Racial Enjoyments
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-11 · 1:50:03 · 13,977 words
with Christopher Wood, Avital Ronell
ideologyliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismcommunism-socialismsexuality-genderrace-antisemitismfascism-populismdemocracypsychoanalysisecology-climatehegel-dialecticshistorygeopolitics-warreligion-theologysubjectivity
Delivered at NYU days after the 2016 US election, Žižek argues that Trump's victory was a symptom of the left's abandonment of class politics in favor of cultural identity battles, and that Hillary Clinton represented a status-quo cold-war establishment more dangerous in the long run than Trump's vulgarity. He situates the election within a broader analysis of post-patriarchal subjectivity, the rise of fluid gender identities as the hegemonic (not subversive) norm, political correctness as a 'revolution without revolution', and the structural failure of liberal multiculturalism to address the enjoyment-embedded roots of racism. The Q&A extends into ecological catastrophe, Fredric Jameson's 'dual power' thesis, the role of race in left-coalition building, and the tragic dimension of emancipatory politics.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's sardonic prediction of the politically-correct euphemism that will eventually replace 'rape', by analogy with 'enhanced interrogation technique' replacing 'torture'.
Žižek (citing Robespierre) uses this phrase to characterize political correctness and liberal multiculturalism: they acknowledge injustice but seek change without any real redistribution of power or material sacrifice.
as “talmudo-Zionist”
Žižek quotes a Slovenian publicist deploying this antisemitic conspiracy-theory label against Soros, combining Islamophobia and antisemitism in a pseudo-dialectical 'reunion', which Žižek cites as evidence of Europe's dangerous ideological regression.
Žižek's phrase (borrowing from Heidegger's notion of world as totality of meaning) for a social order that has lost any shared symbolic horizon, leaving individuals oscillating between hedonist excess and fundamentalist retreat.
Žižek invokes the death drive in the context of Lee Edelman's ethics of homosexuality as unconditional fidelity to jouissance and rejection of futurity, which Žižek argues is merely the self-destructive reverse of capitalist consumerism.
Implicitly present in the discussion of consumerism offering 'coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol', enjoyment that is always split between excess and its regulated simulacrum.
Post-paternal youth gangs provide a substitute rite of passage now that military service, stable employment, and linear education no longer function as male initiation rituals.
Following Badiou, Žižek's label for the ideological figure of femininity the ruling order now promotes: women as judges, ministers, CEOs, a new form of the One rather than a challenge to it.
Žižek's compressed formula for the contemporary political figure: Hillary = cold, manipulative feminine power; Trump = reckless adolescent; Duterte = the open extra-legal violence that secretly sustains both.
as “new feminine One”
Žižek's term (derived from Badiou) for the emerging hegemonic feminine subject: a cold, self-controlled, efficient administrator who replaces patriarchal authority with a new form of domination.
The post-traditional subject that experiences itself as permanently reinventing and reconstructing its identity; Žižek argues this is not subversive but already the hegemonic subjective form of late capitalism.
Lacan's axiom that there is no sexual relationship, Žižek uses it to argue that sexual difference is an immanent antagonism that always fails, and that gender plurality follows from this impossibility rather than from a primordial multiplicity.
Nazi term for placing all institutions under one coordinating authority; Žižek uses it to argue the US's rich civic texture prevents Trumpism from qualifying as genuine fascism.
Žižek deploys the Freudian formula to describe Trump's victory: the class struggle the liberal left repressed by sidelining Bernie Sanders returned in distorted proto-fascist populist form.
as “two-spirit capitalist”
Satirical coinage: a capitalist (e.g. Soros, Gates) who is half ruthless accumulator, half generous humanitarian, a parody of the Native American 'two-spirit' identity applied to class position.
Žižek's figure for the dystopian endpoint of current trends: a society where 20% of the population is economically active and 80% is superfluous, more extreme than the familiar 99%/1% frame.
Used in discussing Jameson's American Utopia: even in such a society, basic antagonisms (resentment, jealousy) will persist and will need to be managed, Žižek treats this as Jameson's key insight.
The Hegelian-Marxist insight that emancipatory projects necessarily go wrong in ways that reshape the very goals being pursued; what is needed is not to avoid this but to accept it and work through it.
as “jouissance of the other”
Lacanian concept invoked (by Ronell and then Žižek) to explain how racism fantasises that the other is 'getting it all', stealing or possessing an excess of enjoyment.
Žižek's term for the way racism is embedded not in abstract prejudice but in the visceral irritation at the particular enjoyment-style (music, food, behaviour) of the other group.
Stories he reaches for 7
Žižek wants to see what happens the day after the revolution when the people control the UK Parliament, the real problem is not winning but reorganising power, which Hollywood never shows.
“i was so interested, but what happens then the next day? what do the revolutionaries do?”
Malcolm X's adoption of 'X', rejecting ethnic roots and family tradition, is read by Žižek not as Afrocentrism but as opening a possibility for a new community more universalist than European universalism.
“his idea was what if this opens up a possibility for a new community even more universalist than european universalism”
Žižek lists consumerist products drained of their active ingredient as the model for political correctness: a multicultural liberalism that admits injustice but removes any real transformative element.
“coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar, beer without alcohol, multiculturalism without violent clashes”
Foucault (via Borges) lists a nonsensical taxonomy of dogs that ends with 'all dogs not included in this list', Žižek uses this to argue that every classification must include a paradoxical element that marks its own exterior, and applies this to the LGBT+ 'plus'.
“the last category is all the dogs which are not included into this list”
Greeks voted 'No' to EU austerity in a heroic referendum, then capitulated one or two days later; Žižek cites this not as betrayal (as Tariq Ali argued) but as the tragic deadlock of radical politics: winning without knowing what to do next.
“first you have this heroic referendum, no to european union. one or two days later, they had to capitulate”
When asked what you personally do about ecology, you are told to recycle coke cans, the ideological mechanism makes you individually guilty for a structural problem and then offers a trivial personal absolution, letting you 'go on living as usual'.
“you do that stupid recycling and you can go on living as usual”
Facebook in September 2016 removed the iconic napalm girl photo as 'child nudity', illustrating how politically correct logic confuses the traumatic image of war's horror with pornography, suppressing the political dimension.
“it hypocritically justified this removal as a defense against displaying child nudity, which can even count as child pornography”
Works invoked 13
V for Vendetta film
Žižek loves the film but wants to see 'V for Vendetta Part 2', what happens the day after the revolution, when the revolutionaries must reorganise government.
Elysium film
Cited alongside Hunger Games as a Hollywood dystopia reflecting the 20/80 society endpoint of current capitalist trends.
The Hunger Games film
Cited among dystopian Hollywood films that envision the 20/80 society Žižek thinks capitalism is heading toward.
Homo Deus book
Harari's bestseller on digital control of lives; Žižek finds it fascinating but notes we lack the theoretical apparatus to know what it implies.
The Order of Things book
Foucault's book; cited for the Borges Chinese dog classification in the introduction, used to illustrate that every classification must include an element marking its own exterior.
An American Utopia essay
Fredric Jameson's essay (in a volume Žižek edited); praised for its radical rethinking of communist possibility, especially the admission that basic antagonisms persist even post-class.
The Crying Game film
Neil Jordan's film; same use as M. Butterfly, the scene of discovering the woman is a man as enacting the structure of male heterosexual desire.
Reds film
Warren Beatty's film about Jack Reed; Žižek was 'so mad' that Beatty screened it for Reagan at the White House, used as an example of progressive culture compromised by proximity to power.
M. Butterfly film
Cronenberg's film; used to illustrate the Lacanian claim that the innermost logic of heterosexual male desire is a fantasy that the femme fatale is really a man.
Orwell's 1937 book; quoted: 'we all rail against class distinctions but very few people seriously want to abolish them', used to characterise the radical's secret conviction that nothing can change.
Badiou's book; Žižek draws extensively on its analysis of post-patriarchal subjectivity, masculine adolescence, the feminine One, and the claim that women embody proof that God doesn't exist.
The Mikado opera
Gilbert and Sullivan; Žižek's 'favourite opera'; quoted 'they are all on the list and none of them will be missed' in the satirical class-identity parody section.
Avital Ronell's book; mentioned in the introduction; Žižek jokingly riffs on 'losers' in the opening exchange.
People invoked 44
Avital Ronell positive
Co-host of the event at NYU; playful antagonism throughout; Žižek agrees with her point about Lacan's TV essay and the jouissance of the other as the root of racism.
Žižek reads Bill as 'the true clown' and 'servant' who Hillary allowed small pleasures (Monica Lewinsky) while she was the real 'master' conducting serious political manipulation.
Jeremiah Glick positive
Described as a good friend who wrote on echoes of Haiti in literature; Žižek credits him with the concept of 'revolutionary tragedy' in the Hegelian sense.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri positive
Žižek reports (via private sources) that Hardt and Negri are now radically rethinking their multitude thesis, admitting the need for verticality and central power, which Žižek welcomes as a sign of the left's necessary self-rethinking.
Nikki Johnson-Huston positive
African American lawyer quoted at length: described how white liberals police language without requiring real sacrifice, espouse diversity while holding condescending assumptions about Black people, Žižek says he 'fully agrees'.
Named alongside Rifkin and Elon Musk as authors/figures who accept that capitalism as known is reaching its limits around intellectual property.
Žižek was 'so mad' that Beatty screened his supposedly progressive Reds for Reagan at the White House, used as an example of left cultural politics compromised by access to power.
Cited in a list of women who have wielded brutal political power (alongside Thatcher, Merkel post-Brexit), illustrating the new feminine One of late capitalist governance.
Cited as target of Slovenian antisemitic conspiracy theory labelling him 'talmudo-Zionist'; also used (sardonically) as example of the 'two-spirit capitalist'.
David Duke negative
Cited as the last person to send a congratulatory message to Julian Assange after the election, used to illustrate the dangerous political company Assange's actions kept.
Jacques Lacan positive
Used extensively: il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel as the ground for sexual difference theory; the logic of identification through weakness; the jouissance of the other as basis of racism.
Ted Cruz negative
Žižek says Cruz (and Rick Santorum) are 'not human', embodying something so monstrous they cannot be identified with even as the nastiest part of oneself.
Cited for the concept of sovereignty as radical negativity and constrained expenditure; Žižek uses this as the theoretical reference point for Edelman's death-drive ethics, which he then criticises.
Mentioned twice: Avital Ronell cites her concept of 'precariousness'; Žižek notes that post-mod theorists of the 'society of choice' sound 'almost copying Judith Butler' when celebrating precarious work as freedom to reinvent oneself.
Žižek calls Trump 'disgust embodied', a vulgar opportunist who is not a productive capitalist but excels at bankruptcy and taxpayer bailouts; yet Žižek finds a perverse use-value in his victory as a potential trigger for left renewal.
Cited for Homo Deus and its description of a society controlled by gigantic digital machinery; Žižek finds these futurist texts fascinating but notes we lack the theoretical apparatus to know where they lead.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek draws heavily on Badiou's 'The True Life' for the analysis of post-patriarchal subjectivity, masculine adolescence vs. feminine maturity, and the new feminine One; disagrees with Badiou's ontology of primordial multiplicity.
Tariq Ali negative
Žižek mocks Ali for crying 'betrayal' over Syriza's capitulation while flying back to his multi-million pound London flat, using him to represent the hypocrisy of comfortable radical critics.
Cited as accepting that capitalism is reaching its limit around intellectual property, grouped with Mason and Rifkin as non-Marxist evidence of the system's crisis.
George Orwell positive
Quoted from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937): 'we all rail against class distinctions but very few people seriously want to abolish them', used to characterise liberal anti-racism and anti-Trump politics.
Fredric Jameson positive
Žižek edited the volume containing Jameson's 'American Utopia'; praises Jameson's radical rethinking of the communist project and the admission that basic antagonisms persist post-class; finds the army bureaucracy idea ultimately confused but the underlying insight valuable.
Bernie Sanders positive
Žižek's 'hero' of the election: the one candidate who came close to uniting economic class struggle with cultural-identity struggles; his failure is the structural cause of Trump's rise.
Žižek calls him 'my otherwise good friend' but sent him a message expressing unease that the last person to congratulate Assange on the WikiLeaks election impact was David Duke.
Žižek calls him 'my good friend' but notes he believes a little too much in democratising Europe without specifying what democracy concretely means in the context of the EU's management of Greece and refugees.
Malcolm X positive
Žižek calls him his 'hero' in the context of race politics: Malcolm X's genius was to read the absence of ethnic roots encoded in 'X' as an opening toward a new universalism rather than a return to origins.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited twice for the phrase 'revolution without revolution', which Žižek uses to characterise both political correctness and liberal anti-Trump politics.
Michel Foucault positive
The Order of Things introduction with the Borges dog-classification is cited to illustrate that every classification must include a paradoxical element marking its own exterior.
The Philippine president who openly solicits extrajudicial murders; Žižek uses him as the third term in the Hillary-Duterte-Trump triad, the embarrassing supplement that reveals the hidden violence sustaining 'civilised' political power.
Cited by Avital Ronell at the close: 'the good message of christianity is that the end is near.'
Cited as a futurist who argues capitalism is reaching its limits; Žižek reads him as evidence of a growing consensus even among non-Marxists.
Named alongside Soros as a 'two-spirit capitalist': half ruthless accumulator, half generous humanitarian.
Angela Merkel positive
Žižek says she 'did the right thing' on refugees by consciously going against majority opinion, an example of authentic political leadership that bets on retroactive justification.
Mao Zedong positive
Quoted at the close, 'there is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent', as Žižek's sardonic but sincere formula for reading the post-Trump political conjuncture.
Walter Benjamin positive
His formula 'behind every fascism there is a failed revolution' is applied directly to Trump: behind Trump is the failure of the Sanders movement.
Hillary Clinton negative
Described as a cold-war establishment embodied, a 'ruthless manipulator' who exploits femininity, the true master in her marriage to Bill; her victory would have guaranteed Trump's return with a vengeance.
Lee Edelman negative
Žižek notes he 'otherwise appreciates' Edelman but rejects his no-future ethics of the death drive as merely the obverse of capitalist self-destruction, not a genuine social transgression.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Cited for her critique of social-democratic opportunism, the argument that now is not the right time for revolution, which Žižek uses against leftists who say they must be fully organised before acting.
Cited as early example of the 'if the job needs to be done tough, you need a woman' pattern, the new feminine One of capitalism.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek 'respectfully disagrees' with Obama's claim that America is already great, arguing that a country that can elect Trump cannot be called great.
Tim Dean negative
Gay theorist Žižek 'otherwise appreciates' but argues against: Dean's quasi-Deleuzian view that primordial sexuality is fluid polymorphous perversion with gender binary imposed secondarily misses Lacan's point that the binary fails from within.
Socrates positive
Via Badiou: the first philosopher and first victim, ordered by democratic Athens to drink poison for corrupting the youth, cited to illustrate that philosophy's function is to alienate youth from the predominant order.
Edward Bond positive
Quoted: 'if you can't face hiroshima in the theater, you'll eventually end up in hiroshima itself', used as the opening argument for why graphic representation of violence is necessary rather than complicit.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the concept of ethical substance and the state as all-encompassing community; his notion of tragic dimension (doing something good, things necessarily go wrong) is applied to emancipatory politics.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Cited by Ronell for the concept of ressentiment as a motor of history; Ronell also invokes the notion of 'enabling fiction'.
What it argues
Trump's election as symptom of the left's failure to address class strugglepolitical correctness as ideology ('revolution without revolution')post-patriarchal subjectivity and fluid gender identity as hegemonic normthe enjoyment-embedded roots of racismHillary Clinton as cold-war establishment vs. Trump as proto-fascist populisttragic dimension of emancipatory politicsEuropean antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the refugee crisis
Dialectical moves 10
“The more Trump's failings were mocked, the more ordinary people identified with him — identification works precisely through the other's weaknesses, not their strengths.”
Inversion of the common-sense view that ridicule destroys identification; Žižek uses Lacan to show that identification with the underdog's weakness is the mechanism the liberal commentariat missed.
“The very new burdens and new forms of domination are presented to you as new freedoms.”
The ideological reversal of late capitalism: precarious work = freedom to reinvent yourself; abolition of healthcare = freedom to choose; the oppressive structure presents itself as liberation.
“Liberals who fear Trump are not afraid of fascism — they are afraid of actual social change.”
The real object of liberal anti-Trump anxiety is not the right but the left: the fear that a genuine redistributive politics might emerge.
“Fluid post-patriarchal subjectivity is not transgressive but is already the hegemonic ideological norm; it attacks an enemy in full retreat.”
What presents itself as radical subversion of the old patriarchal order is actually the dominant subjective form capitalism requires.
“The only true heterosexuals are lesbians; heterosexual men are a subspecies of homosexuals.”
Žižek (following Lacan) inverts the apparent hierarchy: the male fantasy sustaining heterosexual desire is already a homosexual structure, the norm subverts itself from within.
“Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.”
Walter Benjamin's formula applied to Trump: the proto-fascist populism is the distorted return of the class politics the liberal left refused to pursue.
“Women are by themselves the terrestrial proof that God doesn't exist — this is why traditional societies keep women invisible.”
Badiou's claim (quoted approvingly): woman as the 'two' embodies immanent resistance to the monotheistic One, so patriarchy must render women invisible to preserve the fiction of God.
“The problem with fluid queer subjectivity is not that it is utopian, but that it is already predominant.”
The critique of identity fluidity is not that it is impossible but that it has already been accomplished by capitalism as its own subjective form, making it complicit rather than critical.
“You feel alone and abandoned by God — and that abandonment IS the freedom God is giving you; the problem becomes its own solution.”
