts the critical insight precisely in order to neutralize it.
In contemporary cynicism, knowledge itself functions as the obstacle that prevents one from seriously assuming and acting on what one knows.
The anonymous authority of public symbolic space whose 'not knowing' allows individuals to act as if they don't know what they in fact know (e.g., WikiLeaks disclosures only truly disturb when the big Other learns them).
When a mask is worn, it engenders a third entity, neither the face behind it nor the mask surface, which is the pure subject as abyss; Žižek illustrates this with his child's persistent fear even after the mask is revealed.
as “the neighbor (das Ding)”
The terrifying, impenetrable abyss of the other that the face-as-mask normally conceals; the covered face of the burqa strips away this protective shield and confronts us with the neighbor directly.
as “the face as ultimate mask”
The face is not what reveals authentic selfhood but what conceals the abyss of the neighbor; the burqa, by hiding the face, paradoxically exposes this uncanny void more directly.
Implied in the analysis of ideology and Brexit: social forms that function independently of individuals' beliefs about them.
as “death drive (political)”
Applied to Brexit: the organism (nation) wants to die, dismantle its own sovereignty, but on its own terms, through submission to global capital rather than Brussels bureaucracy.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek updates Freud's dream example: today's dreamer wouldn't deny 'that was not my mother' but would say 'Of course it was my mother, so don't bother me with this', illustrating how cynical over-acceptance of knowledge disarms critique.
“today the dreamer would admit all too willingly It was my mother of course so don't bother me with this we all know it”
Modern rulers dress casually and act 'like us,' renouncing all dignitary insignia, but this displayed castration is the very instrument of their limitless power, not a limitation on it.
“See we are common people like you with all weaknesses fears limitations like everyone else”
When asked whether the right or leftist deviation was worse, Stalin replied 'They are both worse', Žižek applies this to Brexit: both Remain and Leave were 'both worse.'
“Which deviation is worse the right one or the leftist one he snapped back They are both worse”
People who met Lacan privately expected to find a warm, human person behind the artificially formal public persona, but he was exactly the same in private, never giving anyone the relief of 'the real human behind the mask.'
“when you met him in private he was precisely the same affected artificial bastard Never you got this Oh but now I got him as a real human being like ourselves”
Works invoked 9
Parsifal opera
Analyzed at length for the Amfortas/Titurel father-son dynamic as a counterpart to Alberich/Hagen, illustrating the two modes of the obscene father.
Homo Deus book
Harari's book cited for the argument that democratic elections require a pre-existing common bond among voters, used to argue against naive global-democracy solutions to problems like migration.
Chesterton's novel cited for its structure in which the master criminal is revealed to be God, parallel to Palpatine/Darth Sidious and the Republic fighting itself.
Der fliegende Holländer opera
Identified as the first full Wagnerian hero, the Dutchman as wandering Jew Ahasuerus, which for Žižek reveals the Jewish archetype at the heart of all Wagnerian heroism.
Der Ring des Nibelungen opera
The central text of the talk; Žižek deploys it to analyze the internal origins of evil, the ethics of Wotan vs. Alberich, Hagen as proto-fascist, and the final crowd as image of contemporary humanity.
Lang's film is mentioned as a precursor that depicted Hagen as a dark plotter, but Wagner's version already goes further in making Hagen the supreme figure of Nibelungentreue.
Jean Genet's play, cited via Badiou's reading, as the locus classicus for the observation that democracy means no costumes, no insignia distinguish rulers from ordinary people.
The Usual Suspects film
Keyser Söze as the paradigmatic modern figure of power exercised by the seemingly weakest, most ordinary character, illustrating the castration of the symbolic public image.
Used to illustrate power seized through total helplessness, Palpatine's face transformation and the Republic-fighting-itself structure, with a nod to its 'somewhat awkward Hegelianism.'
People invoked 28
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my Lacanian colleague from Ljubljana'; Žižek quotes her formulation that the castration of the public image enables unlimited exercise of actual power.
Marine Le Pen negative
Cited as the model the confused left mistakenly wants to imitate, mobilizing workers with nationalist rhetoric, which Žižek calls 'a ridiculous struggle lost in advance.'
Edward Snowden positive
Cited alongside Assange and Manning as examples whose disclosures did not reveal previously unknown facts but changed the status of public/official knowledge.
Richard Wagner positive
Žižek defends Wagner against charges of proto-fascism by showing his anti-Semitic figures are also ironic self-portraits, and reads the Ring as a profound diagnosis of modern power and the internal origins of evil.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
The 'Levinasian face' as unconditional ethical call is implicitly rejected: Žižek argues the covered face is more confrontational and ethically charged precisely because it strips the reassuring Levinasian humanizing function.
Pierre Boulez positive
Co-creator with Chéreau of the pathbreaking Ring staging at Bayreuth; cited approvingly in the same context as Chéreau.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek draws on Lacan's concepts of symbolic castration, the phallic signifier, the big Other, and the madman who thinks he is king; also recounts anecdotes about Lacan's famously artificial persona even in private.
Invoked twice: once humorously as the Brexit equivalent of Siegfried's German bureaucratic contempt, and once as a possible contemporary example of a leader who exerts power through displaying human weaknesses.
G. K. Chesterton positive
The Man Who Was Thursday cited for its structural logic (the criminal mastermind turns out to be God) to illuminate the Star Wars III Palpatine/Darth Sidious revelation.
Jean Genet positive
His play Le Balcon is cited (via Badiou) as the source of the observation that democracy means no costumes, no insignia of power.
Fritz Lang positive
His film version of the Nibelung saga is mentioned as depicting Hagen as a dark plotter, in contrast to Wagner who already sees Hagen as a proto-fascist figure of ultimate fidelity.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Quoted from Homo Deus on the limits of democracy, democratic elections work only within populations sharing a prior common bond, to argue against naive calls for worldwide democratic solutions.
Mentioned as the actor who plays Keyser Söze / the apparent weakest character who turns out to be the all-powerful criminal, illustrating power through displayed weakness.
Chelsea Manning positive
Cited as part of the trio of whistleblowers alongside Assange and Snowden.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek cites Badiou's reading of Jean Genet's Le Balcon, 'Democracy means there are no costumes', as the key observation about modern power's renunciation of insignia.
Adolf Hitler positive
Cited as the exemplar of the double game of using a Hagen-figure (Himmler) to commit atrocities while maintaining plausible deniability.
Bernie Sanders positive
Cited as the positive counterpart to Trump: just as the same chaos that produced Trump also produced Sanders, Žižek hopes the Brexit confusion will open space for a European Bernie Sanders.
Julian Assange positive
WikiLeaks cited as an example of disclosures that troubled not because they revealed unknown facts but because they forced the big Other to 'officially know.'
Patrice Chéreau positive
Žižek quotes Chéreau's description of his and Boulez's pathbreaking Götterdämmerung staging, where the surviving crowd stares at the audience, used as an image of disoriented contemporary humanity.
Alphonse Allais positive
The French satirist's version of Salome's dance where she removes her own skin, used to illustrate the burqa argument about the face as ultimate mask.
Heinrich Himmler positive
Used as the historical instantiation of the Hagen figure: Hitler's Hagen who performed the Holocaust as 'necessary dirty work', quoted from his 1943 Posen speech as evidence.
Heinrich Heine positive
Identified as Wagner's main source for the Flying Dutchman, a Jewish poet, reinforcing the argument that the foundational Wagnerian hero is of Jewish origin.
Eric Santner positive
Described as 'my good friend'; Žižek quotes Santner's letter arguing that Brexit has the markings of the death drive, the organism wanting to die on its own terms by submitting to global capital.
Mao Zedong positive
His motto 'Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent' is approvingly cited as a model for how to treat the Brexit crisis as an opportunity.
Joseph Stalin positive
The 'both deviations are worse' anecdote is cited to frame Brexit as a false dilemma where both options are worse.
Karl Marx positive
The elementary fetishist structure of kingship ('a king is a king because we treat him like a king') is attributed to Marx and used as the baseline for Žižek's analysis of power's deeper reversal.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's mother-dream example is updated by Žižek to illustrate cynical ideology: today's dreamer readily admits 'of course it was my mother' in order to neutralize the insight.
Tony Blair negative
The Blair government is cited as resisting EU limits on weekly work hours on grounds of industrial competitiveness, refuting the left-nationalist fantasy that UK sovereignty protects workers.
What it argues
Wagner's Ring as diagnosis of modern power and evilPower exercised through displayed weakness and castrationAnti-Semitism in Wagner redeemed by self-ironyBrexit as ideological false consciousnessFascist executive as loyal obscene enforcer (Hagen/Himmler parallel)The mask, the face, and the abyss of the neighborEuropean technocracy vs. nationalist populism as a false choice
Dialectical moves 12
“Evil does not come from the outside. The source of evil is in the very center of our own community.”
Reversing the populist logic that blames an external intruder (Jews, immigrants), Žižek shows that in Wagner the catastrophe originates from Wotan's own ethical failure, not from Alberich.
“Wotan's choice is ethically much worse than Alberich's — Alberich longed for love and only turned to power after being brutally mocked, while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying love and getting tired of it.”
The supposed villain (Alberich) is morally superior to the nominal god-hero (Wotan), inverting the surface moral hierarchy of the Ring.
“They are two sides of the same coin — Wotan is called the white Alb in contrast to the black Alb Alberich.”
The opposition between law-giving god and greedy dwarf collapses into an identity: both are driven by the renunciation of love in favor of power.
“Let the image be castrated in all possible ways, while I can do more or less whatever I want.”
The public display of weakness and castration is not a limitation on power but its very instrument, demystification serves mystification.
“Demystification is here redoubled: beneath the gesture of demystification the exercise of power remains intact.”
The cynical move of 'dropping the mask' is itself a new mask; transparency becomes the most effective form of opacity.
“It is no longer just 'I know very well you are an ordinary weak guy like me but I still accept you as my master'; it is rather 'because I know this, I can continue to obey you.'”
Knowledge is no longer an obstacle that belief overcomes but a positive condition for the functioning of authority, knowing fully enables, rather than undermines, submission.
“Mystification persists not in spite of its denunciation but through it, because of it.”
The cynical form of ideology sustains itself by incorporating its own critique; ideology is most powerful when it appears most transparent.
