Rage, Rebellion, New Power
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-10-27 · 1:37:42 · 12,275 words
ideologyliberalism-political-correctnesssexuality-genderhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysiscapitalismdemocracygeopolitics-warrevolution-violencetechnology-ai-cyberspaceecology-climatefascism-populismhistoryreligion-theologysubjectivity
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture opening with Alain Badiou's book La Vraie Vie on the disintegration of patriarchal symbolic order and its differential effects on men and women, using Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Duterte as political illustrations. He attacks political correctness as a form of 'revolution without revolution,' defends a qualified eurocentrism, and diagnoses the collapse of Hegelian Sittlichkeit (ethical substance) in contemporary society. The lecture closes with reflections on the failure of the left to move from rage through rebellion to new power, the limits of Syriza, the dangers of AI and digitalization, and a fatalist-predestinarian call to persist despite catastrophe.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Brecht's estrangement effect, cited via Badiou as the original function of philosophy: alienating the young from the dominant ideological order to enable autonomous thought.
as “surplus enjoyment / jouissance”
The Korean youth's oscillation between intense hedonism and career obsession illustrates a society structured around jouissance with no symbolic frame to contain it.
as “worldless civilization (Weltlos)”
The emerging condition of no tradition, no meaningful symbolic frame of life, oscillating between hedonist excess and career obsession, cited from Badiou but deployed as Žižek's own diagnostic term.
as “eternal adolescent (male)”
Žižek's (via Badiou) characterization of contemporary masculinity: men condemned to prolonged adolescence with no initiatic rite into maturity, exemplified by Trump's reckless hedonism.
Žižek's condensation of three political figures into an 'ideal image of the politician today': the ruthless feminine manipulator + the extralegal mob-ruler + the adolescent hedonist, middle name Trump.
A cold competitive agent of power, seductive, manipulative, self-controlled, who emerges as the hegemonic subject-form as the old patriarchal One dissolves; exemplified by Hillary Clinton.
The post-traditional fluid subject that permanently reinvents and reconstructs itself through performative enactment of different identities, Žižek argues this fits consumerist society perfectly despite its subversive self-presentation.
as “coffee without caffeine / X without X”
Series of decaffeinated substitutes (coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar, beer without alcohol, multiculturalism without violent clashes) used to illustrate political correctness as revolution without revolution, the thing deprived of its substance.
Žižek's Robespierre-derived phrase for political correctness: admitting real injustices but wanting to cure them without actual structural change, without anyone being hurt or giving anything up.
Hegelian ethical substance, the thick background of mostly unwritten rules of social life telling us what we can and cannot do, which Žižek claims is now disintegrating.
as “qualified eurocentrism”
The position that the very standpoint from which we criticize European horrors (radical egalitarianism, feminism, abstract individuality) is itself European, and that anti-eurocentrism signals capitalism's no longer needing universal emancipation.
Implicit in the critique of global capitalism's compatibility with multiculturalism, the universal logic of capital subsumes local particularities without negating them.
as “manufacturing consent (crisis of)”
Borrowing Chomsky's phrase to describe the breakdown of the unwritten customs and routines through which political consent was reproduced, populism is one symptom of this void.
as “rage–rebellion–new power triad”
Žižek's schema for revolutionary processes: chaotic rage → organized rebellion with a named enemy → new power reorganizing society; the problem is we almost never get the full progression.
as “Aufhebung / dialectical synthesis”
Invoked ironically via the Stalinist joke about money in communism, 'there will be and there will not be money', to illustrate how digital inequality will function: some will lose freedom, others will not.
as “bureaucratic socialism”
Žižek's provocative ideal social model: not local self-management but an efficient, invisible administrative network providing infrastructure (water, electricity, health) that leaves individuals free to pursue their own lives.
as “the open/closed future reversal”
Against the common sense that the past is fixed and the future open, Žižek (via Benjamin and Frank Ruda) argues the opposite: the future is closed (fatalistic), while the past is open and can be retroactively transformed.
Protestant theological notion appropriated as a political-philosophical stance: everything is determined but you don't know how, producing a radical anxiety that mimics true freedom, used to argue for fatalist persistence rather than resignation.
Lacan's thesis that sexual difference is a constitutive antagonism that always fails, never a complementary relation, which Žižek uses to argue that transgender people are a symptom of this irreducible impossibility rather than a deviation from a functioning norm.
as “symptom (transgender as symptom)”
Transgender people as the symptom of the impossibility of sexual identity as such, they bring out an antagonism immanent to all gender identities rather than representing a deviation from a functioning norm.
Implicit throughout as the symbolic authority (divine name of the Father, state, shared customs) whose weakening produces a new fluid consumerist subjectivity.
Referenced implicitly via Lacanian logic in the discussion of sexual difference and lack.
Stories he reaches for 7
The film ends with the crowd storming parliament. Žižek says he's ready to sell his mother into slavery to see Part Two, what happens the next day when the revolution must organize new power.
“I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called V for Vendetta part two what happens then next day how do they organize new power”
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, sent by the EU after Fukushima, revealed that for a few hours Japanese authorities considered evacuating the entire Tokyo area, illustrating the need for large-scale organizations beyond local communities.
“for a couple of hours Japanese authorities thought that the radiations will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area million people where would they go”
Žižek's Native American friends told him they prefer 'Indian' because it monuments white stupidity in thinking they'd discovered India, rather than 'Native American' which sounds patronizing.
“I prefer to be called Indian because in this way at least my name is a monument to the stupidity of white men who thought they discovered India”
In the 1930s Politburo, Bukharin's faction wanted money in communism, the left said no; Stalin intervened: 'dialectical synthesis, there will and will not be money.' Asked how: 'Simple, some people will have money, others will not.'
“there will be and there will not be money in communism... some people will have money others will not have money”
Facebook censored the iconic 'Napalm Girl' photo justifying it as preventing child pornography, ignoring the political dimension, illustrating political correctness's sanitizing impulse.
“Facebook censored the iconic Napalm Girl photo of a terrified nine-year-old girl Vietnamese girl running away from napalm bombs”
In a remote Oaxacan community under the Usos y Costumbres system, a pastor who raped an eight-year-old was fined two crates of beer; feminist groups protested but local tradition was invoked as protection.
“the result is what the result is that because this is part of their tradition or whatever that you rape eight-year-old girl and you are punished by having to buy two crates of beer”
Varoufakis expected threatening Grexit would be a trump card against Schäuble; instead Schäuble enthusiastically supported it, offering billions, proving that leaving the system was not subversive, only remaining inside and defaulting was.
“Varoufakis told me that his greatest surprise was this one he visited Wolfgang Schäuble... what was Schäuble's reaction fine we fully support you”
Works invoked 8
V for Vendetta film
Žižek says he doesn't like it but uses it to illustrate the left's failure to think beyond the moment of revolutionary triumph, 'Part Two: what happens the next day?'
Elysium film
Cited alongside The Hunger Games as Hollywood blockbusters that 'know' we are heading toward a society of privileged inside a cupola and the majority outside.
The Hunger Games film
Cited alongside Elysium as post-apocalyptic visions that accurately paint the coming Sloterdijk cupola society.
Homo Deus book
Harari's 'popular but interesting' book; credited with noticing that anti-free-will arguments still implicitly preserve the free observer's vantage point.
The Crying Game film
Žižek says he loves it; used to illustrate the Lacanian thesis that heterosexual male desire is secretly homosexual.
M. Butterfly film
The Cronenberg film; paired with The Crying Game for the same Lacanian reading of male heterosexuality.
La Vraie Vie book
Badiou's new book; the primary intellectual interlocutor for the first half of the talk. Žižek calls it 'very new' and engages it closely on sexual difference, the withering of symbolic authority, and the emergence of new subject-forms.
Axel Honneth's book; cited for the paradox that dissatisfaction with capitalism is growing while the ability to articulate it into a leftist project is shrinking.
People invoked 37
Called 'the true clown' in the Clinton marriage; Hillary is described as 'the master in the relationship' who tolerated his philandering as a small irrelevant pleasure.
Nikki Johnson-Huston positive
Black American lawyer whom Žižek 'appreciates very much'; quoted at length on how white liberals have hijacked diversity conversations through language policing without material change.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'my friend,' a theorist of catastrophes sent by the EU to Fukushima; his report on the near-evacuation of Tokyo is used to argue for large-scale organizational capacity.
Oskar Lafontaine positive
Cited as a parallel to Varoufakis: forced out of the first Schröder government because he touched the sore point of controlling banks and finance.
Mentioned as the target of a Slovenian right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theory calling him a 'Talmudo-Zionist' orchestrating Muslim immigration, Žižek cites this as an example of paranoid ideology going public.
Wolfgang Schäuble positive
His welcoming of Grexit is used as evidence that leaving the eurozone was not subversive, Schäuble's systemic perspective is used to clarify what genuine disruption would look like.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: invoked for 'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel,' the claim that true heterosexuals are lesbians, and the analysis of transgender identity as symptom.
Stephen Hawking negative
Žižek rejects his warnings about AI as resting on a naive humanist notion of freedom; notes that Hawking's book dismisses philosophy as dead and then immediately articulates 'the most vulgar philosophy you can imagine.'
Mentioned in passing as associated with an 'affirmative joy' aesthetic that Žižek contrasts with the painful reality of transgender experience.
Called 'the true monster' of the Republican primaries; Žižek jokes that Cruz may not be human, 'maybe he is alien monster.'
Frank Ruda positive
Described as 'my good friend'; his recent defense of fatalism is the philosophical anchor for Žižek's closing argument about accepting catastrophe as unavoidable to avoid it.
Judith Butler negative
Named as 'the paradigmatic theorist' of the new fluid performative subjectivity; Žižek argues this subjectivity fits perfectly consumerist society and is already hegemonic, making Butler's claims of subversiveness false and desperate.
Donald Trump positive
Žižek treats Trump as intellectually symptomatic, an 'eternal adolescent,' a 'reckless hedonist prone to irrational brutal outbursts,' and a symbol of Sittlichkeit's disintegration; yet credits him with 'single-handedly ruining the Christian moral majority.'
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Homo Deus described as a 'popular book but interesting'; credited with noticing that even those who argue against free will still implicitly retain the position of the free observer.
Mentioned only as the chancellor under whom Lafontaine served before being pushed out.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Lumped with 'total idiots' who believe in the Singularity, a merger into one mega post-human awareness.
Alain Badiou positive
Describes Badiou as 'my good friend'; engages extensively with La Vraie Vie on sexual difference, the withering of the state, and the emergence of a new One subjectivity; says he 'maybe doesn't totally agree' with some passages but praises them as 'wonderful' and 'crazy.'
Alexis Tsipras negative
Žižek opposes the 'betrayal' narrative but also condemns the capitulation after the referendum as 'unacceptable'; says he is in bad relations personally with the Syriza majority.
Elon Musk negative
Mentioned alongside Hawking as warning about uncontrollable AI; Žižek treats these warnings as philosophically naive.
David Harvey positive
Mentioned alongside Sloterdijk as correctly arguing that capitalism's neglect of environmental costs cannot be solved by including them in commodity prices.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited as having emphasized that Protestant predestination is 'the most interesting notion for a Marxist from theology.'
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Žižek calls him 'the only true radical' in Syriza; praises his strategy of defaulting while remaining in the euro to cause chaos as genuinely subversive, and notes this is why he was forced out.
Described as the 'first candidate' for the post-feminist hegemonic woman figure, but too stupid to play the role effectively.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited for the phrase 'revolution without revolution' to describe political correctness's demand for change without cost.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek reads him carefully despite ideological distance ('maybe a neo-nazi eugenic whatever'): praises his diagnosis of capitalist collapse and the cupola image, but notes he provides no concrete proposals.
Rodrigo Duterte positive
Stands for decay of the rule of law and transformation of state power into extralegal mob rule; used diagnostically alongside Trump and Clinton as the third member of the ideal contemporary politician.
Martin Heidegger positive
Žižek says he would approach the AI question 'almost in a Heideggerian mode', asking what prior understanding of human freedom underlies Hawking's and Musk's warnings.
Axel Honneth positive
Cited for the paradox in Idee des Sozialismus: growing dissatisfaction with capitalism but decreasing ability to articulate it into a new leftist project.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for the idea that the past is open, retroactive transformation of the past as a form of political action.
Hillary Clinton positive
Figures as the exemplary 'new feminine one': a 'self-controlled ruthless manipulator' who exploits her femininity; Žižek uses her as diagnostic of a new hegemonic subject-form, while resisting the liberal narrative of her as Bill's victim.
Thomas Metzinger positive
Praised as 'your great brain scientist'; cited for the serious question of whether we can subjectively live with the neuroscientific result that there is no substantial self.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek begins to invoke him as 'the big Other the terrorist' (an in-joke with the moderator) before being interrupted; implies Habermas represents a position he'd challenge.
Benjamin Libet positive
His neuroscience experiments (neural firing preceding conscious choice) are praised for yielding an 'extremely refined Hegelian reading': freedom as veto power over predetermined decisions.
Noam Chomsky positive
Borrows the phrase 'manufacturing consent' for his own analysis; reports that Chomsky privately expressed genuine despair for the first time about ecological and geopolitical threats.
Karl Marx positive
Badiou's (and Žižek's) reference point: today's state resembles a decadent version of Marx's 'withering away of the state,' reduced to an administrative regulator of market egotism.
Edward Bond positive
Quoted for the line 'If you can't face Hiroshima in the theater you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself', the best argument against politically correct censorship of graphic violence.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Sittlichkeit is the Hegelian concept anchoring the lecture's main diagnosis; Hegel's notion of the state as all-encompassing community is used to measure contemporary disintegration.
What it argues
disintegration of Sittlichkeit and ethical substancepolitical correctness as revolution without revolutiondifferential gendering of contemporary subjectivityrage–rebellion–new power triad and its failurefatalism and predestination as political stancequalified eurocentrism and the limits of multiculturalismSyriza, Varoufakis, and the paradox of remaining inside to cause chaos
Dialectical moves 11
“The problem with political correctness is not that it's utopian but that it's already predominant — the hegemonic ideology presenting itself as subversive and transgressive.”
What poses as radical critique of the system is already its dominant form; the 'transgression' is the norm.
“The biggest problem of Stalinism was that it couldn't organize a well-functioning bureaucracy — it always needed an emergency state because it lacked efficient administration.”
