Rules, Race and Mel Gibson
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2006 · 1:09:13 · 10,211 words
ideologypsychoanalysisrace-antisemitismgeopolitics-warreligion-theologyethicsphilosophy-generalsubjectivityfascism-populismhistory
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture at EGS that begins with the distinction between explicit legal rules and the unwritten meta-rules that govern their application, illustrating the point through Soviet/post-Soviet Russia, a Yugoslavian student prank, Sartre's café waiter, and the structure of symbolic appearance versus simulacrum. He then pivots to two connected cases of ideological obscenity: the Mel Gibson antisemitism scandal (and Abraham Foxman's therapeutic response) and Sam Harris's utilitarian defense of torture, arguing both exemplify a dangerous tendency to pathologize political-ideological positions rather than treating them as matters of moral responsibility. The talk's final third addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tracing the illegitimate founding violence of state power, the hypocritical use of Holocaust memory to shield Israeli politics from criticism, and the inconsistent logic of radical Islamist Holocaust denial. Žižek closes by defending the intellectual's duty to resist false urgency and to theorize patiently rather than rush into action.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “unwritten rules / meta-rules”
The implicit network of rules that tell us how to apply, violate, or disregard explicit social norms; the real operative logic beneath formal legality.
The substitute order provided by organized crime when the unwritten meta-rules of legitimate society collapse, as in post-Soviet Russia.
as “shibboleth”
A publicly non-proclaimed sign of distinction, invisible to outsiders, that marks who belongs to an in-group; Žižek uses it for the meta-rules of social normativity.
Sartre's concept of self-objectivization in which a subject escapes into a firm symbolic identity to cover the void of subjectivity; Žižek complicates it via the waiter example.
A subversive strategy of following or performing a role so excessively that the very excess signals distance from the role and undermines it.
An imaginary reproduction of reality so perfect it becomes experientially indistinguishable from the real; exemplified by decaf coffee, fat-free cream, and digital recreations.
The properly symbolic dimension of meaning that operates through 'sincere lies' (polite exchanges), distinct from simulacra; what is threatened by today's reign of simulacra.
as “sincere lie”
A performative utterance both parties know is not literally meant but that nonetheless constitutes a real social pact; exemplified by polite greetings like 'How are you?'.
The capacity of symbolic acts to produce real social effects; how appearance determines social being.
as “symbolic efficiency / efficacité symbolique”
The performative power by which symbolic identity determines one's actual position in social reality; borrowed from Lévi-Strauss.
Soviet psychiatric diagnosis invented at the Serbsky Institute to pathologize political dissent; Žižek invokes it as the template for today's therapeutic approach to antisemitism.
as “institutional unconscious”
The set of unwritten, disavowed obscene rules that supplement an institution's explicit rules and are constitutive of that institution's identity, distinct from any individual's unconscious.
The Judeo-Christian-Freudian notion of the Other as carrying an infinite abyss of subjectivity that demands ethical recognition; Žižek argues this dimension is destroyed by therapeutic-utilitarian approaches.
as “decaf torture / truth pill”
Sam Harris's imagined drug that produces the full epistemic results of torture while concealing the suffering; Žižek reads it as the torture equivalent of decaf coffee, enjoyment without its unpleasant remainder.
as “chocolate laxative logic”
The postmodern operation of obtaining a result (relief, pleasure, confession) while chemically/technologically removing the unpleasant side-effect; the underlying structure of decaf coffee, wind-free beans, and Harris's truth pill.
as “founding violence / founding crime”
The illegitimate originary act of force on which every state is founded, typically repressed into a timeless heroic narrative; the Israeli case uniquely fails to obliterate it.
The fashionable post-modern left concept of the dissolution of fixed territorial identities; Žižek suggests Palestinian territorial attachment challenges and demands rethinking of this concept.
The unconscious enjoyment gained from persisting in a political deadlock, as when parties in the Middle East conflict seem to profit from not resolving it.
A political deadlock that, like a neurotic symptom, everyone can see how to dissolve yet no one wills to dissolve because of concealed libidinal investment.
Lacan's term for the object-cause of desire; implied by Žižek's broader Lacanian framework though not explicitly named in this talk.
Stories he reaches for 7
A series of market products deprived of their active/unpleasant property (decaf coffee, fat-free cream, alcohol-free beer, genetically modified wind-free beans) illustrate the logic of simulacrum: the appearance without the substance.
“coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, which all look and taste like it without being it”
Marx prefers a wife, Engels a mistress; Lenin wants both, so he can tell each he is with the other and instead go study. Žižek relates this to Lenin's retreat to Switzerland to read Hegel's Logic after the disaster of WWI.
“I would like to have both of them…so that one can say to one's wife that I'm going to my mistress and to my mistress that I have to be with my wife.”
In a letter during the Paris Commune period, Marx reportedly wrote in anxiety that revolutionaries wanted to start the revolution before he had finished Capital; Žižek uses this to defend the intellectual's right, even duty, to theorize before acting.
“My God, are they crazy? They want to start the revolution, I haven't yet finished Capital, can't they wait?”
Priestly pedophilia is not merely individual pathology but is inscribed in the Church as institution; Žižek cites Slovenian research suggesting formerly non-pedophiliac priests were gradually seduced into it by the institutional logic itself.
“one can imagine a straight, non-pedophiliac priest who after years of service gets involved in pedophilia because the very logic of the institution seduces him into it”
Harris imagines a drug producing all the epistemic results of torture while hiding the suffering from the torturer's consciousness; Žižek reads this as the torture equivalent of decaf coffee, a desire to abolish the neighbor's proximity.
“a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instruments of its utter concealment”
Sartre's waiter performs the gestures of a waiter with exaggerated theatricality, which paradoxically signals his distance from the role and asserts his subjectivity; this over-doing is the very mechanism of true non-identification.
“His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid.”
Žižek recounts Sartre's dilemma of a young Frenchman torn between caring for his ill mother and joining the Resistance, then adds a cynical third option: tell each he is with the other and secretly go study, echoing the Lenin joke.
“withdrawing to a secluded place and study”
Works invoked 9
Capital book
Referenced via Marx's joke letter, 'can't they wait, I haven't finished Capital', as the model of theoretical work that must precede revolutionary action.
Science of Logic book
The text Lenin retreated to Switzerland to study after WWI; Žižek frames this as the model of productive intellectual retreat and presents EGS as its heir.
The End of Faith book
Sam Harris's bestseller; Žižek reads it with horror, particularly Harris's utilitarian defense of torture and his imagined truth pill, which Žižek argues abolishes the dimension of the neighbor.
L'être et le néant book
Žižek extensively deploys Sartre's café waiter description as the central example for his analysis of role-playing, over-identification, and symbolic appearance.
Žižek recounts Sartre's dilemma of the young man choosing between mother and Resistance, then adds a cynical third way (retreat to study) to make a point about intellectual duty.
Threepenny Opera play
Žižek invokes Brecht's motto ('What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?') to frame the illegitimate founding violence of the state of Israel.
Žižek uses Brecht's play (based on the Solomon judgment) to propose a 'Jerusalem chalk circle': whoever truly loves Jerusalem will let it go rather than see it torn apart.
How to Read Beauvoir book
Stella Sandford's book, criticized by Žižek for misreading Beauvoir's point about racism by reducing it to a matter of white interpretation.
Simon Wiesenthal's book; Žižek finds Wiesenthal's argument that Israel's founding violence with 'limited violations' was acceptable today problematic.
People invoked 32
Cécile Winter positive
Žižek approvingly cites Winter's thought experiment: imagine Israel without the Holocaust-victim stigma, and you get a standard story of colonization.
Žižek analyzes Gibson's drunken antisemitic outburst as an expression of his ideological-cultural formation, not a pathology, and criticizes both Gibson's evasion of responsibility and Foxman's therapeutic response.
Ra'anan Gissin negative
Žižek notes that Gissin's invocation of ancient historical birthright, if applied universally, would justify endless ethnic conflict worldwide.
Yitzhak Rabin positive
Žižek cites Rabin's decision to deal with the PLO as an example of an authentic act that changed the coordinates of the situation.
Stella Sandford negative
Žižek argues Sandford's reading of Beauvoir in 'How to Read Beauvoir' misses the point by reducing racism to a matter of white interpretation rather than social-ontological constitution.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Žižek invokes Lévi-Strauss's concept of symbolic efficiency (efficacité symbolique) to explain performative social power.
Blaise Pascal positive
Mentioned among thinkers who elaborated the notion of illegitimate origins of power and founding crime.