Christian abandonment is not a failure of God's care but the very mechanism of human freedom: the absence of divine guarantee throws all responsibility back onto the subject.
“A Hillary victory would have been the victory of a status quo that would have guaranteed Trump's return with a vengeance.”
The 'safer' choice was actually the more dangerous one in the long run: continuity of neoliberal establishment politics would have reproduced the conditions for a worse right-wing revolt.
Claims 20
asserts
Trump's victory was caused not by excess radicalism on the left but by the liberal establishment's neutralisation of Bernie Sanders and abandonment of class politics.the 2016 US election
asserts
Liberals who feared a Trump victory were not afraid of a rightist turn but of actual social change — they wanted a revolution without revolution.liberal anti-Trump politics
asserts
Fluid post-patriarchal subjectivity is not subversive but is already the hegemonic ideological norm of late capitalism.post-feminist fluid identity politics
rejects
Trump is not a fascist in any precise conceptual sense; the US civic infrastructure prevents the kind of Gleichschaltung true fascism requires.the characterisation of Trump as fascist
asserts
Political correctness is ideologically dangerous because it mistakes aseptic description for anti-violence and thereby vaccinates against real understanding of atrocity.political correctness and the representation of violence
asserts
Hillary Clinton represented a cold-war establishment status quo more likely to lead to a new world war than Trump, making her victory the worse long-term option.Hillary Clinton
asserts
The left can only be mobilised through catastrophe; waiting for full organisation before acting is the old social-democratic opportunism Rosa Luxemburg criticised.left strategy and organisation
rejects
Lee Edelman's ethics of the death drive and refusal of futurity is not socially transgressive but is merely the self-destructive obverse of capitalist consumerism.Lee Edelman's queer theory of negativity
asserts
Being gay or lesbian does not undermine the gender binary; transgender people do so more radically by embodying sexual difference as impossible.LGBT politics and the gender binary
asserts
For Lacan, heterosexual men are a subspecies of homosexuals: the male unconscious fantasy sustaining desire for the femme fatale is that she is really a man dressed as a woman.Lacanian theory of heterosexual desire
asserts
Behind Trump's rise is the failure of Bernie Sanders — behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.the structural cause of right-wing populism
asserts
Ordinary Trump supporters identified with Trump precisely because of his weaknesses and vulgarity, not despite them — the more he was attacked, the more they identified with him against patronising elites.identification and Trump support
asserts
The abolition of universal military conscription, though superficially progressive, destroys the shared symbolic community Hegel saw as the essence of the state and turns armed forces into mercenary bodies.military conscription and ethical substance
asserts
Racism is not primarily an abstract prejudice but is embedded in antagonism toward the particular enjoyment-style of the other — food, music, bodily habits — even among sincere liberal anti-racists.the libidinal structure of racism
rejects
ISIS has nothing genuinely traditional about it; it is an ultra-modern, post-modern dynamic organisation combining religious community and mafia, fully part of the current world.ISIS as traditional religious phenomenon
rejects
Gender plurality is the result of the basic thwarted impossibility of sexual difference, not a primordial natural fact — against Badiou's notion of a primordial multiplicity.Badiou's ontology of multiplicity
asserts
The only hope for emancipation is to translate popular anti-establishment rage into an organised radical left project; without that, catastrophic outcomes (world war, ecological collapse) are likely.prospects for left politics
asserts
European democracy is producing worse outcomes than technocratic Brussels in practice: referenda on Greece and refugees would have returned more racist results.democracy and the European Union
asserts
Precarious work is ideologically presented as freedom to reinvent oneself, when it is in fact a new burden imposed by capital without material security.precarity and ideological mystification
asserts
The Christian message is not consolation but radical abandonment by God that throws all responsibility back onto the human — the problem becomes its own solution.Christianity and freedom
Quotes 13
“if you can't face hiroshima in the theater, you'll eventually end up in hiroshima itself”Slavoj Žižek · argument for the necessity of graphic representation of atrocity
“the very new burdens, new forms of domination are presented to you as new freedoms”Slavoj Žižek · ideological reversal of late capitalism
“coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar, beer without alcohol, multiculturalism without violent clashes”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness as 'revolution without revolution'
“a woman is always by herself the terrestrial proof that god doesn't exist, that god doesn't have to exist”Slavoj Žižek · Badiou: woman as embodied resistance to the monotheistic One
“the only true heterosexuals are lesbians. heterosexual men are subspecies of homosexuals.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian inversion: heterosexual male desire is structured as homosexual fantasy
“behind every fascism there is a failed revolution. behind the rise of trump, there is the failure of bernie sanders.”Slavoj Žižek · Walter Benjamin's formula applied to Trump's election
“liberals who fear trump victory are not really afraid of a radical rightist turn. what they are really afraid of is simply an actual social change.”Slavoj Žižek · the true object of liberal anti-Trump anxiety
“the problem with this vision of a new fluid subjectivity is not that it is utopian, but it is already predominant.”Slavoj Žižek · fluid identity as hegemonic norm, not subversion
“there is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.”Slavoj Žižek · Mao quotation used as formula for the post-Trump political situation
“can a country in which a person like trump can become a president really be considered great? i mean, something is wrong here.”Slavoj Žižek · rebuke of Obama's 'America is already great'
“we feel abandoned and that the christian solution is not to say don't worry too much. the message of christianity is you feel alone, all responsibility is on you.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian freedom as divine abandonment
“trump reminded people of the half-forgotten reality of class struggle — in a distorted proto-fascist populist way, but nonetheless.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump's involuntary contribution: making class visible again
“now if you love america as i do, now is the time for the hard work of love, for becoming engaged in the long process of the formation of a radical political left in the united states.”Slavoj Žižek · concluding call to left organisation
Transcript 67 turns
Christopher Wood
hello, i'm christopher wood, chair of the german department at nyu. and i'm here simply to introduce my colleague. an individual who needs no introduction, university professor at new york university, abital ronnel. among her recent publications, i'll name only the book loser sons. politics and authority. please join me in welcoming avital ranel. luther.
hello, i'm christopher wood, chair of the german department at nyu. and i'm here simply to introduce my colleague. an individual who needs no introduction, university professor at new york university, abital ronnel. among her recent publications, i'll name only the book loser sons. politics and authority. please join me in welcoming avital ranel. luther.
Slavoj Žižek
loserers chance. loser, like those who are losers.
loserers chance. loser, like those who are losers.
Avital Ronell
like trump.
like trump.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Avital Ronell
thank.
thank.
Slavoj Žižek
hello everyone! and to put it in this lgbt way and every day. so this is not only he and she. sorry, not interrupt you again.
hello everyone! and to put it in this lgbt way and every day. so this is not only he and she. sorry, not interrupt you again.
Avital Ronell
don't start with me.
don't start with me.
Slavoj Žižek
he.
he.
Avital Ronell
so we intentionally scheduled this event for tonight, but certainly not with the understanding that we would be in some sense intellectual. or intellectually appointed and called first responders. something happened. to us all. that might be designated in the terms outlined by blanchot as a disclosure, most of us are still reverberating and shaking or shaken down with a sense of despair and horror. but some, and mostly with a sense also of mute. shock. it took me a while to get off the mute button myself, but i'd like you to consider the experience or inexperience to the extent that can you stop that noise? to the extent that we... something happened on the order of an event which we might not be able to appropriate. but what would that disclosure? b what was disclosed, what will have been disclosed, what what would the pressure and weight of the disclosure be? it would be something like a nihilistic buildup. a lot of us have been reading up on nihilism and a major attack! on democracy. um... we didn't expect, some of us, the resentimental fervor. with which hillary would be slammed. and i would like to urge that we think about and discuss together at some point the trope discovered by nietzsche that of ressentiment. a resentment that motors history according to nietzsche. so a lot of you are feeling fragile. we have a lot of fragility or what our friend judith butler calls... precariousness that probably is deepening and intensifying. we have a lot to talk about, a lot to think about ever since at least adorno. marked these f. factors, meaning fascoid factors that he saw. all over, distributed all over america, already das. so one wants to consider the disappearance of authority, already signaled by kjv and arendt. and what it means to have an authoritarian. thing or unding an unthing. that is perched on the disappearance and loss of authority. this i can't say more about, but i'd love to if you insist. so at another so fast-forward, even though our morning process has barely begun. let me urge you not to introject. the wounding insults. that you've been served consciously or unconsciously according to a logic that's all too clear or even subterranean. and still moving toward you, let us size together the rhetorical damage. the weaponizing of language. the destruction of are great, great. cousins, friends, families, and other tropologies of intimacy, muslims, women. people of color and everyone. who's being undermined and beaten down right now. so i'm wondering if this is not. game changing for my friend slavoy. in some ways, because this is um there's so much to consider and what kind of pushbacks and paybacks are being distributed right now. don't forget that comey was kind of after bill clinton, who pardoned an israeli. spy. i don't know if you remember that episode. there's a lot of history going back and forth that we might want to consider together as we. try to clear some abysses. with the understanding that we're now groundless, we always were, but now some disclosure has in a way manifested itself. so i have so much to say to you, to ask you to kind of protect yourselves the way we protect the question here and don't kid yourself the university and learning. willby is already a target of opportunity. for the new regimens. um... we now compete with trump university, among other. institutional mutations but there will also be. social aggressions. that come from outfield or left or right. and just let's try to protect each other, one another, and ourselves. with that in mind, and your anti-ballistic shields up and ready, i introduce my friend and colleague. and pain in the ass on so many levels. slavo ishek. you.
so we intentionally scheduled this event for tonight, but certainly not with the understanding that we would be in some sense intellectual. or intellectually appointed and called first responders. something happened. to us all. that might be designated in the terms outlined by blanchot as a disclosure, most of us are still reverberating and shaking or shaken down with a sense of despair and horror. but some, and mostly with a sense also of mute. shock. it took me a while to get off the mute button myself, but i'd like you to consider the experience or inexperience to the extent that can you stop that noise? to the extent that we... something happened on the order of an event which we might not be able to appropriate. but what would that disclosure? b what was disclosed, what will have been disclosed, what what would the pressure and weight of the disclosure be? it would be something like a nihilistic buildup. a lot of us have been reading up on nihilism and a major attack! on democracy. um... we didn't expect, some of us, the resentimental fervor. with which hillary would be slammed. and i would like to urge that we think about and discuss together at some point the trope discovered by nietzsche that of ressentiment. a resentment that motors history according to nietzsche. so a lot of you are feeling fragile. we have a lot of fragility or what our friend judith butler calls... precariousness that probably is deepening and intensifying. we have a lot to talk about, a lot to think about ever since at least adorno. marked these f. factors, meaning fascoid factors that he saw. all over, distributed all over america, already das. so one wants to consider the disappearance of authority, already signaled by kjv and arendt. and what it means to have an authoritarian. thing or unding an unthing. that is perched on the disappearance and loss of authority. this i can't say more about, but i'd love to if you insist. so at another so fast-forward, even though our morning process has barely begun. let me urge you not to introject. the wounding insults. that you've been served consciously or unconsciously according to a logic that's all too clear or even subterranean. and still moving toward you, let us size together the rhetorical damage. the weaponizing of language. the destruction of are great, great. cousins, friends, families, and other tropologies of intimacy, muslims, women. people of color and everyone. who's being undermined and beaten down right now. so i'm wondering if this is not. game changing for my friend slavoy. in some ways, because this is um there's so much to consider and what kind of pushbacks and paybacks are being distributed right now. don't forget that comey was kind of after bill clinton, who pardoned an israeli. spy. i don't know if you remember that episode. there's a lot of history going back and forth that we might want to consider together as we. try to clear some abysses. with the understanding that we're now groundless, we always were, but now some disclosure has in a way manifested itself. so i have so much to say to you, to ask you to kind of protect yourselves the way we protect the question here and don't kid yourself the university and learning. willby is already a target of opportunity. for the new regimens. um... we now compete with trump university, among other. institutional mutations but there will also be. social aggressions. that come from outfield or left or right. and just let's try to protect each other, one another, and ourselves. with that in mind, and your anti-ballistic shields up and ready, i introduce my friend and colleague. and pain in the ass on so many levels. slavo ishek. you.
Slavoj Žižek
okay. will you stand there and just control me or...
okay. will you stand there and just control me or...
Avital Ronell
only, we don't play those games anymore, honey.
only, we don't play those games anymore, honey.
Slavoj Žižek
oh. i'm done. uh... okay, these are your new york place. i don't get them, what this means. i just want to warn you. the lecture will not be exactly what the title promises. i will skip the racial enjoymentments. you will not lose any great thing. but it will be clear why. because i nonetheless want to focus on the obvious thing. it's kind of expected. what you were focusing on. what this election... mean and so on and so on. maybe some of you jeret. my piece, which appeared only on the online version of in these times, this will be sad for you because i will repeat some of the parts. my position is here extremely unorthodox. i'm getting hate mail, i was physically threatened and so on. and as to all those guys from the left who accuse me of being, i'm already now, a new fascist, finally my mask have fallen down.
oh. i'm done. uh... okay, these are your new york place. i don't get them, what this means. i just want to warn you. the lecture will not be exactly what the title promises. i will skip the racial enjoymentments. you will not lose any great thing. but it will be clear why. because i nonetheless want to focus on the obvious thing. it's kind of expected. what you were focusing on. what this election... mean and so on and so on. maybe some of you jeret. my piece, which appeared only on the online version of in these times, this will be sad for you because i will repeat some of the parts. my position is here extremely unorthodox. i'm getting hate mail, i was physically threatened and so on. and as to all those guys from the left who accuse me of being, i'm already now, a new fascist, finally my mask have fallen down.
Avital Ronell
.
.