The classical critique of Stalinism as over-bureaucratized is inverted: the real failure was under-bureaucratization.
“The future is closed while the past is open — the opposite of common sense.”
Fatalist determinism about what will happen is paired with retroactive freedom to reinterpret and transform the meaning of what has happened.
“The only true heterosexuals are lesbians — then there are two types of homosexuality: what we call heterosexuals and gays.”
Lacanian inversion: male 'heterosexuality' is structurally a homosexual fantasy, while lesbian desire is the only genuinely other-sex desire.
“The problem with global capitalism is precisely that it is not global enough.”
Anti-globalization critique is reversed: capitalism's problem is that it does not universalize its own emancipatory logic, not that it is too universal.
“We need more alienation, not less — what I'm advocating is precisely alienation in the sense of efficient bureaucracy.”
The standard left demand to overcome alienation is reversed: impersonal, 'alienated' bureaucratic infrastructure is what enables real freedom and local autonomy.
“Things that were once dirty private rumors and paranoiac fantasies are now becoming public currency — the prohibition itself is prohibited.”
The disintegration of Sittlichkeit means the second-order prohibition (the prohibition on voicing the prohibition's violation) has collapsed.
“The very critics of eurocentrism occupy a European standpoint — radical egalitarianism and feminism are themselves European legacies.”
Anti-eurocentrism performatively contradicts itself: the position from which Europe is criticized is available only through Europe's own emancipatory tradition.
“The fact that you are not taking the threat seriously is precisely what makes it realistic that it will happen.”
Non-seriousness about catastrophe (ecological, geopolitical) is not a sign of safety but the very mechanism that makes catastrophe likely.
“Grexit was not disturbing the game — remaining inside the euro and defaulting was the truly radical move.”
Leaving a system is not subversive; remaining inside while refusing to play by its rules causes more fundamental disruption.
“Occupying empty houses for immigrants does the greatest service to capitalism — it softens its impact and makes the situation tolerable.”
Radical-looking local activism can function as a safety valve that sustains rather than challenges the system.
Claims 17
asserts
Political correctness is a form of 'revolution without revolution' that acknowledges injustice but refuses any actual structural change, functioning as a palliative that leaves the hegemonic order intact.political correctness
rejects
The fluid, performative subjectivity celebrated by Judith Butler as subversive fits perfectly the logic of consumerist commodified society and is already the hegemonic form of subjectivity.Butlerian performative subjectivity as subversive
rejects
The opposition between liberal pluralism and religious/ethnic fundamentalism is a pseudo-struggle lost in advance, not the central conflict of our time.liberalism vs. fundamentalism as the main conflict
asserts
Class struggle and anti-sexist struggle conceal a hidden hard choice: they cannot be genuinely unified without radical self-transformation on both sides, and the rhetorical calls for unity are currently hollow.unity of class struggle and anti-sexist politics
asserts
The very standpoint from which we criticize European horrors — radical egalitarianism, feminism, abstract individuality — is itself a European legacy, and anti-eurocentrism signals capitalism's abandonment of universal emancipation.eurocentrism and the critique of Europe
rejects
Local communities and immediate council democracy cannot serve as the site of resistance to global capitalism; we need more alienation, not less — in the form of efficient large-scale bureaucratic organizations.localism and council democracy as anti-capitalist strategy
reframes
The problem with global capitalism is precisely that it is not global enough — it thrives through multiculturalism and local particularisms rather than being threatened by them.global capitalism and multiculturalism
asserts
Manners and unwritten rules (Sittlichkeit) matter politically because their disintegration is a direct pathway to barbarism, and the left should present itself as a defender of public decency.Sittlichkeit, manners, and left politics
asserts
Today's rage in failed emancipatory movements is not only the starting point but increasingly the endpoint — there is no longer a shared language to articulate dissatisfaction into a new leftist project.contemporary left and the failure to articulate rage
reframes
Syriza's deepest failure was not losing links with social movements but the left's inability to invent a formula for what to do once it takes power.Syriza's failure
asserts
Varoufakis's strategy — default the debt while remaining inside the euro to cause systemic chaos — was the only genuinely radical option, which is why he was the one who truly disturbed the game.Varoufakis and Syriza strategy
asserts
The future is closed and the past is open: a fatalist acceptance that catastrophe may be inevitable is not resignation but the paradoxical condition of genuine political freedom and persistence.fatalism and political action
reframes
Transgender people are the symptom of the impossibility of sexual identity as such — an antagonism immanent to all gender — not a deviation from a working norm.transgender identity and sexual difference
asserts
Heterosexual male love is unconsciously and secretly homosexual — the male fantasy is that the femme fatale is a man dressed as a woman — which is why Lacan says true heterosexuals are lesbians.heterosexuality, homosexuality, and Lacanian sexual difference
asserts
Graphic, traumatizing descriptions of atrocity are necessary to vaccinate against it — sanitized 'politically correct' descriptions achieve the same effect as calling torture 'enhanced interrogation technique.'political correctness, graphic depiction, and Edward Bond
asserts
The abolition of universal military conscription is a form of privatization of the state itself, eroding the shared ethical substance of citizenship.military conscription and state disintegration
asserts
Trump's greatest achievement was single-handedly ruining the conservative Christian moral majority by embodying an obscene consumerist lifestyle incompatible with their values.Trump and the Christian right
Quotes 15
“Revolution without revolution — it admits the injustices of the actual life but it wants to cure them without any actual change, without anyone being hurt or giving anything up.”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness as pseudo-radicalism
“If you can't face Hiroshima in the theater you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself.”Slavoj Žižek · necessity of graphic depiction of atrocity
“The problem with global capitalism is precisely that it's not global enough.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism and universalization
“I want to live in a nice alienated society where there is an invisible relatively well-functioning network which provides water electricity health and so on and I want to be left alone to watch movies and read and write my books.”Slavoj Žižek · defense of bureaucratic alienation
“The only true heterosexuals are lesbians and then there are two types of homosexuality: what we call heterosexuals and gays.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian inversion of sexual difference
“The future is closed it's our fate we are caught in dynamic while the past is open.”Slavoj Žižek · fatalist reversal of time and freedom
“A pessimist is the only way to be a little bit glad — since things are usually not so absolutely bad you are all the time in small details happily surprised.”Slavoj Žižek · pessimism as happiness strategy
“Not only that things are prohibited the prohibition itself is prohibited.”Slavoj Žižek · second-order prohibition and ideology
“The fact that you are not taking it seriously is for me precisely the fact that makes it realistic that it will happen.”Slavoj Žižek · non-seriousness as catastrophe mechanism
“I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called V for Vendetta part two — what happens then next day how do they organize new power.”Slavoj Žižek · failure to think the day after revolution
“In absolute anxiety not to miss the inevitable you get close to true freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · predestination and freedom
“a woman is always by herself a terrestrial proof that god doesn't exist that god doesn't have to exist it is sufficient to take a look at a woman”Slavoj Žižek · women as embodied atheism (Badiou)
“The vulgarity is not in doing this the vulgarity is in even saying this.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump and the collapse of unwritten rules
“We are dealing today with a new version of what was for a long time called in psychoanalysis the post-traditional protean subject — a fluid subject who experiences itself as permanently reinventing and reconstructing itself.”Slavoj Žižek · protean consumerist subjectivity
“There will be and there will not be money in communism... some people will have money others will not have money.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist dialectics and digital inequality
Transcript 13 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I would like to begin with a book that I finished reading a couple of days ago it's very new book a new book by my good friend Alain Badiou La Vraie Vie the true life the book opens with the provocative claim that from Socrates onwards the main function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth the young to alienate or rather extraneate in Brecht's sense of Verfremdung the young from the predominant ideological and political order to sow radical doubts and enable them to think autonomously no wonder Socrates the first philosopher was also its first victim as we all know ordered by the democratic court of Athens to drink poison today however the task of a philosopher is no longer to undermine the hegemonic hierarchic symbolic edifice which grounds social stability but to make not only the young but people in general perceive the dangers of the growing post-patriarchal nihilist order which presents itself as the domain of new freedoms we live in an extraordinary era where there is no tradition on which we can base our identity no frame of meaningful life which would provide for us which would sorry enable us to live a life beyond hedonist reproduction this new world disorder this gradually emerging worldless Weltlos civilization exemplarily affects the younger generation which oscillates between the intensity of fully burning out sexual enjoyment drugs alcohol up to violence and the endeavor to succeed study make a career earn money and so on and so on the only alternative to it being a violent retreat into some artificially resuscitated tradition incidentally the last time I visited Seoul South Korea I was fascinated I think this really is the country of our future literally I counted once on a train people and nine out of ten minimum were on some medium talking looking at a screen and they of course have in Korea the highest suicide number per capita of in younger generation the young people are absolutely obsessed with intensely enjoying and with succeeding career Badiou perspicuously noticed that we are getting today a kind of decadent reactionary version of the withering away disintegration of the state announced by Marx today's 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 ourselves this disintegration of the ethical substance is clearly signaled by the abolition of universal military conscription in many countries the very notion of being ready to risk one's life for a common cause appears more and more pointless if not directly ridiculous to most of us so that armed forces as the body in which all citizens equally participate are gradually turning into a mercenary force so I think you see this is the first thing that a critical thought should do not just celebrate wonderful no longer universal military conscription and so on what's the price we are paying for it that you have mercenary army and that and that this again abolition of of military universal military conscription is a clear case of privatization of state itself this disintegration of a shared ethical substance I follow here Badiou who develops this how this disintegration affects differently the two sexes and I'm well into transgender debate I don't want to go into it now how no they are not two they are three four five the latest number from Canada is that there are sexes but okay I will not go into that we can debate it men are gradually turning into perpetual adolescents with no clear passage of initiation that would enact their entry into maturity you know in more traditional societies till my god half a century ago there were many initiatic points in the life of a young man in some countries military service you become a man after you do military service then it was acquiring a profession then it was finishing your education this no longer functions no wonder then that in order to supplant this lack youth gangs proliferate providing ersatz initiation and social identity but and here I found Badiou's thesis interesting he claims that in contrast to men who are condemned to some kind of prolonged eternal adolescence women are more and more precociously mature treated as small adults expected to control their lives to plan their careers and so on what then is happening today with sexual difference traditionally we all know this men were perceived as bearers of the one the monotheist god patriarchal power stable social hierarchy while women were associated with the two their position was always perceived as the one of between the two between mother and whore lover and saint and so on Badiou sees in this between the two something much deeper than an effect of oppressive patriarchal ideology a quote from Badiou a woman is the overcoming of the one in the guise of a passage of between the two end of quote the conclusion Badiou draws from this is surprising but consequent and it's crazy I like this passage although I maybe don't totally agree with it namely Badiou claims that by their very existence women are atheists they embody resistance to one god denouncing it as a fiction here is this wonderful quote my translation from French into English from Badiou's book a woman is always by herself a 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 jealousy tradition knows that in order to keep god alive in whatever way women have to be kept absolutely invisible end of quote today however when the reign of the symbolic one is weakened the hierarchy of roles and places under a divine name of the father is becoming largely irrelevant to fill in this void a new one the figure of one subjectivity is emerging a hedonist consumer caught in market competition enjoying life and simultaneously a ruthless manipulator in how he or she does it here sexual difference re-enters unexpectedly men are more and more ludic adolescents outlaws women appear as hard mature serious legal and punitive subjects this is why as Badiou claims there is a bourgeois feminism bent on domination women are today not called by the ruling ideology to be subordinated they are called solicited expected to be judges administrators ministers CEOs teachers even policewomen and soldiers a paradigmatic scene occurring daily in our security institutions is that of a feminine teacher judge psychologist taking care of an immature asocial young male delinquent 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 condition of today's capitalism women can do better than men there is a political triad which renders perfectly this predicament I think Hillary Duterte Trump Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are today's ultimate political couple Trump is precisely following Badiou's diagnosis the eternal adolescent a reckless hedonist prone prone to irrational brutal outbursts that hurt his chances while Hillary exemplifies the new feminine one a self-controlled ruthless manipulator who recklessly exploits her femininity and presents herself as caring for the marginal victims and so on her femininity makes her all the more efficient in manipulation so one should not be seduced by her image as the victim of Bill Bill Clinton's joyful philandering about allowing woman to suck him and so on Bill Clinton was the the true clown while she was the master in the relationship allowing her servants small irrelevant pleasures like I imagine her Bill go go there Monica is waiting for you to suck you leave me alone to do serious manipulations planning what then about Rodrigo Duterte the Philippine president openly soliciting extrajudicial murders of drug addicts and dealers going up to comparing himself positively of course 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 it is not yet permitted to do openly in our civilized so-called civilized western countries so if we condense the three into one I think this would be the ideal image of the politician today a person called Hillary Duterte middle name Trump all three together as for the now comes next problematic more philosophical point as for the underlying form of subjectivity which is operative in this shift we are clearly dealing with a new version of so-called what was for a long time called in psychoanalysis in social psychoanalysis the post-traditional protean subject today the hegemonic form of subjectivity is no longer the autonomous protestant subject subordinated to the paternal Oedipal law which guarantees his or her moral freedom but a fluid subject a subject who experiences itself as permanently reinventing and reconstructing itself joyfully experimenting with combinations of different identities the paradigmatic theorist of this new form of subjectivity is Judith Butler and although she insists on its subversive character it is easy to demonstrate that such a subjectivity you know permanently reconstructing itself through through performatively enacting assuming different positions and so on a subjectivity rejecting any fixed identity obsessed with playful discursive reinvention fits perfectly our consumerist commodified society this is why the obsessive attacks on patriarchy and Oedipal order sound at least for me false and desperate they attack an enemy who is in full retreat reacting to something new which is already hegemonic in short the problem with this vision of a new fluid subjectivity it's not that it is utopian but that it is already predominant yet another case of the hegemonic ideology presenting itself as subversive and transgressive now this of course appears to be but I think it's not the central conflict today forces of freedom plurality reinvention versus new forms of religious or whatever fundamentalism I think this is ultimately a pseudo struggle which is lost in advance the first problem I see here is that one cannot distinguish in a direct way the universal dimension of the emancipatory project and the identity of a particular way of life so that as liberals are telling us while we are all together engaged in a universal struggle for freedom equality and so on tolerance and so on we should simultaneously fully respect the right of each group to its particular way of life one should never forget that for a subject who lives a particular way of life all universals appear to him colored by this specific way of life each identity each way of life comprises also a specific way to relate to other ways of life so when we posit as a guideline that each group should be left to enact its particular identity to practice its own way of life the problem immediately arises where do customs that form my identity stop and where does injustice begin are women's rights just our custom or is the struggle for women's rights also universal and in this sense part of the emancipatory struggle is homophobia just a thing of particular culture to be tolerated as a component of its identity should arranged marriages which form the very core of the kinship structures of some societies should they also be accepted as part of a particular identity where to draw the line the task is here I think to bring the struggle into every