Menachem Begin positive
Žižek quotes Begin's post-WWII defense of Jewish armed resistance to show that the language now used against Palestinian militants was once used positively by Jewish fighters.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek uses the Lenin wife-mistress-study joke and Lenin's actual retreat to Switzerland to read Hegel as models for the intellectual's duty to learn rather than rush into action.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek identifies himself as Lacanian and uses Lacan's definition of the madman (the king who thinks he is king) to supplement Sartre's analysis.
Alan Dershowitz negative
Mentioned as Harris's reference point for torture legalization; implicitly criticized alongside Harris.
Judith Butler positive
Žižek notes a partial overlap between his work and Butler's, particularly around performative imitation as a subversive strategy for undermining racial or social-role clichés.
Ben Hecht positive
Žižek quotes Hecht's 1940s 'Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine' (a pro-Jewish-resistance ad), replacing Jews/British with Palestinians/Israeli to expose the relativity of 'terrorist' as a label.
Abraham Foxman negative
Žižek argues Foxman's acceptance of the therapeutic framing of Gibson's antisemitism is obscene, reproducing Serbsky Institute logic and actually boosting antisemitism by implying Jewish power forces psychiatric treatment.
Sam Harris negative
Žižek reads Harris's utilitarian defense of torture in 'End of Belief' as a terrifying abolition of the neighbor, structurally equivalent to decaf coffee, a desire to extract results without their ethical costs.
Joseph de Maistre positive
Mentioned among thinkers who elaborated the notion of noble lies concealing founding violence.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek agrees with Badiou's proposal to abstract from Holocaust when judging Israeli politics, and with his characterization of Israel as a mixture of revolution and reaction, but criticizes his solution as too easy, like the prohibition politician's answer.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Žižek briefly notes that the reduction of the neighbor to bare life can also be approached via Agamben's work on Homo Sacer, though he lacks time to develop it.
Žižek analyzes Ahmadinejad's December Mecca speech as a mixture of disgusting Holocaust-denial/insinuation and a correct insight about European hypocrisy paying for guilt with another people's land.
Pat Robertson negative
Žižek notes Robertson's claim that Sharon's heart attack was divine punishment for Gaza withdrawal, as example of the obscene Christian fundamentalist–Zionist pact.
David Ben-Gurion positive
Žižek quotes Ben-Gurion's frank acknowledgment that there is no universal-justice ground for Jewish claims to Palestine, an honesty Žižek finds almost sympathetic compared to later hypocrisy.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Žižek invokes Brecht's Beggar's Opera motto on founding violence and his Caucasian Chalk Circle for the Jerusalem chalk circle analogy.
Simon Wiesenthal negative
Žižek finds Wiesenthal's argument in 'Justice, Not Vengeance', that founding violence with limited violations is acceptable, today problematic, though he understands its historical logic.
Bill Gates negative
Žižek cites Gates's rhetorical question ('what do computers matter when millions die of diarrhea?') as exemplary of the false urgency that short-circuits theoretical reflection.
Walter Benjamin positive
Mentioned among thinkers who worked on the notion of illegitimate origins of power.
Simone de Beauvoir positive
Žižek defends Beauvoir's account of Black inferiority in American racism as making a deeper point about symbolic violence, against feminist misreadings.
Arthur Koestler positive
Žižek quotes approvingly Koestler's insight that persecution corrupts victims as surely as power corrupts perpetrators.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek cites Marx's letter to Engels ('can't they wait, I haven't finished Capital') in defense of the intellectual's right to theorize before acting.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek invokes the borrowed kettle joke from Freud to analyze the logical inconsistency of radical Islamist Holocaust denial.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced via Lenin's retreat to reading Hegel's Logic as the model of productive theoretical retreat from urgency; Žižek frames EGS as heir to this Leninist intellectual tradition.
Immanuel Kant positive
Mentioned among thinkers who elaborated the notion of illegitimate origins of power and founding crime.
Jean-Paul Sartre positive
Žižek extensively deploys Sartre's café waiter analysis from L'être et le néant to develop his own points about role-playing, over-identification, and performativity; also uses the Existentialism is a Humanism dilemma.
What it argues
unwritten rules and the obscene underside of social normssymbolic appearance versus simulacrumthe pathologization of ideology as political strategyinstitutional unconscious and the Catholic Church pedophilia scandalthe illegitimate founding violence of the state of IsraelHolocaust memory as political instrumentthe intellectual's duty to resist false urgency and theorize
Dialectical moves 11
“The stabilization under Putin amounts not to more legality but to a newly established transparency of the unwritten rules—people again know whom to bribe.”