Slavoj Žižek
where, all i can tell you is that i don't know if you noticed this, how it's more and more difficult for me to publish here and in the united kingdom. first, i was able five, ten years ago to publish from time to time a co-ed in new york times. that's out. then it was in newsweek, but only online. it's out. now even my good friends in english times only allow me from time to time on the, how do you call it, digital version. not there. in england, it's even worse. i'm now totally prohibited. by guardian, by london review of books, by new left review, and so on and so on. so what should i say? that if i'm a fascist, then it's very difficult to be a fascist these days or whatever. so let me say that. i will, with best intentions but consciously, let's say, provoke you. i am convinced about what i am. saying it's not just an empty provocation. and i know this is part of a more general way my theories claims are problematized and i want maybe to begin with that. namely, i would like to begin with a well-known statement, you must all know it by edward bond. if you can't face hiroshima in the theater, you'll eventually end up in hiroshima. itself i think that this statement provides the best argument against those who oppose what they dismiss as graphic descriptions of sexual violence and other atrocities. they dismiss them as, that's the claim, participating in the same violence these descriptions pretend to critically analyze and reject. like if you, for example, describe. violence, atrocities against women, you you are working on a very thin ice because soon people will say, but wait a minute, your description itself repeats the very act you pretend to criticize and so on and so on, not out of narcissism, but... just to find a clear example of these accusations, i would like to. quote you one paragraph from a very critical review in some german newspaper, i think, of my intervention at the walter benjamin conference in ramallah almost a year ago. the writer claims that i enumerate, quote, a detailed list of ritualized sexual violences taking place outside of the islamic world, thus showing his mind willingness to accompany honor killings with matching atrocities. he, me, was each time rhetorically apologetic about his descriptions. it's really hard to talk about this, but i must tell you. and each time he, me, came back with more obscene, bloody and graphic details. this is sufficient to grasp the pointlessness and ambivalence of his mind intervention, displaying concerns about sexual violence by subjecting the watchful audience to the very violence of crude images of or heinous sexual practices. end of quote. here you have the logic that i totally reject. why? i think this passage that i quoted. confronts us with the prototype of politically correct line of argumentation. i not only reject it, but consider it extremely dangerous. in order to really grasp sexual violence, i claim, one has to be shocked, traumatized even by it. if we constrain ourselves to aseptic technical descriptions, we do exactly the same as those who refer to torture as enhanced interrogation technique, or, i warn you, i think this will be true in five to ten years, we will soon begin to refer to rape as, it sounds more pc, nobody is hurt, to enhanced seduction technique. and it is only the taste of the thing itself. that effectively vaccinates us against it. and we can already see the consequences of such a stance, politically correct stance. when, you may remember it two months ago, at the beginning of september of this year, facebook censored the iconic napalam girl photo of a terrified nine-year-old naked vietnamese girl running away from napal bombs. it hypocritically justified this removal as a defense against displaying child nudity, which can even count as child pornography. ignoring the obvious political dimension as if anyone could really be sexually aroused by the photo of a terrified girl. what this image could trigger is clearly not sexual arousal, but the awareness of the horror of war against civilian population. along these lines. nki johnson houston. if i got it correctly from the author's description, a black, i mean, african american lawyer. he described eloquently how white liberals have hijacked the conversation about diversity, political correctness, and what topics we should be outraged about. end of quote, and now comes the full slightly longer quote from this guy, with which i fully agree, of course. my problem with liberalism is that it's more concerned with policing people's language and thoughts without requiring them to do anything to fix the problem. white liberal college students speak of safe spaces, trigger words, microaggressions and white privilege while not having to do anything or more importantly, give up anything. they can't even have a conversation with someone who sees the world differently without resorting to calling someone a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, bigot and trying to to have them banned from campus or ruin them and their reputation. they say they feel black people's pain because they took a trip to africa to help the disadvantaged, but are unwilling to go to a black neighborhood in the city in which they live. these same college students will espouse the joys of diversity, but will in the same breath assume you are only on campus if you are african american because of african affirmative action or that all black people grew up in poverty. of quote. therein resides for me the political problem with political correctness. to repeat robespierre, it admits the injustices of the actual life, but it wants to cure them with, again, what robespierre called a revolution without revolution. in exact parallel to today's consumerism, which offers coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar, beer without alcohol, multiculturalism without violent clashes, and so on and so on. a vision of social change where, with no actual change, a change where no blood is spilled, where no one gets really hurt, where well-meaning liberals remain cocooned in their safe enclaves. now you will say but nonetheless there is one big result of this politically correct influence precisely because of what political correctness stands for we did have a chance with hillary clinton to have the first woman president of the united states. of course i would be mega glad if this were to happen but i see some problems we live more than ever in an ideological era where you know, the first thing to ask ich. what precisely was meant by a woman how what image of woman, of woman, femininity predomates? in the ideological space where. you can get someone like hillary clinton elected. i would like to. pr. provide a provisional at least reply to this question by referring to alain badiou's new book. the true life, la vraie vie. where bieu already begins with a wonderful provocative claim that from socrates onward, the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth. to alienate, or rather, in brechtian sense, extranate them from the predominant ideologico-political order, to sow radical doubts, to enable them to think autonomously. no wonder socrates, the first philosopher, was also its first victim, ordered by the democratic court of athens to drink poison. and here, incidentally, just small improvisations, i have a problem even with my good friend. janis varoufakis, who i think believes a little bit too much in this, you know, democratizing europe. but again, nothing against it in principle. but what does he concretely mean with democracy let me tell you something very sad that i experienced let's take europe and don't feel too bad, you in the united states. you think you are in bad situation now. i think europe is much worse. penetrated by such outrageous racist discourse, we even have europeans who, in a pseudo-dialectical way, reunite islamophobia and anti-seemitism. like, you know, i almost like it. it's so perverse. the topic now among european. well, it's not even extreme right. you find them in big media in my own country, slovenia, a guy, it's an obscenity to pronounce his name, attacked george soros as literally the most despicable and dangerous person today. why? because he is, that's how he is addressed in that text, a talmudo zionist who is organizing the invasion of europe by neg. islamist hordes, not even crowds, hordes like primitive and so, okay, he goes on, but what fascinated me so much is that we naive people, we thought there is maybe some misunderstanding between jews and arabs in the middle east, so we should help them to find a shared emancipatory project. no, no, this guy has an answer, which is at the level of that old nazi answer, you know, plutocratic bolshevik plot, you know. he claims that there is no noagonism between islamic fundamentalism and zionism because jews are secret puppet masters organizing isis and all that to ruin christian european civilization and so on and so on. what shocked me is not the fact of claiming this, but that it was openly published in one of the biggest weekly. newspapers in slovenia and okay people laughed, were shocked, but no serious public reaction. to eat. so uh. what i'm... what i'm trying to say is that europe is getting even worse and the problem with democracy here is this one i've spoken with many people from brussels and so on listen, what does it mean democratizing europe? let's take two big topics with which the european union was dealing in the last year and a half. greek crisis and refugees. are you aware that in both cases, if the process of decision in brussels were to be more transparent, responsible to the people, the result would have been much worse. i know i spoke with the slovene representative in brussels who told me he was only able to argue let's not be so tough against greece in closed sessions. because the moment the debate was public, our media reported it and he was under tremendous racist pressure. like how could you help those lazy greeks were ruining us. it's the same with refugees. if you were to do... in a democratic way it means what organising referendum in most european countries do you want refugees or not practically all european countries would have rejected them. so i think, not that i'm her mega political fan, but here i think angela merkel did the right thing. she consciously went against. the opinion of the majority with this typical risky gesture that authentic politicians should do. you do something that you know is not popular but you hope that through insisting on it you will change the situation to such an extent that retroactively people will see the justice of it. so much about democracy. let me return to my view. today, however, the task of a philosopher is no longer to undermine the hegemonic hierarchy symbolic edifice which grounds social stability but to make the young people perceive the dangers of the growing post-patriarchal nihilist order which presents itself as the domain of new freedoms. i often repeat this, but i will do it again. we live in a wonderful, wonderful, in the sense of horror, ideological era where, and that's always the greatest success of ideology, where the very new burdens, new forms of domination are presented to you as new freedoms. for example, precarious work is more and more becoming a rule. in my own city country, slovenia, almost half the people already work precariously. and you think, oh my, i it's horrible, i cannot even rely on my job. then comes some post-mod theorist of society of choice and so on and tells you something like almost copying judith butler incidentally. but isn't it wonderful that you are given the free choice every half a year or year to reinvent yourself? you are no longer transfixed to certain alienated identity and so on and so on. even they argue in the same way even with abolishing universal health care. they say now you have a choice. you can opt either you spend your money for health or you can risk your health and rather, i don't know, provide for your children's education or take a big holiday or whatever. but you see the trick. new burdens, new anxieties are presented to you as new freedoms. we live in an extraordinary era. where there is no tradition on which we can firmly base our identity, no frame of meaningful life which would enable us to live a life beyond hedonist reproduction. this new world disorder, this gradually emerging world less, like it's no longer world in this keggerian sense of the totality of meaning, worldless civilization, exemplarily affects the young. who oscillate between. on the one hand the intensity of fully burning out sexual enjoyment drugs alcohol up to violence and radical search for a career, endeavor to succeed, study, earn money within the existing capitalist order. the only alternative to all this is obviously violent retreat into some artificially resuscitated tradition. there are attempts to assert a social form of radical negativity and constrained expenditure in georges batataille's sense of sovereignty as only thing that can really undermine the smooth flow of capitalist reproduction. for example, among these lines, lee edelman, whom i otherwise appreciate, has developed the notion of homosexuality as involving an ethics of now, of unconditional fidelity to jouissance's extreme enjoyment, of following the death drive by totally ignoring any reference to the future or engagement with the practical network of world affairs. homosexuality does for edelman stands for the radical assumption of the negativity of death drive. or withdrawal from reality into the real of the night of the world. along these lines, edelman opposes the radical ethics of homosexuality to the predominant obsession with posterity, that is to say children. children are, for edelman, pathological moment which binds us to pragmatic considerations and thus compels us to betray the radical ethics of jouissance. ever. i'm more tempted to claim that. the unleashing of such radical negativity is just the obverse of the capitalist manipulative calculation, its own self-destructive aspect. you know, capitalist consumerism is never simple consumerism. it's always divided between extreme consumerism, drugs, mortal enjoyment, sex, getting drunk, whatever, and the controlled version. like. enjoy but within certain measures and so on and so on. so again my thesis is here very radical i see absolutely nothing in any meaningful way socially transgressive transformative into saying follow the death drive to its end or whatever. now let me go on. we are getting here a reactive even, a reactive decadent version of what marx called or desired the withering away of the state. today's state. state in the sense of stat, political state. is more and more an administrative regulator of market egotism with no symbolic authority, lacking what hegel perceived as the essence of state, the all-encompassing community for which we are ready to sacrifice our lives. this disintegration of ethical substance is clearly signaled by the abolishment of universal military conscription in many developed countries. okay, you will say this is nice, we no longer have militarism. but i claim the very notion of being ready to risk one's life for a common cause appears today more and more pointless if not directly ridiculous so that armed forces as a body in which all citizens equally participate is gradually turning into a mercenary force. you know, that's the other sad aspect of abolishing universal military conscription, that we are ultimately controlled, ruled by... now now let me go on. this disintegration of a shared ethical substance that badoux's thesis affects differently the two predominant hegemonic gender identities. men are gradually turning into perpetual adolescents with no clear passage. of initiation that would enact their entry into maturity. it's clear till like 30, 40 years ago, there were clear rites of initiation for men. usually it was in those countries which had it military service. after that, you really became a man. or it was getting a permanent job, a profession. even education worked like that. after finishing university, you are potentially a worker, you are there. with precarious work, with abolishing military conscription, with education, with, okay, i agree with you, trumpization of education, where, you know, instead of this good old, i love it more and more, alienated process of education for four or five years, you are detached from... so-called real life, you just study. now the idea is all your life you should learn, you study, which means study becomes part of capitalist reproduction and so on and so on. no wonder then that in order to supplement this lack. postaternal youth gangs proliferate, providing ersad initiation and social identity. now comes badou's other thesis, which may be problematic, but i think it can be saved. according to bieu, in contrast to men, women are today more and more precociously mature. treated. as small adults, already as small girls expected to control their lives, to plan their career and so on and so on. what then is happening today with sexual difference in the traditional sense of gender binary? traditionally, men were perceived as the bearers of the one. the monotheistic god, patriarchal power, stable social hierarchy, while women were associated with the two. their position being the one-off between the two, whatever, between mother and whore, between lover and saint, and so on. but you see in this between the two something much deeper than an after effect of patriarchy. quote from bieu's book, a woman is the overcoming of the one in the guise of a passage between the two. such is my speculative definition of femininity. end of quote. the conclusion he draws from this is surprising but consequent. i love it. his claim is that by their very existence, women are, not so much atheists are, a direct embodiment of resistance to one, to god, denouncing it as a fiction. i will read you this short passage. i love it. fromieu. a woman is always by herself the terrestrial proof that god doesn't exist, that god doesn't have to exist. it is sufficient to take a look at a woman, what is called really to take a look, to be immediately convinced that one can well do without god. this is why in traditional societies, women are hidden. things are here more serious than a vulgar sexual possessiveness or jealousy. tradition knows that in order to keep god alive in whatever way women have to be kept invisible i mean it's a wonderful naive statement i find it a little bit problematic but he is onto something. let me go on. today however when the reign of the symbolic one is weakened. the hierarchy of roles and places under divine name of the father. this hierarchy is becoming largely irrelevant. to fill in this void, a new one in the sense of individuality, is emerging. a hedonistic consumer caught in market competition, enjoying life and simultaneously a ruthless manipulator in how she, he, they it does it. here, unexpectedly, sexual difference enters. men are ludic adolescents, outlaws, out of law, women more and more hard, mature, serious, legal, punitive beings. this is why, as badiuk claims, there is a bourgeois feminism bent on domination. women are today not called. upon by the ruling ideology to be subordinated, they are called, solicited, expected to be judges, administrators, ministers, ceos, teachers, even polic women and soldiers. a paradigmatic scene occurring daily in our security institutions. i don't know how it is with you here, but in europe it is like this. is that of a feminine teacher, judge, psychologist taking care of an immature, asocial young male delinquent. but you, this has to be said about him who. is not at this level bluffing he adopted too small african american boys, no african you see this is the limit of political correctness, black it's ridiculous to call them in europe african americans who came from a mother single mother who died from aids and so on and his sons got into some legal troubles he said that the scene was as a rule for this young boys, the face of power was a woman who was at the same time a little bit maternal, caring, oh, i want to understand you, to help you, but no less brutal efficient. the voice of power. a new figure of the one is thus arising a cold competitive agent of power seductive and manipulative, attesting to the paradox that in the conditions of capitalism women can sometimes do better than men. now, to avoid a misunderstanding i must be very careful here. i am not. in any way making women suspicious as today's agents of capitalism and so on. i only think that in the conditions of late capitalism if women want to become powerful we try totally support even if this power can be brutal and so on. i think that more and more in our society from england after brexit to germany to the unfortunate margaret thatcher, 30 years, 20 ago, to india, indira gandhi and so on. you know, we men are more and more bull feeders, if you want. job to be done in a tough way you need a woman, not a man. what all i'm saying is that. this woman. dich! figure. of feminine identity death. the system offers to you. to be successful. ich. very suspicious. it's another trap of the... uh. trap of the existing order. there is a political triad which renders perfectly this predicament that i am trying to describe. three names enter hilary duterte trump. hillary clinton and donald trump, are they not today's ultimate political couple? trump is precisely what baudieu is describing, the eternal adolescent, reckless hedonist, prone to irrational, brutal outbursts that hurt or appear to hurt his chances, while hillary exemplifies the new feminine one, a self-controlled, ruthless manipulator who recklessly exploits her femininity and sheresents herself as caring for the marginal victims and her femininity makes her all the more efficient in. manipulation. so one should not be seduced by hillary clinton's image of the victim of bill, bill clinton, who was gladly philandering around allowing women to sh him whatever you want. i think bill was the true clown, while she was always the master in the relationship, allowing her. servant bill, small irrelevant pleasure, like, listen bill, i'm now in the middle of some serious manipulation, go to monica, leave leave me alone. i almost like this. i mean, not criticism. so what then about rodrigo duterte, the philippine president openly soliciting extraajudicial murders, as you know? murders of drug addicts and dealers going up to comparing himself with hitler. he stands for the decay of the rule of law, for the transformation of state power into an extra-legal mob rule administering its wild justice. as such, he does what is not yet permissible to do openly in our so-called civilized western countries. so if we condense the three into one we get an ideal image of the politician today. i would call him hilary duterte trump hilary trump the major opposition plus duterte, the embarrassing intruder who signals violence that sustains both. and you know where we can see this decay of legal order, even in your society, for example, you remember, when was it, a couple of months ago, when a guy also called some policeman, sorry, shot some policeman, i don't know where, then. all the right-wingers with trump, of course, on their head exploded like, that's enough, that's too much. will we now allow policemen to be freely shot? but this scandalized me. because, you know why? because let's compare these two, okay crimes. desperate individual shoots policeman and in excessive use of force, police shoots usually to that usually a black guy. i claim not the first, the second crime is much more dangerous. why? in the first case, when a lone guy, i think it was a black army veteran, schutz policeman. this is simply external to the law. some outsider takes revenge. but when policemen do the killings, this means undermining rule of the law from within. it's incomparably worse, i claim now let me move step. forward. as for the underlying form of subjectivity. in all these shifts to post-patriarchal society, we are clearly dealing with the sexualized version of the so-called post-traditional protean subject. today, i claim, the hegemonic form of subjectivity is no longer the autonomous subject subordinated to the paternal aip law which guarantees his her their moral freedom. but a fluid subject that experiences itself as permanently reinventing, reconstructing itself, joyfully experimenting with combinations of different sexual and other identities. so i think that. the problem for me with those, let's call them whatever you want, post-feminist or whatever, who claim, who see the emancipatory dimension of sexual struggles into asserting this fluid, non-fixed identity, you know, in the sense of... don't get transfixed onto one role, reconstruct yourself all the time and so on and so on. my only counter argument is that where is the emancipatory potential? this is the hegemonic form of subjectivity today. even if it's not yet majority, i claim major, it's clearly the one which defines the entire field. and although i hate, maybe even more than you, the ridiculous attempts to return to patriarchy by all the christian fundamentalists and so on and so on, they are precisely this, a ridiculous reaction. so. ep. this is why, again, the obsessive attacks on patriarchy and ed order sound so false and desperate. they attack an enemy w in full retreat. reacting to something new which is already hegemonic. in short, the problem with this vision of a new fluid subjectivity is not that it is utopian, but it is already predominant. yet another case. of the hegemonic ideology presenting itself as subversive and transgressive of the existing order. here, if you ask me, i don't have time to go into it. here although i cannot emphas enough with all the problems that brought me. my approach to this topic, lgbt, transgender and so on. i was just shocked how people didn't notice this that i not only totally support. lgbt. movement or whatever we call it transgender. i even... admit a