particular way of life each particular way of life is antagonistic full of inner tensions and inconsistencies and the only way to proceed is to work for an alliance of struggles in different cultures from here I would like to return to the project which is of course the alpha and omega of today's left of the alliance between progressive middle classes fighting for LGBT tolerance and so on and the so-called nomadic proletarians all these third-world refugees in terms of concrete problematic this means that the politico-economic struggle against global capitalism and the struggle for sexual freedoms tolerance and so on have to be conceived as two forms the two forms of aspects of the same struggle which is I claim extremely difficult all the desperate calls for the unification of struggles I know there there are some wonderful almost almost dreamy scenes that I remember for example my friend showed me photos of how in in a small Palestinian village close to Jerusalem there were effectively two-three years ago demonstrations protesting Israeli activity where it was incredible Muslim women totally covered walked together with transgender and feminist activists dressed in an extremely provocative way and so on and so on okay I almost cried it's beautiful but I claim it cannot be universalized I don't share the hope of some of my leftist friends that you see you see it's the beginning and slowly slowly we will have the majority I don't think this will happen because I think that today's predominant form of anti-sexist struggle in developed western countries is to such an extent constrained by our own ideological coordinates that it's simply impossible to unify it with third-world economic struggles struggles against western domination maybe the phrase class struggle and anti-sexist struggle conceal a hidden hard choice one or the other never never both of them in spite of all the rhetoric of solidarity today's actual nomadic proletarians immigrants from non-western countries and today's actual anti-sexist movements cannot find the same language to construct a shared space for both of them is a difficult task that requires long and hard work of self-transformation from both sides from both sides not only will the immigrants have to change profoundly their identity really radically abandon their way of their way of reproducing themselves through family ties but also here all this you know I call them the people who fight here for for anti-sexist and so on who causes but express abstract solidarity with immigrants it's not enough the way they are you cannot unite them without radical self-transformation on both sides second general point I want to make it here I think that one of the main if not the main ideological obstacle to this unity in the west is political correctness why no it's not people usually accuse me that when I attack political correctness I do it for egotist reasons to justify my propensity to make dirty tasteless jokes and so on it's not as simple as that I want to begin by a quote from Edward Bond that perhaps you know it if you can't face Hiroshima in the theater you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself this is I think the best argument against those who oppose graphic descriptions of sexual violence and other atrocities dismissing them as participating in the same violence these descriptions pretend to critically analyze and reject for example in a very critical review of my own intervention at the Walter Benjamin conference in Ramallah a little bit less than a year ago the writer in some German journal I forgot where claims that I enumerate quote now criticism of me a detailed list of ritualized sexual violences taking place outside of the Islamic world thus showing his mine willingness to accompany honor killings with matching atrocities he me was each time rhetorically apologetic about his descriptions it's really hard for me to talk about this and so on and each time he came back with more obscene bloody and graphic details this is sufficient to grasp the pointlessness and ambivalence of his intervention displaying concerns about sexual violence by subjecting the watchful audience to the violence of crude images of heinous sexual practices in other words because what I did there in Ramallah was I totally supported their own struggle against honor killings and so on and I claim that nonetheless that what women suffer there is just part of a general plague of horrors going on today from Mexico to Canada and so on I was accused of just reproducing the same horrors this I think is the prototype of politically correct line of argumentation in order I claim to really grasp sexual violence 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 to rape as enhanced seduction technique it is only the taste of the real thing that effectively vaccinate us against it and we can already see the consequences of such a stance of protection when at the beginning of September of this year two months ago Facebook censored the iconic Napalm Girl photo of a terrified nine-year-old girl Vietnamese girl running away from napalm bombs it hypocritically justified it as a defense against displaying child nudity which can count as child pornography of course ignoring the obvious political dimension along these lines the one whom I appreciate very much Nikki Johnson-Huston it's an American black lawyer wrote a wonderful letter to the public where he describes eloquently how quote white liberals have hijacked the conversation about diversity political correctness and what topics we should be outraged about now comes the long quote 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 call him or her a racist homophobic misogynistic bigot and trying to have him or her 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 because of affirmative action or that all black people grew up in poverty end of quote therein resides I think the political problem with political correctness to repeat Robespierre it admits the injustices of the actual life but it wants to cure them with a what Robespierre called revolution without revolution in exact parallel incidentally 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 we have everything today this censored aseptic politically correct versions for example so-called Native Americans we call them once Indians I much prefer the term Indians incidentally as they do also my so-called Indian friends you know what they told me no I am not a native American because if I'm native nature what are you white culture I prefer to be called Indian because in this way at least my name is a monument to the stupidity of white men who thought they discovered India and so on you have to really encounter all those protective victims to see how they hate this politically correct approach and so on and so on and they are so sensitive about the dangers of patronizing them for example a friend in in Missoula Montana it happened an academic guy there gave me a small study he wrote proving that Native Americans Indians killed more buffaloes and burnt more forests than all white people combined there no it's not crazy masochism it's just a wonderful insight into no thanks for your patronizing image of us you know the first right of autonomy is I can also be as evil as you maybe even worse that's where true anti-racism begins so what liberals want is a vision of social change 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 in their safe enclaves a further consequence of this politically correct speech is the spreading prohibition of irony when one makes a remark considered non-politically correct it is less and less possible to save oneself by claiming it was meant ironically here I claim opposites coincide again in the beginning of September of this year two months ago media reported that North Korea has forbidden people from making sarcastic comments about Kim Jong-un or his regime in their everyday conversation even indirect criticism has been banned namely it's a wonderful news that the people in North Korea started to do what to use in an ironic way the official phrases themselves for example as you know North Korea blames everything on United States all their misfortunes are because South Korea is still occupied by Americans and so on so people started you like somebody doesn't function a train crashes there is no food and people say oh this is all America's fault and so on and so on and in a wonderful scene which was reported in media at one public meeting where by mistake one foreigner found himself a desperate ordinary guy says listen we cannot criticize the official regime now we cannot even agree with it because then we can be accused of irony so what can we do and in a wonderful symptomatic moment of truth the functionary from central government said just shut up and everything and everything will be okay so now I move to more general points from all this we are witnessing today something that one cannot but call the disintegration of what Hegel named Sittlichkeit not simply morality but mores customs Sitten the thick background of mostly unwritten rules of social life which tell us what we can do and what we cannot do this I claim is disintegrating on two accounts on the one hand it's as you may have noticed it more and more possible and here I am a classic moralist I'm for hypocrisy I am for keeping the appearances namely I don't know how it is in Germany but I know from United States to my own city country Slovenia things that it was unimaginable like years ago not even years ago for them to say it publicly now they can be widely propagated publicly and nobody reacts for example I must report this to you what I was shocked by it it happened in Slovenia two months ago in the main right-wing weekly magazine one of their anti-immigrant European racist commentators published a ferocious attack on George Soros claiming that calling him Talmudo-Zionist who is the most dangerous living person on earth why the idea was that he Soros is fulfilling actualizing the old Zionist plan of ruining western European identity and culture by secretly organizing Muslim immigrants to enter Europe and these immigrants are characterized in openly racist terms as as Muslim negroid hordes and so on whatever what I like here I like these excessive moments of ideology because they are the moment of truth like you think that we live in some kind of a conflict between Zionism and Islam no to this guy everything is clear behind this Muslim invasion of Europe it's Zionism it's it's are the Jews the Jews are again the hidden masters so it's all one big plot and so on and so on okay I will not go on and lose time here what I just wanted to tell you is how surprised I am that nobody reacts to this people laugh a little bit they oh did you read that idiot what he wrote there but it's slowly becoming a common currency to talk like this so again I believe what is happening today is again things which were years ago something that belonged to this private domain of dirty rumors paranoiac ideas and so on we all maybe were telling each other all these but it was private fantasies as it were are now becoming a public currency I will not even enumerate examples of this all I want to say is that for me civilization in good and in bad means that you know not only written rules but the unwritten rules let let me give you an example which is not a good one I remember it from when I was serving Yugoslav army in in Yugoslav constitution it says that all languages of Yugoslav federation are equal also in the army which means Serbo-Croat Slovene Macedonian Albanian and that only only in commandment the Serbo-Croat language should be used which I accept I mean like you cannot shout attack in all five languages or whatever but that's all but it was nice example of unwritten rules how de facto in the army we all had to talk Serbo-Croat if two of us Slovenes were caught talking among ourselves Slovene we were immediately accused of nationalism separatism and so on and so on then at some political class one of the soldiers asked the officer comrade officer whatever isn't there a small contradiction here we have to speak Serbo-Croat but in constitution it says all languages official languages the four that I enumerated are equal what happened is that the officer simply told him you are an idiot you don't understand anything if you ask a question like this again you will be arrested you you see how this is how ideology works in everyday life it's not only that things are prohibited the prohibition itself is prohibited and I will make a jump now I improvise a lot today Trump is precisely violating this prohibition for example he tried to prove I was quite shocked in one of his TV interviews that his wife Melania who is Slovene I'm proud to tell you but I'm ashamed that how what a great lady she is and she said something that I don't want to use the dirty word flatulence you know if you eat too many beans or what he said that never once in their marriage did he hear her emitting a sound of flatulence you know what's the problem the problem is that you don't say this my god you know the vulgarity is not in doing this the vulgarity is in even saying this or the same was with Hillary Clinton once Donald Trump made fun of her because she had to disappear for three minutes probably taking a break for the toilet and Trump said I don't want even to imagine what where she went it's disgusting and so on no sorry we all do this the disgusting thing is to mention this publicly and Trump can do it which is why he is for me one of the symbols of this let's call it disintegration of disintegration of ethical substance I claim that manners matter because now you can say but we have serious problems today the threat of a new world war ecological catastrophe and so on why talk about manners ah here I am tempted to repeat you know De Quincey's famous quip about the simple art of murder how many people began with a simple murder and ended up behaving badly at a table and so on I'm tempted to say how many people began with unleashing terror and economic catastrophes and ended up behaving badly at a party because I think manners do matter sometimes precisely manners are the last thing that separates us from direct barbarism and here I'm becoming a leftist moralist I'm claiming that some of us unfortunately old enough to remember the 60s where it was I remember popular to use the F-word to talk a little bit brutally dirty to denounce the hypocrisy of the official jargon but now the right-wingers populists are talking like that and I think the left should shamelessly use the chance and present itself as a defender of decency and public manners we should be this today let me go on another very tricky topic at this level is Europe eurocentrism and so on I think that another leftist tragedy today should be a qualified eurocentrism why today of course I don't agree with right-wingers who claim our culture is threatened by Islam by whoever I fully admit that the greatest threat today to what is worth saving from European legacy are precisely our anti-immigrant populist defenders of Europe themselves but we should nonetheless beware of something if you look at a high-quality critique of dark aspects of European legacy and there are many of them don't forget that Holocaust colonial horrors even Gulag these are ultimately results of European civilization but if you look closely at it we have to admit that the very position from which we criticize this from which we are horrified at this is a European one radical egalitarianism feminism and so on the idea of us as abstract individuals where ultimately doesn't matter if we are men women and so on and so on is part of European legacy all other cultures are basically organic organic in the sense that each of us at his her there proper place within the social edifice and this is for me why criticism of eurocentrism is so popular today it's not something good it's a very ominous sign of the fact that that capitalism is entering a new stage where it no longer needs universal emancipation freedom equality and so on and so on so this brings me to my next very problematic for some of you political point it's nice to be against global capitalism but I absolutely don't believe that the ultimate resort of this anti-global capitalist struggle can be some local manners local communities resisting to it and so on and so on I always claim global capitalism is fully multiculturalist it functions ideally with multitude of local cultures and so on and so on let me give you an example that it happened recently I found it in the media in the fall of a 55-year-old former pastor in Santiago Quetzalapa a remote indigenous community in the south of Mexico raped an eight-year-old girl and the local court condemned him to buy the girl's father two crates of beer as punishment then feminist groups from Mexico City protested and the answer was what was that sorry in this city indigenous communities are ruled by a system popularly known as Usos y Costumbres traditions and customs supposed to enshrine the traditions of local populations in a state with diverse indigenous groups so you see they wanted to do something noble not just this bourgeois abstract law let's include into our legal system the wisdom thousand-years-old wisdom of local communities and so on and so on the result is what the result is that because this is part of their tradition or whatever that you rape eight-year-old girl and you are punished by paying by having to buy two crates of beer and many other examples and so on and so on so what I want to say is that we have to be courageous enough to admit that these famous local traditions are not really a site of resistance something from where we can attack what is wrong with global capitalism I think that the problem with global capitalism is precisely that it's not precisely that it's not global enough I don't have time to go in detail here and so I will just go to the my concluding moments to the title of my talk finally rage rebellion new power that's the problem of all this ultimately the problem of populism is for me something that referring to Noam Chomsky we can call a crisis in manufacturing consent our political system is not just a set of explicit rules written unwritten but it's a lot of customs of how things effectively function and that no longer works and populism is one of the ways to fill in this void what's our problem today we know that this triad rage rebellion and a new power is a kind of a basic triad of every revolutionary process first there is chaotic rage people are not satisfied they show it in a more or less violent way without any clear goal and organization then when this rage gets articulated organized we get a rebellion with a minimal organization and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is finally if rebellion succeeds the new power confronts the immense task of organizing the new society the problem is that we almost never get this triad in its logical progression chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into a rightist populism rebellion succeeds but loses steam and so on and so on so this is why in our societies more and more rage is not only the beginning but also the end the outcome of failed emancipatory projects remember I always remember them years ago how the French suburban riots were exploding where thousands of cars were burning and there were major outbursts of public violence in suburbs of Paris and so on what strikes the eye in these protests what struck the eye was the total absence of any positive utopian prospect if May was a revolt with a utopian vision the revolts were outbursts with no pretense to vision if the often repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense it is here there was no program and this tells a lot about our predicament because as even Axel Honneth noticed in his last book Idee des Sozialismus Idea of Socialism the great paradox of our situation is that there is a growing dissatisfaction with global capitalism which often explodes in rage but it is less and less possible to articulate this rage into a new leftist political project so this is how things disintegrate back into rage but let's take the example where we had a success there was a new power the victory of Syriza in Greece I think it's a genuine tragedy what happened there I totally oppose to