“Our private inner truth is the true mask.”
The 'real person behind the public role' is not more authentic but is itself a construction designed to make the horrors of the public role tolerable.
“The covered face causes such anxiety because it confronts us directly with the neighbor in its uncanny dimension — the very covering up of the face obliterates a protective shield.”
Inverting the liberal intuition, it is not the hidden face but the revealed face that reassures; the burqa exposes rather than conceals the abyss of the other.
“Palpatine seizes power at the very moment of total helplessness — his ridiculous weakness is not an obstacle to his power but its very resort.”
The ruler's utter debasement is the condition of possibility for his absolute domination, not its negation.
“The organism wants to die in its own way, on its own terms — Brexit has the markings of the death drive.”
The demand to 'take back control' is paradoxically a drive toward self-destruction: recovering sovereignty in order to surrender it more completely to global capital.
“They are both worse — Remain was worse since it meant persisting in inertia, Exit was worse since it made changing nothing look desirable.”
Both options in the Brexit referendum shared the same fundamental deficiency, replicating Stalin's formula to show the false dichotomy on offer.
Claims 17
asserts
Wagner's anti-Semitism is not hidden but openly displayed, yet Wagner consistently undermines it through his artistic practice by making the Jewish stereotypes his own ironic self-portraits.Wagner and anti-Semitism
asserts
The first full-blooded Wagnerian hero — the Flying Dutchman — is clearly a Jewish figure modeled on the wandering Jew Ahasuerus, making all subsequent Wagnerian heroes variations on a Jewish archetype.Wagner's Ring / Flying Dutchman
asserts
Evil in Wagner does not come from outside (the intruding Jew/dwarf) but originates in the very center of the community: Wotan's own ethical fiasco precedes and causes Alberich's power.the source of evil in Wagner
asserts
Wotan's choice is ethically worse than Alberich's because Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying love and growing tired of it, whereas Alberich turned to power only after being brutally rejected.comparative ethics of Wotan and Alberich
asserts
Hagen is a proto-fascist figure who anticipates the modern ruthless executive — the unconditional loyalist who performs necessary dirty work that must remain publicly concealed.Hagen and fascism
asserts
The move from Siegfried to Hagen in the Ring can be compared to the move from SA to SS: from brutal thugs to cold, calculating criminals.Wagner's Ring and National Socialism
asserts
Modern power no longer requires the insignia and costumes of authority; today rulers exercise power more effectively by displaying weakness, ordinariness, and symbolic castration.contemporary forms of authority
asserts
The cynical 'I know very well but nonetheless' today takes a new form: knowledge itself becomes the fetish that neutralizes critique, so that accepting knowledge is the very means of disavowing it.cynicism and ideology
asserts
WikiLeaks and Snowden did not disclose anything we did not already suspect; what changed was that the big Other — the anonymous public authority — now 'knows it,' making disavowal harder.WikiLeaks / knowledge and power
asserts
The face is not the locus of authentic selfhood but the ultimate mask that shields us from the uncanny abyss of the neighbor; the burqa, by removing the face-mask, paradoxically exposes us to this abyss more directly.the face, the burqa, and the neighbor
asserts
One's private inner life or 'true self' is itself a mask constructed to make tolerable the horrors one performs in one's public role — the private is not more real than the public persona.the relation between public and private identity
asserts
Brexit exemplifies ideological false consciousness in the classic Marxist sense: voters were mobilized by nationalist and anti-immigrant passion while the real question — how to resist global capital — was occluded.Brexit and ideology
asserts
The call to restore national sovereignty against Brussels is paradoxical: the UK government consistently used sovereignty to resist EU protections for workers, ecology, and human rights — not to defend them.Brexit and national sovereignty
asserts
Both Remain and Leave were 'both worse': Remain meant persisting in an inertia that blocked large-scale political projects; Leave made this inertia look desirable by offering only nationalist regression.Brexit choice
asserts
The European political space is being reorganized around a new axis: a pro-global-capital party with liberal tolerance vs. an anti-immigrant populist party, replacing the old left/right division.European political realignment
asserts
The crowd at the end of Götterdämmerung — disoriented humanity surviving an ideological catastrophe — is an image of our contemporary predicament and perhaps of our only hope.Wagner's Ring ending and contemporary politics
asserts
Worldwide democratic elections cannot solve problems like immigration because democratic legitimacy requires a prior shared bond among voters that does not exist at the global level.limits of democracy
Quotes 15
“Evil does not come from the outside. The insight of Wotan's tragic monologue is that the power of Alberich and the prospect of the end of the world is ultimately Wotan's own guilt, the result of his own ethical fiasco.”Slavoj Žižek · evil originates from within the community
“If anything Wotan's choice is ethically much worse than Alberich's. Alberich longed for love and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down, while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits of love and getting tired of them.”Slavoj Žižek · moral inversion of Wotan and Alberich
“It is much more difficult to commit a crime for your country when it is needed.”Slavoj Žižek · fascist logic of the dirty job
“Let the image be castrated in all possible ways while I can do more or less whatever I want.”Slavoj Žižek · displayed weakness as instrument of power
“Mystification persists not in spite of its denunciation but through it, because of it.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical ideology sustains itself through self-critique
“Power functions only insofar as it mocks itself.”Slavoj Žižek · self-mockery as mechanism of power
“Our private inner truth is the true mask.”Slavoj Žižek · the private self is more mask than the public persona
“The greatest lie today in our post-ideological era is precisely this lie of: behind the ideological clichés we are real persons all with our traumas fears and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · humanization as ideological lie
“The mask engenders a third reality, a ghost in the mask, which is not the reality of the face hidden beneath it.”Slavoj Žižek · the ghost in the mask / pure subject
“The very covering up of the face obliterates a protective shield so that the other neighbor stares at me directly.”Slavoj Žižek · burqa exposes the neighbor's abyss
“Palpatine seizes power at the very moment of total helplessness. His ridiculous weakness is not an obstacle to his power but its very resort.”Slavoj Žižek · power seized through total helplessness
“Brexit exemplifies perfectly the falsity of the calls to restore national sovereignty. England wants to withdraw from Brussels in order to be better able to organize the dismantling of its sovereignty by way of more radical submission to global capital.”Slavoj Žižek · Brexit as death drive / sovereignty paradox
“They are both worse — Remain was worse since it meant persisting in the inertia, Exit was worse since it made changing nothing look desirable.”Slavoj Žižek · Brexit false dilemma: both options worse
“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos — the situation is excellent.”Slavoj Žižek · crisis as opportunity for radical change
“We can imagine this nameless crowd as a figure of today's proletariat — a crowd of refugees, survivors of an ideological catastrophe or a civil war. Everything now rests on them without any guarantee in God or any other figure of the big Other.”Slavoj Žižek · the Götterdämmerung crowd as contemporary proletariat
Transcript 2 turns
unknown
Afternoon ladies and gentlemen I'm Judith Kelly artistic director of the Southbank Centre and very pleased that you're all here We're competing with an event at Trafalgar Square which is a protest about not being in Europe and here we're going to have a different kind of protest a more cerebral protest about many things But I want to give you a context for this particular event which is to do with Wagner and some of you will know that and some of you might immediately be thinking what's that about I've come to see Žižek But we decided a few years ago that one of the most peculiar and amazing and unknowable pieces in the European canon was Wagner's Ring cycle It's one of those things where people say to you you won't understand it you won't like it and even if you did you can't get a ticket And it produces in people a sense that there are these huge cultural artifacts that belong to the few and not the many And so we decided to do a Ring cycle here over this weekend that would be as far as we could make it for the many and not the few in the way that it was done in who joined us doing it Streetwise Homeless Opera London Transport staff nurses from St Thomas' Hospital many many schools etc And for those of you who are going to come back tomorrow if you want to Götterdämmerung which is the final one is free on the ballroom floor in that sort of garden area where you can sit and watch it When we were thinking about that we also thought about the kind of strangeness of this amazing piece of work which ends up being for the few and not the many and the fact that the central story in the Ring cycle is actually about the lust and desire for power and for this idea of the ring the golden ring which if you have it you can rule the world And so we thought well let's really examine the notion of power because even then two years ago when we started thinking about it it was so evident that people who love power like to have as much as possible and once people start losing power actually it's very difficult to regain it And there are some people in our society who are absolutely powerless and there are others who accumulate power and power themselves up on and on and on So we wanted to examine the whole construct of power and its dynamics and who are the gains and who are having the gains and who are having the losses We never could have predicted although I'd like to pretend we did that this week we would be having a European referendum about whether to stay in or stay out and then there would be all of these corpses like the end of a Jacobean tragedy But there we are we have got that situation So when we invited Slavoj Žižek to talk about Wagner Power and Treachery we didn't realize just how on the button we were So he really needs very little introduction He's a global thinker he's a somebody who actually given any topic will form a very interesting and unusual and sometimes maverick opinion He understands what it's like to be both entertaining and thoughtful and it's going to be a very interesting morning So the format is going to be he's going to talk for about or minutes-ish and then we'll take a few questions But I think the main thing is we're here to hear what he has to say and we're very excited to have him So can I introduce you straight away Žižek Thank
Afternoon ladies and gentlemen I'm Judith Kelly artistic director of the Southbank Centre and very pleased that you're all here We're competing with an event at Trafalgar Square which is a protest about not being in Europe and here we're going to have a different kind of protest a more cerebral protest about many things But I want to give you a context for this particular event which is to do with Wagner and some of you will know that and some of you might immediately be thinking what's that about I've come to see Žižek But we decided a few years ago that one of the most peculiar and amazing and unknowable pieces in the European canon was Wagner's Ring cycle It's one of those things where people say to you you won't understand it you won't like it and even if you did you can't get a ticket And it produces in people a sense that there are these huge cultural artifacts that belong to the few and not the many And so we decided to do a Ring cycle here over this weekend that would be as far as we could make it for the many and not the few in the way that it was done in who joined us doing it Streetwise Homeless Opera London Transport staff nurses from St Thomas' Hospital many many schools etc And for those of you who are going to come back tomorrow if you want to Götterdämmerung which is the final one is free on the ballroom floor in that sort of garden area where you can sit and watch it When we were thinking about that we also thought about the kind of strangeness of this amazing piece of work which ends up being for the few and not the many and the fact that the central story in the Ring cycle is actually about the lust and desire for power and for this idea of the ring the golden ring which if you have it you can rule the world And so we thought well let's really examine the notion of power because even then two years ago when we started thinking about it it was so evident that people who love power like to have as much as possible and once people start losing power actually it's very difficult to regain it And there are some people in our society who are absolutely powerless and there are others who accumulate power and power themselves up on and on and on So we wanted to examine the whole construct of power and its dynamics and who are the gains and who are having the gains and who are having the losses We never could have predicted although I'd like to pretend we did that this week we would be having a European referendum about whether to stay in or stay out and then there would be all of these corpses like the end of a Jacobean tragedy But there we are we have got that situation So when we invited Slavoj Žižek to talk about Wagner Power and Treachery we didn't realize just how on the button we were So he really needs very little introduction He's a global thinker he's a somebody who actually given any topic will form a very interesting and unusual and sometimes maverick opinion He understands what it's like to be both entertaining and thoughtful and it's going to be a very interesting morning So the format is going to be he's going to talk for about or minutes-ish and then we'll take a few questions But I think the main thing is we're here to hear what he has to say and we're very excited to have him So can I introduce you straight away Žižek Thank