certain, i hate this word because it's not proper here, normative superiority of transgender people. in what sense? i do this as a lachenian. for lacon, the basic premise is il n'y pas de rapport sex. there is no sexual relationship. which means precisely that what laconis reproach with he. implies two. that he remains fully within the binary gender opposition. no, for lacan, the point is that precisely this opposition always fails. sexual identity is something, sorry, sexual difference is something which is a true antagonism in the sense that it's immanently thwarted problematic. you never can find an identity. every identity fails. and we. ordinary heterosexuals, if we are or whatever, even gay people. now i will again, i love to provoke you, no? because i'm old, close to retirement. screw you. you can do you cannot fire me and so on. you know you know what i never got? okay, now i will say you will immediately attack me. it's the worst form of racism. some of gay people are among my best friends. so don't misunderstand me, but can you correct me where i'm wrong? some gay theorists, like tim dean, whom i otherwise appreciate very much, point out how, for them, we should render sexual difference more fluid and so on. for them, even, laconte's notion of sexual difference is lacant's fundamental fantasy. the idea is clear. it's kind of a pseudo-delesian idea that the primordial factor of our sexual lives is some kind of fluid polymorphous perversion and then bab oedipus imposes the big gender difference, totalizes it. but i never got something. can you explain to me in what sense being gay or lesbian undermines the gender binary? like, if i am gay. i am a guy who wants to screw guys or being screwed by them. i will not go into it. but... the gender binary is strictly 100% here. i just choose the other half, but still, half are excluded and so on. so i think that the way to really undermine heterosexual normativity is, i don't have time to go into it, something much more radical i developed in some of my books. i wonder if you would agree. i'm of course repeating old stuff, but what the hell. i see two movies that i appreciate very much, m. butterfly, cronenberg and the crime game, neil jordan. in both of them, a guy falls in love with a beautiful woman when they are at the point of consuming their sexual relationship, he discovers that the woman is a man. it's a kind of a nice ironic reversal of this. founding scene of fetishism for freud when boy looks at another at a girl and. there is no penis there. here the problem is that there is a penis there. shouldn't have been. okay. now some gay theorists were criticizing these films, claiming that they are still some kind of a compromise. like, why didn't the films openly admit that these two guys knew from the very beginning some subconsciously, unconsciously, fully, halfconsciously that their object of desire is a man then they just were not ready to openly admit to themselves. no, lachenian reading would have been, i claim, much more radical and beautiful. what these movies present is not an this extreme exceptional case of a guy who doesn't admit to himself that he is gay, what if this, the scene of these films is... the innermost logic of the normal, at least from the male side, heterosexual love. lecon's idea is that the unconscious fantasy which from the male side sustains men's love for a femme fatale is that this femme fatale is really a man dressed up as a woman. and again, this is not an exception, this is it, which is why for lacon. as he says, the only true heterosexuals are lesbians. heterosexual men are subspecies of homosexuals. so again, you see my point. it's not enough to say against heterosexual binary gender roles, yeah, but they are fluid, blah, blah, blah. no, things are much more perverse. it's not just that the norm is never fully realized. it's that the norm subverts itself from within. the other, so. my point would be this one. i'm just a little bit more marxist freudian here. for me. transgender persons embody at its purest the deadlock of sexual difference. farf! they embody this difference as impossible. uh. which is why, again, one tends to ignore them, makes it difficult for them. but here comes the problem. and i'm not bluffing here. please believe me. forget now about all my bad taste jokes. that's how my mother and god created me. it's not my responsibility. but what i try to say is that you know, for example, i read somewhere that now even the city of new york, some human rights committee established a list of 31. sexual identities and of course it's obvious this anti-straight heterosexuality pleasure in it like men, women are listed just one among as if at the same level as butch, bigender trigender whatever you know, i have nothing against it. uh. just i don't believe that. i sometimes find with transgender people some of them. this secret dream that we are full of anxiety under oppression because we cannot locate ourselves within the big binary. gender binary. but if you provide a wide enough classification, we will be more at ease. we will find slot for ourselves. no, you will never find it. and that's why for me, the best of lgbt is, i love them here. you know what is now the official formula? lgbt plus or lgbtq whatever plus, the idea of plus is all those who are not included. but what i like is to include into declassification its externality. marx knew it, schegel knew it. every classification in order to work has to include such a paradoxical element. for example, you know, from michel foucault, the order of things, in the introduction, i think, he refers to borges. a text by borches where borches enumerates a crazy ancient chinese classification of all dogs, which is totally nonsensical, like dogs with big tail, black dogs, dogs with three legs, whatever. but at the end, the last category is all the dogs which are not included into this list. so i... again, all i want to do is to assert this my point. there is, i totally agree with lgbt people, there is a plurality of gender identities, but it's not some natural primordial fact, precisely because sexual relationship is impossible. for me, and here i'm a classical freudian marxist, even derida, i think it's more with me here, that plurality is always the result of some basic thwarted impossibility of the. one or whatever. here i disagree with my good friend badadiieu who goes all too easy with this idea of some primordial multitude, multiplicity and then one only arrives later and so on and so on. now i will do something really evil. but i love it, that's why i will do it. namely do you know that in california, where else there are already some capitalists who referring to this, and i think it's a misuse, i'm here making fun just of these capitalists who claim if we deconstruct gender binary. should we not also deconstruct class binary? and some of them even attempted to say, no, there are not only capitalists and proletarians, but there is a multiplicity of positions which cannot be reduced to this binary. and what i try to do in my absolutely evil way is... to establish a kind of a list of this class multitude like what if we have by-class like by gender by-class position, a proletarian sub-employing and exploiting other proletarians masturbatory cross-class a small company uh self-employed owner exploiting himself. class queen. a motherly capitalist who takes care of her workers but tolerates no trade unions. then you have ptc, proletarian to capitalist. c. capitalist proletarian, class bender, class queer, pan-class, non-class, trans class, a-class, third class, class fluid, non-binary trans class, class gifted. then you have my favorite. you know, one in this list provided by new york city authorities of 31 identities, one is. two spirit. i don't know if it holds for sex, it certainly holds for capitalists. aren't people like george soros or bill gates two-s spirit capitalists? half time, ruthless manipulators, one spirit, then the other half of the time, the most generous humanitarians and so on. it's two spirit. then we have precarious proletarians, digital capitalists. cec books, a capitalist brutally exploiting capitaliste. as they say in mikado, gilbert and sullivan, my favorite opera, they are all on the list and none of them will be missed. why? and here comes another thing. i totally support and understand. lgbt. people when they claim that. when they demand for themselves the right how they are. referred to. i just claim that i don't accept this as a general universal principle. it holds for sexuality, but i definitely am not ready to concede this as a general principle. we all have right to be called the way we want so that we will not be hurt. i mean, to give you an extreme example, take somebody like hitler. no, she should be called dirty criminal monster. she be called precisely so that it will hurt as much as possible and so on. but okay, that's another story now i want to go on. s you. i'm taking a lot of time. okay, what i will do now is... go into these elections. what happened here? what do i see as a problem based on all that i developed till now of this... electionump said he wants to make america great again. to what president obama responded that america already is great. here i respectfully disagree with obama. can a country in which a person like trump can become a president really be considered great? i mean, something is wrong here. the dangers of trump presidency are obvious. he not only promises to nominate conservative judges to the supreme court, he not only mobilizes the darkest white supremacy circles, and he openly flirts with anti-immigrant racism. and yesterday i sent a message like warning him a little bit to my otherwise good friend julian assange. did you know who was the last guy who sent a congrat l congrat? message message to as. our good friend david duke. so you see, strange games are being played here. but so again, let's go on. trump not only flouts basic rules of decency. he not only symbolizes the disintegration of basic ethical standards, while advocating concern for the misery of ordinary people, he effectively promotes a brutal neoliberal agenda inclusive of... tax breaks for the rich and so on and so on. trump! but okay, now i will not celebrate trump. don't be afraid. i think what we can say for trump is that he is simply a vulgar opportunist. that's why, did you notice this? from time to time, he says something that even half makes sense. for example, when bernie sanders endorsed hillary. trump made a wonderful statement. remember, he said it's like somebody from occupy wall street to endorse lehman brothers or whatever. but trump is a vulgar opportunist. but he is still somehow. member of our species of humanity he's just the low vulgar example of it. but... what about entities, i didn't say humans, like ted cruz or rick santoro? they are not human. do you think they are human? they are some kind of i'm serious here. there is something so monstrous in the way they talk. it's no longer that you can identify with them. oh, they simply embody the nastiest part in me and so on and so on. but what trump is definitely not is a... let's presume in a naive way that this exists, a successful, productive, innovative capitalist. that's the tragedy. trump excels what trump excels in is getting into bankruptcy and then making the taxpayers cover up his debts and so on and so on. trump is not what he presents himself as, a genius capitalist or whatever. liberal sp who are in panic because of trump dismiss the idea that trump's eventual victory can start a process out of which an authentic left would emerge. their counter-argument is a reference to hitler. many german communists welcomed. that's a very sad story. in europe. welcomed in 1933 the nazi takeover as a new chance for the radical left as the only force which can defeat them. but as we all know, their appreciation was a catastrophic mistake. true, at the end the nazis lost, but many things from holocaust on happened in between. so the question is, are things the same with trump? is trump a danger which should bring together a broad front in the same way that hitler did a front where decent conservatives and libertarians fight together with mainstream liberal progressives and whatever remains of the radical left. frankly i doubt it now comes just a little bit of pages i will not be too long the problematic part first, the fear that a trump victory would have turned the usa into a fascist state i think simply doesn't hold united states. incidentally, i have a problem even with term fascism. i think the term fascism is often used by today's left in a totally non-conceptual way. something bad is emerging, you don't know what it is, so bam, let's call it fascism, and so on. no, no, no, i'm not saying trump is better or whatever. i'm just saying... trump is not in that precise sense a fascist. ep. uh... first, i think again, this doesn't. hold united states still have a relatively rich texture of divergent civic political institutions so that their direct gleichschaltung, what we call. puting. under the same global order cannot be enacted. where then does this fear of trump come from? its function, i claim, is to unify us all against trump and thus to obfuscate the true political divisions which run between the left resuscitated by bernie sanders and hillary clinton who is the establishment candidate supported. bye. rainbow coalition which includes old george bush called warriors like paul volowitz and saudi arabian money. second problem. the fact remains that trump draws support from the same rage out of which bernie sanders mobilized his partisans. he is perceived by the majority of his supporters as an anti-establishment candidate. and what we should never forget is that popular rage is by definition free-floating. it can be redirected. liberals who fear trump victory. and now they got it, are not really, that's my crazy thesis. now comes what you call now trigger warning. like the way you deserve it when you quoted that extremely racist heldin's poem against braune frauen, you know, here come my braune frauen. liberals whoufir trump victory. are not really afraid, i claim, of a radical rightist turn. what they are really afraid of is simply an actual social change. again, to repeat robespierre, they want a revolution without a revolution. they are sincerely worried about injustices of our social life, racism, sexism, economic exploitation. but they want they want to cure them in a social oft. wait. george orwell, back in 1937 wrote a wonderful quote. we all rail against class distinctions but very few people seriously want to abolish them here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed orway's point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the opposite, prevent the only change that really matters, the change in those who rule us. this change from socurring so that's my very problematic, here comes my very problematic thesis. hilararies! victory would have been the victory of a status quo overshadowed by the prospect of a new world war, and hillary definitely is a typical democratic cold warrior. it would have been a status quo of a situation in which we gradually but inevitably slide towards ecological, economic, humanitarian and other catastrophes. that's why i consider extremely cynical. leftist critics of my position who claim that. i quote. from an online attack on me. to intervene in a crisis, the left, they claim, must be organized, prepared and with support among the working class and oppressed. we cannot in any way endorse the vile racism and sexism which divides us and weakens our struggle. we must always stand on the side of the oppressed and we must be independent, fighting for a real left exit to the crisis. even if causes a r class it will also be a catastrophe for us if we have not laid the foundations for our own intervention. it sounds convincing. you know, what's my problem? the guy claims, let's wait till we are fully organized. well, this will never happen. you have to begin with some risky acts. you know, this is precisely what rosa luxemburg criticized as social democratic opportunism. no, it's not yet the time for revolution. what do you think? that if we wait and wait and wait, i don't know how is's called that, those marginal communist groups that you have will grow into a big party and there will be a mega coalition, millions of transgender, gays, immigrant workers marching together. no! if you wait the right moment, the right moment will never... ar. my comment on that passage. true, the left must be organized, prepared, and with support among the working class and oppressed, end of quote. but in this case, the question should be, which candidate's victory would contribute more to the organization of the left and its expansion? isn't it clear that trump's victory. maybe we'll lay the foundations for our own interventions much more than eventual, it didn't happen, hillary's victory. yes, i'm forced to admit it, there is a great danger in trump's victory. but the left can only be mobilized through such catastrophes. if we continue. the inertia of the existing status quo there will for sure be no leftist. uh. mobilization. many of the poor voters claim trump speaks for them. now you will say how can they recognize themselves in the voice of a billionaire whose speculations and failures are one of the causes of their misery. but when trump supporters are denounced as white trash, it is easy to discern in this designation the fear of the lower classes that characterizes the liberal. él. now comes very concluding part. clinton's defeat was, i claim, the price she had to pay for neutralizing bernie sanders. she did not lose because she moved too much to the left, but precisely because she was too centrist and in this way failed to capture the anti-establishment revolt that sustained both trump and sanders. trump reminded. the people of the and that's for me the true achievement of trump. he did it in a wrong proto-fascist way, but nonetheless he reminded people of the half-forgotten reality of class struggle. of course, again, he did it in a distorted proto-fascist populist way. trump's anti-establishment rage was a kind of return of the repressed, of what was repressed in the more moderate liberal left politics which focuses on cultural issues and so on and so on. this left got from trump its own message in its inverted true form. you know, the left forgot about class struggle, forgot or. eliminated it by getting rid of. bernie sanders and that's what was for me almost. the genius of hillary he built this impossible coalition where you have occupy wall street and wall street you have saudi arabian money and. and lgbt or whatever, but what really happened? she integrated all this. radical sexual and other struggles by way of neutralising their radical emancipatory political edge and in this way. see. tragically contributed to the situation in which this. sense of. anti-establishment sense of class exploitation. then articulates itself in right-wing populism. arrogant liberal commentators are shocked at how their continuous acerbic attacks on trump's vulgar racist and sexist outbursts, factual inaccuracies, economic nonsense and so on did not hurt him at all. here you can see at best this leftist naive arrogance. you know, it's easy to make fun idiot trump, this that. and they just just remember how often trump was proclaimed dead. he made this mistake when he attacked, i don't know, mccain as a fake hero. or that, was it, which nationality, iranian soldier who fell and then he insulted his father or whatever. and people thought, oh, it's over with him. i remember a big title after one of these accidents, trump just killed himself. he is dead. you know where they fell? they should have read lacon a little bit. more. because they totally missed how identification works. we as a rule identify precisely with others. weaknesses. so the more trump's imitation were mocked, the more ordinary people identified with him and perceived attacks on him as condescending attacks on themselves. the subliminal message to ordinary people of trump's vulgarities was, i am really one of you. while ordinary trump supporters felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elites patronizing patronizing attitude towards them. so that's the tragedy. the left paid for. ignoring the class issue. it returned in this proto-fascist obscene forum. you know what walter benjamin said long ago. behind every fascism there is a failed revolution. applied to the united states, i'm not saying that bernie sanders was a big revolutionary. i'm just saying that behind the rise of trump, there is the failure of bernie sanders. and i sincerely admire bernie sanders. why? because i think that the only it can in the united states for the rise of a more radical emancipatory movement, and don't be afraid, i'm not expecting some new communist party, especially not with bob avakyan or with the guy and so on. all i'm saying is that. er. all i'm saying is that. the key task is this one, and that's why i admire bernie sanders. in spite of all his compromises and so on, i still don't get it, for example, why did he have to publicly endorse in such a ridiculous way hillary? i understand it, delicate situation. he could not oppose her, but couldn't he just withdraw with silent dignity or whatever? but let me go on. so, you know what for me, the true greatness of bernie sanders. what's our dream? we have all these cultural lgbt against sexism, racism struggles, and we have the big economic struggle, refugees, all the poor and so on, to bring these two struggles together. bernnie almost did it in what sense? his miracle is this one his voters in many states of the united states, especially in his home state, are precisely those low middle class farmers workers who are the, ideally get caught into right-wing populism. without without redirecting to us that anti establishmentment popular support that trump mobilized there is no chance for the left to achieve. anything. so, again, in this sense, don't misunderstand me, i'm not in any way for trump, and certainly not, it amuses me what i read a couple of days ago, that i endorse trump because melania, his wife, is slovene, and i'm hoping for invitation to white house. okay, i will tell you this. i can be bribed, but not in such a cheap way, you know. like if trump says, why don't you get, maybe not trump tower in new york, but trump tower in chicago and so on, i might reflect upon it. but not for a villa to white house. no for example, i even remember years ago, warren betatty, when he did that apparently progressive film about jack reed, rats, no? i was so mad when i learned that he went to, at that point reagan was the president. he went to the white house to show the film to reagan, who was grateful for it, celebrated the film. but to go on, my hope is this one. dead. if hillary, and i'm open here, i'm not bluffing, i'm ready to change my mind, maybe i'm going too far, but if hillary were to win we would have the continuation of status quo. of course it would have been in a way. much better. but! i claim it wouldn't solve the problem she is cold war establishment embodied. four years later or more we would have trump back or somebody like trump trump with a vengeance. what we got now is what? maybe the... price is too high. i i can be. reconverted here. but i still have this idea that very soon trump will encounter tensions in his own republican party. like ronald reagan already was master of this double game. he knew you know how ronald reagan ruled iaq. in some good essay. when he talked to christian conservatives, he told them, i'm totally on your side, no abortion and so on, but you see, for us to rule, we need the support of those big corrupted republican capitalists and upper classes who are decadent personally. so be patient and wait. then he went to these business-oriented republicans, and tell them, i'm totally on your side. who cares about abortion? but you know, in order to win, we need the support of those stupid fundamentalist jer. and so on. i don't think that in today's state of things trump can play this game the tension which is more and more constitutive of the republican party. between the business. more modern oriented wing and fundamentalists will, i claim, this tension will have to explode already now. there was, i say this with great irony of course, there was one mega achievement of donald trump. he-handedly practically ruined the republican party. admit it's not so bad. okay. second thing. now with. loss of hilary. so there is a hope that when trump will not be able to deliver, he will have to do something with this anti-establishment. reich. he will not deliver. there is a possibility that they will be redirected towards another more or less radical project. plus, there will be now deep self-examination within democratic party. there is a possibility that... they will finally get it. that's the nice paradox. it's not always this famous her husband, bill clinton's triangulation which brings victory. sometimes. to win, you have to be more radical. that's what great politicians learn and are able to do. so that's the absolute limit of my ha haa support for donald trump. he's disgust embodied. my hope is this one. can his crazy victory? trigger a certain process of political renewal without risking too much. new authoritarian rule i made a risky decision i can well be convinced that i am wrong. but... to conclude, so. uh. my message to you would be to really conclude. dich one. trump! victory may create a new political situation with chances for an organized more radical left. so if you love america as i do now is the time for the hard work of love, for becoming engaged in the long process of the formation of a radical political left in the united states. or to quote mao zedong again, this would be my formula of your situation now. there is great disorder under. kevin showed the situation is excellent. thank you very much.