those idiots who simply shout betrayal betrayal Syriza won a referendum and then were afraid to act upon it no I think that when people blame that capitulation or whatever you call it of Syriza they the usual counter-argument is that Syriza forgot or obliterated its links to actual social movements that the moment Syriza took power already before it was no longer what was its strength the network of local movement feminist workers rights ecological it simply became another party competing for state power I think that this exactly is a wrong counter-argument to make I don't think that keeping links with social keeping links alive with social base maintaining roots in actual social movements this is simply an excuse the big problem is not is precisely that the left didn't yet invent a formula of effectively how should I put it what to do when you take power how to reorganize power we have two-three models we have real socialist communist stalinist model it didn't work we see it clearly we have social democratic model welfare state it worked as long as it worked it didn't work at the end today it frankly no it I mean the tragedy is with some exceptions I admit it that social democracy is basically today the great conservative power their motive is basically let's not abandon let's keep our old achievements we all know that we live in new times where tremendous things are happening I'm not ideologically blinded by them but just think about two-three of them about a so-called cooperative commons I don't believe that this is already a new communism but obviously the market economy is gradually overcoming itself or just think philosophically about what the new digitalization of our lives but digitalization combined with biogenetics and so on brain sciences leads to we will be more and more dominated by digital machines and I'm not even afraid of it look it can already be proven I read some wonderful experiments with they did it in United States they in so many levels for example in even in stock market investing do you know that you already can download for free a program which it's demonstrated through experiments which will tell you when to buy to sell your stocks better than the most expensive stockbrokers advisers and so on machines know it better machines already can diagnose you better than at least the average doctor some progressive leftist I like this cynicism sociologists even proved that computers can do it better in elections because we are stupid confused people you hate the ruling government but then usually through some last minute spin spins and manipulations you vote for something immediately before elections out of fear and so on which goes against your interest what they my friends did it is people selected people allowed the computer to follow their everyday experience all the disappointment with politics economics and so on and then computer who kept the entire picture decided how to vote it was much more to the left even even they decided that with marriage they again to two sets of the people whom will you marry not computer a computer did better and wait a minute these are not naive science fiction people they are not claiming computers cannot make mistakes no they are also stupid and so on they are just saying on average they are doing much better than our daily lives so where are we coming we have just different fantasies here one fantasy is so-called singularity total idiots I think so like Ray Kurzweil and so on you know we are approaching the moment when we will all be combined into one big mega post-human awareness or we will simply be reduced to idiots to puppets manipulated digitally or through biogenetic and so on and so on but my prediction is that something third will happen the combination of the two what do I mean by this you know I always remember here one of my favorite stalinist jokes that in the mid-30s they were debating in the Politburo will there be money in communism or not and the right-wing Bukharin people claimed of course it's natural to have money to exchange products so there have to be money in communism left-wingers claimed no money means alienated commodity societies there will not be money in communism then comrade Stalin the greatest genius intervenes and says no these are both deviations left-wing right-wing deviations the reality is a dialectical synthesis there will be and there will not be money in communism then they ask Stalin but how do you mean this comrade Stalin and he says well it's simple some people will have money others will not have money no and my point is that it's the same with this digitalization you know some people will lose their freedom other people will not lose their freedom and I mean there are such complex things happening today what will happen again with cooperative commons with I think the big problem I see with we already see the tendencies to post-market economy it's clear it's clear it's clear that the way intellectual property functions today it more and more undermines private property and I even see potentially a progressive element in all these ultra-capitalist horrors like Uber taxis and so on and so on something new is emerging we don't yet have concrete ideas what to do you know to be very brief short you know what's the problem for me did you see the film which I don't like very much but that's why I'm mentioning it to you V for Vendetta with Natalie Portman and so on you remember how the film ends the crowd attacks the British parliament victory of the revolution end of the film as I usually say my god I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called V for Vendetta part two what happens then next day how do they organize new power and so on we I I don't believe in state socialism of course not I don't believe in no longer in welfare social-democratic capitalism but I also don't believe if anything even less I believe in the last I claim remainder of the 20th century that will have to be sacrificed immediate council democracy you know what is still alive for 20th century is this idea against alienated representational politics local communities organizing their life and so on and so on I think this is a horrible vision it's totally wrong politically and so on first no local communities with living self-management self-organization cannot save us I literally I'm not joking I will again be accused of provocations I think we need more alienation precisely alienation in the sense of efficient bureaucracy if I have a problem today is bureaucratic socialism now you will say horror GDR Stalinism no don't you see if you read and I do with pleasure always old stalinist texts the biggest problem of Stalinism was bureaucracy Stalinism couldn't organize a well-functioning bureaucracy that's why it always needed an emergency state I an ideal social model for me is not some stupid local community where every afternoon I have to go to some debate group how we will distribute water how we will take no I want to live in a nice alienated society where there is an invisible relatively well-functioning network which provides water electricity health and so on and I want to be left alone to watch movies to read and write my books and so on and so on first problem second problem what we need today the with the problems we are confronted intellectual property ecology brain sciences and so on immigrants we need more and more strong large-scale organizations I claim just think about Fukushima do you know my friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy who was there immediately after he is a theorist of catastrophes and was sent by European Union he said that do you know that for a couple of hours Japanese authorities thought that the radiations will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area million people where would they go how we need even stronger than state larger organizations I mean local communities are wonderful in so far as they local self-organized communities in so far as they work but I always claim for them to work quite many things have to function imperceptibly in the background and that's where the battle is decided okay we debate how to how to organize health but for this you have to have large hospitals which work how to distribute water electricity who organizes that and so on and so on so another thing that's the true if you ask me tragedy for me I will not name you names but I'm sad that I cannot for ethical reasons I spoke with many well-known leftists recently really big names who all privately like in secret literally told me that you know the only hope for us today is a big mega catastrophe not just thousand dead but at least a couple of hundred of thousand dead that such a radical catastrophe is the only thing that can awaken people and to make them to take seriously social change and so on and so on but this makes me even sad where are we when the radical left literally not only awaits mega catastrophe as their only chance but even some of the leftists told me maybe we should even risk it to organize this catastrophe to explode a couple of a couple of atomic energy nuclear electric plants and so on and so on this is for me just another thing in this hopelessness we don't have a model and I think that in spite of all these problems now I will finish although the picture is bleak we have to persist namely if the picture is so dark as I painted it then you can say but my god why don't simply resign to a radical change why don't we say okay let's play the modest game that goes on modest small changes maybe it will work no I am more of a pessimist I think that we are today approaching and although Chomsky really hates me but a good friend of mine recently visited Chomsky now two weeks ago and told me something very sad that Chomsky in private drinking coffee after the official interview told him that he is already active politically for years and that now now I mean the last month Chomsky told him he is for the first time really desperate he really think that ecology possibility of new world war Russia Western Europe and so on that he thinks we are on the edge of a catastrophe so the problem is not should we resign ourselves the problem is that something will have to be done I prefer not to think what type of society we are approaching and we even know it in some sense I claim who is we here we are collective ideological subject which is formed by Hollywood and my god Hollywood knows it you remember all these big post-apocalyptic blockbusters that we have now they all paint the same society which fits very much the image painted by Peter Sloterdijk in his book on the cupola of capitalism you know the privileged living under a cupola protected the majority is outside so we are all aware of the need of a radical change people often attack me why are you taking seriously Sloterdijk he is a neo-nazi eugenic whatever maybe but read his book his I forgot which one of his latest books he wonderfully sorry to mention it develops this idea my god he gets pretty radical he claims that wait a minute read him what he claims he claims that because of ecological catastrophe and other threats the idea of sovereign nation state and capitalism is self-destructive he says this he says that that if there is a lesson from ecology it's that capitalism has this inbuilt tendency of ignoring as collateral damage these costs which you don't have to pay for to the environment and so on and quite correctly he joins hands here Sloterdijk of all people with David Harvey and so on who says that we cannot solve this problem as some left Keynesians dream or feminist Keynesians so that we include into the price of the commodity also all these collateral costs I mean I read some of their books they are wonderful utopian reading the idea is that they try to calculate I don't know how many trillions of dollars the cost of entire water supply of earth and then if you use water it should be added to the price of a commodity or the idea is women's homework non-paid taking care of children if they still do it and so on they should also be given a salary for that but I think this is precisely a model of utopia of how you want to over-expand a model no the problem is to get out of capitalist logic it's the only way that of course I don't where do I absolutely not agree with Sloterdijk is that he just correctly concludes that first this state sovereignty logic where the greatest heroic act is war sacrifice yourself for your country and so on and this capitalist logic of neglecting consequences and so on that it's a matter of our survival to step out of this then being Sloterdijk he of course doesn't give any realistic or even minimally concrete plans ideas even of how to do this who will do it how it will be done and so on and so on but I claim that I don't I don't claim anything basically I don't I don't have a clear idea here but I absolutely claim that we are approaching a potential catastrophe and maybe we are getting caught into some kind of a weird moral inertia look you remember years ago years ago even more for Vietnam war there was still even for Iraq war big demonstrations and so on but today much worse things are happening look at the ultra-tragedy of Aleppo today in Syria even out of egotist reasons out of the meanest egotist reasons we should be more mobilized my god we can see there hundreds of thousand of you new refugees in the making no we are just apathetic or look at all this Putin Western Europe United States madness are we aware that we are already entering the climate of the next world war our situation is not as people claim now we have new fascism it's like Western Europe in the 1930s no I think a much better metaphor is the years before the great war before the first world war where everyone was talking about the war and then the big surprise was that the war really exploded why because everyone was talking about it but nobody took it seriously you know they and I think isn't this our deepest attitude towards if you ask me of the majority of us attitude towards ecological threat we are well aware there are dangers but deeply existentially we we cannot even imagine that you know that our daily life like you go out my god look no now it's not okay but when it is it's spring it's sun birds are singing what can change and so on it can I think our situation today again is the situation before first world war and from what I read in the media are we aware what is going on United States putting their battalions on the border of Russia Russia already organized my friends from Russia told sent me messages which are terrifying they told me they already organized in the big cities exercises for nuclear attack and so on and so on and again this is the tragedy the fact that you are not taking it seriously is for me precisely the fact that makes it realistic that it will happen and if you ask me what's my solution the only thing I will tell you is that I'm a pessimist but maybe pessimists are the only happy people you know in a very stupid common sense if you are a pessimist then you are since things are usually not so absolutely bad then you are all the time in small details happily surprised you know for me a pessimist is the only way to be a little bit glad you see nonetheless this happened that happened I I the the problem is that I see today the situation as potentially revolutionary in the very traditional Marxist sense forces of production are developing in a way which makes them incompatible with our economic social order and so on and if we don't do something we will live in you know where from the movies like Elysium like Hunger Games and so on and so on and I think that here again I don't have time to develop it I did it in my books but I don't think the language we should speak is this language of open situation oh we can make a choice and so on and so on no it's a closed I'm a fatalist I think that we have to accept that we are lost that there will be a war but maybe we can postpone it we can you know and that sometimes the only way to avoid the catastrophe is to accept it as unavoidable like my good friend Frank Ruda recently published a book in English I think only in German a plea a defense of fatalism and I'm ready to follow it namely in what sense people like to say how the past is determined the past is what it was while the future is open we have a choice I claim more and more that exactly the opposite is true the future is closed it's our fate we are caught in dynamic while the past is open as we learned from Benjamin from I don't know who we can change it of course not in reality but the point is not to say how we can act differently but to re to change the past itself we should take the lesson of Protestantism of predestination which is for me as already my good friend Frederic Jameson emphasized the most interesting notion for a Marxist from theology is the Protestant notion of predestination because it's the exact opposite of radical fatalism because predestination means everything is determined yes everything is determined but you know you don't know in what way in what sense is determined what is freedom actual freedom imagine you are in a situation where you have to choose strawberry cake or cheesecake that's freedom in a stupid sense totally non-interesting remember yourself in a situation where somebody tells you it's predestined what you will do you don't have a choice but you don't know what is predestined and then you sweat you are afraid that you will not miss your destiny and in this absolute anxiety not to miss the inevitable you get close to true freedom we must do something like that okay I've spoken too much I'm grateful for your patience thank you very much sorry can I add a short thing because people often accuse me of being anti-immigrant and so on no my god I'm absolutely for immigrants I just think that any idealization of immigrants is directly feeding the anti-immigrant racist I think we should not for example recently I gave an interview to a local Al Jazeera and I raised a simple question from and because of this the interview was immediately cut short they told me you know this oh why don't you accept Western Europe more refugees and I simply told them listen you are from Qatar Qatar competes with Liechtenstein and Singapore for the richest per capita country in the world and I asked them how many refugees did Qatar accept you probably know the answer none all these extremely wealthy Arab countries Saudi Arabia Emirates Qatar Kuwait Bahrain practically zero why this what geopolitics is going on there and so on and so on I mean we don't have to be afraid to ask these questions sorry thank you for this amusing hour and the shock and awe you presented to us I think we should immediately open to the public if there are questions you know what would be my ideal debate I will tell you that I say something answer and then they have to guess and ask the right question okay wonderful but as they stalinists say the situation is not yet mature for that now unfortunately but let's begin so let's simulate a question yeah I tell you that you didn't do your stalinist job and distribute the questions in advance I did it but I don't follow and you know I have some intellectual problems also and my intellectual problem was always Alain Badiou because he's always telling me the truth and I don't understand the truth and I don't understand the truth taught by Badiou and by Zizek so I don't understand your Badiou yeah but let me ask the question because you know that we are all the time in deep friendly but deep struggle I know I know problem probably that's the problem and so my question is it's about men and women yeah this was the question so men looking at women and women looking at men yes and I have this example of of of Trump and Hillary Clinton so is it correct did I understand Badiou and you correctly that when Trump is looking at Hillary Clinton he knows that god no longer exists and if Hillary is looking at Trump that god exists no but incidentally I know this not through Melania I know people who know people who know people who know Trump and Hillary and I can guarantee you something Trump is an atheist okay so I'm not I'm not saying he had to look at Hillary Clinton to see this you see that's the great thing that Trump did are we aware that he single-handedly ruined the the conservative Christian moral majority he