Slavoj Žižek
you Thank you very much I am proud to be here although it will be a little bit overstretched to move from Wagner to Brexit but I will try it Okay In at a conference on Wagner at Columbia University New York after the majority of participants exceeded each other in the art of unmasking the anti-Semitic and proto-fascist dimension of Wagner's art sorry a member of the public asked a wonderfully naive question So if all you are saying is true if anti-Semitism is not just Wagner's private idiosyncrasy but something which concerns the very core of his art why then should we listen to Wagner today after the experience of Holocaust When we enjoy Wagner's music does this not stigmatize us with the complicity Then typically the embarrassed participants replied with confused versions of no of course we did not mean that Wagner wrote wonderful music and so on and so on So again is our passionate attachment to Wagner to remain an obscene secret to be disavowed in public academic discourse I will try to redeem Wagner Anti-Semitism first is not some hidden ultimate truth of Wagner's universe that had to be unearthed through complex hermeneutic procedures It is not hidden it is openly displayed out there for everyone to see in Wagner's written texts Even when the anti-Semitic message is discernible in his work Wagner I think always undermines it acquires a distance towards it through his very artistic practice For example maybe the most obvious case Mime the brother of Alberich in Siegfried especially third part of the Ring It is obviously a portrait of a repulsive Jew contrasted to the heroic youth and strength of Siegfried But and everybody knows this Wagner wrote about it he is also Wagner's own ironic self-portrait So it's so interesting this that all figures which obviously imitate this cliché of a confused aggressive Jew are Wagner's self-portraits And above all we should never forget that the first full-blooded Wagnerian hero finding himself in the archetypal Wagnerian position of being undead condemned to endless wandering unable to find but longing for redemption in death is fliegende Holländer the Flying Dutchman who is clearly a Jewish figure modeled on Ahasuerus the wandering Jew And incidentally the main source for it was Heinrich Heine a Jewish poet Wagner himself called fliegende Holländer Ahasuerus des Ozeans Ahasuerus of the ocean And all other Wagnerian heroes are variations of the Dutchman up to Wotan the supreme god in the Ring who as you probably know in Siegfried the third installment of the Ring turns into Wanderer Again figure of wandering Jew So how did Wotan end up as a wanderer His Wotan's act was to impose the rule of law on innocent nature From his project as it were was to rule the world from Valhalla the fortress of gods bringing peace and justice to the universe But the attempt fails because of the compromises he had to commit These compromises concern not only the well-known topic of illegitimate violence that grounds the rule of law not only the notion of the rule of law disturbing the innocence of the spontaneous natural life A crucial part of Wotan's tragedy is that he has abandoned love in the service of law and he thereby relinquished everything that is most precious to him This everything is embodied in Brünnhilde his preferred daughter In the Ring this is absolutely crucial always to bear in mind the source of evil is not in the first scene of Rheingold Alberich's the evil dwarf's fatal choice he renounced love to get the gold Long before this event took place Wotan broke the natural balance succumbing to the lure of power giving preference to power over love He tore out and destroyed the gigantic world tree making out of it his spear on which he inscribed the runes fixating the laws of his rule Plus he plucked out one of his eyes in order to gain insight into inner truth Evil thus does not come from the outside The insight of Wotan's tragic monologue with Brünnhilde in the second act of Valkyrie is that the power of Alberich and the prospect of the end of the world is ultimately Wotan's own guilt the result of his own ethical fiasco No wonder then that Wotan is called the white Alb in contrast to the black Alb Alberich They are two sides of the same coin If anything Wotan's choice is ethically much worse than Alberich's Alberich longed for love and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down by the Rhine maidens while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits of love and getting tired of them And it is precisely after this moral fiasco that Wotan turns into Wanderer To get out of this mess Wotan creates Siegfried the innocent hero not bound by the paradoxes of law Here things also immediately turn wrong There is effectively in Wagner's Siegfried not opera the figure of Siegfried an unconstrained innocent aggressivity an urge to directly pass to the act and just squash what goes on his nerves As in Siegfried's words to Mime the small dwarf brother of Alberich in the act one of Siegfried I quote libretto When I watch you standing shuffling and chambling servilely stooping squinting and blinking I long to seize you by your nodding neck and make an end of your obscene blinking This sounds even more impressive in German Seh’ ich dich stehn gangeln und gehn nicken und nicken mit den Augen zwicken beim Genick’ möcht’ ich den Nicker packen den Garaus geb’n dem garst’gen Zwicker This is probably how some German bureaucrat was shouting at Boris Johnson but that's another that comes later So is this not what we get here the most elementary disgust repulsion felt by a racist when confronted with an intruding foreigner One can easily imagine a Brexit skinhead uttering the same words in the face of a worn-out immigrant worker That should be one topic I think Wagner knew it Siegfried is not simply a good guy he's an extremely brutal person From this point again things then just go downward After Siegfried comes Hagen Alberich's son and Siegfried's murderer And the move from Siegfried to Hagen can effectively be compared to the one from SA to SS in Nazi Germany from brutal thugs to cold calculating criminals The dark figure of Hagen is profoundly ambiguous Although initially depicted as a dark plotter both in the old epic Nibelungenlied and in Fritz Lang's film he emerges as the ultimate hero of the entire work and is redeemed at the end as the supreme case of Nibelungentreue fidelity to death to one's cause or rather to the master who stands for this cause The conflict is here between fidelity to the master and everyday moral obligations Hagen stands for a kind of teleological suspension of morality on behalf of fidelity He is the ultimate Gefolgsmann follower Significantly it is only Wagner who depicts Hagen as a figure of evil Is this not an indication of how Wagner nonetheless belongs to the modern space of freedom It was Wagner's genius to intuit ahead of his time the rising figure of a fascist ruthless executive who is at the same time a rabble-rousing demagogue Just if you know a little bit Ring remember Hagen's terrifying Männerruf call to his men from the second act of the Twilight of Gods What makes Hagen a proto-fascist is his role of the unconditional support for the weak ruler King Günther He does for Günther the dirty jobs which although necessary have to remain concealed from the public gaze We find this stance a kind of mirror reversal of the beautiful soul which refuses to dirty its hands we find it at its purest in the rightist admiration for the heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty job The logic is this one it is easy to do a noble thing for your country up to sacrificing your life for it it is much more difficult to commit a crime for your country when it is needed Hitler knew very well how to play this double game apropos the Holocaust using Himmler as his Hagen In the speech to the SS leaders in Posen Poznan on October Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as quote from Himmler a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and never can be written end of quote Now it is crucial to perceive Hagen in contrast to his father Alberich Together they form the two versions of the figure of the obscene father in Wagner Let me recall another similar traumatic relationship in Wagner's work the one between the Fisher King Amfortas and his father Titurel in Parsifal a true counterpart to the relationship between Alberich and Hagen in the Twilight of Gods The contrast between the two confrontations of father and son is clear In the Twilight the dynamics nervous agitation most of the talking is on the side of the father with Hagen for the most part just listening to this obscene apparition which appears like Alptraum like a nightmarish dream In Parsifal Titurel is an immobile immobilized oppressive presence who barely breaks his silence with the superego injunction Enthüllet den Gral reveal the Grail whereas Amfortas the wounded Fisher King is the dynamic agent giving voice to his refusal to perform the ritual Is it not clear if one listens very closely to this dialogue between father and son in Parsifal that the truly obscene presence the ultimate cause of the decay of the Grail community is not the external threat to it Klingsor the evil magician who controls his gang of prostitutes Klingsor is evidently a small-time crook The true evil is Titurel himself an obscene undead apparition a dirty old man who is so immersed in the enjoyment of the Grail that he perturbs the regular rhythm of its disclosure So the opposition of Alberich and Titurel is the opposition between the two modes of obscenity itself the opposition between the strong oppressive enjoying father Titurel and the humiliated agitated weak father Alberich This is for me again this central element in Wagner which I think more or less redeems him of this accusation of proto-fascist anti-Semitism Again if you look subtly at it evil does not come from outside It's not we have an organic community then Jews or whoever intervenes No the true source of evil is in the very center of our own community This brings me to the figure that embodies contemporary authority a friendly boss manager whatever who is like us with all ordinary human weaknesses This figure of a friendly boss totally turns around the logic of what in psychoanalysis we call symbolic castration the price to be paid for the exercise of power From the traditional rituals of investiture we know the objects which not only symbolize power but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power If a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown his words will be taken as the words of a king Such insignia are external not part of my nature I don dorn them [unintelligible] I wear them in order to exert power As such they castrate me They introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise This is the infamous symbolic castration not castration as symbolic as symbolically enacted in the sense in which we say that for example when I am deprived of something I feel castrated but the castration which occurs by the very fact of me being caught into the symbolic order assuming a symbolic title Castration is this very gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic mandate which confers on me this authority Which is why for Lacan as he put it a madman is precisely psychotic is precisely a subject who denies this gap As Lacan puts it a madman is not just a beggar who thinks he is a king but even more a king who thinks he is a king in the sense of he thinks he is a king in himself of what he naturally is not because of the symbolic investiture One has to think of what Lacan calls the phallic signifier not as the organ which immediately expresses the vital force of my being my virility but precisely as such an insignia as a mask which I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia Phallus is an organ without a body which I put on which gets attached to my body without ever becoming its organic part forever sticking out as an incoherent excessive supplement However this gap between the symbolic title insignia that I wear and the miserable reality empirical reality of me the individual who bears this title now I come to my crucial point this relationship tends to function today I claim in a radically different way It underwent a reversal noted by Alain Badiou apropos Jean Genet's famous play Le Balcon The Balcony Quote from Alain Badiou Democracy means precisely that there are no costumes Inequality no longer wears a costume There are dramatic gigantic inequalities but their laicization leaves them without a costume end of quote What does this mean On a simple descriptive level this means that in a democratic egalitarian society masters those who exert power no longer have to wear insignia or