where, all i can tell you is that i don't know if you noticed this, how it's more and more difficult for me to publish here and in the united kingdom. first, i was able five, ten years ago to publish from time to time a co-ed in new york times. that's out. then it was in newsweek, but only online. it's out. now even my good friends in english times only allow me from time to time on the, how do you call it, digital version. not there. in england, it's even worse. i'm now totally prohibited. by guardian, by london review of books, by new left review, and so on and so on. so what should i say? that if i'm a fascist, then it's very difficult to be a fascist these days or whatever. so let me say that. i will, with best intentions but consciously, let's say, provoke you. i am convinced about what i am. saying it's not just an empty provocation. and i know this is part of a more general way my theories claims are problematized and i want maybe to begin with that. namely, i would like to begin with a well-known statement, you must all know it by edward bond. if you can't face hiroshima in the theater, you'll eventually end up in hiroshima. itself i think that this statement provides the best argument against those who oppose what they dismiss as graphic descriptions of sexual violence and other atrocities. they dismiss them as, that's the claim, participating in the same violence these descriptions pretend to critically analyze and reject. like if you, for example, describe. violence, atrocities against women, you you are working on a very thin ice because soon people will say, but wait a minute, your description itself repeats the very act you pretend to criticize and so on and so on, not out of narcissism, but... just to find a clear example of these accusations, i would like to. quote you one paragraph from a very critical review in some german newspaper, i think, of my intervention at the walter benjamin conference in ramallah almost a year ago. the writer claims that i enumerate, quote, a detailed list of ritualized sexual violences taking place outside of the islamic world, thus showing his mind willingness to accompany honor killings with matching atrocities. he, me, was each time rhetorically apologetic about his descriptions. it's really hard to talk about this, but i must tell you. and each time he, me, came back with more obscene, bloody and graphic details. this is sufficient to grasp the pointlessness and ambivalence of his mind intervention, displaying concerns about sexual violence by subjecting the watchful audience to the very violence of crude images of or heinous sexual practices. end of quote. here you have the logic that i totally reject. why? i think this passage that i quoted. confronts us with the prototype of politically correct line of argumentation. i not only reject it, but consider it extremely dangerous. in order to really grasp sexual violence, i claim, one has to be shocked, traumatized even by it. if we constrain ourselves to aseptic technical descriptions, we do exactly the same as those who refer to torture as enhanced interrogation technique, or, i warn you, i think this will be true in five to ten years, we will soon begin to refer to rape as, it sounds more pc, nobody is hurt, to enhanced seduction technique. and it is only the taste of the thing itself. that effectively vaccinates us against it. and we can already see the consequences of such a stance, politically correct stance. when, you may remember it two months ago, at the beginning of september of this year, facebook censored the iconic napalam girl photo of a terrified nine-year-old naked vietnamese girl running away from napal bombs. it hypocritically justified this removal as a defense against displaying child nudity, which can even count as child pornography. ignoring the obvious political dimension as if anyone could really be sexually aroused by the photo of a terrified girl. what this image could trigger is clearly not sexual arousal, but the awareness of the horror of war against civilian population. along these lines. nki johnson houston. if i got it correctly from the author's description, a black, i mean, african american lawyer. he described eloquently how white liberals have hijacked the conversation about diversity, political correctness, and what topics we should be outraged about. end of quote, and now comes the full slightly longer quote from this guy, with which i fully agree, of course. my problem with liberalism is that it's more concerned with policing people's language and thoughts without requiring them to do anything to fix the problem. white liberal college students speak of safe spaces, trigger words, microaggressions and white privilege while not having to do anything or more importantly, give up anything. they can't even have a conversation with someone who sees the world differently without resorting to calling someone a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, bigot and trying to to have them banned from campus or ruin them and their reputation. they say they feel black people's pain because they took a trip to africa to help the disadvantaged, but are unwilling to go to a black neighborhood in the city in which they live. these same college students will espouse the joys of diversity, but will in the same breath assume you are only on campus if you are african american because of african affirmative action or that all black people grew up in poverty. of quote. therein resides for me the political problem with political correctness. to repeat robespierre, it admits the injustices of the actual life, but it wants to cure them with, again, what robespierre called a revolution without revolution. in exact parallel to today's consumerism, which offers coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar, beer without alcohol, multiculturalism without violent clashes, and so on and so on. a vision of social change where, with no actual change, a change where no blood is spilled, where no one gets really hurt, where well-meaning liberals remain cocooned in their safe enclaves. now you will say but nonetheless there is one big result of this politically correct influence precisely because of what political correctness stands for we did have a chance with hillary clinton to have the first woman president of the united states. of course i would be mega glad if this were to happen but i see some problems we live more than ever in an ideological era where you know, the first thing to ask ich. what precisely was meant by a woman how what image of woman, of woman, femininity predomates? in the ideological space where. you can get someone like hillary clinton elected. i would like to. pr. provide a provisional at least reply to this question by referring to alain badiou's new book. the true life, la vraie vie. where bieu already begins with a wonderful provocative claim that from socrates onward, the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth. to alienate, or rather, in brechtian sense, extranate them from the predominant ideologico-political order, to sow radical doubts, to enable them to think autonomously. no wonder socrates, the first philosopher, was also its first victim, ordered by the democratic court of athens to drink poison. and here, incidentally, just small improvisations, i have a problem even with my good friend. janis varoufakis, who i think believes a little bit too much in this, you know, democratizing europe. but again, nothing against it in principle. but what does he concretely mean with democracy let me tell you something very sad that i experienced let's take europe and don't feel too bad, you in the united states. you think you are in bad situation now. i think europe is much worse. penetrated by such outrageous racist discourse, we even have europeans who, in a pseudo-dialectical way, reunite islamophobia and anti-seemitism. like, you know, i almost like it. it's so perverse. the topic now among european. well, it's not even extreme right. you find them in big media in my own country, slovenia, a guy, it's an obscenity to pronounce his name, attacked george soros as literally the most despicable and dangerous person today. why? because he is, that's how he is addressed in that text, a talmudo zionist who is organizing the invasion of europe by neg. islamist hordes, not even crowds, hordes like primitive and so, okay, he goes on, but what fascinated me so much is that we naive people, we thought there is maybe some misunderstanding between jews and arabs in the middle east, so we should help them to find a shared emancipatory project. no, no, this guy has an answer, which is at the level of that old nazi answer, you know, plutocratic bolshevik plot, you know. he claims that there is no noagonism between islamic fundamentalism and zionism because jews are secret puppet masters organizing isis and all that to ruin christian european civilization and so on and so on. what shocked me is not the fact of claiming this, but that it was openly published in one of the biggest weekly. newspapers in slovenia and okay people laughed, were shocked, but no serious public reaction. to eat. so uh. what i'm... what i'm trying to say is that europe is getting even worse and the problem with democracy here is this one i've spoken with many people from brussels and so on listen, what does it mean democratizing europe? let's take two big topics with which the european union was dealing in the last year and a half. greek crisis and refugees. are you aware that in both cases, if the process of decision in brussels were to be more transparent, responsible to the people, the result would have been much worse. i know i spoke with the slovene representative in brussels who told me he was only able to argue let's not be so tough against greece in closed sessions. because the moment the debate was public, our media reported it and he was under tremendous racist pressure. like how could you help those lazy greeks were ruining us. it's the same with refugees. if you were to do... in a democratic way it means what organising referendum in most european countries do you want refugees or not practically all european countries would have rejected them. so i think, not that i'm her mega political fan, but here i think angela merkel did the right thing. she consciously went against. the opinion of the majority with this typical risky gesture that authentic politicians should do. you do something that you know is not popular but you hope that through insisting on it you will change the situation to such an extent that retroactively people will see the justice of it. so much about democracy. let me return to my view. today, however, the task of a philosopher is no longer to undermine the hegemonic hierarchy symbolic edifice which grounds social stability but to make the young people perceive the dangers of the growing post-patriarchal nihilist order which presents itself as the domain of new freedoms. i often repeat this, but i will do it again. we live in a wonderful, wonderful, in the sense of horror, ideological era where, and that's always the greatest success of ideology, where the very new burdens, new forms of domination are presented to you as new freedoms. for example, precarious work is more and more becoming a rule. in my own city country, slovenia, almost half the people already work precariously. and you think, oh my, i it's horrible, i cannot even rely on my job. then comes some post-mod theorist of society of choice and so on and tells you something like almost copying judith butler incidentally. but isn't it wonderful that you are given the free choice every half a year or year to reinvent yourself? you are no longer transfixed to certain alienated identity and so on and so on. even they argue in the same way even with abolishing universal health care. they say now you have a choice. you can opt either you spend your money for health or you can risk your health and rather, i don't know, provide for your children's education or take a big holiday or whatever. but you see the trick. new burdens, new anxieties are presented to you as new freedoms. we live in an extraordinary era. where there is no tradition on which we can firmly base our identity, no frame of meaningful life which would enable us to live a life beyond hedonist reproduction. this new world disorder, this gradually emerging world less, like it's no longer world in this keggerian sense of the totality of meaning, worldless civilization, exemplarily affects the young. who oscillate between. on the one hand the intensity of fully burning out sexual enjoyment drugs alcohol up to violence and radical search for a career, endeavor to succeed, study, earn money within the existing capitalist order. the only alternative to all this is obviously violent retreat into some artificially resuscitated tradition. there are attempts to assert a social form of radical negativity and constrained expenditure in georges batataille's sense of sovereignty as only thing that can really undermine the smooth flow of capitalist reproduction. for example, among these lines, lee edelman, whom i otherwise appreciate, has developed the notion of homosexuality as involving an ethics of now, of unconditional fidelity to jouissance's extreme enjoyment, of following the death drive by totally ignoring any reference to the future or engagement with the practical network of world affairs. homosexuality does for edelman stands for the radical assumption of the negativity of death drive. or withdrawal from reality into the real of the night of the world. along these lines, edelman opposes the radical ethics of homosexuality to the predominant obsession with posterity, that is to say children. children are, for edelman, pathological moment which binds us to pragmatic considerations and thus compels us to betray the radical ethics of jouissance. ever. i'm more tempted to claim that. the unleashing of such radical negativity is just the obverse of the capitalist manipulative calculation, its own self-destructive aspect. you know, capitalist consumerism is never simple consumerism. it's always divided between extreme consumerism, drugs, mortal enjoyment, sex, getting drunk, whatever, and the controlled version. like. enjoy but within certain measures and so on and so on. so again my thesis is here very radical i see absolutely nothing in any meaningful way socially transgressive transformative into saying follow the death drive to its end or whatever. now let me go on. we are getting here a reactive even, a reactive decadent version of what marx called or desired the withering away of the state. today's state. state in the sense of stat, political state. is more and more an administrative regulator of market egotism with no symbolic authority, lacking what hegel perceived as the essence of state, the all-encompassing community for which we are ready to sacrifice our lives. this disintegration of ethical substance is clearly signaled by the abolishment of universal military conscription in many developed countries. okay, you will say this is nice, we no longer have militarism. but i claim the very notion of being ready to risk one's life for a common cause appears today more and more pointless if not directly ridiculous so that armed forces as a body in which all citizens equally participate is gradually turning into a mercenary force. you know, that's the other sad aspect of abolishing universal military conscription, that we are ultimately controlled, ruled by... now now let me go on. this disintegration of a shared ethical substance that badoux's thesis affects differently the two predominant hegemonic gender identities. men are gradually turning into perpetual adolescents with no clear passage. of initiation that would enact their entry into maturity. it's clear till like 30, 40 years ago, there were clear rites of initiation for men. usually it was in those countries which had it military service. after that, you really became a man. or it was getting a permanent job, a profession. even education worked like that. after finishing university, you are potentially a worker, you are there. with precarious work, with abolishing military conscription, with education, with, okay, i agree with you, trumpization of education, where, you know, instead of this good old, i love it more and more, alienated process of education for four or five years, you are detached from... so-called real life, you just study. now the idea is all your life you should learn, you study, which means study becomes part of capitalist reproduction and so on and so on. no wonder then that in order to supplement this lack. postaternal youth gangs proliferate, providing ersad initiation and social identity. now comes badou's other thesis, which may be problematic, but i think it can be saved. according to bieu, in contrast to men, women are today more and more precociously mature. treated. as small adults, already as small girls expected to control their lives, to plan their career and so on and so on. what then is happening today with sexual difference in the traditional sense of gender binary? traditionally, men were perceived as the bearers of the one. the monotheistic god, patriarchal power, stable social hierarchy, while women were associated with the two. their position being the one-off between the two, whatever, between mother and whore, between lover and saint, and so on. but you see in this between the two something much deeper than an after effect of patriarchy. quote from bieu's book, a woman is the overcoming of the one in the guise of a passage between the two. such is my speculative definition of femininity. end of quote. the conclusion he draws from this is surprising but consequent. i love it. his claim is that by their very existence, women are, not so much atheists are, a direct embodiment of resistance to one, to god, denouncing it as a fiction. i will read you this short passage. i love it. fromieu. a woman is always by herself the terrestrial proof that god doesn't exist, that god doesn't have to exist. it is sufficient to take a look at a woman, what is called really to take a look, to be immediately convinced that one can well do without god. this is why in traditional societies, women are hidden. things are here more serious than a vulgar sexual possessiveness or jealousy. tradition knows that in order to keep god alive in whatever way women have to be kept invisible i mean it's a wonderful naive statement i find it a little bit problematic but he is onto something. let me go on. today however when the reign of the symbolic one is weakened. the hierarchy of roles and places under divine name of the father. this hierarchy is becoming largely irrelevant. to fill in this void, a new one in the sense of individuality, is emerging. a hedonistic consumer caught in market competition, enjoying life and simultaneously a ruthless manipulator in how she, he, they it does it. here, unexpectedly, sexual difference enters. men are ludic adolescents, outlaws, out of law, women more and more hard, mature, serious, legal, punitive beings. this is why, as badiuk claims, there is a bourgeois feminism bent on domination. women are today not called. upon by the ruling ideology to be subordinated, they are called, solicited, expected to be judges, administrators, ministers, ceos, teachers, even polic women and soldiers. a paradigmatic scene occurring daily in our security institutions. i don't know how it is with you here, but in europe it is like this. is that of a feminine teacher, judge, psychologist taking care of an immature, asocial young male delinquent. but you, this has to be said about him who. is not at this level bluffing he adopted too small african american boys, no african you see this is the limit of political correctness, black it's ridiculous to call them in europe african americans who came from a mother single mother who died from aids and so on and his sons got into some legal troubles he said that the scene was as a rule for this young boys, the face of power was a woman who was at the same time a little bit maternal, caring, oh, i want to understand you, to help you, but no less brutal efficient. the voice of power. a new figure of the one is thus arising a cold competitive agent of power seductive and manipulative, attesting to the paradox that in the conditions of capitalism women can sometimes do better than men. now, to avoid a misunderstanding i must be very careful here. i am not. in any way making women suspicious as today's agents of capitalism and so on. i only think that in the conditions of late capitalism if women want to become powerful we try totally support even if this power can be brutal and so on. i think that more and more in our society from england after brexit to germany to the unfortunate margaret thatcher, 30 years, 20 ago, to india, indira gandhi and so on. you know, we men are more and more bull feeders, if you want. job to be done in a tough way you need a woman, not a man. what all i'm saying is that. this woman. dich! figure. of feminine identity death. the system offers to you. to be successful. ich. very suspicious. it's another trap of the... uh. trap of the existing order. there is a political triad which renders perfectly this predicament that i am trying to describe. three names enter hilary duterte trump. hillary clinton and donald trump, are they not today's ultimate political couple? trump is precisely what baudieu is describing, the eternal adolescent, reckless hedonist, prone to irrational, brutal outbursts that hurt or appear to hurt his chances, while hillary exemplifies the new feminine one, a self-controlled, ruthless manipulator who recklessly exploits her femininity and sheresents herself as caring for the marginal victims and her femininity makes her all the more efficient in. manipulation. so one should not be seduced by hillary clinton's image of the victim of bill, bill clinton, who was gladly philandering around allowing women to sh him whatever you want. i think bill was the true clown, while she was always the master in the relationship, allowing her. servant bill, small irrelevant pleasure, like, listen bill, i'm now in the middle of some serious manipulation, go to monica, leave leave me alone. i almost like this. i mean, not criticism. so what then about rodrigo duterte, the philippine president openly soliciting extraajudicial murders, as you know? murders of drug addicts and dealers going up to comparing himself with hitler. he stands for the decay of the rule of law, for the transformation of state power into an extra-legal mob rule administering its wild justice. as such, he does what is not yet permissible to do openly in our so-called civilized western countries. so if we condense the three into one we get an ideal image of the politician today. i would call him hilary duterte trump hilary trump the major opposition plus duterte, the embarrassing intruder who signals violence that sustains both. and you know where we can see this decay of legal order, even in your society, for example, you remember, when was it, a couple of months ago, when a guy also called some policeman, sorry, shot some policeman, i don't know where, then. all the right-wingers with trump, of course, on their head exploded like, that's enough, that's too much. will we now allow policemen to be freely shot? but this scandalized me. because, you know why? because let's compare these two, okay crimes. desperate individual shoots policeman and in excessive use of force, police shoots usually to that usually a black guy. i claim not the first, the second crime is much more dangerous. why? in the first case, when a lone guy, i think it was a black army veteran, schutz policeman. this is simply external to the law. some outsider takes revenge. but when policemen do the killings, this means undermining rule of the law from within. it's incomparably worse, i claim now let me move step. forward. as for the underlying form of subjectivity. in all these shifts to post-patriarchal society, we are clearly dealing with the sexualized version of the so-called post-traditional protean subject. today, i claim, the hegemonic form of subjectivity is no longer the autonomous subject subordinated to the paternal aip law which guarantees his her their moral freedom. but a fluid subject that experiences itself as permanently reinventing, reconstructing itself, joyfully experimenting with combinations of different sexual and other identities. so i think that. the problem for me with those, let's call them whatever you want, post-feminist or whatever, who claim, who see the emancipatory dimension of sexual struggles into asserting this fluid, non-fixed identity, you know, in the sense of... don't get transfixed onto one role, reconstruct yourself all the time and so on and so on. my only counter argument is that where is the emancipatory potential? this is the hegemonic form of subjectivity today. even if it's not yet majority, i claim major, it's clearly the one which defines the entire field. and although i hate, maybe even more than you, the ridiculous attempts to return to patriarchy by all the christian fundamentalists and so on and so on, they are precisely this, a ridiculous reaction. so. ep. this is why, again, the obsessive attacks on patriarchy and ed order sound so false and desperate. they attack an enemy w in full retreat. reacting to something new which is already hegemonic. in short, the problem with this vision of a new fluid subjectivity is not that it is utopian, but it is already predominant. yet another case. of the hegemonic ideology presenting itself as subversive and transgressive of the existing order. here, if you ask me, i don't have time to go into it. here although i cannot emphas enough with all the problems that brought me. my approach to this topic, lgbt, transgender and so on. i was just shocked how people didn't notice this that i not only totally support. lgbt. movement or whatever we call it transgender. i even... admit a certain, i