is an obscene consumerist he is a nightmare for them and I think I mean Trump is a nightmare but I think that he wasn't the worst look you remember those Republican preliminary debates the true monster is for me Ted Cruz total monster I think that I even have some now you can catch my anti-immigrant right-wing do I have doubts that Ted Cruz is human maybe he is alien monster you have to see how that guy's you have certain crazy fundamentalist American Republicans where there is really something absolutely monstrous at them no so sorry what I want to say is that I know what is problematic there with this Trump versus Hillary and I don't read Badiou as giving a general theory of sexual difference today and so on and so on but as a very vague description of typical very strong role offered to young men and offered to women today and I don't think even Hillary is specific here I think that already Sarah Palin was but she was so stupid she couldn't play it was the first candidate for this let's call it post-feminist woman or whatever as for sexual difference and so on I know I got into some trouble with LGBT but in some sense practically I fully support them what I just don't agree with is the status of sexual difference in the sense of a basic antagonism which defines sexuality okay my theory is not that that LGBT transgender people are perverts which don't fit who don't fit the big official binary you are a either masculine or feminine I would have said that the basic lesson of Lacan when he repeats how il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel there is no sexual relationship is that sexual difference is an antagonism which always fails never works that there is a failure inscribed into every sexual identity and that in this sense the transgender people are the symptom of it all they are the most radical they bring out an impossibility which is part of the impossibility of again gender identities and so on so I was deeply shocked by that fanatic reaction I was practically lynched in the United States for that text about transgender problems and so on because like you know what bothers me with and we can debate I'm now consciously trying to provoke you with transgender people I totally sympathize with the horror of their situation and so on and I know some of them how you know like if you look at this gay parades and so on you would have thought transgender beautiful some Deleuzian affirmative joy wonder no it's very painful it's agony and so on but not painful agony in the sense of deviation from the norm it's a deviation immanent to the norm itself I will not go further into it just one example from cinema if you allow me I love two films very different but basically the similar you did you see the two films one is Neil Jordan's The Crying Game and the other is Cronenberg's M. Butterfly they both have a similar story a guy gets passionately in love with a beautiful woman and when they for the first time decide to make love you have that famous scene which I find hilarious because it's a reversal of Freud's scene of fetishism which is you know the woman gets naked and then she doesn't have a penis or whatever here the problem is that she she does have a penis no okay now how are we to read this not I claim in the sense of they are horrified at their own latent homosexuality but that it's a very radical Lacanian thesis that from the male side heterosexual love is from the male side unconsciously secretly homosexual the ultimate dream of a man is that the femme fatale he tries to seduce is a man dressed as a woman so this is why Lacan says something wonderful that the only true heterosexuals are lesbians and then there are two types of homosexuality what we call heterosexuals and gays so what I am saying is that you see this is the problem I have with all these movements LGBT aren't they not getting that they have so many symptoms like you know that now LGBT and they are already afraid that they will exclude something so you have now LGBTQIA and so on and then it goes on so they save it by adding a plus LGBT plus and for me this is a symptom but I stop I talk too much these are some okay yeah yeah there are some well-prepared questions here please go ahead so you've elaborated a bit about phenomena of digitalization my question would be there seems to be this fascinating alliance of very different people like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk or all pointing out prominently that artificial intelligence which we can't control is the largest threat for our free societies what do you think about that based on what you explained and how could the left you know empowering policy towards AI look like thank you here I am an old-fashioned philosopher and I would say almost in a Heideggerian mode that my first question is this one when somebody like Hawking who is not a very good philosopher I mean in the beginning of his previous book he claims triumphantly philosophy is dead no and then on the next page he articulates this thesis in the most vulgar philosophy you can imagine but my problem is this one when he says the greatest threat to humanity to human freedom okay my problem is what pre-for- how do you call it Vorverständnis what previous understanding of human freedom he has to claim this what does he understand by human freedom what does he mean by human freedom is human freedom a free choice okay what is a free choice is a free choice a choice which is not pre-determined no it's not enough because let's say that there is a process which is definitely not deterministic let us say that when I decide when I go to patisserie chocolate cake or strawberry cake that it's a genuinely open situation in the sense that some totally contingent quantum fluctuation in my mind which cannot be pre-determined decides my choice but if it's a total external contingency then this still is not freedom we don't mean by freedom this so what this is what I think what they have they Hawking and others they commit a double mistake first they usually presuppose a very naive humanist notion of freedom which I think is not radical enough a lesson this thing I don't have time to go on sorry but things are so interesting here for example I'm not against freedom because things are do you know Benjamin Libet who the who made that famous experiment demonstrating that before you make a contingent choice your neurons brains already know it split of a second before okay so for our vulgar common sense this should have been a proof that we don't have a freedom of the will because when we freely decide something before us deciding the process is already on the way but interestingly enough Benjamin Libet himself doesn't give this reading he gives an extremely refined Hegelian reading claiming that yes every choice is pre-determined but the primordial form of freedom is not to decide what do you want but to sabotage your decision and that this same okay I will not go in what I want to say is another it's there are and second problem noticed very nicely by the book which is a popular book but interesting this big hit now Yuval Harari Homo Deus is that how even people who advocate the fact that there is no freedom of the will but still the way they argue you know like the way they describe the situation it's as if the same free individual is at some level still here simply stay you know there is a way of stating I am not free which leaves you out of the affair perfectly safe and so on here I have a great appreciation for I think he even works or did is he in Berlin Thomas Metzinger your great brain scientist where he asked a very serious question no which was if we accept the result of brain sciences that there is no free will or rather no substantial self can we really assume this subjectively is this just something that we rationally accept or can we live in that way and his answer is that there is only a certain type of Buddhist enlightenment which accepts this so what I'm saying is that the first thing I didn't answer your question I just complicated it no that the first thing I would have said it we have to be much more precise here as philosophers what do we what because my problem my first problem would be that if we accept the results of brain sciences and so on then we don't really have a choice of freedom of unfreedom we're already now not free we just don't accept it you know this is my problem for example with Habermas I appreciate okay okay he is the big other the terrorist yeah yeah now now I know how it functions yeah yeah we are running completely out of time so there was another that was my that was my intention so that now I can say hypocritically I'm so sorry that I cannot stay for another hour you know so we would allow a last question please yeah my question is concerning the notion of disintegration of Sittlichkeit because it seems that what you claim in a political perspective seems much more like a social-democratic way of answering the questions and being or giving like a conservative answer in like restoring what is still there in a way and that radical left should rather explore like new or create new values and I think this can also be be seen on a European scale that we shouldn't see Europe like as a fixed identity of values that we should defend or something else but we see it as a continuity or a connection of
I would like to begin with a book that I finished reading a couple of days ago it's very new book a new book by my good friend Alain Badiou La Vraie Vie the true life the book opens with the provocative claim that from Socrates onwards the main function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth the young to alienate or rather extraneate in Brecht's sense of Verfremdung the young from the predominant ideological and political order to sow radical doubts and enable them to think autonomously no wonder Socrates the first philosopher was also its first victim as we all know ordered by the democratic court of Athens to drink poison today however the task of a philosopher is no longer to undermine the hegemonic hierarchic symbolic edifice which grounds social stability but to make not only the young but people in general perceive the dangers of the growing post-patriarchal nihilist order which presents itself as the domain of new freedoms we live in an extraordinary era where there is no tradition on which we can base our identity no frame of meaningful life which would provide for us which would sorry enable us to live a life beyond hedonist reproduction this new world disorder this gradually emerging worldless Weltlos civilization exemplarily affects the younger generation which oscillates between the intensity of fully burning out sexual enjoyment drugs alcohol up to violence and the endeavor to succeed study make a career earn money and so on and so on the only alternative to it being a violent retreat into some artificially resuscitated tradition incidentally the last time I visited Seoul South Korea I was fascinated I think this really is the country of our future literally I counted once on a train people and nine out of ten minimum were on some medium talking looking at a screen and they of course have in Korea the highest suicide number per capita of in younger generation the young people are absolutely obsessed with intensely enjoying and with succeeding career Badiou perspicuously noticed that we are getting today a kind of decadent reactionary version of the withering away disintegration of the state announced by Marx today's 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 ourselves this disintegration of the ethical substance is clearly signaled by the abolition of universal military conscription in many countries the very notion of being ready to risk one's life for a common cause appears more and more pointless if not directly ridiculous to most of us so that armed forces as the body in which all citizens equally participate are gradually turning into a mercenary force so I think you see this is the first thing that a critical thought should do not just celebrate wonderful no longer universal military conscription and so on what's the price we are paying for it that you have mercenary army and that and that this again abolition of of military universal military conscription is a clear case of privatization of state itself this disintegration of a shared ethical substance I follow here Badiou who develops this how this disintegration affects differently the two sexes and I'm well into transgender debate I don't want to go into it now how no they are not two they are three four five the latest number from Canada is that there are sexes but okay I will not go into that we can debate it men are gradually turning into perpetual adolescents with no clear passage of initiation that would enact their entry into maturity you know in more traditional societies till my god half a century ago there were many initiatic points in the life of a young man in some countries military service you become a man after you do military service then it was acquiring a profession then it was finishing your education this no longer functions no wonder then that in order to supplant this lack youth gangs proliferate providing ersatz initiation and social identity but and here I found Badiou's thesis interesting he claims that in contrast to men who are condemned to some kind of prolonged eternal adolescence women are more and more precociously mature treated as small adults expected to control their lives to plan their careers and so on what then is happening today with sexual difference traditionally we all know this men were perceived as bearers of the one the monotheist god patriarchal power stable social hierarchy while women were associated with the two their position was always perceived as the one of between the two between mother and whore lover and saint and so on Badiou sees in this between the two something much deeper than an effect of oppressive patriarchal ideology a quote from Badiou a woman is the overcoming of the one in the guise of a passage of between the two end of quote the conclusion Badiou draws from this is surprising but consequent and it's crazy I like this passage although I maybe don't totally agree with it namely Badiou claims that by their very existence women are atheists they embody resistance to one god denouncing it as a fiction here is this wonderful quote my translation from French into English from Badiou's book a woman is always by herself a 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 jealousy tradition knows that in order to keep god alive in whatever way women have to be kept absolutely invisible end of quote today however when the reign of the symbolic one is weakened the hierarchy of roles and places under a divine name of the father is becoming largely irrelevant to fill in this void a new one the figure of one subjectivity is emerging a hedonist consumer caught in market competition enjoying life and simultaneously a ruthless manipulator in how he or she does it here sexual difference re-enters unexpectedly men are more and more ludic adolescents outlaws women appear as hard mature serious legal and punitive subjects this is why as Badiou claims there is a bourgeois feminism bent on domination women are today not called by the ruling ideology to be subordinated they are called solicited expected to be judges administrators ministers CEOs teachers even policewomen and soldiers a paradigmatic scene occurring daily in our security institutions is that of a feminine teacher judge psychologist taking care of an immature asocial young male delinquent 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 condition of today's capitalism women can do better than men there is a political triad which renders perfectly this predicament I think Hillary Duterte Trump Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are today's ultimate political couple Trump is precisely following Badiou's diagnosis the eternal adolescent a reckless hedonist prone prone to irrational brutal outbursts that hurt his chances while Hillary exemplifies the new feminine one a self-controlled ruthless manipulator who recklessly exploits her femininity and presents herself as caring for the marginal victims and so on her femininity makes her all the more efficient in manipulation so one should not be seduced by her image as the victim of Bill Bill Clinton's joyful philandering about allowing woman to suck him and so on Bill Clinton was the the true clown while she was the master in the relationship allowing her servants small irrelevant pleasures like I imagine her Bill go go there Monica is waiting for you to suck you leave me alone to do serious manipulations planning what then about Rodrigo Duterte the Philippine president openly soliciting extrajudicial murders of drug addicts and dealers going up to comparing himself positively of course 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 it is not yet permitted to do openly in our civilized so-called civilized western countries so if we condense the three into one I think this would be the ideal image of the politician today a person called Hillary Duterte middle name Trump all three together as for the now comes next problematic more philosophical point as for the underlying form of subjectivity which is operative in this shift we are clearly dealing with a new version of so-called what was for a long time called in psychoanalysis in social psychoanalysis the post-traditional protean subject today the hegemonic form of subjectivity is no longer the autonomous protestant subject subordinated to the paternal Oedipal law which guarantees his or her moral freedom but a fluid subject a subject who experiences itself as permanently reinventing and reconstructing itself joyfully experimenting with combinations of different identities the paradigmatic theorist of this new form of subjectivity is Judith Butler and although she insists on its subversive character it is easy to demonstrate that such a subjectivity you know permanently reconstructing itself through through performatively enacting assuming different positions and so on a subjectivity rejecting any fixed identity obsessed with playful discursive reinvention fits perfectly our consumerist commodified society this is why the obsessive attacks on patriarchy and Oedipal order sound at least for me false and desperate they attack an enemy who is in full retreat reacting to something new which is already hegemonic in short the problem with this vision of a new fluid subjectivity it's not that it is utopian but that it is already predominant yet another case of the hegemonic ideology presenting itself as subversive and transgressive now this of course appears to be but I think it's not the central conflict today forces of freedom plurality reinvention versus new forms of religious or whatever fundamentalism I think this is ultimately a pseudo struggle which is lost in advance the first problem I see here is that one cannot distinguish in a direct way the universal dimension of the emancipatory project and the identity of a particular way of life so that as liberals are telling us while we are all together engaged in a universal struggle for freedom equality and so on tolerance and so on we should simultaneously fully respect the right of each group to its particular way of life one should never forget that for a subject who lives a particular way of life all universals appear to him colored by this specific way of life each identity each way of life comprises also a specific way to relate to other ways of life so when we posit as a guideline that each group should be left to enact its particular identity to practice its own way of life the problem immediately arises where do customs that form my identity stop and where does injustice begin are women's rights just our custom or is the struggle for women's rights also universal and in this sense part of the emancipatory struggle is homophobia just a thing of particular culture to be tolerated as a component of its identity should arranged marriages which form the very core of the kinship structures of some societies should they also be accepted as part of a particular identity where to draw the line the task is here I think to bring the struggle into every particular way of life each particular way of life is antagonistic full of inner tensions and