costumes that would constitute them as bearers of power They can dress and act naturally like everybody else renouncing all dignity The message of the way they dress and act is See we are common people like you with all weaknesses fears limitations like everyone else In short their castration is no longer covered up by the splendor of their insignia but is openly displayed However this honest operation should in no way deceive us For all their common appearance they continue to assert their full power perhaps even more directly than the traditional master Or to quote my Lacanian colleague from Ljubljana Alenka Zupancic Let the image be castrated in all possible ways while I can do more or less whatever I want In a strange reversal of the classic logic of castration as the means to access symbolic power we are dealing here with the castration of the symbolic public image as a means to execute and perpetuate limitless power End of quote Castration the display of weakness thus becomes part of the public image Not in the simple and straightforward sense that it simply masks the actual exercise of ruthless power The point is rather that this mask of castration is the very instrument mode of how power is practiced Demystification is here redoubled beneath the gesture of demystification You see I dropped all masks and costumes I'm an ordinary guy like you tells you your boss the exercise of power which is a symbolic fact remains intact When confronted with a boss who talks and acts as an ordinary man his subordinate would thus be fully justified in addressing him with a paraphrase of the well-known Marx brothers' joke Why are you talking and acting as an ordinary man when you really are just an ordinary man The paradox is that if the agent of power were to put on the masks of insignia this would not increase his power but undermine it making it appear ridiculously pathetic So the formula [unintelligible] Je sais bien mais quand même I know very well but still is here given a specific taste It is no longer just I know very well you are an ordinary weak guy like me but I still accept you as my master because you wear the proper insignia of power It is rather something like I know very well you're a miserable weak guy like me and for that very reason because I know this I can continue to obey you to allow you to function as my master Knowledge is here not an obstacle to be suspended like I know but I act as if I don't know it is a positive condition of the functioning of what it discloses in its gesture of demystification Mystification persists not in spite of its denunciation but through it because of it You get my point Power functions only insofar as it mocks itself We thus get the figure of a master who rules through a display of his castration a master who claims he is our pal who renounces his insignia he presents himself as our equal friend while retaining all his authority with the help of this very self-debasement This paradox characterizes cynicism as the hegemonic form of today's ideology In cynicism the denial the fetishist denial I know very well but acquires a new form It is no longer the belief which persists in our actual practice in spite of our knowledge like I know very well that you are just an ordinary person but nonetheless I treat you as my master like I know there is no God but I continue to participate in religious rituals out of respect for my culture and so on So I think that incidentally even religion functions like this today The more I read religious statements even from Vatican I think that they already in a very refined way incorporate this self-distance like we know that probably there is no God but it's part of our culture let's play the game and so on In today's cynicism the disavowal of knowledge is not embodied in a fetish object Things are brought to a self-referential extreme so that the fetish which enables us to disavow knowledge is knowledge itself Knowledge functions as an obstacle which prevents what Seriously accepting and assuming knowledge itself It is true no let me give you an example to make this clear if it sounds too Hegelian-speculative It is true that we didn't really learn a lot from Assange Snowden Chelsea Manning and so on We didn't learn anything we didn't already at least presume to be true But it is one thing to know it in general another thing to get concrete data Apropos Assange I already used this tasteless metaphor it's a little bit like knowing that your sexual partner is playing around with other persons You can easily accept the abstract knowledge of it but it gets painful only when you learn the steamy details you get pictures you are told she put her finger there and so on whatever that's what ruins it And so this is why the most perfidious defense of those in power for example is not to deny the WikiLeaks accusations but to say I think this was the strategy of power to say We are not naive we knew or suspected all of this Do you really think we are so stupid we didn't know it all along what those in power are doing So why all the fuss about it With this operation those who disclosed the problematic data that should worry and annoy us become themselves a source of annoyance Like What this WikiLeaks so what we know it leave the power alone to function the way it has to function and the less you know the better and so on and so on So again what happens nonetheless with WikiLeaks We knew it all I claim of course not the details but generally The one who didn't know is the one called by Lacan the big Other the authority knowledge of the public space We can act as if we don't know because the big Other doesn't know it A similar strategy is at work in apologizing where a quick admission can serve as an excuse to avoid a real apology You know I know this I witnessed it it's a wonderful strategy If you do something wrong say Okay I apologize so now shut up and stop annoying me You know how apology itself can serve as a way to avoid truly apologizing Along these lines one can imagine a new version of Freud's old example of a dreamer whose answer to who was that woman in your dream is I don't know who that woman was but I am sure it was not my mother I think today the dreamer would admit all too willingly It was my mother of course so don't bother me with this we all know it You see my point here you accept it you accept knowledge precisely in order to neutralize it Now things get really complicated The basic fetishism which structures the way we relate to a person of authority was described long ago by among others Marx a king is a king because we treat him like a king but it appears to us that we treat him as a king because he is in himself a king However beneath this elementary fetishist reversal there is I claim another more tricky one the illusion that beneath the costume of power which confers on a person his/her charisma there is just an ordinary person like ourselves Recall how on the back cover of a book we often find beneath the description of the topic content some personal details about the author something like In her free time Patricia Highsmith grows tulips and collects rare silver coins whatever I think that such a list of personal features whose function is to prove look she is like one of us she is nonetheless human I think this is how power works again It makes you all the time aware that but listen behind all that blah blah I'm just an ordinary person which is why incidentally years ago but it was rejected by a publisher I tried to subvert this logic by simply putting in this they told me Can you tell us some personal details What do you do Do you take walks bicycle whatever And I of course it was not true but I wrote something like In his free time Professor Žižek slowly dissects cats and rats and teaches his son how to torture [unintelligible] I don't know what something You know of course I don't do this but the point was precisely to show to show the lie of it I think the greatest lie today in our post-ideological era is precisely this lie of behind the ideological clichés we are real persons all with our traumas fears and so on and never forget this we cannot be reduced to this public image of authority and so on In Israel I noticed the IDF Israeli Defense Forces play this game in a perfect way They are not presented as perfect soldiers you know like one battalion of Israeli army can defeat in one afternoon Egypt or whatever No I read texts interviews where they claim it was horrible Yom Kippur war we were urinating in our pants we were terrified and so on and so on That's how you build the myth And here Lacan Jacques Lacan as a person did something ingenious Those who knew him personally were always looking for small private details signs of humanity so that they would be able to say You know behind the arrogant posture of his performances you know Lacan acted with an ridiculously artificial formal way there is really don't worry he is a nice warm guy like us And I didn't know Lacan but all who knew him told me that this was the great shock of their lives that when you met him in private he was precisely the same affected artificial bastard Never you got this Oh but now I got him as a real human being like ourselves and so on and so on So this means that things with the mask we are wearing mask in the sense of our public image and the relation between this and what is behind the mask is much more complicated than what it may appear It's not that mask is just a mask and but beneath you can see let's say I am a Nazi and if I were to be Hitler and would be caught today mega old and accused I would have said but you only see me as a public figure didn't you know how I stroke cats I play with children my god I'm a warm human person and so on and so on And there is only one answer to this No it's not that your public mask masks the real person behind What you construct as a real person behind you construct it in order to obfuscate and render tolerable to yourself the horrors you are doing in your public role Our private inner truth is the true mask This is how I would like to propose you to read a slightly brutal experiment that you can perform on your child I'm maybe a crazy father I did it to my child when he was small I approached him with a mask on and of course he got frightened Then I pulled the mask off and show I and he saw my stupid face which was well known to him and he smiled a little bit Then now comes the mystery then I put the mask on again And the mystery is that he was terrified again Although he knew very well behind the mask is just my stupid dad but no he was terrified again And I think he was right since the mask engenders a third reality a ghost in the mask which is not the reality of the face hidden beneath it This ghost in the mask this X the child is afraid of is precisely the abyss of pure subject not to be confused with personality and so on This is also the reason why that's how I read how do you call it in English I don't know in French they call it burqa this cover of Muslim women This is why wearing a burqa is so unbearable for some of us in the West Not because the face remains hidden so that we don't know with whom we are dealing but because we in a way see the void behind the naked face this ultimate mask When in the French government prohibited wearing a burqa in public what could not but strike the eye was the ambiguity of those who criticized allowing women wearing a burqa Their criticism moved at two levels First the prohibition of burqa was presented as a defense of the dignity and freedom of the oppressed Muslim women They claimed it is unacceptable that in secular France any woman has to live a hidden life secluded from public space subordinated to brutal patriarchal authority However as a rule the argument then shifted towards the anxieties of non-Muslim French people faces covered by the burqa do not fit the coordinates of French culture and identity they intimidate and alienate non-Muslims So some French women have even suggested that they perceive the wearing of a burqa as their own humiliation an act of being brutally excluded from a social link And again this brings us to the true enigma here why does the encounter with a face covered by a burqa trigger such anxiety Is it that a face so covered is no longer this Levinasian face the otherness from which an unconditional ethical call emanates this ultimate ethical agency I think the opposite is true From a Freudian perspective the face itself is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of what in Judeo-Christian tradition is called neighbor which is precisely the terrifying other the abyss of the other the other for whom we don't know what he or she wants The face is what makes the neighbor le semblable a fellow man with whom we can identify empathize Not to mention the fact that today so many faces are surgically modified that they are mostly deprived of the last vestige of personal authenticity This then is why I claim covered face causes such anxiety It confronts us directly with the neighbor in its uncanny dimension The very covering up of the face obliterates a protective shield so that the other neighbor stares at me directly Recall that the burqa has a narrow slit for the eyes We don't see the eyes but we know there is a gaze there Alphonse Allais the French satirical writer presented his own version of Salome's dance of seven veils when Salome is completely naked Herod shouts Go on go on expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin We should imagine something similar with a woman wearing a burqa It's the opposite of a woman removing her burqa to reveal her face We should imagine a woman taking off the skin of her face itself so that what we see beneath is precisely the anonymous dark smooth burqa-like surface with a narrow slit for the gaze You see