hate this word because it's not proper here, normative superiority of transgender people. in what sense? i do this as a lachenian. for lacon, the basic premise is il n'y pas de rapport sex. there is no sexual relationship. which means precisely that what laconis reproach with he. implies two. that he remains fully within the binary gender opposition. no, for lacan, the point is that precisely this opposition always fails. sexual identity is something, sorry, sexual difference is something which is a true antagonism in the sense that it's immanently thwarted problematic. you never can find an identity. every identity fails. and we. ordinary heterosexuals, if we are or whatever, even gay people. now i will again, i love to provoke you, no? because i'm old, close to retirement. screw you. you can do you cannot fire me and so on. you know you know what i never got? okay, now i will say you will immediately attack me. it's the worst form of racism. some of gay people are among my best friends. so don't misunderstand me, but can you correct me where i'm wrong? some gay theorists, like tim dean, whom i otherwise appreciate very much, point out how, for them, we should render sexual difference more fluid and so on. for them, even, laconte's notion of sexual difference is lacant's fundamental fantasy. the idea is clear. it's kind of a pseudo-delesian idea that the primordial factor of our sexual lives is some kind of fluid polymorphous perversion and then bab oedipus imposes the big gender difference, totalizes it. but i never got something. can you explain to me in what sense being gay or lesbian undermines the gender binary? like, if i am gay. i am a guy who wants to screw guys or being screwed by them. i will not go into it. but... the gender binary is strictly 100% here. i just choose the other half, but still, half are excluded and so on. so i think that the way to really undermine heterosexual normativity is, i don't have time to go into it, something much more radical i developed in some of my books. i wonder if you would agree. i'm of course repeating old stuff, but what the hell. i see two movies that i appreciate very much, m. butterfly, cronenberg and the crime game, neil jordan. in both of them, a guy falls in love with a beautiful woman when they are at the point of consuming their sexual relationship, he discovers that the woman is a man. it's a kind of a nice ironic reversal of this. founding scene of fetishism for freud when boy looks at another at a girl and. there is no penis there. here the problem is that there is a penis there. shouldn't have been. okay. now some gay theorists were criticizing these films, claiming that they are still some kind of a compromise. like, why didn't the films openly admit that these two guys knew from the very beginning some subconsciously, unconsciously, fully, halfconsciously that their object of desire is a man then they just were not ready to openly admit to themselves. no, lachenian reading would have been, i claim, much more radical and beautiful. what these movies present is not an this extreme exceptional case of a guy who doesn't admit to himself that he is gay, what if this, the scene of these films is... the innermost logic of the normal, at least from the male side, heterosexual love. lecon's idea is that the unconscious fantasy which from the male side sustains men's love for a femme fatale is that this femme fatale is really a man dressed up as a woman. and again, this is not an exception, this is it, which is why for lacon. as he says, the only true heterosexuals are lesbians. heterosexual men are subspecies of homosexuals. so again, you see my point. it's not enough to say against heterosexual binary gender roles, yeah, but they are fluid, blah, blah, blah. no, things are much more perverse. it's not just that the norm is never fully realized. it's that the norm subverts itself from within. the other, so. my point would be this one. i'm just a little bit more marxist freudian here. for me. transgender persons embody at its purest the deadlock of sexual difference. farf! they embody this difference as impossible. uh. which is why, again, one tends to ignore them, makes it difficult for them. but here comes the problem. and i'm not bluffing here. please believe me. forget now about all my bad taste jokes. that's how my mother and god created me. it's not my responsibility. but what i try to say is that you know, for example, i read somewhere that now even the city of new york, some human rights committee established a list of 31. sexual identities and of course it's obvious this anti-straight heterosexuality pleasure in it like men, women are listed just one among as if at the same level as butch, bigender trigender whatever you know, i have nothing against it. uh. just i don't believe that. i sometimes find with transgender people some of them. this secret dream that we are full of anxiety under oppression because we cannot locate ourselves within the big binary. gender binary. but if you provide a wide enough classification, we will be more at ease. we will find slot for ourselves. no, you will never find it. and that's why for me, the best of lgbt is, i love them here. you know what is now the official formula? lgbt plus or lgbtq whatever plus, the idea of plus is all those who are not included. but what i like is to include into declassification its externality. marx knew it, schegel knew it. every classification in order to work has to include such a paradoxical element. for example, you know, from michel foucault, the order of things, in the introduction, i think, he refers to borges. a text by borches where borches enumerates a crazy ancient chinese classification of all dogs, which is totally nonsensical, like dogs with big tail, black dogs, dogs with three legs, whatever. but at the end, the last category is all the dogs which are not included into this list. so i... again, all i want to do is to assert this my point. there is, i totally agree with lgbt people, there is a plurality of gender identities, but it's not some natural primordial fact, precisely because sexual relationship is impossible. for me, and here i'm a classical freudian marxist, even derida, i think it's more with me here, that plurality is always the result of some basic thwarted impossibility of the. one or whatever. here i disagree with my good friend badadiieu who goes all too easy with this idea of some primordial multitude, multiplicity and then one only arrives later and so on and so on. now i will do something really evil. but i love it, that's why i will do it. namely do you know that in california, where else there are already some capitalists who referring to this, and i think it's a misuse, i'm here making fun just of these capitalists who claim if we deconstruct gender binary. should we not also deconstruct class binary? and some of them even attempted to say, no, there are not only capitalists and proletarians, but there is a multiplicity of positions which cannot be reduced to this binary. and what i try to do in my absolutely evil way is... to establish a kind of a list of this class multitude like what if we have by-class like by gender by-class position, a proletarian sub-employing and exploiting other proletarians masturbatory cross-class a small company uh self-employed owner exploiting himself. class queen. a motherly capitalist who takes care of her workers but tolerates no trade unions. then you have ptc, proletarian to capitalist. c. capitalist proletarian, class bender, class queer, pan-class, non-class, trans class, a-class, third class, class fluid, non-binary trans class, class gifted. then you have my favorite. you know, one in this list provided by new york city authorities of 31 identities, one is. two spirit. i don't know if it holds for sex, it certainly holds for capitalists. aren't people like george soros or bill gates two-s spirit capitalists? half time, ruthless manipulators, one spirit, then the other half of the time, the most generous humanitarians and so on. it's two spirit. then we have precarious proletarians, digital capitalists. cec books, a capitalist brutally exploiting capitaliste. as they say in mikado, gilbert and sullivan, my favorite opera, they are all on the list and none of them will be missed. why? and here comes another thing. i totally support and understand. lgbt. people when they claim that. when they demand for themselves the right how they are. referred to. i just claim that i don't accept this as a general universal principle. it holds for sexuality, but i definitely am not ready to concede this as a general principle. we all have right to be called the way we want so that we will not be hurt. i mean, to give you an extreme example, take somebody like hitler. no, she should be called dirty criminal monster. she be called precisely so that it will hurt as much as possible and so on. but okay, that's another story now i want to go on. s you. i'm taking a lot of time. okay, what i will do now is... go into these elections. what happened here? what do i see as a problem based on all that i developed till now of this... electionump said he wants to make america great again. to what president obama responded that america already is great. here i respectfully disagree with obama. can a country in which a person like trump can become a president really be considered great? i mean, something is wrong here. the dangers of trump presidency are obvious. he not only promises to nominate conservative judges to the supreme court, he not only mobilizes the darkest white supremacy circles, and he openly flirts with anti-immigrant racism. and yesterday i sent a message like warning him a little bit to my otherwise good friend julian assange. did you know who was the last guy who sent a congrat l congrat? message message to as. our good friend david duke. so you see, strange games are being played here. but so again, let's go on. trump not only flouts basic rules of decency. he not only symbolizes the disintegration of basic ethical standards, while advocating concern for the misery of ordinary people, he effectively promotes a brutal neoliberal agenda inclusive of... tax breaks for the rich and so on and so on. trump! but okay, now i will not celebrate trump. don't be afraid. i think what we can say for trump is that he is simply a vulgar opportunist. that's why, did you notice this? from time to time, he says something that even half makes sense. for example, when bernie sanders endorsed hillary. trump made a wonderful statement. remember, he said it's like somebody from occupy wall street to endorse lehman brothers or whatever. but trump is a vulgar opportunist. but he is still somehow. member of our species of humanity he's just the low vulgar example of it. but... what about entities, i didn't say humans, like ted cruz or rick santoro? they are not human. do you think they are human? they are some kind of i'm serious here. there is something so monstrous in the way they talk. it's no longer that you can identify with them. oh, they simply embody the nastiest part in me and so on and so on. but what trump is definitely not is a... let's presume in a naive way that this exists, a successful, productive, innovative capitalist. that's the tragedy. trump excels what trump excels in is getting into bankruptcy and then making the taxpayers cover up his debts and so on and so on. trump is not what he presents himself as, a genius capitalist or whatever. liberal sp who are in panic because of trump dismiss the idea that trump's eventual victory can start a process out of which an authentic left would emerge. their counter-argument is a reference to hitler. many german communists welcomed. that's a very sad story. in europe. welcomed in 1933 the nazi takeover as a new chance for the radical left as the only force which can defeat them. but as we all know, their appreciation was a catastrophic mistake. true, at the end the nazis lost, but many things from holocaust on happened in between. so the question is, are things the same with trump? is trump a danger which should bring together a broad front in the same way that hitler did a front where decent conservatives and libertarians fight together with mainstream liberal progressives and whatever remains of the radical left. frankly i doubt it now comes just a little bit of pages i will not be too long the problematic part first, the fear that a trump victory would have turned the usa into a fascist state i think simply doesn't hold united states. incidentally, i have a problem even with term fascism. i think the term fascism is often used by today's left in a totally non-conceptual way. something bad is emerging, you don't know what it is, so bam, let's call it fascism, and so on. no, no, no, i'm not saying trump is better or whatever. i'm just saying... trump is not in that precise sense a fascist. ep. uh... first, i think again, this doesn't. hold united states still have a relatively rich texture of divergent civic political institutions so that their direct gleichschaltung, what we call. puting. under the same global order cannot be enacted. where then does this fear of trump come from? its function, i claim, is to unify us all against trump and thus to obfuscate the true political divisions which run between the left resuscitated by bernie sanders and hillary clinton who is the establishment candidate supported. bye. rainbow coalition which includes old george bush called warriors like paul volowitz and saudi arabian money. second problem. the fact remains that trump draws support from the same rage out of which bernie sanders mobilized his partisans. he is perceived by the majority of his supporters as an anti-establishment candidate. and what we should never forget is that popular rage is by definition free-floating. it can be redirected. liberals who fear trump victory. and now they got it, are not really, that's my crazy thesis. now comes what you call now trigger warning. like the way you deserve it when you quoted that extremely racist heldin's poem against braune frauen, you know, here come my braune frauen. liberals whoufir trump victory. are not really afraid, i claim, of a radical rightist turn. what they are really afraid of is simply an actual social change. again, to repeat robespierre, they want a revolution without a revolution. they are sincerely worried about injustices of our social life, racism, sexism, economic exploitation. but they want they want to cure them in a social oft. wait. george orwell, back in 1937 wrote a wonderful quote. we all rail against class distinctions but very few people seriously want to abolish them here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed orway's point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the opposite, prevent the only change that really matters, the change in those who rule us. this change from socurring so that's my very problematic, here comes my very problematic thesis. hilararies! victory would have been the victory of a status quo overshadowed by the prospect of a new world war, and hillary definitely is a typical democratic cold warrior. it would have been a status quo of a situation in which we gradually but inevitably slide towards ecological, economic, humanitarian and other catastrophes. that's why i consider extremely cynical. leftist critics of my position who claim that. i quote. from an online attack on me. to intervene in a crisis, the left, they claim, must be organized, prepared and with support among the working class and oppressed. we cannot in any way endorse the vile racism and sexism which divides us and weakens our struggle. we must always stand on the side of the oppressed and we must be independent, fighting for a real left exit to the crisis. even if causes a r class it will also be a catastrophe for us if we have not laid the foundations for our own intervention. it sounds convincing. you know, what's my problem? the guy claims, let's wait till we are fully organized. well, this will never happen. you have to begin with some risky acts. you know, this is precisely what rosa luxemburg criticized as social democratic opportunism. no, it's not yet the time for revolution. what do you think? that if we wait and wait and wait, i don't know how is's called that, those marginal communist groups that you have will grow into a big party and there will be a mega coalition, millions of transgender, gays, immigrant workers marching together. no! if you wait the right moment, the right moment will never... ar. my comment on that passage. true, the left must be organized, prepared, and with support among the working class and oppressed, end of quote. but in this case, the question should be, which candidate's victory would contribute more to the organization of the left and its expansion? isn't it clear that trump's victory. maybe we'll lay the foundations for our own interventions much more than eventual, it didn't happen, hillary's victory. yes, i'm forced to admit it, there is a great danger in trump's victory. but the left can only be mobilized through such catastrophes. if we continue. the inertia of the existing status quo there will for sure be no leftist. uh. mobilization. many of the poor voters claim trump speaks for them. now you will say how can they recognize themselves in the voice of a billionaire whose speculations and failures are one of the causes of their misery. but when trump supporters are denounced as white trash, it is easy to discern in this designation the fear of the lower classes that characterizes the liberal. él. now comes very concluding part. clinton's defeat was, i claim, the price she had to pay for neutralizing bernie sanders. she did not lose because she moved too much to the left, but precisely because she was too centrist and in this way failed to capture the anti-establishment revolt that sustained both trump and sanders. trump reminded. the people of the and that's for me the true achievement of trump. he did it in a wrong proto-fascist way, but nonetheless he reminded people of the half-forgotten reality of class struggle. of course, again, he did it in a distorted proto-fascist populist way. trump's anti-establishment rage was a kind of return of the repressed, of what was repressed in the more moderate liberal left politics which focuses on cultural issues and so on and so on. this left got from trump its own message in its inverted true form. you know, the left forgot about class struggle, forgot or. eliminated it by getting rid of. bernie sanders and that's what was for me almost. the genius of hillary he built this impossible coalition where you have occupy wall street and wall street you have saudi arabian money and. and lgbt or whatever, but what really happened? she integrated all this. radical sexual and other struggles by way of neutralising their radical emancipatory political edge and in this way. see. tragically contributed to the situation in which this. sense of. anti-establishment sense of class exploitation. then articulates itself in right-wing populism. arrogant liberal commentators are shocked at how their continuous acerbic attacks on trump's vulgar racist and sexist outbursts, factual inaccuracies, economic nonsense and so on did not hurt him at all. here you can see at best this leftist naive arrogance. you know, it's easy to make fun idiot trump, this that. and they just just remember how often trump was proclaimed dead. he made this mistake when he attacked, i don't know, mccain as a fake hero. or that, was it, which nationality, iranian soldier who fell and then he insulted his father or whatever. and people thought, oh, it's over with him. i remember a big title after one of these accidents, trump just killed himself. he is dead. you know where they fell? they should have read lacon a little bit. more. because they totally missed how identification works. we as a rule identify precisely with others. weaknesses. so the more trump's imitation were mocked, the more ordinary people identified with him and perceived attacks on him as condescending attacks on themselves. the subliminal message to ordinary people of trump's vulgarities was, i am really one of you. while ordinary trump supporters felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elites patronizing patronizing attitude towards them. so that's the tragedy. the left paid for. ignoring the class issue. it returned in this proto-fascist obscene forum. you know what walter benjamin said long ago. behind every fascism there is a failed revolution. applied to the united states, i'm not saying that bernie sanders was a big revolutionary. i'm just saying that behind the rise of trump, there is the failure of bernie sanders. and i sincerely admire bernie sanders. why? because i think that the only it can in the united states for the rise of a more radical emancipatory movement, and don't be afraid, i'm not expecting some new communist party, especially not with bob avakyan or with the guy and so on. all i'm saying is that. er. all i'm saying is that. the key task is this one, and that's why i admire bernie sanders. in spite of all his compromises and so on, i still don't get it, for example, why did he have to publicly endorse in such a ridiculous way hillary? i understand it, delicate situation. he could not oppose her, but couldn't he just withdraw with silent dignity or whatever? but let me go on. so, you know what for me, the true greatness of bernie sanders. what's our dream? we have all these cultural lgbt against sexism, racism struggles, and we have the big economic struggle, refugees, all the poor and so on, to bring these two struggles together. bernnie almost did it in what sense? his miracle is this one his voters in many states of the united states, especially in his home state, are precisely those low middle class farmers workers who are the, ideally get caught into right-wing populism. without without redirecting to us that anti establishmentment popular support that trump mobilized there is no chance for the left to achieve. anything. so, again, in this sense, don't misunderstand me, i'm not in any way for trump, and certainly not, it amuses me what i read a couple of days ago, that i endorse trump because melania, his wife, is slovene, and i'm hoping for invitation to white house. okay, i will tell you this. i can be bribed, but not in such a cheap way, you know. like if trump says, why don't you get, maybe not trump tower in new york, but trump tower in chicago and so on, i might reflect upon it. but not for a villa to white house. no for example, i even remember years ago, warren betatty, when he did that apparently progressive film about jack reed, rats, no? i was so mad when i learned that he went to, at that point reagan was the president. he went to the white house to show the film to reagan, who was grateful for it, celebrated the film. but to go on, my hope is this one. dead. if hillary, and i'm open here, i'm not bluffing, i'm ready to change my mind, maybe i'm going too far, but if hillary were to win we would have the continuation of status quo. of course it would have been in a way. much better. but! i claim it wouldn't solve the problem she is cold war establishment embodied. four years later or more we would have trump back or somebody like trump trump with a vengeance. what we got now is what? maybe the... price is too high. i i can be. reconverted here. but i still have this idea that very soon trump will encounter tensions in his own republican party. like ronald reagan already was master of this double game. he knew you know how ronald reagan ruled iaq. in some good essay. when he talked to christian conservatives, he told them, i'm totally on your side, no abortion and so on, but you see, for us to rule, we need the support of those big corrupted republican capitalists and upper classes who are decadent personally. so be patient and wait. then he went to these business-oriented republicans, and tell them, i'm totally on your side. who cares about abortion? but you know, in order to win, we need the support of those stupid fundamentalist jer. and so on. i don't think that in today's state of things trump can play this game the tension which is more and more constitutive of the republican party. between the business. more modern oriented wing and fundamentalists will, i claim, this tension will have to explode already now. there was, i say this with great irony of course, there was one mega achievement of donald trump. he-handedly practically ruined the republican party. admit it's not so bad. okay. second thing. now with. loss of hilary. so there is a hope that when trump will not be able to deliver, he will have to do something with this anti-establishment. reich. he will not deliver. there is a possibility that they will be redirected towards another more or less radical project. plus, there will be now deep self-examination within democratic party. there is a possibility that... they will finally get it. that's the nice paradox. it's not always this famous her husband, bill clinton's triangulation which brings victory. sometimes. to win, you have to be more radical. that's what great politicians learn and are able to do. so that's the absolute limit of my ha haa support for donald trump. he's disgust embodied. my hope is this one. can his crazy victory? trigger a certain process of political renewal without risking too much. new authoritarian rule i made a risky decision i can well be convinced that i am wrong. but... to conclude, so. uh. my message to you would be to really conclude. dich one. trump! victory may create a new political situation with chances for an organized more radical left. so if you love america as i do now is the time for the hard work of love, for becoming engaged in the long process of the formation of a radical political left in the united states. or to quote mao zedong again, this would be my formula of your situation now. there is great disorder under. kevin showed the situation is excellent. thank you very much.