inconsistencies and the only way to proceed is to work for an alliance of struggles in different cultures from here I would like to return to the project which is of course the alpha and omega of today's left of the alliance between progressive middle classes fighting for LGBT tolerance and so on and the so-called nomadic proletarians all these third-world refugees in terms of concrete problematic this means that the politico-economic struggle against global capitalism and the struggle for sexual freedoms tolerance and so on have to be conceived as two forms the two forms of aspects of the same struggle which is I claim extremely difficult all the desperate calls for the unification of struggles I know there there are some wonderful almost almost dreamy scenes that I remember for example my friend showed me photos of how in in a small Palestinian village close to Jerusalem there were effectively two-three years ago demonstrations protesting Israeli activity where it was incredible Muslim women totally covered walked together with transgender and feminist activists dressed in an extremely provocative way and so on and so on okay I almost cried it's beautiful but I claim it cannot be universalized I don't share the hope of some of my leftist friends that you see you see it's the beginning and slowly slowly we will have the majority I don't think this will happen because I think that today's predominant form of anti-sexist struggle in developed western countries is to such an extent constrained by our own ideological coordinates that it's simply impossible to unify it with third-world economic struggles struggles against western domination maybe the phrase class struggle and anti-sexist struggle conceal a hidden hard choice one or the other never never both of them in spite of all the rhetoric of solidarity today's actual nomadic proletarians immigrants from non-western countries and today's actual anti-sexist movements cannot find the same language to construct a shared space for both of them is a difficult task that requires long and hard work of self-transformation from both sides from both sides not only will the immigrants have to change profoundly their identity really radically abandon their way of their way of reproducing themselves through family ties but also here all this you know I call them the people who fight here for for anti-sexist and so on who causes but express abstract solidarity with immigrants it's not enough the way they are you cannot unite them without radical self-transformation on both sides second general point I want to make it here I think that one of the main if not the main ideological obstacle to this unity in the west is political correctness why no it's not people usually accuse me that when I attack political correctness I do it for egotist reasons to justify my propensity to make dirty tasteless jokes and so on it's not as simple as that I want to begin by a quote from Edward Bond that perhaps you know it if you can't face Hiroshima in the theater you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself this is I think the best argument against those who oppose graphic descriptions of sexual violence and other atrocities dismissing them as participating in the same violence these descriptions pretend to critically analyze and reject for example in a very critical review of my own intervention at the Walter Benjamin conference in Ramallah a little bit less than a year ago the writer in some German journal I forgot where claims that I enumerate quote now criticism of me a detailed list of ritualized sexual violences taking place outside of the Islamic world thus showing his mine willingness to accompany honor killings with matching atrocities he me was each time rhetorically apologetic about his descriptions it's really hard for me to talk about this and so on and each time he came back with more obscene bloody and graphic details this is sufficient to grasp the pointlessness and ambivalence of his intervention displaying concerns about sexual violence by subjecting the watchful audience to the violence of crude images of heinous sexual practices in other words because what I did there in Ramallah was I totally supported their own struggle against honor killings and so on and I claim that nonetheless that what women suffer there is just part of a general plague of horrors going on today from Mexico to Canada and so on I was accused of just reproducing the same horrors this I think is the prototype of politically correct line of argumentation in order I claim to really grasp sexual violence 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 to rape as enhanced seduction technique it is only the taste of the real thing that effectively vaccinate us against it and we can already see the consequences of such a stance of protection when at the beginning of September of this year two months ago Facebook censored the iconic Napalm Girl photo of a terrified nine-year-old girl Vietnamese girl running away from napalm bombs it hypocritically justified it as a defense against displaying child nudity which can count as child pornography of course ignoring the obvious political dimension along these lines the one whom I appreciate very much Nikki Johnson-Huston it's an American black lawyer wrote a wonderful letter to the public where he describes eloquently how quote white liberals have hijacked the conversation about diversity political correctness and what topics we should be outraged about now comes the long quote 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 call him or her a racist homophobic misogynistic bigot and trying to have him or her 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 because of affirmative action or that all black people grew up in poverty end of quote therein resides I think the political problem with political correctness to repeat Robespierre it admits the injustices of the actual life but it wants to cure them with a what Robespierre called revolution without revolution in exact parallel incidentally 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 we have everything today this censored aseptic politically correct versions for example so-called Native Americans we call them once Indians I much prefer the term Indians incidentally as they do also my so-called Indian friends you know what they told me no I am not a native American because if I'm native nature what are you white culture I prefer to be called Indian because in this way at least my name is a monument to the stupidity of white men who thought they discovered India and so on you have to really encounter all those protective victims to see how they hate this politically correct approach and so on and so on and they are so sensitive about the dangers of patronizing them for example a friend in in Missoula Montana it happened an academic guy there gave me a small study he wrote proving that Native Americans Indians killed more buffaloes and burnt more forests than all white people combined there no it's not crazy masochism it's just a wonderful insight into no thanks for your patronizing image of us you know the first right of autonomy is I can also be as evil as you maybe even worse that's where true anti-racism begins so what liberals want is a vision of social change 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 in their safe enclaves a further consequence of this politically correct speech is the spreading prohibition of irony when one makes a remark considered non-politically correct it is less and less possible to save oneself by claiming it was meant ironically here I claim opposites coincide again in the beginning of September of this year two months ago media reported that North Korea has forbidden people from making sarcastic comments about Kim Jong-un or his regime in their everyday conversation even indirect criticism has been banned namely it's a wonderful news that the people in North Korea started to do what to use in an ironic way the official phrases themselves for example as you know North Korea blames everything on United States all their misfortunes are because South Korea is still occupied by Americans and so on so people started you like somebody doesn't function a train crashes there is no food and people say oh this is all America's fault and so on and so on and in a wonderful scene which was reported in media at one public meeting where by mistake one foreigner found himself a desperate ordinary guy says listen we cannot criticize the official regime now we cannot even agree with it because then we can be accused of irony so what can we do and in a wonderful symptomatic moment of truth the functionary from central government said just shut up and everything and everything will be okay so now I move to more general points from all this we are witnessing today something that one cannot but call the disintegration of what Hegel named Sittlichkeit not simply morality but mores customs Sitten the thick background of mostly unwritten rules of social life which tell us what we can do and what we cannot do this I claim is disintegrating on two accounts on the one hand it's as you may have noticed it more and more possible and here I am a classic moralist I'm for hypocrisy I am for keeping the appearances namely I don't know how it is in Germany but I know from United States to my own city country Slovenia things that it was unimaginable like years ago not even years ago for them to say it publicly now they can be widely propagated publicly and nobody reacts for example I must report this to you what I was shocked by it it happened in Slovenia two months ago in the main right-wing weekly magazine one of their anti-immigrant European racist commentators published a ferocious attack on George Soros claiming that calling him Talmudo-Zionist who is the most dangerous living person on earth why the idea was that he Soros is fulfilling actualizing the old Zionist plan of ruining western European identity and culture by secretly organizing Muslim immigrants to enter Europe and these immigrants are characterized in openly racist terms as as Muslim negroid hordes and so on whatever what I like here I like these excessive moments of ideology because they are the moment of truth like you think that we live in some kind of a conflict between Zionism and Islam no to this guy everything is clear behind this Muslim invasion of Europe it's Zionism it's it's are the Jews the Jews are again the hidden masters so it's all one big plot and so on and so on okay I will not go on and lose time here what I just wanted to tell you is how surprised I am that nobody reacts to this people laugh a little bit they oh did you read that idiot what he wrote there but it's slowly becoming a common currency to talk like this so again I believe what is happening today is again things which were years ago something that belonged to this private domain of dirty rumors paranoiac ideas and so on we all maybe were telling each other all these but it was private fantasies as it were are now becoming a public currency I will not even enumerate examples of this all I want to say is that for me civilization in good and in bad means that you know not only written rules but the unwritten rules let let me give you an example which is not a good one I remember it from when I was serving Yugoslav army in in Yugoslav constitution it says that all languages of Yugoslav federation are equal also in the army which means Serbo-Croat Slovene Macedonian Albanian and that only only in commandment the Serbo-Croat language should be used which I accept I mean like you cannot shout attack in all five languages or whatever but that's all but it was nice example of unwritten rules how de facto in the army we all had to talk Serbo-Croat if two of us Slovenes were caught talking among ourselves Slovene we were immediately accused of nationalism separatism and so on and so on then at some political class one of the soldiers asked the officer comrade officer whatever isn't there a small contradiction here we have to speak Serbo-Croat but in constitution it says all languages official languages the four that I enumerated are equal what happened is that the officer simply told him you are an idiot you don't understand anything if you ask a question like this again you will be arrested you you see how this is how ideology works in everyday life it's not only that things are prohibited the prohibition itself is prohibited and I will make a jump now I improvise a lot today Trump is precisely violating this prohibition for example he tried to prove I was quite shocked in one of his TV interviews that his wife Melania who is Slovene I'm proud to tell you but I'm ashamed that how what a great lady she is and she said something that I don't want to use the dirty word flatulence you know if you eat too many beans or what he said that never once in their marriage did he hear her emitting a sound of flatulence you know what's the problem the problem is that you don't say this my god you know the vulgarity is not in doing this the vulgarity is in even saying this or the same was with Hillary Clinton once Donald Trump made fun of her because she had to disappear for three minutes probably taking a break for the toilet and Trump said I don't want even to imagine what where she went it's disgusting and so on no sorry we all do this the disgusting thing is to mention this publicly and Trump can do it which is why he is for me one of the symbols of this let's call it disintegration of disintegration of ethical substance I claim that manners matter because now you can say but we have serious problems today the threat of a new world war ecological catastrophe and so on why talk about manners ah here I am tempted to repeat you know De Quincey's famous quip about the simple art of murder how many people began with a simple murder and ended up behaving badly at a table and so on I'm tempted to say how many people began with unleashing terror and economic catastrophes and ended up behaving badly at a party because I think manners do matter sometimes precisely manners are the last thing that separates us from direct barbarism and here I'm becoming a leftist moralist I'm claiming that some of us unfortunately old enough to remember the 60s where it was I remember popular to use the F-word to talk a little bit brutally dirty to denounce the hypocrisy of the official jargon but now the right-wingers populists are talking like that and I think the left should shamelessly use the chance and present itself as a defender of decency and public manners we should be this today let me go on another very tricky topic at this level is Europe eurocentrism and so on I think that another leftist tragedy today should be a qualified eurocentrism why today of course I don't agree with right-wingers who claim our culture is threatened by Islam by whoever I fully admit that the greatest threat today to what is worth saving from European legacy are precisely our anti-immigrant populist defenders of Europe themselves but we should nonetheless beware of something if you look at a high-quality critique of dark aspects of European legacy and there are many of them don't forget that Holocaust colonial horrors even Gulag these are ultimately results of European civilization but if you look closely at it we have to admit that the very position from which we criticize this from which we are horrified at this is a European one radical egalitarianism feminism and so on the idea of us as abstract individuals where ultimately doesn't matter if we are men women and so on and so on is part of European legacy all other cultures are basically organic organic in the sense that each of us at his her there proper place within the social edifice and this is for me why criticism of eurocentrism is so popular today it's not something good it's a very ominous sign of the fact that that capitalism is entering a new stage where it no longer needs universal emancipation freedom equality and so on and so on so this brings me to my next very problematic for some of you political point it's nice to be against global capitalism but I absolutely don't believe that the ultimate resort of this anti-global capitalist struggle can be some local manners local communities resisting to it and so on and so on I always claim global capitalism is fully multiculturalist it functions ideally with multitude of local cultures and so on and so on let me give you an example that it happened recently I found it in the media in the fall of a 55-year-old former pastor in Santiago Quetzalapa a remote indigenous community in the south of Mexico raped an eight-year-old girl and the local court condemned him to buy the girl's father two crates of beer as punishment then feminist groups from Mexico City protested and the answer was what was that sorry in this city indigenous communities are ruled by a system popularly known as Usos y Costumbres traditions and customs supposed to enshrine the traditions of local populations in a state with diverse indigenous groups so you see they wanted to do something noble not just this bourgeois abstract law let's include into our legal system the wisdom thousand-years-old wisdom of local communities and so on and so on the result is what the result is that because this is part of their tradition or whatever that you rape eight-year-old girl and you are punished by paying by having to buy two crates of beer and many other examples and so on and so on so what I want to say is that we have to be courageous enough to admit that these famous local traditions are not really a site of resistance something from where we can attack what is wrong with global capitalism I think that the problem with global capitalism is precisely that it's not precisely that it's not global enough I don't have time to go in detail here and so I will just go to the my concluding moments to the title of my talk finally rage rebellion new power that's the problem of all this ultimately the problem of populism is for me something that referring to Noam Chomsky we can call a crisis in manufacturing consent our political system is not just a set of explicit rules written unwritten but it's a lot of customs of how things effectively function and that no longer works and populism is one of the ways to fill in this void what's our problem today we know that this triad rage rebellion and a new power is a kind of a basic triad of every revolutionary process first there is chaotic rage people are not satisfied they show it in a more or less violent way without any clear goal and organization then when this rage gets articulated organized we get a rebellion with a minimal organization and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is finally if rebellion succeeds the new power confronts the immense task of organizing the new society the problem is that we almost never get this triad in its logical progression chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into a rightist populism rebellion succeeds but loses steam and so on and so on so this is why in our societies more and more rage is not only the beginning but also the end the outcome of failed emancipatory projects remember I always remember them years ago how the French suburban riots were exploding where thousands of cars were burning and there were major outbursts of public violence in suburbs of Paris and so on what strikes the eye in these protests what struck the eye was the total absence of any positive utopian prospect if May was a revolt with a utopian vision the revolts were outbursts with no pretense to vision if the often repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense it is here there was no program and this tells a lot about our predicament because as even Axel Honneth noticed in his last book Idee des Sozialismus Idea of Socialism the great paradox of our situation is that there is a growing dissatisfaction with global capitalism which often explodes in rage but it is less and less possible to articulate this rage into a new leftist political project so this is how things disintegrate back into rage but let's take the example where we had a success there was a new power the victory of Syriza in Greece I think it's a genuine tragedy what happened there I totally oppose to those idiots who simply shout betrayal betrayal Syriza won a referendum and then were afraid to act