my point I think what you see with the covered face is precisely a totally naked woman when the face as the ultimate mask is taken off That's why it's so horrible Because of course it's impenetrable What do I know that gaze what it [unintelligible] But this impenetrability of the other is the innermost truth of the other Let me give you an example from popular culture before I go to that boring conclusion Brexit and so on In a unique moment in Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith we get a glimpse of this figure We should bear in mind the somewhat awkward Hegelianism of the first three installments of the Star Wars saga As in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday where the mastermind criminal is revealed to be none other than God himself we gradually discover that Senator Palpatine the leader of the Republic [unintelligible] Chancellor of its Senate in its war against the separatist federation is none other than Darth Sidious the mysterious supreme Sith Lord who pulls the strings behind the separatist So in fighting separatists the Republic is fighting itself Which is why the moment of its triumph and the defeat of the separatists is the moment of the Republic's conversion into the evil empire In the middle of the film when Palpatine reveals himself to Anakin the future Darth Vader as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious Anakin reports his treachery to Mace Windu a Jedi Knight who subdues Palpatine in a lightsaber duel Seeing Palpatine threatened and humiliated by Mace Windu Anakin intervenes on Palpatine's behalf allowing him to kill the Jedi Master Now what I want to focus on here is the transformation of Palpatine's face during this interchange After being exposed to brutal energy shocks from Mace Windu's lightsaber the skin of Palpatine's face gradually turns hard and crinkly as if corrugated changing into a crocodile head surface But the change is also the one in his attitude when Palpatine is under duress his face gets deformed twisted expressing Palpatine's fear of pain and death like an evil child in panic And the moment Anakin cuts off Windu's hand and thus immobilizes him Palpatine attacks him frying him with rays of force with childish pleasure a true laughing hyena To quote from a personal communication from Lisa Thompson Palpatine seizes power at the very moment of total helplessness One can see how he has won in that very moment He is already looking forward to the moment when he can throw back his hood in the Senate and display his horribly mutilated scrotum-like head end of quote So it is only after this passage through the utter loss of all dignity after his symbolic authority is totally debased that Palpatine can re-emerge as what he really is Darth Sidious the Lord of Darkness His ridiculous weakness is not an obstacle to his power but its very resort So to conclude who would be today's figure of such a leader who exerts power through displaying his or her human weaknesses I will not go into it here maybe Boris Johnson again Because you know it's interesting to note that when on a visit to England Wagner was approaching London on Thames and saw from his boat all the factories and smoke from their chimneys he exclaimed This is Nibelheim Alberich's land And effectively is the duality of Wotan and Alberich of the white Alb and black Alb not the duality of the public political leader and the capitalist running his subterranean empire You find the same shift in the figure of the master in what I consider a crucial film detecting this shift in modern authority I hope you saw it The Usual Suspects where Keyser Söze is precisely the guy played like Kevin Spacey the weakest guy a guy like us normal guy And Hagen Who is Brexit's Hagen We are still waiting for him Why The true stakes of the Brexit referendum become clear if we locate it into its larger context In Western and Eastern Europe we are witnessing signs of a long-term rearrangement of the political space Till recently the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body a right-of-center party Christian Democrats liberal conservatives people's party and the left-of-center party socialist social democratic and so on Then with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate ecologists neo-fascists communists whatever Now there is progressively emerging a one-party which stands for global capitalism as such usually even with a relative tolerance towards abortion gay rights religious ethnic minorities and so on Opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which on its fringes can be accompanied by directly racist neo-fascist groups And the stakes of so-called radical center today are which of the two old main parties conservatives or liberals will succeed in presenting itself as embodying the post-ideological non-politics against the other party dismissed as still caught in old ideological specters First it looked conservatives were better at it then liberal leftists now it's again so it seems conservatives The anti-immigrant populism brings passion back into politics it's true It speaks in the terms of antagonisms us against them And one of the signs of the confusion of what remains of the left is the idea that one should take this passionate approach from the right that one should adopt it You know the logic of If Marine Le Pen can do it mobilize workers with nationalist rhetoric why should we also not do it So one should return to strong nation state and mobilize national passions and so on A ridiculous struggle for me lost in advance The Brexit referendum moved along the lines of this new opposition Which is why there was something terribly wrong with it To see this one should only look at the strange bedfellows that found themselves together in the Brexit camp right-wing patriots populist nationalists fueled by the fear of immigrants mixed with desperate working-class rage Is such a mixture of patriotic racism with the rage of ordinary people not the ideal ground for a new form of fascism The intensity of the emotional investment into the referendum I think should not deceive us The choice offered obfuscated the true questions how to fight agreement like TTI like TTIP which present a real threat to our sovereignty how to confront ecological catastrophes or economic imbalances which breed new poverty and migrations and so on The choice of Brexit means a setback for these true struggles Suffice it to bear in mind that an important argument for Brexit was precisely the so-called refugee threat The Brexit referendum was the ultimate proof that ideology in the good old Marxist sense of false consciousness is well and alive in our societies The case of Brexit exemplifies perfectly the falsity of the calls to restore national sovereignty like The British people themselves not some anonymous Brussels bureaucrat should decide the fate of our country Immediately after the Brexit victory here is what my good friend Eric Santner wrote me from Chicago a couple of days ago now a quote At the heart of the Brexit is a paradox worth articulating England wants to withdraw from the bureaucratic administrative control of Brussels control seen as compromising its sovereignty in order to be better able to organize the dismantling of its sovereignty by way of more radical submission to the logic of global capital to organize this dismantling on its own Does this not have the markings of the death drive The organism wants to die in its own way on its own terms This is the paradox at the heart also of American Republican thinking We want to take back our country in order to be better able to submit it and pretty much all of life to the logic of the market end of quote And this paradox I think is confirmed by a quick look at the conflict between the UK and the European Union in the past decades You know when some leftists dream about how if we restore the full sovereignty of the United Kingdom we will be able to restore some welfare state and so on and so on my god just look you can locate them easily on the web look at the predominant all the big conflicts between the UK government and Brussels It was not UK government defending workers' rights against Brussels as the instrument of international capital I remember one big conflict in the Tony Blair years was that the EU demanded limiting the weekly work hours and United Kingdom government complained that such a measure will affect the competitiveness of the British industry Then there was ecology the Brussels bureaucracy wanted to impose higher ecological standard like prohibiting buying oil produced through fracking and so on Again United Kingdom sabotaged it It was the same with the topic of human rights and so on and so on In short the so much vilified Brussels bureaucracy was also a protector of minimal workers' rights in exactly the same way as it is today the protector of the rights of refugees against many sovereign nation states which are not ready to receive them The ongoing troubles with immigrants in Germany simply confront us with the limits of democracy the way we have it now How are we to counter anti-immigrant populists who demand a referendum on immigrants assured that the majority of Germans will vote against the immigrants Is then the solution to give the voting rights also to immigrants but to whom among them To those who are already in Germany to those who want to go there At the end of this line we get the idea of worldwide elections which is self-defeating for a simple and precise reason I quote here Yuval Harari from his new book Homo Deus People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters If the experience of other voters is alien to me and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict Democratic elections work only within populations that have some prior common bind such as shared religious beliefs or national myths They are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics End of quote In larger context the only procedure at our disposal outside outright war of course are negotiations That's why the Middle East conflict cannot be solved by elections but only either by war or by negotiations So where does this leave us with Brexit When Stalin was asked in the late twenties sorry I repeat this story for probably like 40th time when Stalin was asked in the late twenties Which deviation is worse the right one or the leftist one he snapped back They are both worse I think it was the same with the choice British voters were confronting Remain remain reject Brexit remain in the EU was in some sense worse since it meant persisting in the inertia that keeps Europe mired down Exit was worse since it made changing nothing look desirable In the days before the referendum there was a pseudo-deep thought circulating in our media Whatever the result EU will never be the same it will be irreparably damaged I think it's the opposite which is true Nothing will really change just the inertia of Europe will be more and more impossible to ignore Europe will again lose time in negotiations among the EU members which all will continue to make any large-scale political project impossible This is what those who oppose Brexit didn't see Shocked they now complain about the irrationality of the Brexit voters ignoring the desperate need for change that the vote made palpable So again I am well aware that the Brussels bureaucracy is inefficient and so on whatever you want corrupted but the solution is not return to national sovereignty Why I like to recall always Mao Zedong's old motto Everything under heaven is in utter chaos the situation is excellent A crisis is to be taken seriously without illusions but also as a chance to be fully exploited Although crisis are painful and dangerous they are the terrain on which battles have to be won Is there not a struggle also in heaven Is the heaven also not divided And does the ongoing confusion not offer a unique chance to react to the need for a radical change in a more appropriate way with a project that will break the vicious cycle of European technocracy Brussels technocracy and nationalist populism The true division of our heaven is not between anemic Brussels bureaucracy and nationalist passions but between the two together their vicious cycle and maybe a new European project which will address the true challenges that humanity is confronted today This is maybe the only small hope given to us In the same way that in the United States the same rage and chaos which gave birth to Donald Trump also gave birth to Sanders let's hope that the present confusion will also open up the space for European Bernie Sanders So was this deadlock the deadlock in which we are today after Brexit where we see clear that both choices are worse just changing nothing persisting in the Europe we have or the nationalist way out was it not already staged now I return to Wagner in the very last scene of Wagner's Ring What remains after the Twilight of Gods is the human crowd silently observing the cataclysmic event a crowd which in Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez's pathbreaking staging is left staring into the spectators when the music ends Here is Chéreau's own description The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world but like all pythonesis the orchestra is unclear and there are several ways of interpreting its message Doesn't one hear it shouldn't one hear it with mistrust and anxiety A mistrust which would match the boundless hope which this humanity nurses and which has always been at stake silently and invisibly in the atrocious battles which have torn human beings apart throughout the Ring The gods have lived the values of their world must be reconstructed and reinvented Men are there as if on the edge of a cliff they listen tensely to the oracle which rumbles from the depth of the earth End of quote We can imagine this nameless crowd as a figure of today's proletariat a crowd of refugees survivors of an ideological catastrophe or a civil war Everything now rests on them without any guarantee in God or any other figure of the big Other This predicament the ending of Wagner's Twilight of Gods again when humanity but totally disoriented humanity survive just staring into empty space this devastating vision this is our situation today and maybe just maybe also our hope Thank you very much