Avital Ronell
thank you. thank you, sl.
thank you. thank you, sl.
Slavoj Žižek
joy. you my british friends, they can praise you but in such a way that you can see the mortifying dimension. you are kind to people in a way cutting me with the knife
joy. you my british friends, they can praise you but in such a way that you can see the mortifying dimension. you are kind to people in a way cutting me with the knife
Avital Ronell
do you think you're projecting?
do you think you're projecting?
Slavoj Žižek
i.
i.
Avital Ronell
said thank you.
said thank you.
Slavoj Žižek
you see, didn't she say now thank't you in a very ungrateful way?
you see, didn't she say now thank't you in a very ungrateful way?
Avital Ronell
in a very nietzschean way. okay. so fuck you very much. and we do have time if... you want to ask a question or so i will just toss out one thing which is i would put on our reading list if we had six more weeks to discuss maybe liotard. who would... would... throw into question this emancipatory jubilation that. just the set.
in a very nietzschean way. okay. so fuck you very much. and we do have time if... you want to ask a question or so i will just toss out one thing which is i would put on our reading list if we had six more weeks to discuss maybe liotard. who would... would... throw into question this emancipatory jubilation that. just the set.
Slavoj Žižek
generally, yeah.
generally, yeah.
Avital Ronell
yeah, the sense that some renewal, this whole tropology of renewal, of emancipating, of organizing. and so even though you presented it very, very carefully, and i appreciate. so much of what, as you say, about your enemies, i appreciate them otherwise. if... there isn't still the kind of boost and pump of an emancipatory. fiction. and maybe we have gone too far. this time we went too far. mean. and in terms of a certain kind of lexicon of reflection that i urge upon all of us. which is what it means to have gone too far.
yeah, the sense that some renewal, this whole tropology of renewal, of emancipating, of organizing. and so even though you presented it very, very carefully, and i appreciate. so much of what, as you say, about your enemies, i appreciate them otherwise. if... there isn't still the kind of boost and pump of an emancipatory. fiction. and maybe we have gone too far. this time we went too far. mean. and in terms of a certain kind of lexicon of reflection that i urge upon all of us. which is what it means to have gone too far.
Slavoj Žižek
we or trump...
we or trump...
Avital Ronell
all of us. it's just too far. we went too far. there's no retraction possible hypothetically. there's no... beating
all of us. it's just too far. we went too far. there's no retraction possible hypothetically. there's no... beating
Slavoj Žižek
a path or find.
a path or find.
Avital Ronell
up
up
Slavoj Žižek
go back. or how do we get out of this shit?
go back. or how do we get out of this shit?
Avital Ronell
that would be my question rather than to... we needed you very much and we needed a sense of that narrow path that wasn't happening last night. um... to some sense of futurity. and something happened, an event happened in your talk to us. i think we're very grateful. we needed. this very much. i can't say we in a stable way, i'm just rhetorically trying to. i shut myself down very quickly. but at the same time is it? since you would understand this. so well, just a sugar high. or a false high. to revert though we may have needed it. or it might be what nietzsche would call an enabling fiction. to think that there could be an emancipatory other side or negotiation with something that just went too far. this is just a question, and i'm opening the discussion to you if you have. questions you don't have to answer.
that would be my question rather than to... we needed you very much and we needed a sense of that narrow path that wasn't happening last night. um... to some sense of futurity. and something happened, an event happened in your talk to us. i think we're very grateful. we needed. this very much. i can't say we in a stable way, i'm just rhetorically trying to. i shut myself down very quickly. but at the same time is it? since you would understand this. so well, just a sugar high. or a false high. to revert though we may have needed it. or it might be what nietzsche would call an enabling fiction. to think that there could be an emancipatory other side or negotiation with something that just went too far. this is just a question, and i'm opening the discussion to you if you have. questions you don't have to answer.
Slavoj Žižek
can i just reply in a very friendly way, very briefly to you? your problem. i just would have insisted. i was thinking a lot about it. but my first problem here is this one. when i speak about emancipation, please forget about the 20th century. i'm not dreaming about a new proletarian revolution or communist party or whatever. although i remain very radical. what do i mean by this? listen. we live in a very paradoxical situation where on the one hand there is an incredible popular rage exploding all around even the developed world here in europe and so on. but there is again and again an impossibility to translate this rage into even a minimally organized political program and so on and so on and that's for me a mega tragedy. i'm sorry if some of you know this metaphor of mine, but i like it so much that i repeat it all the time. did you see the movie v for vendetta? you know how it ends up people win in the united kingdom and they penetrate the parliament, people are in power. okay i'm sorry for repeating this old tasteless remark of mine i'm ready to sell my mother into slavery and it's safe to say because she is already dead but that's another point i'm ready to sell to see a movie. which would be called v for vendetta part 2. i was so interested, but what happens then the next day? what do the revolutionaries do? how do they reorganize the government or whatever and so on and so on? i find this such a tragic deadlock. that's why i think that, for example, what syriza did in greece, you know, first you have this heroic referendum, no to european union. one or two days later, they had to capitulate. i totally disagree with those who simply cry betrayal like tariq ali. he cried betrayal and then he flew back to london to his5 million. flat which is now that's how we know how much it worth selling on the market and so on but what i want to say is this that uh. no okay, if all this fails we can say okay, why don't we call it a day and become. i use this term ironically, leftist fukuyamaists, like, you know, we basically accept fukuyama, we cannot the liberal democratic capitalism is the only feasible way. we just could make it a little bit better up and down and so on and so on. uh... okay, i don't think this works because i think we are approaching so many. problems, antagonisms, which it's clear to me it will not be possible to solve them, even to contain them within the existing world order. there is a problem of ecology where large international cooperation will be possible. and here you have another example of ideology. how? you are interpolated as ideological subjects. when you ask radical questions, how to change, restructure our industry, the answer you get is, ah, but why do you just criticize? what did you do? did you recycle all your coke cans? did you put all the newspapers aside and so on and so on? it's a wonderful mechanism which makes you individually guilty and at the same time it offers you an easy way out. you know, you do that stupid recycling and you can go on living as usual. but more, i will not get lost. i'm sorry. so first we have the problem of ecology where i think mega-large international cooperation will be needed. then, although they are very naive but different authors like paul mason, like jeremiah rifkin and others, even elon musk, the tesla guy, now accepts that obviously capitalism, the way we know it, it's reaching its limit. in so-called intellectual property and so on and so on. what will happen? how will we restructure it and so on, not to mention all other problems. so i am saying that, and maybe we are lost. i don't see any automatic rise of some marxist new working class subjectivity. i am just saying if things go on the way they are going on, what will happen? well, hollywood knows it as always. you know, all dyst topic movies, hunger games, elysium and so on. we are approaching 20%, 80%. it's not just one 99%, 20%, 80% society. that's why with all naivety i cling to this notion of emancipation and so on. because i don't believe in this micropolitical gestures of resistance and so on and so on. i am saying if something more radical will not happen and i'm a pessimist openly probably it will not happen then we are not maybe totally lost, but maybe even totally lost. i think that there is even a growing chance of new world war. and paradoxically, i think, i wonder if you agree here, that hillary is more of a cold warrior than donald trump. i would be much more, i am. we have been much more afraid of her as a president. you know why i'm afraid of it. i don't think it's a good parallel of today's situation with the 30s nazism. it's i think, more with world war i. decades before, everybody knew world war. is approaching. everybody was getting ready of the way they do it today. i read in newspapers you know what's already happening in russia. they already have mass millions participating, mass training for how to react in the case of a nuclear war and so on and so on. but at the same time, we don't take it really seriously. we know we but we don't really believe in it and that's why it can happen. it was exactly as in world war i, where everybody was getting ready for the war, but nobody believed in your guts. it's the same as, and that's why it exploded. it's the same with ecological catastrophe. we all know global warming and that bullshit, but i don't think we really believe in it. like the thing can really change. that's why it will happen. and you know, here for me, there is a problem. i mean,... like... what is the option? maybe nothing. i'm ready to accept this. i'm just saying. that we are gradually approaching a catastrophe. so, it's not so much, i'll put it like this. i'm not saying that let's drop emancipation. the universality is rather the universality of a catastrophe. and i mean it in a very empirical way, not in some mystic pseudo-heideggerarian way. we will not even be noticing it, but our work will be over. i'm talking about very concrete catastrophes. hunger, world war, total chaos, and so on and so on. sorry, i was too long.
can i just reply in a very friendly way, very briefly to you? your problem. i just would have insisted. i was thinking a lot about it. but my first problem here is this one. when i speak about emancipation, please forget about the 20th century. i'm not dreaming about a new proletarian revolution or communist party or whatever. although i remain very radical. what do i mean by this? listen. we live in a very paradoxical situation where on the one hand there is an incredible popular rage exploding all around even the developed world here in europe and so on. but there is again and again an impossibility to translate this rage into even a minimally organized political program and so on and so on and that's for me a mega tragedy. i'm sorry if some of you know this metaphor of mine, but i like it so much that i repeat it all the time. did you see the movie v for vendetta? you know how it ends up people win in the united kingdom and they penetrate the parliament, people are in power. okay i'm sorry for repeating this old tasteless remark of mine i'm ready to sell my mother into slavery and it's safe to say because she is already dead but that's another point i'm ready to sell to see a movie. which would be called v for vendetta part 2. i was so interested, but what happens then the next day? what do the revolutionaries do? how do they reorganize the government or whatever and so on and so on? i find this such a tragic deadlock. that's why i think that, for example, what syriza did in greece, you know, first you have this heroic referendum, no to european union. one or two days later, they had to capitulate. i totally disagree with those who simply cry betrayal like tariq ali. he cried betrayal and then he flew back to london to his5 million. flat which is now that's how we know how much it worth selling on the market and so on but what i want to say is this that uh. no okay, if all this fails we can say okay, why don't we call it a day and become. i use this term ironically, leftist fukuyamaists, like, you know, we basically accept fukuyama, we cannot the liberal democratic capitalism is the only feasible way. we just could make it a little bit better up and down and so on and so on. uh... okay, i don't think this works because i think we are approaching so many. problems, antagonisms, which it's clear to me it will not be possible to solve them, even to contain them within the existing world order. there is a problem of ecology where large international cooperation will be possible. and here you have another example of ideology. how? you are interpolated as ideological subjects. when you ask radical questions, how to change, restructure our industry, the answer you get is, ah, but why do you just criticize? what did you do? did you recycle all your coke cans? did you put all the newspapers aside and so on and so on? it's a wonderful mechanism which makes you individually guilty and at the same time it offers you an easy way out. you know, you do that stupid recycling and you can go on living as usual. but more, i will not get lost. i'm sorry. so first we have the problem of ecology where i think mega-large international cooperation will be needed. then, although they are very naive but different authors like paul mason, like jeremiah rifkin and others, even elon musk, the tesla guy, now accepts that obviously capitalism, the way we know it, it's reaching its limit. in so-called intellectual property and so on and so on. what will happen? how will we restructure it and so on, not to mention all other problems. so i am saying that, and maybe we are lost. i don't see any automatic rise of some marxist new working class subjectivity. i am just saying if things go on the way they are going on, what will happen? well, hollywood knows it as always. you know, all dyst topic movies, hunger games, elysium and so on. we are approaching 20%, 80%. it's not just one 99%, 20%, 80% society. that's why with all naivety i cling to this notion of emancipation and so on. because i don't believe in this micropolitical gestures of resistance and so on and so on. i am saying if something more radical will not happen and i'm a pessimist openly probably it will not happen then we are not maybe totally lost, but maybe even totally lost. i think that there is even a growing chance of new world war. and paradoxically, i think, i wonder if you agree here, that hillary is more of a cold warrior than donald trump. i would be much more, i am. we have been much more afraid of her as a president. you know why i'm afraid of it. i don't think it's a good parallel of today's situation with the 30s nazism. it's i think, more with world war i. decades before, everybody knew world war. is approaching. everybody was getting ready of the way they do it today. i read in newspapers you know what's already happening in russia. they already have mass millions participating, mass training for how to react in the case of a nuclear war and so on and so on. but at the same time, we don't take it really seriously. we know we but we don't really believe in it and that's why it can happen. it was exactly as in world war i, where everybody was getting ready for the war, but nobody believed in your guts. it's the same as, and that's why it exploded. it's the same with ecological catastrophe. we all know global warming and that bullshit, but i don't think we really believe in it. like the thing can really change. that's why it will happen. and you know, here for me, there is a problem. i mean,... like... what is the option? maybe nothing. i'm ready to accept this. i'm just saying. that we are gradually approaching a catastrophe. so, it's not so much, i'll put it like this. i'm not saying that let's drop emancipation. the universality is rather the universality of a catastrophe. and i mean it in a very empirical way, not in some mystic pseudo-heideggerarian way. we will not even be noticing it, but our work will be over. i'm talking about very concrete catastrophes. hunger, world war, total chaos, and so on and so on. sorry, i was too long.
Avital Ronell
not at all. we have time, no time. yeah, because he set the.
not at all. we have time, no time. yeah, because he set the.
Slavoj Žižek
no. you did.
no. you did.
Audience Member 2
okay.
okay.
Slavoj Žižek
okay,. sorry. yeah. you see the working class.
okay,. sorry. yeah. you see the working class.
Avital Ronell
i'm the working. i'm the working class here.
i'm the working. i'm the working class here.
Slavoj Žižek
ah you learned the trick of the communists in power. even the highest nomenclature and stalin always said, i'm the real working class here sorry, let's go on.. but please, now we just debate. allow us to. shamelessly escape with the illusion that there is democracy, will somebody save democracy by asking at least one question?
ah you learned the trick of the communists in power. even the highest nomenclature and stalin always said, i'm the real working class here sorry, let's go on.. but please, now we just debate. allow us to. shamelessly escape with the illusion that there is democracy, will somebody save democracy by asking at least one question?
Avital Ronell
we have...
we have...
Audience Member 2
i we have someone, please. i was wondering, in the light of what you said today, what do you think about frederick jameson's thesis on dual power and american utopia? of dual power of universal army and if you think that this is't... still an interesting thesis. thanks.
i we have someone, please. i was wondering, in the light of what you said today, what do you think about frederick jameson's thesis on dual power and american utopia? of dual power of universal army and if you think that this is't... still an interesting thesis. thanks.