upon it no I think that when people blame that capitulation or whatever you call it of Syriza they the usual counter-argument is that Syriza forgot or obliterated its links to actual social movements that the moment Syriza took power already before it was no longer what was its strength the network of local movement feminist workers rights ecological it simply became another party competing for state power I think that this exactly is a wrong counter-argument to make I don't think that keeping links with social keeping links alive with social base maintaining roots in actual social movements this is simply an excuse the big problem is not is precisely that the left didn't yet invent a formula of effectively how should I put it what to do when you take power how to reorganize power we have two-three models we have real socialist communist stalinist model it didn't work we see it clearly we have social democratic model welfare state it worked as long as it worked it didn't work at the end today it frankly no it I mean the tragedy is with some exceptions I admit it that social democracy is basically today the great conservative power their motive is basically let's not abandon let's keep our old achievements we all know that we live in new times where tremendous things are happening I'm not ideologically blinded by them but just think about two-three of them about a so-called cooperative commons I don't believe that this is already a new communism but obviously the market economy is gradually overcoming itself or just think philosophically about what the new digitalization of our lives but digitalization combined with biogenetics and so on brain sciences leads to we will be more and more dominated by digital machines and I'm not even afraid of it look it can already be proven I read some wonderful experiments with they did it in United States they in so many levels for example in even in stock market investing do you know that you already can download for free a program which it's demonstrated through experiments which will tell you when to buy to sell your stocks better than the most expensive stockbrokers advisers and so on machines know it better machines already can diagnose you better than at least the average doctor some progressive leftist I like this cynicism sociologists even proved that computers can do it better in elections because we are stupid confused people you hate the ruling government but then usually through some last minute spin spins and manipulations you vote for something immediately before elections out of fear and so on which goes against your interest what they my friends did it is people selected people allowed the computer to follow their everyday experience all the disappointment with politics economics and so on and then computer who kept the entire picture decided how to vote it was much more to the left even even they decided that with marriage they again to two sets of the people whom will you marry not computer a computer did better and wait a minute these are not naive science fiction people they are not claiming computers cannot make mistakes no they are also stupid and so on they are just saying on average they are doing much better than our daily lives so where are we coming we have just different fantasies here one fantasy is so-called singularity total idiots I think so like Ray Kurzweil and so on you know we are approaching the moment when we will all be combined into one big mega post-human awareness or we will simply be reduced to idiots to puppets manipulated digitally or through biogenetic and so on and so on but my prediction is that something third will happen the combination of the two what do I mean by this you know I always remember here one of my favorite stalinist jokes that in the mid-30s they were debating in the Politburo will there be money in communism or not and the right-wing Bukharin people claimed of course it's natural to have money to exchange products so there have to be money in communism left-wingers claimed no money means alienated commodity societies there will not be money in communism then comrade Stalin the greatest genius intervenes and says no these are both deviations left-wing right-wing deviations the reality is a dialectical synthesis there will be and there will not be money in communism then they ask Stalin but how do you mean this comrade Stalin and he says well it's simple some people will have money others will not have money no and my point is that it's the same with this digitalization you know some people will lose their freedom other people will not lose their freedom and I mean there are such complex things happening today what will happen again with cooperative commons with I think the big problem I see with we already see the tendencies to post-market economy it's clear it's clear it's clear that the way intellectual property functions today it more and more undermines private property and I even see potentially a progressive element in all these ultra-capitalist horrors like Uber taxis and so on and so on something new is emerging we don't yet have concrete ideas what to do you know to be very brief short you know what's the problem for me did you see the film which I don't like very much but that's why I'm mentioning it to you V for Vendetta with Natalie Portman and so on you remember how the film ends the crowd attacks the British parliament victory of the revolution end of the film as I usually say my god I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called V for Vendetta part two what happens then next day how do they organize new power and so on we I I don't believe in state socialism of course not I don't believe in no longer in welfare social-democratic capitalism but I also don't believe if anything even less I believe in the last I claim remainder of the 20th century that will have to be sacrificed immediate council democracy you know what is still alive for 20th century is this idea against alienated representational politics local communities organizing their life and so on and so on I think this is a horrible vision it's totally wrong politically and so on first no local communities with living self-management self-organization cannot save us I literally I'm not joking I will again be accused of provocations I think we need more alienation precisely alienation in the sense of efficient bureaucracy if I have a problem today is bureaucratic socialism now you will say horror GDR Stalinism no don't you see if you read and I do with pleasure always old stalinist texts the biggest problem of Stalinism was bureaucracy Stalinism couldn't organize a well-functioning bureaucracy that's why it always needed an emergency state I an ideal social model for me is not some stupid local community where every afternoon I have to go to some debate group how we will distribute water how we will take no I want to live in a nice alienated society where there is an invisible relatively well-functioning network which provides water electricity health and so on and I want to be left alone to watch movies to read and write my books and so on and so on first problem second problem what we need today the with the problems we are confronted intellectual property ecology brain sciences and so on immigrants we need more and more strong large-scale organizations I claim just think about Fukushima do you know my friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy who was there immediately after he is a theorist of catastrophes and was sent by European Union he said that do you know that for a couple of hours Japanese authorities thought that the radiations will be so strong that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area million people where would they go how we need even stronger than state larger organizations I mean local communities are wonderful in so far as they local self-organized communities in so far as they work but I always claim for them to work quite many things have to function imperceptibly in the background and that's where the battle is decided okay we debate how to how to organize health but for this you have to have large hospitals which work how to distribute water electricity who organizes that and so on and so on so another thing that's the true if you ask me tragedy for me I will not name you names but I'm sad that I cannot for ethical reasons I spoke with many well-known leftists recently really big names who all privately like in secret literally told me that you know the only hope for us today is a big mega catastrophe not just thousand dead but at least a couple of hundred of thousand dead that such a radical catastrophe is the only thing that can awaken people and to make them to take seriously social change and so on and so on but this makes me even sad where are we when the radical left literally not only awaits mega catastrophe as their only chance but even some of the leftists told me maybe we should even risk it to organize this catastrophe to explode a couple of a couple of atomic energy nuclear electric plants and so on and so on this is for me just another thing in this hopelessness we don't have a model and I think that in spite of all these problems now I will finish although the picture is bleak we have to persist namely if the picture is so dark as I painted it then you can say but my god why don't simply resign to a radical change why don't we say okay let's play the modest game that goes on modest small changes maybe it will work no I am more of a pessimist I think that we are today approaching and although Chomsky really hates me but a good friend of mine recently visited Chomsky now two weeks ago and told me something very sad that Chomsky in private drinking coffee after the official interview told him that he is already active politically for years and that now now I mean the last month Chomsky told him he is for the first time really desperate he really think that ecology possibility of new world war Russia Western Europe and so on that he thinks we are on the edge of a catastrophe so the problem is not should we resign ourselves the problem is that something will have to be done I prefer not to think what type of society we are approaching and we even know it in some sense I claim who is we here we are collective ideological subject which is formed by Hollywood and my god Hollywood knows it you remember all these big post-apocalyptic blockbusters that we have now they all paint the same society which fits very much the image painted by Peter Sloterdijk in his book on the cupola of capitalism you know the privileged living under a cupola protected the majority is outside so we are all aware of the need of a radical change people often attack me why are you taking seriously Sloterdijk he is a neo-nazi eugenic whatever maybe but read his book his I forgot which one of his latest books he wonderfully sorry to mention it develops this idea my god he gets pretty radical he claims that wait a minute read him what he claims he claims that because of ecological catastrophe and other threats the idea of sovereign nation state and capitalism is self-destructive he says this he says that that if there is a lesson from ecology it's that capitalism has this inbuilt tendency of ignoring as collateral damage these costs which you don't have to pay for to the environment and so on and quite correctly he joins hands here Sloterdijk of all people with David Harvey and so on who says that we cannot solve this problem as some left Keynesians dream or feminist Keynesians so that we include into the price of the commodity also all these collateral costs I mean I read some of their books they are wonderful utopian reading the idea is that they try to calculate I don't know how many trillions of dollars the cost of entire water supply of earth and then if you use water it should be added to the price of a commodity or the idea is women's homework non-paid taking care of children if they still do it and so on they should also be given a salary for that but I think this is precisely a model of utopia of how you want to over-expand a model no the problem is to get out of capitalist logic it's the only way that of course I don't where do I absolutely not agree with Sloterdijk is that he just correctly concludes that first this state sovereignty logic where the greatest heroic act is war sacrifice yourself for your country and so on and this capitalist logic of neglecting consequences and so on that it's a matter of our survival to step out of this then being Sloterdijk he of course doesn't give any realistic or even minimally concrete plans ideas even of how to do this who will do it how it will be done and so on and so on but I claim that I don't I don't claim anything basically I don't I don't have a clear idea here but I absolutely claim that we are approaching a potential catastrophe and maybe we are getting caught into some kind of a weird moral inertia look you remember years ago years ago even more for Vietnam war there was still even for Iraq war big demonstrations and so on but today much worse things are happening look at the ultra-tragedy of Aleppo today in Syria even out of egotist reasons out of the meanest egotist reasons we should be more mobilized my god we can see there hundreds of thousand of you new refugees in the making no we are just apathetic or look at all this Putin Western Europe United States madness are we aware that we are already entering the climate of the next world war our situation is not as people claim now we have new fascism it's like Western Europe in the 1930s no I think a much better metaphor is the years before the great war before the first world war where everyone was talking about the war and then the big surprise was that the war really exploded why because everyone was talking about it but nobody took it seriously you know they and I think isn't this our deepest attitude towards if you ask me of the majority of us attitude towards ecological threat we are well aware there are dangers but deeply existentially we we cannot even imagine that you know that our daily life like you go out my god look no now it's not okay but when it is it's spring it's sun birds are singing what can change and so on it can I think our situation today again is the situation before first world war and from what I read in the media are we aware what is going on United States putting their battalions on the border of Russia Russia already organized my friends from Russia told sent me messages which are terrifying they told me they already organized in the big cities exercises for nuclear attack and so on and so on and again this is the tragedy the fact that you are not taking it seriously is for me precisely the fact that makes it realistic that it will happen and if you ask me what's my solution the only thing I will tell you is that I'm a pessimist but maybe pessimists are the only happy people you know in a very stupid common sense if you are a pessimist then you are since things are usually not so absolutely bad then you are all the time in small details happily surprised you know for me a pessimist is the only way to be a little bit glad you see nonetheless this happened that happened I I the the problem is that I see today the situation as potentially revolutionary in the very traditional Marxist sense forces of production are developing in a way which makes them incompatible with our economic social order and so on and if we don't do something we will live in you know where from the movies like Elysium like Hunger Games and so on and so on and I think that here again I don't have time to develop it I did it in my books but I don't think the language we should speak is this language of open situation oh we can make a choice and so on and so on no it's a closed I'm a fatalist I think that we have to accept that we are lost that there will be a war but maybe we can postpone it we can you know and that sometimes the only way to avoid the catastrophe is to accept it as unavoidable like my good friend Frank Ruda recently published a book in English I think only in German a plea a defense of fatalism and I'm ready to follow it namely in what sense people like to say how the past is determined the past is what it was while the future is open we have a choice I claim more and more that exactly the opposite is true the future is closed it's our fate we are caught in dynamic while the past is open as we learned from Benjamin from I don't know who we can change it of course not in reality but the point is not to say how we can act differently but to re to change the past itself we should take the lesson of Protestantism of predestination which is for me as already my good friend Frederic Jameson emphasized the most interesting notion for a Marxist from theology is the Protestant notion of predestination because it's the exact opposite of radical fatalism because predestination means everything is determined yes everything is determined but you know you don't know in what way in what sense is determined what is freedom actual freedom imagine you are in a situation where you have to choose strawberry cake or cheesecake that's freedom in a stupid sense totally non-interesting remember yourself in a situation where somebody tells you it's predestined what you will do you don't have a choice but you don't know what is predestined and then you sweat you are afraid that you will not miss your destiny and in this absolute anxiety not to miss the inevitable you get close to true freedom we must do something like that okay I've spoken too much I'm grateful for your patience thank you very much sorry can I add a short thing because people often accuse me of being anti-immigrant and so on no my god I'm absolutely for immigrants I just think that any idealization of immigrants is directly feeding the anti-immigrant racist I think we should not for example recently I gave an interview to a local Al Jazeera and I raised a simple question from and because of this the interview was immediately cut short they told me you know this oh why don't you accept Western Europe more refugees and I simply told them listen you are from Qatar Qatar competes with Liechtenstein and Singapore for the richest per capita country in the world and I asked them how many refugees did Qatar accept you probably know the answer none all these extremely wealthy Arab countries Saudi Arabia Emirates Qatar Kuwait Bahrain practically zero why this what geopolitics is going on there and so on and so on I mean we don't have to be afraid to ask these questions sorry thank you for this amusing hour and the shock and awe you presented to us I think we should immediately open to the public if there are questions you know what would be my ideal debate I will tell you that I say something answer and then they have to guess and ask the right question okay wonderful but as they stalinists say the situation is not yet mature for that now unfortunately but let's begin so let's simulate a question yeah I tell you that you didn't do your stalinist job and distribute the questions in advance I did it but I don't follow and you know I have some intellectual problems also and my intellectual problem was always Alain Badiou because he's always telling me the truth and I don't understand the truth and I don't understand the truth taught by Badiou and by Zizek so I don't understand your Badiou yeah but let me ask the question because you know that we are all the time in deep friendly but deep struggle I know I know problem probably that's the problem and so my question is it's about men and women yeah this was the question so men looking at women and women looking at men yes and I have this example of of of Trump and Hillary Clinton so is it correct did I understand Badiou and you correctly that when Trump is looking at Hillary Clinton he knows that god no longer exists and if Hillary is looking at Trump that god exists no but incidentally I know this not through Melania I know people who know people who know people who know Trump and Hillary and I can guarantee you something Trump is an atheist okay so I'm not I'm not saying he had to look at Hillary Clinton to see this you see that's the great thing that Trump did are we aware that he single-handedly ruined the the conservative Christian moral majority he is an obscene consumerist he is a nightmare for them and I think I mean Trump is