you Thank you very much I am proud to be here although it will be a little bit overstretched to move from Wagner to Brexit but I will try it Okay In at a conference on Wagner at Columbia University New York after the majority of participants exceeded each other in the art of unmasking the anti-Semitic and proto-fascist dimension of Wagner's art sorry a member of the public asked a wonderfully naive question So if all you are saying is true if anti-Semitism is not just Wagner's private idiosyncrasy but something which concerns the very core of his art why then should we listen to Wagner today after the experience of Holocaust When we enjoy Wagner's music does this not stigmatize us with the complicity Then typically the embarrassed participants replied with confused versions of no of course we did not mean that Wagner wrote wonderful music and so on and so on So again is our passionate attachment to Wagner to remain an obscene secret to be disavowed in public academic discourse I will try to redeem Wagner Anti-Semitism first is not some hidden ultimate truth of Wagner's universe that had to be unearthed through complex hermeneutic procedures It is not hidden it is openly displayed out there for everyone to see in Wagner's written texts Even when the anti-Semitic message is discernible in his work Wagner I think always undermines it acquires a distance towards it through his very artistic practice For example maybe the most obvious case Mime the brother of Alberich in Siegfried especially third part of the Ring It is obviously a portrait of a repulsive Jew contrasted to the heroic youth and strength of Siegfried But and everybody knows this Wagner wrote about it he is also Wagner's own ironic self-portrait So it's so interesting this that all figures which obviously imitate this cliché of a confused aggressive Jew are Wagner's self-portraits And above all we should never forget that the first full-blooded Wagnerian hero finding himself in the archetypal Wagnerian position of being undead condemned to endless wandering unable to find but longing for redemption in death is fliegende Holländer the Flying Dutchman who is clearly a Jewish figure modeled on Ahasuerus the wandering Jew And incidentally the main source for it was Heinrich Heine a Jewish poet Wagner himself called fliegende Holländer Ahasuerus des Ozeans Ahasuerus of the ocean And all other Wagnerian heroes are variations of the Dutchman up to Wotan the supreme god in the Ring who as you probably know in Siegfried the third installment of the Ring turns into Wanderer Again figure of wandering Jew So how did Wotan end up as a wanderer His Wotan's act was to impose the rule of law on innocent nature From his project as it were was to rule the world from Valhalla the fortress of gods bringing peace and justice to the universe But the attempt fails because of the compromises he had to commit These compromises concern not only the well-known topic of illegitimate violence that grounds the rule of law not only the notion of the rule of law disturbing the innocence of the spontaneous natural life A crucial part of Wotan's tragedy is that he has abandoned love in the service of law and he thereby relinquished everything that is most precious to him This everything is embodied in Brünnhilde his preferred daughter In the Ring this is absolutely crucial always to bear in mind the source of evil is not in the first scene of Rheingold Alberich's the evil dwarf's fatal choice he renounced love to get the gold Long before this event took place Wotan broke the natural balance succumbing to the lure of power giving preference to power over love He tore out and destroyed the gigantic world tree making out of it his spear on which he inscribed the runes fixating the laws of his rule Plus he plucked out one of his eyes in order to gain insight into inner truth Evil thus does not come from the outside The insight of Wotan's tragic monologue with Brünnhilde in the second act of Valkyrie is that the power of Alberich and the prospect of the end of the world is ultimately Wotan's own guilt the result of his own ethical fiasco No wonder then that Wotan is called the white Alb in contrast to the black Alb Alberich They are two sides of the same coin If anything Wotan's choice is ethically much worse than Alberich's Alberich longed for love and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down by the Rhine maidens while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits of love and getting tired of them And it is precisely after this moral fiasco that Wotan turns into Wanderer To get out of this mess Wotan creates Siegfried the innocent hero not bound by the paradoxes of law Here things also immediately turn wrong There is effectively in Wagner's Siegfried not opera the figure of Siegfried an unconstrained innocent aggressivity an urge to directly pass to the act and just squash what goes on his nerves As in Siegfried's words to Mime the small dwarf brother of Alberich in the act one of Siegfried I quote libretto When I watch you standing shuffling and chambling servilely stooping squinting and blinking I long to seize you by your nodding neck and make an end of your obscene blinking This sounds even more impressive in German Seh’ ich dich stehn gangeln und gehn nicken und nicken mit den Augen zwicken beim Genick’ möcht’ ich den Nicker packen den Garaus geb’n dem garst’gen Zwicker This is probably how some German bureaucrat was shouting at Boris Johnson but that's another that comes later So is this not what we get here the most elementary disgust repulsion felt by a racist when confronted with an intruding foreigner One can easily imagine a Brexit skinhead uttering the same words in the face of a worn-out immigrant worker That should be one topic I think Wagner knew it Siegfried is not simply a good guy he's an extremely brutal person From this point again things then just go downward After Siegfried comes Hagen Alberich's son and Siegfried's murderer And the move from Siegfried to Hagen can effectively be compared to the one from SA to SS in Nazi Germany from brutal thugs to cold calculating criminals The dark figure of Hagen is profoundly ambiguous Although initially depicted as a dark plotter both in the old epic Nibelungenlied and in Fritz Lang's film he emerges as the ultimate hero of the entire work and is redeemed at the end as the supreme case of Nibelungentreue fidelity to death to one's cause or rather to the master who stands for this cause The conflict is here between fidelity to the master and everyday moral obligations Hagen stands for a kind of teleological suspension of morality on behalf of fidelity He is the ultimate Gefolgsmann follower Significantly it is only Wagner who depicts Hagen as a figure of evil Is this not an indication of how Wagner nonetheless belongs to the modern space of freedom It was Wagner's genius to intuit ahead of his time the rising figure of a fascist ruthless executive who is at the same time a rabble-rousing demagogue Just if you know a little bit Ring remember Hagen's terrifying Männerruf call to his men from the second act of the Twilight of Gods What makes Hagen a proto-fascist is his role of the unconditional support for the weak ruler King Günther He does for Günther the dirty jobs which although necessary have to remain concealed from the public gaze We find this stance a kind of mirror reversal of the beautiful soul which refuses to dirty its hands we find it at its purest in the rightist admiration for the heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty job The logic is this one it is easy to do a noble thing for your country up to sacrificing your life for it it is much more difficult to commit a crime for your country when it is needed Hitler knew very well how to play this double game apropos the Holocaust using Himmler as his Hagen In the speech to the SS leaders in Posen Poznan on October Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as quote from Himmler a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and never can be written end of quote Now it is crucial to perceive Hagen in contrast to his father Alberich Together they form the two versions of the figure of the obscene father in Wagner Let me recall another similar traumatic relationship in Wagner's work the one between the Fisher King Amfortas and his father Titurel in Parsifal a true counterpart to the relationship between Alberich and Hagen in the Twilight of Gods The contrast between the two confrontations of father and son is clear In the Twilight the dynamics nervous agitation most of the talking is on the side of the father with Hagen for the most part just listening to this obscene apparition which appears like Alptraum like a nightmarish dream In Parsifal Titurel is an immobile immobilized oppressive presence who barely breaks his silence with the superego injunction Enthüllet den Gral reveal the Grail whereas Amfortas the wounded Fisher King is the dynamic agent giving voice to his refusal to perform the ritual Is it not clear if one listens very closely to this dialogue between father and son in Parsifal that the truly obscene presence the ultimate cause of the decay of the Grail community is not the external threat to it Klingsor the evil magician who controls his gang of prostitutes Klingsor is evidently a small-time crook The true evil is Titurel himself an obscene undead apparition a dirty old man who is so immersed in the enjoyment of the Grail that he perturbs the regular rhythm of its disclosure So the opposition of Alberich and Titurel is the opposition between the two modes of obscenity itself the opposition between the strong oppressive enjoying father Titurel and the humiliated agitated weak father Alberich This is for me again this central element in Wagner which I think more or less redeems him of this accusation of proto-fascist anti-Semitism Again if you look subtly at it evil does not come from outside It's not we have an organic community then Jews or whoever intervenes No the true source of evil is in the very center of our own community This brings me to the figure that embodies contemporary authority a friendly boss manager whatever who is like us with all ordinary human weaknesses This figure of a friendly boss totally turns around the logic of what in psychoanalysis we call symbolic castration the price to be paid for the exercise of power From the traditional rituals of investiture we know the objects which not only symbolize power but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power If a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown his words will be taken as the words of a king Such insignia are external not part of my nature I don dorn them [unintelligible] I wear them in order to exert power As such they castrate me They introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise This is the infamous symbolic castration not castration as symbolic as symbolically enacted in the sense in which we say that for example when I am deprived of something I feel castrated but the castration which occurs by the very fact of me being caught into the symbolic order assuming a symbolic title Castration is this very gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic mandate which confers on me this authority Which is why for Lacan as he put it a madman is precisely psychotic is precisely a subject who denies this gap As Lacan puts it a madman is not just a beggar who thinks he is a king but even more a king who thinks he is a king in the sense of he thinks he is a king in himself of what he naturally is not because of the symbolic investiture One has to think of what Lacan calls the phallic signifier not as the organ which immediately expresses the vital force of my being my virility but precisely as such an insignia as a mask which I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia Phallus is an organ without a body which I put on which gets attached to my body without ever becoming its organic part forever sticking out as an incoherent excessive supplement However this gap between the symbolic title insignia that I wear and the miserable reality empirical reality of me the individual who bears this title now I come to my crucial point this relationship tends to function today I claim in a radically different way It underwent a reversal noted by Alain Badiou apropos Jean Genet's famous play Le Balcon The Balcony Quote from Alain Badiou Democracy means precisely that there are no costumes Inequality no longer wears a costume There are dramatic gigantic inequalities but their laicization leaves them without a costume end of quote What does this mean On a simple descriptive level this means that in a democratic egalitarian society masters those who exert power no longer have to wear insignia or costumes that would constitute them as bearers of power They can dress and act naturally like everybody else renouncing all dignity The message of the way they dress and act is See we are common people like you with all weaknesses fears limitations like everyone else In short their castration is no longer covered up by the splendor of their insignia but is openly displayed However this honest operation should in no way deceive us For all their common appearance they continue to assert their full power perhaps even