Slavoj Žižek
thanks very much. well. it's a very fundamental question and to answer it properly i could simply tell you, read my text in that volume because i edited the volume. i'm just saying that what i like about jameson's text, it's not so much all the details. i think that what he wants is an impossible dream. he wants an army which would just function as army bureaucracy without preparing for a real war. i i asked him already, why then the army? why not some mega state bureaucracy or whatever? why call it the army? but what i like in his work is this radical rethinking of... communist or socialist project, you know, first it's no longer the dream of all antagonisms will be overcome, sex will be work and work will be sex and no envy and so on. like i find that idea absolutely fascinating that the basic problem, if we can even imagine of a post-class communist society will be what you mentioned, resentment, jealousy and all that. that this will explode there. and you know, if you read the text, actually obviously did what is fred jameson's solution? it is that. to regulate this state or society should organize mega. psychoanalytic institutes where individuals will be cured of resentment and jealousy and so on. i mean, i love the idea but more as a paradox. but again, what i like is this open admission that we will not get rid of basic antagonisms, even of a certain form of authority, whatever you want, and so on and so on. i like this idea, you know which is one point which fred jenson maybe he is, but i don't think he is ready to leave behind. it's my favorite point and i learned it from a good friend of mine who wrote a book on the echoes of haiti in literature of the haiti revolution, jeremiah glick, it's this idea of revolutionary tragedy, not just in the sense of things may go wrong and so on, but that what hegel describes as a tragic dimension, you want to do something, freedom and so on, things necessarily go wrong and so on, that it holds also for what i naively call process of emancipation. here, we have to. admit that we don't know where we are moving that things will have to be radically redefined. it's not only that we have different paths towards socialism and so on but in the process of building socialism, what socialism means. up to its most basic constituents will have to be radically redefined. so i'm even much more in a way pessimist than fred jameson, but i can only tell you that this. change is sensible everywhere for example i haven't yet read their text but i know that now through my private grapevine spying service that hart and negri are now. radically rethinking their position and then they no longer play this like ignore state power, multitude, reorganize locally. no, they said we also need not only multitude, verticality, strong central power, authority taking power and so on. that's for me that. the left, we are not yet, but it needs this very radical rethinking. for me, we have really to accept. that also. in the so-called process of emancipation. the tragic dimension, precisely in this sense, you do something with best intentions, you totally screw it up, and then in this process, the very goal you are pursuing changes and so on and so on. has to be accepted. i really think that i'm a pessimist. we don't know where we stand. we have all these futurist books that i like to read, like again, jeremiah rifkin, or now the bestseller by how is the guy called? juuval harari, homo deus. this description of a society that is emerging where our lives will be controlled by gigantic digital machinery and and so on and so on and what will happen with our freedom and so on. these are all such fascinating topics and we don't yet have even the proper theoretical apparatus to know. where they lead. let's give up one more so that.
thanks very much. well. it's a very fundamental question and to answer it properly i could simply tell you, read my text in that volume because i edited the volume. i'm just saying that what i like about jameson's text, it's not so much all the details. i think that what he wants is an impossible dream. he wants an army which would just function as army bureaucracy without preparing for a real war. i i asked him already, why then the army? why not some mega state bureaucracy or whatever? why call it the army? but what i like in his work is this radical rethinking of... communist or socialist project, you know, first it's no longer the dream of all antagonisms will be overcome, sex will be work and work will be sex and no envy and so on. like i find that idea absolutely fascinating that the basic problem, if we can even imagine of a post-class communist society will be what you mentioned, resentment, jealousy and all that. that this will explode there. and you know, if you read the text, actually obviously did what is fred jameson's solution? it is that. to regulate this state or society should organize mega. psychoanalytic institutes where individuals will be cured of resentment and jealousy and so on. i mean, i love the idea but more as a paradox. but again, what i like is this open admission that we will not get rid of basic antagonisms, even of a certain form of authority, whatever you want, and so on and so on. i like this idea, you know which is one point which fred jenson maybe he is, but i don't think he is ready to leave behind. it's my favorite point and i learned it from a good friend of mine who wrote a book on the echoes of haiti in literature of the haiti revolution, jeremiah glick, it's this idea of revolutionary tragedy, not just in the sense of things may go wrong and so on, but that what hegel describes as a tragic dimension, you want to do something, freedom and so on, things necessarily go wrong and so on, that it holds also for what i naively call process of emancipation. here, we have to. admit that we don't know where we are moving that things will have to be radically redefined. it's not only that we have different paths towards socialism and so on but in the process of building socialism, what socialism means. up to its most basic constituents will have to be radically redefined. so i'm even much more in a way pessimist than fred jameson, but i can only tell you that this. change is sensible everywhere for example i haven't yet read their text but i know that now through my private grapevine spying service that hart and negri are now. radically rethinking their position and then they no longer play this like ignore state power, multitude, reorganize locally. no, they said we also need not only multitude, verticality, strong central power, authority taking power and so on. that's for me that. the left, we are not yet, but it needs this very radical rethinking. for me, we have really to accept. that also. in the so-called process of emancipation. the tragic dimension, precisely in this sense, you do something with best intentions, you totally screw it up, and then in this process, the very goal you are pursuing changes and so on and so on. has to be accepted. i really think that i'm a pessimist. we don't know where we stand. we have all these futurist books that i like to read, like again, jeremiah rifkin, or now the bestseller by how is the guy called? juuval harari, homo deus. this description of a society that is emerging where our lives will be controlled by gigantic digital machinery and and so on and so on and what will happen with our freedom and so on. these are all such fascinating topics and we don't yet have even the proper theoretical apparatus to know. where they lead. let's give up one more so that.
Avital Ronell
all right. there
all right. there
Slavoj Žižek
oh sorry.
oh sorry.
Avital Ronell
you said one more. did you say or do you say? that's it.
you said one more. did you say or do you say? that's it.
Slavoj Žižek
one more and then... okay, with the
one more and then... okay, with the
Avital Ronell
one and the two and the plus. um... let.
one and the two and the plus. um... let.
Slavoj Žižek
now, let's move from moderate right to radical left or sorry. or it's from moderate left to radical right, i was never good in locating.
now, let's move from moderate right to radical left or sorry. or it's from moderate left to radical right, i was never good in locating.
Audience Member 1
thank you.
thank you.
Slavoj Žižek
thank you.
thank you.
Audience Member 1
since i've arrived to the us, i've been fascinated with the racial divide and the institutional racism that is here in the us.
since i've arrived to the us, i've been fascinated with the racial divide and the institutional racism that is here in the us.
Slavoj Žižek
what do you mean by institutional?
what do you mean by institutional?
Audience Member 1
the shooting against people and the criminalization and the jailing of 1.5 million black people, like we outside of the us refer to african americans. but which is the part that is going to play this institutional racism and black people and people of color in the new radicalization of the left or the possible radicalization of the left? in the near future and the political process that maybe it will be triggered.
the shooting against people and the criminalization and the jailing of 1.5 million black people, like we outside of the us refer to african americans. but which is the part that is going to play this institutional racism and black people and people of color in the new radicalization of the left or the possible radicalization of the left? in the near future and the political process that maybe it will be triggered.
Slavoj Žižek
i cannot give you a precise answer my only point which makes me even more unpopular is that uh... my hero is here, again, i'm sorry if i'm repeating myself, my hero is here, malcolm max, because he precisely opted for universalist version. you know what he did with x. it's not. haley and that hollywood kids return to roots and so on. his genius was to see in the most how in the most striking dimension of the black experience they x they lack. family tradition ethnic roots but his idea was what if this opens up a possibility for a new community even more universalist than european universalism and so on and so on so all this idea of happy coalition between or coordination between. universal economic struggle and concrete identities, identity politics in whatever sense. it will not work i am a pessimist there there should be radical changes on both levels for example many of my friends now that we have not, it's unfair to say problems with refugees in europe because we are a problem for them also, you know. but there are problems. some people propose simple formulas like we should distinguish between our universal struggle and the right of every group to maintain their specific way of life. that's for me the worst idealism. the point is that precisely you cannot distinguish them. because universal dimension, it's not that i have my way of life and apart from it i participate in some universality. universality must be inscribed in whatever way in your particular way of life. for example, and that's why you get all these problems, for example with women's rights you try to regulate in europe with immigrants, women's rights, and they complain, and they are quite justified to complain, that this means destroying their way of life. so what will you do? there is no easy way out. you have sometimes to make a choice. you take seriously women's rights like when a woman protests i don't want to be controlled by my family, enforced marriage and so on. but then when you protect the woman these communities will claim in a totally true way, they are right, that you are destroying our way of life. and also in my own country, for this i was so much attacked, proclaimed a neo-fascist who wrote, when i drew attention to the fact that, for example, for roma, what in racist way we called once gypsies. for them, arranged marriages are the very core of their communal life. you take away from them this, they disappear in two generations, the latest. so what will you do here? whose side will it take? in slovenia, we had a serious problem with this because years ago a young girl escaped, she didn't want to be, when she was 12 years old, married, and then of course, all feminists, they were right, supported her. but then the roma community said, sorry, you are brutally intervening in our way of life. i'm not simply saying that i'm defending european universalism against others' particular way of life. i am well aware of these dialectics of how european universalism is itself partial and so on and so on. what i'm just trying to do is to complicate things. tolerance doesn't help here. what do you tolerate? you tolerate, you don't tolerate. like, if you say we should tolerate. the way of life of other comm. okay, but... where do you draw the line if their way of life violates what we consider rights of gay people, of women and so on and so on? where do you draw the line? there is it's not so much that i offer an easy way out i'm blessed. the first step towards a solution is maybe to admit that it's a difficult problem. if both sides admit that it's a problem maybe something can be done but on the other hand of course i reject this a notion of traditional groups we want our way of life and so on and so on but also of course this enlightened western arrogance and so on and so on. i mean it's interesting how today often those very marginal communist groups. one to. criticise eurocentrism and want to protect all those particular ways of life but all those to whom they refer for example in mos china no, they... maoists were, when they were in power, pretty brutally in destroying all traditional ways of life and so on and so on. and i will tell you something else things get even more complicated here. take something like isis or daesh or whatever. there is, i think, absolutely nothing traditional about it. okay, they fake to have some ideas, whatever from old quran, but they are in their mode of organization an ultra, i would say even post-modern, extremely dynamic group. and it's also clear from the way they function that they are a combination of a religious community and a mafia family laundering money, selling artifacts, drugs, oil or whatever. i think that they are part and package of our world. so what is even traditional today and so on where do you draw all these lines again i don't see any simple solutions here. sorry, maybe another one if... are you raising your hands or scratching yourself, you lady who is...
i cannot give you a precise answer my only point which makes me even more unpopular is that uh... my hero is here, again, i'm sorry if i'm repeating myself, my hero is here, malcolm max, because he precisely opted for universalist version. you know what he did with x. it's not. haley and that hollywood kids return to roots and so on. his genius was to see in the most how in the most striking dimension of the black experience they x they lack. family tradition ethnic roots but his idea was what if this opens up a possibility for a new community even more universalist than european universalism and so on and so on so all this idea of happy coalition between or coordination between. universal economic struggle and concrete identities, identity politics in whatever sense. it will not work i am a pessimist there there should be radical changes on both levels for example many of my friends now that we have not, it's unfair to say problems with refugees in europe because we are a problem for them also, you know. but there are problems. some people propose simple formulas like we should distinguish between our universal struggle and the right of every group to maintain their specific way of life. that's for me the worst idealism. the point is that precisely you cannot distinguish them. because universal dimension, it's not that i have my way of life and apart from it i participate in some universality. universality must be inscribed in whatever way in your particular way of life. for example, and that's why you get all these problems, for example with women's rights you try to regulate in europe with immigrants, women's rights, and they complain, and they are quite justified to complain, that this means destroying their way of life. so what will you do? there is no easy way out. you have sometimes to make a choice. you take seriously women's rights like when a woman protests i don't want to be controlled by my family, enforced marriage and so on. but then when you protect the woman these communities will claim in a totally true way, they are right, that you are destroying our way of life. and also in my own country, for this i was so much attacked, proclaimed a neo-fascist who wrote, when i drew attention to the fact that, for example, for roma, what in racist way we called once gypsies. for them, arranged marriages are the very core of their communal life. you take away from them this, they disappear in two generations, the latest. so what will you do here? whose side will it take? in slovenia, we had a serious problem with this because years ago a young girl escaped, she didn't want to be, when she was 12 years old, married, and then of course, all feminists, they were right, supported her. but then the roma community said, sorry, you are brutally intervening in our way of life. i'm not simply saying that i'm defending european universalism against others' particular way of life. i am well aware of these dialectics of how european universalism is itself partial and so on and so on. what i'm just trying to do is to complicate things. tolerance doesn't help here. what do you tolerate? you tolerate, you don't tolerate. like, if you say we should tolerate. the way of life of other comm. okay, but... where do you draw the line if their way of life violates what we consider rights of gay people, of women and so on and so on? where do you draw the line? there is it's not so much that i offer an easy way out i'm blessed. the first step towards a solution is maybe to admit that it's a difficult problem. if both sides admit that it's a problem maybe something can be done but on the other hand of course i reject this a notion of traditional groups we want our way of life and so on and so on but also of course this enlightened western arrogance and so on and so on. i mean it's interesting how today often those very marginal communist groups. one to. criticise eurocentrism and want to protect all those particular ways of life but all those to whom they refer for example in mos china no, they... maoists were, when they were in power, pretty brutally in destroying all traditional ways of life and so on and so on. and i will tell you something else things get even more complicated here. take something like isis or daesh or whatever. there is, i think, absolutely nothing traditional about it. okay, they fake to have some ideas, whatever from old quran, but they are in their mode of organization an ultra, i would say even post-modern, extremely dynamic group. and it's also clear from the way they function that they are a combination of a religious community and a mafia family laundering money, selling artifacts, drugs, oil or whatever. i think that they are part and package of our world. so what is even traditional today and so on where do you draw all these lines again i don't see any simple solutions here. sorry, maybe another one if... are you raising your hands or scratching yourself, you lady who is...
Avital Ronell
you...
you...
Slavoj Žižek
whom i mean. no, sorry, i was wrong.
whom i mean. no, sorry, i was wrong.
Avital Ronell
you were hallucinating. if we were to pursue your question further and we had the time, perhaps we would want to read together lacon tv. text where he writes
you were hallucinating. if we were to pursue your question further and we had the time, perhaps we would want to read together lacon tv. text where he writes
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Avital Ronell
the jouissance of the other and how racism is precisely and since donald trump is such a tv. an effect of tv, television. we would want to consider what laccon says about imagining through the circuitry of television the the jouissance of the other and how the other is getting it all. are you interrupting me?
the jouissance of the other and how racism is precisely and since donald trump is such a tv. an effect of tv, television. we would want to consider what laccon says about imagining through the circuitry of television the the jouissance of the other and how the other is getting it all. are you interrupting me?
Slavoj Žižek
absolutely.
absolutely.
Avital Ronell
you didn't have enough time.
you didn't have enough time.
Slavoj Žižek
no, what i wanted to say is that i here sincerely fully agree with you because this is... no, no. this is what i all of a sudden now we have i'm interested now we. this is what i wanted to arrive at with those racial enjoyments and so on and so on. for me, literally enjoyment in the sense of enjoying your specific way of life, it's absolutely fundamental. that's where racism is embedded in our daily lives. that's so typical in europe. even here, you know, where people, liberals who can be very sincerely anti-racist. but almost all of them that i know, but then they find some tiny feature of, like, the traditional thing here in states. many of my friends say, i like blacks, it's horrible what we did to them. but they talk too loudly, their music is too loud or whatever, you know. or in france, it's so traditional to say, arabs, it's horrible what we are doing with them. but just when i pass a moroccan restaurant, it's so much garlic or whatever. you know this, okay. this is a ridiculous example, but what i mean is that it's easy to be anti-racism at the abstract level of you know, we are all equal and so on and so on. the true conflict is at the level of this particular race of life and i agree with you this is why in some other texts all the honour goes to him already in the mid seventies he predicted the rise of new forms of racism as absolutely an inherent part of globalization of world capital.
no, what i wanted to say is that i here sincerely fully agree with you because this is... no, no. this is what i all of a sudden now we have i'm interested now we. this is what i wanted to arrive at with those racial enjoyments and so on and so on. for me, literally enjoyment in the sense of enjoying your specific way of life, it's absolutely fundamental. that's where racism is embedded in our daily lives. that's so typical in europe. even here, you know, where people, liberals who can be very sincerely anti-racist. but almost all of them that i know, but then they find some tiny feature of, like, the traditional thing here in states. many of my friends say, i like blacks, it's horrible what we did to them. but they talk too loudly, their music is too loud or whatever, you know. or in france, it's so traditional to say, arabs, it's horrible what we are doing with them. but just when i pass a moroccan restaurant, it's so much garlic or whatever. you know this, okay. this is a ridiculous example, but what i mean is that it's easy to be anti-racism at the abstract level of you know, we are all equal and so on and so on. the true conflict is at the level of this particular race of life and i agree with you this is why in some other texts all the honour goes to him already in the mid seventies he predicted the rise of new forms of racism as absolutely an inherent part of globalization of world capital.
Avital Ronell
yeah. so i know we're all beginning our sense of loss and horror. i hope we contributed to your sense of loss and horror. and made it stick. we are here to suffer together and continue to.
yeah. so i know we're all beginning our sense of loss and horror. i hope we contributed to your sense of loss and horror. and made it stick. we are here to suffer together and continue to.
Slavoj Žižek
no, i don't want to suffer, i want to enjoy my loss. that's true. no, no, no, sorry, to finish, just's this place. that's for me the lesson of christianity. in christianity, you know, god gives us our freedom. how? you experience yourself as abandoned by god. let's say i'm alone.
no, i don't want to suffer, i want to enjoy my loss. that's true. no, no, no, sorry, to finish, just's this place. that's for me the lesson of christianity. in christianity, you know, god gives us our freedom. how? you experience yourself as abandoned by god. let's say i'm alone.
Avital Ronell
feel this right now.
feel this right now.
Slavoj Žižek
no,, no, i will not abandon you.
no,, no, i will not abandon you.
Avital Ronell
.
.
Slavoj Žižek
no, what i want to say is we feel abandoned and that the christian solution is not to say don't worry too much. the guy up there god still secretly will save you. no. the message of christianity is you feel alone, all responsibility is on you. you see, this is the freedom that god is giving you, you know. it's a very paradoxical solution where the problem becomes its own solution. el litvert. but.
no, what i want to say is we feel abandoned and that the christian solution is not to say don't worry too much. the guy up there god still secretly will save you. no. the message of christianity is you feel alone, all responsibility is on you. you see, this is the freedom that god is giving you, you know. it's a very paradoxical solution where the problem becomes its own solution. el litvert. but.
Avital Ronell
or the good message of christianity, as jean-luc nancy says, is that the end is near. thank you, everyone.
or the good message of christianity, as jean-luc nancy says, is that the end is near. thank you, everyone.
Slavoj Žižek
thank you,.
thank you,.