a nightmare but I think that he wasn't the worst look you remember those Republican preliminary debates the true monster is for me Ted Cruz total monster I think that I even have some now you can catch my anti-immigrant right-wing do I have doubts that Ted Cruz is human maybe he is alien monster you have to see how that guy's you have certain crazy fundamentalist American Republicans where there is really something absolutely monstrous at them no so sorry what I want to say is that I know what is problematic there with this Trump versus Hillary and I don't read Badiou as giving a general theory of sexual difference today and so on and so on but as a very vague description of typical very strong role offered to young men and offered to women today and I don't think even Hillary is specific here I think that already Sarah Palin was but she was so stupid she couldn't play it was the first candidate for this let's call it post-feminist woman or whatever as for sexual difference and so on I know I got into some trouble with LGBT but in some sense practically I fully support them what I just don't agree with is the status of sexual difference in the sense of a basic antagonism which defines sexuality okay my theory is not that that LGBT transgender people are perverts which don't fit who don't fit the big official binary you are a either masculine or feminine I would have said that the basic lesson of Lacan when he repeats how il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel there is no sexual relationship is that sexual difference is an antagonism which always fails never works that there is a failure inscribed into every sexual identity and that in this sense the transgender people are the symptom of it all they are the most radical they bring out an impossibility which is part of the impossibility of again gender identities and so on so I was deeply shocked by that fanatic reaction I was practically lynched in the United States for that text about transgender problems and so on because like you know what bothers me with and we can debate I'm now consciously trying to provoke you with transgender people I totally sympathize with the horror of their situation and so on and I know some of them how you know like if you look at this gay parades and so on you would have thought transgender beautiful some Deleuzian affirmative joy wonder no it's very painful it's agony and so on but not painful agony in the sense of deviation from the norm it's a deviation immanent to the norm itself I will not go further into it just one example from cinema if you allow me I love two films very different but basically the similar you did you see the two films one is Neil Jordan's The Crying Game and the other is Cronenberg's M. Butterfly they both have a similar story a guy gets passionately in love with a beautiful woman and when they for the first time decide to make love you have that famous scene which I find hilarious because it's a reversal of Freud's scene of fetishism which is you know the woman gets naked and then she doesn't have a penis or whatever here the problem is that she she does have a penis no okay now how are we to read this not I claim in the sense of they are horrified at their own latent homosexuality but that it's a very radical Lacanian thesis that from the male side heterosexual love is from the male side unconsciously secretly homosexual the ultimate dream of a man is that the femme fatale he tries to seduce is a man dressed as a woman so this is why Lacan says something wonderful that the only true heterosexuals are lesbians and then there are two types of homosexuality what we call heterosexuals and gays so what I am saying is that you see this is the problem I have with all these movements LGBT aren't they not getting that they have so many symptoms like you know that now LGBT and they are already afraid that they will exclude something so you have now LGBTQIA and so on and then it goes on so they save it by adding a plus LGBT plus and for me this is a symptom but I stop I talk too much these are some okay yeah yeah there are some well-prepared questions here please go ahead so you've elaborated a bit about phenomena of digitalization my question would be there seems to be this fascinating alliance of very different people like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk or all pointing out prominently that artificial intelligence which we can't control is the largest threat for our free societies what do you think about that based on what you explained and how could the left you know empowering policy towards AI look like thank you here I am an old-fashioned philosopher and I would say almost in a Heideggerian mode that my first question is this one when somebody like Hawking who is not a very good philosopher I mean in the beginning of his previous book he claims triumphantly philosophy is dead no and then on the next page he articulates this thesis in the most vulgar philosophy you can imagine but my problem is this one when he says the greatest threat to humanity to human freedom okay my problem is what pre-for- how do you call it Vorverständnis what previous understanding of human freedom he has to claim this what does he understand by human freedom what does he mean by human freedom is human freedom a free choice okay what is a free choice is a free choice a choice which is not pre-determined no it's not enough because let's say that there is a process which is definitely not deterministic let us say that when I decide when I go to patisserie chocolate cake or strawberry cake that it's a genuinely open situation in the sense that some totally contingent quantum fluctuation in my mind which cannot be pre-determined decides my choice but if it's a total external contingency then this still is not freedom we don't mean by freedom this so what this is what I think what they have they Hawking and others they commit a double mistake first they usually presuppose a very naive humanist notion of freedom which I think is not radical enough a lesson this thing I don't have time to go on sorry but things are so interesting here for example I'm not against freedom because things are do you know Benjamin Libet who the who made that famous experiment demonstrating that before you make a contingent choice your neurons brains already know it split of a second before okay so for our vulgar common sense this should have been a proof that we don't have a freedom of the will because when we freely decide something before us deciding the process is already on the way but interestingly enough Benjamin Libet himself doesn't give this reading he gives an extremely refined Hegelian reading claiming that yes every choice is pre-determined but the primordial form of freedom is not to decide what do you want but to sabotage your decision and that this same okay I will not go in what I want to say is another it's there are and second problem noticed very nicely by the book which is a popular book but interesting this big hit now Yuval Harari Homo Deus is that how even people who advocate the fact that there is no freedom of the will but still the way they argue you know like the way they describe the situation it's as if the same free individual is at some level still here simply stay you know there is a way of stating I am not free which leaves you out of the affair perfectly safe and so on here I have a great appreciation for I think he even works or did is he in Berlin Thomas Metzinger your great brain scientist where he asked a very serious question no which was if we accept the result of brain sciences that there is no free will or rather no substantial self can we really assume this subjectively is this just something that we rationally accept or can we live in that way and his answer is that there is only a certain type of Buddhist enlightenment which accepts this so what I'm saying is that the first thing I didn't answer your question I just complicated it no that the first thing I would have said it we have to be much more precise here as philosophers what do we what because my problem my first problem would be that if we accept the results of brain sciences and so on then we don't really have a choice of freedom of unfreedom we're already now not free we just don't accept it you know this is my problem for example with Habermas I appreciate okay okay he is the big other the terrorist yeah yeah now now I know how it functions yeah yeah we are running completely out of time so there was another that was my that was my intention so that now I can say hypocritically I'm so sorry that I cannot stay for another hour you know so we would allow a last question please yeah my question is concerning the notion of disintegration of Sittlichkeit because it seems that what you claim in a political perspective seems much more like a social-democratic way of answering the questions and being or giving like a conservative answer in like restoring what is still there in a way and that radical left should rather explore like new or create new values and I think this can also be be seen on a European scale that we shouldn't see Europe like as a fixed identity of values that we should defend or something else but we see it as a continuity or a connection of
unknown
different kind
different kind
Slavoj Žižek
of struggles and in this way I don't know
of struggles and in this way I don't know
unknown
that radical left occupied houses in Germany or Greece for
that radical left occupied houses in Germany or Greece for
unknown
refugee self-organization in a small step it's a I don't know it's a local approach that is right but it's an example giving an example of how wealth could be distributed otherwise and this seems to me like giving an example giving a perspective that is radical differently and the situation is in this way opened up that this is possible also so it's not only right-wing populists
refugee self-organization in a small step it's a I don't know it's a local approach that is right but it's an example giving an example of how wealth could be distributed otherwise and this seems to me like giving an example giving a perspective that is radical differently and the situation is in this way opened up that this is possible also so it's not only right-wing populists
Slavoj Žižek
that can say new things but it seems to me that at least to some extent in Syriza was also example of it that the left can also regroup or restart kind of radical emancipation practice practices yeah but you know okay okay a nice question but again my god we would need more more time because you know I know very well the situation with Syriza it's wonderful yes occupy houses and so on and no you know some I will not name them very high level Syriza politician gave me the best argument which is critical towards this approach he said but then we got it that by organizing this occupation of every of abandoned houses for that we are doing the greatest service to capitalism we are softening its impact you know like if I were to be a capitalist I would say yes empty houses put the immigrants in yes it's one you know there is a certain way to fight for the marginals which just how to put it makes this situation tolerable it's a little bit like unfortunately this is not true but I remember from my communist youth it was generally accepted that political jokes were fabricated by communist secret police itself to allow them to let out steam and so on so what I would say is this you know it's I don't this is wonderful when this happens houses here there but I don't think this model has in itself a potential to be universalized this is a secondary palliative measure which is wonderful and so on and so on I think Syriza came and here I'm now in bad relations personally with both of them in Syriza the majority Syriza and the left platform why although I doubt about many of his solutions democratizing Europe and so on but I think the only true radical was Varoufakis why don't forget that you know what's the problem when referendum failed I mean succeeded and then Syriza capitulated and so on what was the real choice there we had on the one hand Tsipras' capitulation okay unacceptable but I think that the left platform plan do Grexit print our own money and so on was also absolutely nothing subversive it fitted perfectly western Europe Brussels bureaucracy that's what it's now clear first Varoufakis made this public and then I learned from some Slovene politician it was true Varoufakis told me that his greatest surprise was this one he visited Wolfgang Schäuble in those negotiations and he thought this would be a moment of almost blackmail threat he said oh if you put pressure on us like that we will do Grexit you know probably what was Schäuble's reaction fine we fully support
that can say new things but it seems to me that at least to some extent in Syriza was also example of it that the left can also regroup or restart kind of radical emancipation practice practices yeah but you know okay okay a nice question but again my god we would need more more time because you know I know very well the situation with Syriza it's wonderful yes occupy houses and so on and no you know some I will not name them very high level Syriza politician gave me the best argument which is critical towards this approach he said but then we got it that by organizing this occupation of every of abandoned houses for that we are doing the greatest service to capitalism we are softening its impact you know like if I were to be a capitalist I would say yes empty houses put the immigrants in yes it's one you know there is a certain way to fight for the marginals which just how to put it makes this situation tolerable it's a little bit like unfortunately this is not true but I remember from my communist youth it was generally accepted that political jokes were fabricated by communist secret police itself to allow them to let out steam and so on so what I would say is this you know it's I don't this is wonderful when this happens houses here there but I don't think this model has in itself a potential to be universalized this is a secondary palliative measure which is wonderful and so on and so on I think Syriza came and here I'm now in bad relations personally with both of them in Syriza the majority Syriza and the left platform why although I doubt about many of his solutions democratizing Europe and so on but I think the only true radical was Varoufakis why don't forget that you know what's the problem when referendum failed I mean succeeded and then Syriza capitulated and so on what was the real choice there we had on the one hand Tsipras' capitulation okay unacceptable but I think that the left platform plan do Grexit print our own money and so on was also absolutely nothing subversive it fitted perfectly western Europe Brussels bureaucracy that's what it's now clear first Varoufakis made this public and then I learned from some Slovene politician it was true Varoufakis told me that his greatest surprise was this one he visited Wolfgang Schäuble in those negotiations and he thought this would be a moment of almost blackmail threat he said oh if you put pressure on us like that we will do Grexit you know probably what was Schäuble's reaction fine we fully support
unknown
you we can give you billions to help you that is to say Grexit
you we can give you billions to help you that is to say Grexit
Slavoj Žižek
the way it was planned by left platform or in Syriza
the way it was planned by left platform or in Syriza
unknown
was
was
unknown
not anything problematic because this is the western European Schäuble and so on perspective we have a certain order you are in you are out Varoufakis tried something much more radical to unsettle these borders themselves to remain in and not obey the game for example his plan was to default the debt but at the same time remain within euro and cause chaos there this is why this was the true tragic story do you know that he was the only one who remember he was forced to step down even before as a minister of finance because he was immediately perceived as the true threat why because again he was
not anything problematic because this is the western European Schäuble and so on perspective we have a certain order you are in you are out Varoufakis tried something much more radical to unsettle these borders themselves to remain in and not obey the game for example his plan was to default the debt but at the same time remain within euro and cause chaos there this is why this was the true tragic story do you know that he was the only one who remember he was forced to step down even before as a minister of finance because he was immediately perceived as the true threat why because again he was
unknown
the one who really disturbed the game if you go out you go out this is not disturbing the game this you just do another model and Europe would say okay let the Greeks swim in their own misery sweat there and so on but what Varoufakis did it was the same
the one who really disturbed the game if you go out you go out this is not disturbing the game this you just do another model and Europe would say okay let the Greeks swim in their own misery sweat there and so on but what Varoufakis did it was the same
Slavoj Žižek
thing although I don't have I don't know him great ideals but you remember first years of the first Gerhard Schröder government how Oskar Lafontaine had to leave why because again I'm not celebrating him but he touched a sore point controlling the banks finances and so on and exactly the same thing Varoufakis wanted I think this is where you touch the sore point controlling banks money and so on that's why do you know that there was a big movement in Greece they tried even to put Varoufakis in prison there was a trial he barely escaped it so you see this was where Syriza was at its most radical that's why Syriza was so traumatic precisely because it was within Europe not outside and I wonder what would have happened I'm not even too much of an optimist because Varoufakis is my good friend blah blah but sometimes I'm like know he has so many creative ideas and so on and I'm afraid of people who have too many creative ideas no Genosse what is this come I know this is his way to say come we go to Normannenstraße or where it's just around the corner oh really oh my god Slava thank you so much for this intellectual pyrotechnics and thank you for your patience for being here and please you are welcome for our next lecture which is when next week oh maybe without Slavoj and so please have a good evening thanks to you Slavoj and hope we hope we sehen uns so oder so wieder absolutely vielen dank vielen dank ich würde aber lieber nicht antworten was ist die zeit jetzt? es ist neun Uhr noch nicht so schlimm noch nicht so schlimm no
thing although I don't have I don't know him great ideals but you remember first years of the first Gerhard Schröder government how Oskar Lafontaine had to leave why because again I'm not celebrating him but he touched a sore point controlling the banks finances and so on and exactly the same thing Varoufakis wanted I think this is where you touch the sore point controlling banks money and so on that's why do you know that there was a big movement in Greece they tried even to put Varoufakis in prison there was a trial he barely escaped it so you see this was where Syriza was at its most radical that's why Syriza was so traumatic precisely because it was within Europe not outside and I wonder what would have happened I'm not even too much of an optimist because Varoufakis is my good friend blah blah but sometimes I'm like know he has so many creative ideas and so on and I'm afraid of people who have too many creative ideas no Genosse what is this come I know this is his way to say come we go to Normannenstraße or where it's just around the corner oh really oh my god Slava thank you so much for this intellectual pyrotechnics and thank you for your patience for being here and please you are welcome for our next lecture which is when next week oh maybe without Slavoj and so please have a good evening thanks to you Slavoj and hope we hope we sehen uns so oder so wieder absolutely vielen dank vielen dank ich würde aber lieber nicht antworten was ist die zeit jetzt? es ist neun Uhr noch nicht so schlimm noch nicht so schlimm no
unknown
no okay no no okay okay.
no okay no no okay okay.