more directly than the traditional master Or to quote my Lacanian colleague from Ljubljana Alenka Zupancic Let the image be castrated in all possible ways while I can do more or less whatever I want In a strange reversal of the classic logic of castration as the means to access symbolic power we are dealing here with the castration of the symbolic public image as a means to execute and perpetuate limitless power End of quote Castration the display of weakness thus becomes part of the public image Not in the simple and straightforward sense that it simply masks the actual exercise of ruthless power The point is rather that this mask of castration is the very instrument mode of how power is practiced Demystification is here redoubled beneath the gesture of demystification You see I dropped all masks and costumes I'm an ordinary guy like you tells you your boss the exercise of power which is a symbolic fact remains intact When confronted with a boss who talks and acts as an ordinary man his subordinate would thus be fully justified in addressing him with a paraphrase of the well-known Marx brothers' joke Why are you talking and acting as an ordinary man when you really are just an ordinary man The paradox is that if the agent of power were to put on the masks of insignia this would not increase his power but undermine it making it appear ridiculously pathetic So the formula [unintelligible] Je sais bien mais quand même I know very well but still is here given a specific taste It is no longer just I know very well you are an ordinary weak guy like me but I still accept you as my master because you wear the proper insignia of power It is rather something like I know very well you're a miserable weak guy like me and for that very reason because I know this I can continue to obey you to allow you to function as my master Knowledge is here not an obstacle to be suspended like I know but I act as if I don't know it is a positive condition of the functioning of what it discloses in its gesture of demystification Mystification persists not in spite of its denunciation but through it because of it You get my point Power functions only insofar as it mocks itself We thus get the figure of a master who rules through a display of his castration a master who claims he is our pal who renounces his insignia he presents himself as our equal friend while retaining all his authority with the help of this very self-debasement This paradox characterizes cynicism as the hegemonic form of today's ideology In cynicism the denial the fetishist denial I know very well but acquires a new form It is no longer the belief which persists in our actual practice in spite of our knowledge like I know very well that you are just an ordinary person but nonetheless I treat you as my master like I know there is no God but I continue to participate in religious rituals out of respect for my culture and so on So I think that incidentally even religion functions like this today The more I read religious statements even from Vatican I think that they already in a very refined way incorporate this self-distance like we know that probably there is no God but it's part of our culture let's play the game and so on In today's cynicism the disavowal of knowledge is not embodied in a fetish object Things are brought to a self-referential extreme so that the fetish which enables us to disavow knowledge is knowledge itself Knowledge functions as an obstacle which prevents what Seriously accepting and assuming knowledge itself It is true no let me give you an example to make this clear if it sounds too Hegelian-speculative It is true that we didn't really learn a lot from Assange Snowden Chelsea Manning and so on We didn't learn anything we didn't already at least presume to be true But it is one thing to know it in general another thing to get concrete data Apropos Assange I already used this tasteless metaphor it's a little bit like knowing that your sexual partner is playing around with other persons You can easily accept the abstract knowledge of it but it gets painful only when you learn the steamy details you get pictures you are told she put her finger there and so on whatever that's what ruins it And so this is why the most perfidious defense of those in power for example is not to deny the WikiLeaks accusations but to say I think this was the strategy of power to say We are not naive we knew or suspected all of this Do you really think we are so stupid we didn't know it all along what those in power are doing So why all the fuss about it With this operation those who disclosed the problematic data that should worry and annoy us become themselves a source of annoyance Like What this WikiLeaks so what we know it leave the power alone to function the way it has to function and the less you know the better and so on and so on So again what happens nonetheless with WikiLeaks We knew it all I claim of course not the details but generally The one who didn't know is the one called by Lacan the big Other the authority knowledge of the public space We can act as if we don't know because the big Other doesn't know it A similar strategy is at work in apologizing where a quick admission can serve as an excuse to avoid a real apology You know I know this I witnessed it it's a wonderful strategy If you do something wrong say Okay I apologize so now shut up and stop annoying me You know how apology itself can serve as a way to avoid truly apologizing Along these lines one can imagine a new version of Freud's old example of a dreamer whose answer to who was that woman in your dream is I don't know who that woman was but I am sure it was not my mother I think today the dreamer would admit all too willingly It was my mother of course so don't bother me with this we all know it You see my point here you accept it you accept knowledge precisely in order to neutralize it Now things get really complicated The basic fetishism which structures the way we relate to a person of authority was described long ago by among others Marx a king is a king because we treat him like a king but it appears to us that we treat him as a king because he is in himself a king However beneath this elementary fetishist reversal there is I claim another more tricky one the illusion that beneath the costume of power which confers on a person his/her charisma there is just an ordinary person like ourselves Recall how on the back cover of a book we often find beneath the description of the topic content some personal details about the author something like In her free time Patricia Highsmith grows tulips and collects rare silver coins whatever I think that such a list of personal features whose function is to prove look she is like one of us she is nonetheless human I think this is how power works again It makes you all the time aware that but listen behind all that blah blah I'm just an ordinary person which is why incidentally years ago but it was rejected by a publisher I tried to subvert this logic by simply putting in this they told me Can you tell us some personal details What do you do Do you take walks bicycle whatever And I of course it was not true but I wrote something like In his free time Professor Žižek slowly dissects cats and rats and teaches his son how to torture [unintelligible] I don't know what something You know of course I don't do this but the point was precisely to show to show the lie of it I think the greatest lie today in our post-ideological era is precisely this lie of behind the ideological clichés we are real persons all with our traumas fears and so on and never forget this we cannot be reduced to this public image of authority and so on In Israel I noticed the IDF Israeli Defense Forces play this game in a perfect way They are not presented as perfect soldiers you know like one battalion of Israeli army can defeat in one afternoon Egypt or whatever No I read texts interviews where they claim it was horrible Yom Kippur war we were urinating in our pants we were terrified and so on and so on That's how you build the myth And here Lacan Jacques Lacan as a person did something ingenious Those who knew him personally were always looking for small private details signs of humanity so that they would be able to say You know behind the arrogant posture of his performances you know Lacan acted with an ridiculously artificial formal way there is really don't worry he is a nice warm guy like us And I didn't know Lacan but all who knew him told me that this was the great shock of their lives that when you met him in private he was precisely the same affected artificial bastard Never you got this Oh but now I got him as a real human being like ourselves and so on and so on So this means that things with the mask we are wearing mask in the sense of our public image and the relation between this and what is behind the mask is much more complicated than what it may appear It's not that mask is just a mask and but beneath you can see let's say I am a Nazi and if I were to be Hitler and would be caught today mega old and accused I would have said but you only see me as a public figure didn't you know how I stroke cats I play with children my god I'm a warm human person and so on and so on And there is only one answer to this No it's not that your public mask masks the real person behind What you construct as a real person behind you construct it in order to obfuscate and render tolerable to yourself the horrors you are doing in your public role Our private inner truth is the true mask This is how I would like to propose you to read a slightly brutal experiment that you can perform on your child I'm maybe a crazy father I did it to my child when he was small I approached him with a mask on and of course he got frightened Then I pulled the mask off and show I and he saw my stupid face which was well known to him and he smiled a little bit Then now comes the mystery then I put the mask on again And the mystery is that he was terrified again Although he knew very well behind the mask is just my stupid dad but no he was terrified again And I think he was right since the mask engenders a third reality a ghost in the mask which is not the reality of the face hidden beneath it This ghost in the mask this X the child is afraid of is precisely the abyss of pure subject not to be confused with personality and so on This is also the reason why that's how I read how do you call it in English I don't know in French they call it burqa this cover of Muslim women This is why wearing a burqa is so unbearable for some of us in the West Not because the face remains hidden so that we don't know with whom we are dealing but because we in a way see the void behind the naked face this ultimate mask When in the French government prohibited wearing a burqa in public what could not but strike the eye was the ambiguity of those who criticized allowing women wearing a burqa Their criticism moved at two levels First the prohibition of burqa was presented as a defense of the dignity and freedom of the oppressed Muslim women They claimed it is unacceptable that in secular France any woman has to live a hidden life secluded from public space subordinated to brutal patriarchal authority However as a rule the argument then shifted towards the anxieties of non-Muslim French people faces covered by the burqa do not fit the coordinates of French culture and identity they intimidate and alienate non-Muslims So some French women have even suggested that they perceive the wearing of a burqa as their own humiliation an act of being brutally excluded from a social link And again this brings us to the true enigma here why does the encounter with a face covered by a burqa trigger such anxiety Is it that a face so covered is no longer this Levinasian face the otherness from which an unconditional ethical call emanates this ultimate ethical agency I think the opposite is true From a Freudian perspective the face itself is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of what in Judeo-Christian tradition is called neighbor which is precisely the terrifying other the abyss of the other the other for whom we don't know what he or she wants The face is what makes the neighbor le semblable a fellow man with whom we can identify empathize Not to mention the fact that today so many faces are surgically modified that they are mostly deprived of the last vestige of personal authenticity This then is why I claim covered face causes such anxiety It confronts us directly with the neighbor in its uncanny dimension The very covering up of the face obliterates a protective shield so that the other neighbor stares at me directly Recall that the burqa has a narrow slit for the eyes We don't see the eyes but we know there is a gaze there Alphonse Allais the French satirical writer presented his own version of Salome's dance of seven veils when Salome is completely naked Herod shouts Go on go on expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin We should imagine something similar with a woman wearing a burqa It's the opposite of a woman removing her burqa to reveal her face We should imagine a woman taking off the skin of her face itself so that what we see beneath is precisely the anonymous dark smooth burqa-like surface with a narrow slit for the gaze You see my point I think what you see with the covered face is precisely a totally naked woman when the face as the ultimate mask is taken off That's why it's so horrible Because of course it's impenetrable What do I know that gaze what it [unintelligible] But this impenetrability of the other is the innermost truth of the other Let me give you an example from popular culture before I go to that boring conclusion Brexit and so on In a unique moment in Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith we get a glimpse of this figure We should bear in mind the somewhat awkward Hegelianism of the first three installments of the Star Wars saga As in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday where the mastermind criminal is revealed to be none other than God himself we gradually discover that Senator Palpatine the leader of the Republic [unintelligible] Chancellor of its Senate in its war against the separatist federation is none other than Darth Sidious the mysterious supreme Sith Lord who pulls the strings behind the separatist So in fighting separatists the Republic is fighting itself Which is why the moment of its triumph and the defeat of the separatists is the moment of the Republic's conversion into the evil empire In the middle of the film when Palpatine reveals himself to Anakin the future Darth Vader as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious Anakin reports his treachery to Mace Windu a Jedi Knight who subdues Palpatine in a lightsaber duel Seeing Palpatine threatened and humiliated by Mace Windu Anakin intervenes on Palpatine's behalf allowing him to kill the Jedi Master Now what I want to focus on here is the transformation of Palpatine's face during this interchange After being exposed to brutal energy shocks from Mace Windu's lightsaber the skin of Palpatine's face gradually turns hard and crinkly as if corrugated changing into a crocodile head surface But the change is also the one in his attitude when Palpatine is under duress his face gets deformed twisted expressing Palpatine's fear of pain and death like an evil child in panic And the moment Anakin cuts off Windu's hand and thus immobilizes him Palpatine attacks him frying him with rays of force with childish pleasure a true laughing hyena To quote from a personal communication from Lisa Thompson Palpatine seizes power at the very moment of total helplessness One can see how he has won in that very moment He is already looking forward to the moment when he can throw back his hood in the Senate and display his horribly mutilated scrotum-like head end of quote So it is only after this passage through the utter loss of all dignity after his symbolic authority is totally debased that Palpatine can re-emerge as what he really is Darth Sidious the Lord of Darkness His ridiculous weakness is not an obstacle to his power but its very resort So to conclude who would be today's figure of such a leader who exerts power through displaying his or her human weaknesses I will not go into it here maybe Boris Johnson again Because you know it's interesting to note that when on a visit to England Wagner was approaching London on Thames and saw from his boat all the factories and smoke from their chimneys he exclaimed This is Nibelheim Alberich's land And effectively is the duality of Wotan and Alberich of the white Alb and black Alb not the duality of the public political leader and the capitalist running his subterranean empire You find the same shift in the figure of the master in what I consider a crucial film detecting this shift in modern authority I hope you saw it The Usual Suspects where Keyser Söze is precisely the guy played like Kevin Spacey the weakest guy a guy like us normal guy And Hagen Who is Brexit's Hagen We are still waiting for him Why The true stakes of the Brexit referendum become clear if we locate it into its larger context In Western and Eastern Europe we are witnessing signs of a long-term rearrangement of the political space Till recently the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body a right-of-center party Christian Democrats liberal conservatives people's party and the left-of-center party socialist social democratic and so on Then with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate ecologists neo-fascists communists whatever Now there is progressively emerging a one-party which stands for global capitalism as such usually even with a relative tolerance towards abortion gay rights religious ethnic minorities and so on Opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which on its fringes can be accompanied by directly racist neo-fascist groups And the stakes of so-called radical center today are which of the two old main parties conservatives or liberals will succeed in presenting itself as embodying the post-ideological non-politics against the other party dismissed as still caught in old ideological specters First it looked conservatives were better at it then liberal leftists now it's again so it seems conservatives The anti-immigrant populism brings passion back into politics it's true It speaks in the terms of antagonisms us against them And one of the signs of the confusion of what remains of the left is the idea that one should take this passionate approach from the right that one should adopt it You know the logic of If Marine Le Pen can do it mobilize workers with nationalist rhetoric why should we also not do it So one should return to strong nation state and mobilize national passions and so on A ridiculous struggle for me lost in advance The Brexit referendum moved along the lines of this new opposition Which is why there was something terribly wrong with it To see this one should only look at the strange bedfellows that found themselves together in the Brexit camp right-wing patriots populist nationalists fueled by the fear of immigrants mixed with desperate working-class rage Is such a mixture of patriotic racism with the rage of ordinary people not the ideal ground for a new form of fascism The intensity of the emotional investment into the referendum I think should not deceive us The choice offered obfuscated the true questions how to fight agreement like TTI like TTIP which present a real threat to our sovereignty how to confront ecological catastrophes or economic imbalances which breed new poverty and migrations and so on The choice of Brexit means a setback for these true struggles Suffice it to bear in mind that an important argument for Brexit was precisely the so-called refugee threat The Brexit referendum was the ultimate proof that ideology in the good old Marxist sense of false consciousness is well and alive in our societies The case of Brexit exemplifies perfectly the falsity of the calls to restore national sovereignty like The British people themselves not some anonymous Brussels bureaucrat should decide the fate of our country Immediately after the Brexit victory here is what my good friend Eric Santner wrote me from Chicago a couple of days ago now a quote At the heart of the Brexit is a paradox worth articulating England wants to withdraw from the bureaucratic administrative control of Brussels control seen as compromising its sovereignty in order to be better able to organize the dismantling of its sovereignty by way of more radical submission to the logic of global capital to organize this dismantling on its own Does this not have the markings of the death drive The organism wants to die in its own way on its own terms This is the paradox at the heart also of American Republican thinking We want to take back our country in order to be better able to submit it and pretty much all of life to the logic of the market end of quote And this paradox I think is confirmed by a quick look at the conflict between the UK and the European Union in the past decades You know when some leftists dream about how if we restore the full sovereignty of the United Kingdom we will be able to restore some welfare state and so on and so on my god just look you can locate them easily on the web look at the predominant all the big conflicts between the UK government and Brussels It was not UK government defending workers' rights against Brussels as the instrument of international capital I remember one big conflict in the Tony Blair years was that the EU demanded limiting the weekly work hours and United Kingdom government complained that such a measure will affect the competitiveness of the British industry Then there was ecology the Brussels bureaucracy wanted to impose higher ecological standard like prohibiting buying oil produced through fracking and so on Again United Kingdom sabotaged it It was the same with the topic of human rights and so on and so on In short the so much vilified Brussels bureaucracy was also a protector of minimal workers' rights in exactly the same way as it is today the protector of the rights of refugees against many sovereign nation states which are not ready to receive them The ongoing troubles with immigrants in Germany simply confront us with the limits of democracy the way we have it now How are we to counter anti-immigrant populists who demand a referendum on immigrants assured that the majority of Germans will vote against the immigrants Is then the solution to give the voting rights also to immigrants but to whom among them To those who are already in Germany to those who want to go there At the end of this line we get the idea of worldwide elections which is self-defeating for a simple and precise reason I quote here Yuval Harari from his new book Homo Deus People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters If the experience of other voters is alien to me and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict Democratic elections work only within populations that have some prior common bind such as shared religious beliefs or national myths They are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics End of quote In larger context the only procedure at our disposal outside outright war of course are negotiations That's why the Middle East conflict cannot be solved by elections but only either by war or by negotiations So where does this leave us with Brexit When Stalin was asked in the late twenties sorry I repeat this story for probably like 40th time when Stalin was asked in the late twenties Which deviation is worse the right one or the leftist one he snapped back They are both worse I think it was the same with the choice British voters were confronting Remain remain reject Brexit remain in the EU was in some sense worse since it meant persisting in the inertia that keeps Europe mired down Exit was worse since it made changing nothing look desirable In the days before the referendum there was a pseudo-deep thought circulating in our media Whatever the result EU will never be the same it will be irreparably damaged I think it's the opposite which is true Nothing will really change just the inertia of Europe will be more and more impossible to ignore Europe will again lose time in negotiations among the EU members which all will continue to make any large-scale political project impossible This is what those who oppose Brexit didn't see Shocked they now complain about the irrationality of the Brexit voters ignoring the desperate need for change that the vote made palpable So again I am well aware that the Brussels bureaucracy is inefficient and so on whatever you want corrupted but the solution is not return to national sovereignty Why I like to recall always Mao Zedong's old motto Everything under heaven is in utter chaos the situation is excellent A crisis is to be taken seriously without illusions but also as a chance to be fully exploited Although crisis are painful and dangerous they are the terrain on which battles have to be won Is there not a struggle also in heaven Is the heaven also not divided And does the ongoing confusion not offer a unique chance to react to the need for a radical change in a more appropriate way with a project that will break the vicious cycle of European technocracy Brussels technocracy and nationalist populism The true division of our heaven is not between anemic Brussels bureaucracy and nationalist passions but between the two together their vicious cycle and maybe a new European project which will address the true challenges that humanity is confronted today This is maybe the only small hope given to us In the same way that in the United States the same rage and chaos which gave birth to Donald Trump also gave birth to Sanders let's hope that the present confusion will also open up the space for European Bernie Sanders So was this deadlock the deadlock in which we are today after Brexit where we see clear that both choices are worse just changing nothing persisting in the Europe we have or the nationalist way out was it not already staged now I return to Wagner in the very last scene of Wagner's Ring What remains after the Twilight of Gods is the human crowd silently observing the cataclysmic event a crowd which in Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez's pathbreaking staging is left staring into the spectators when the music ends Here is Chéreau's own description The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world but like all pythonesis the orchestra is unclear and there are several ways of interpreting its message Doesn't one hear it shouldn't one hear it with mistrust and anxiety A mistrust which would match the boundless hope which this humanity nurses and which has always been at stake silently and invisibly in the atrocious battles which have torn human beings apart throughout the Ring The gods have lived the values of their world must be reconstructed and reinvented Men are there as if on the edge of a cliff they listen tensely to the oracle which rumbles from the depth of the earth End of quote We can imagine this nameless crowd as a figure of today's proletariat a crowd of refugees survivors of an ideological catastrophe or a civil war Everything now rests on them without any guarantee in God or any other figure of the big Other This predicament the ending of Wagner's Twilight of Gods again when humanity but totally disoriented humanity survive just staring into empty space this devastating vision this is our situation today and maybe just maybe also our hope Thank you very much