Apparent normalization is actually just a re-legibilization of the obscene meta-rules, not genuine rule of law.
“What is threatened by the reign of simulacra is not reality but symbolic appearance itself—the sincere lie, not the authentic.”
Contrary to common intuition, it is the symbolic-performative dimension (appearance), not factual reality, that postmodern simulation erodes.
“One is truly identified with one's social role precisely when one does not over-identify with it.”
True identification requires small violations or idiosyncrasies that signal a person behind the role; over-identification paradoxically signals non-identification.
“A madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is king, but also a king who thinks he is a king—or a waiter who really thinks he is a waiter.”
Psychosis consists in failing to perceive the performative gap between playing a role and being it, not merely in misidentifying one's role.
“The ideology of 'beneath our different social roles, we all share the same human passions' is the most dangerous version of racism.”
Liberal humanist universalism, by abstracting from the symbolic-social determination of identity, perpetuates the very racism it claims to overcome.
“Far from being a case of individual pathology, Gibson's antisemitism is simply a well-known ideology; what he needs is not therapy but acceptance of moral responsibility.”
The therapeutic reframing of ideology as pathology is itself an ideological move that evades the real political question.
“What Harris aims at with the truth pill is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the neighbor.”
Utilitarian neutralization of the proximity of suffering does not merely calibrate our ethical reactions, it destroys the ethical dimension altogether.
“The misfortune of Israel is that it was established too late—in conditions where founding crimes are no longer acceptable; paradoxically, it was Jewish intellectual influence that made them unacceptable.”
Israel is caught by the very ethical standards that Jewish intellectual culture helped establish, confronting the world with the repressed founding violence common to all states.
“In the Middle East, the true utopia is the realistic approach; the only realistic solution is the one that appears impossible within the given coordinates.”
Standard pragmatism is itself utopian in this case; only a radical 'impossible' gesture is genuinely realistic.
“Israel is getting from the Palestinians its own message in its inverted true form.”
The Palestinians' stubborn territorial attachment mirrors and returns to Israel the very founding logic of Zionist settlement, exposing it by repetition.
“Those who evoke the Holocaust to legitimize Israeli politics are the ones who effectively manipulate and instrumentalize it.”
Invoking Holocaust as political trump card is itself the worst desecration of the Holocaust's memory.
Claims 20
asserts
Every explicit legal or social order must be supplemented by a complex network of unwritten meta-rules that tell us how, when, and to what extent to follow or violate the explicit rules.social normativity and the gap between explicit and implicit rules
asserts
Homophobia, sexism, and racism today operate primarily at the level of implicit obscene rules, not explicit prohibitions.racism and discrimination
asserts
The subversive political strategy of over-identifying with explicit rules—treating them as if literally meant—can be more effective than direct protest.emancipatory politics and subversion
asserts
What is threatened by today's reign of simulacra is not reality itself but symbolic appearance—the domain of sincere lies and performative social pacts.simulacrum versus symbolic appearance
asserts
The racist degradation of Blacks in the American South was not merely an interpretation imposed by whites but constituted Blacks as actually inferior at the level of social reality itself.racism and symbolic violence
asserts
The ideology that 'beneath our different social roles, we all share the same human passions' is the most dangerous version of racism.liberal humanist anti-racism
asserts
Pedophilia in the Catholic Church is not a matter of individual pathology but is inscribed in the institution's symbolic functioning as its obscene disavowed underside.institutional unconscious and the Catholic Church
asserts
Abraham Foxman's offer to treat Gibson's antisemitism as an individual pathology requiring therapy reproduces the Serbsky Institute logic of pathologizing ideological positions.the Gibson-Foxman antisemitism incident
asserts
Antisemitism in Western societies has not been the ideology of insane people but an ingredient of the spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people.antisemitism
rejects
Sam Harris's utilitarian argument for torture effectively abolishes the dimension of the neighbor by reducing the tortured subject's pain to a calculable property.utilitarian defense of torture (Sam Harris)
asserts
The misfortune of the state of Israel is that it was established too late, in conditions where the founding violence of state creation is no longer acceptable.the legitimacy of the state of Israel
asserts
Invoking the Holocaust to legitimize Israeli politics instrumentalizes it, and ironically implies that only such an absolute trump card can redeem the crimes being committed.Holocaust memory and Israeli politics
rejects
Anti-Semitic outbursts by Arab or Palestinian actors cannot be excused as 'not really meaning Jews' any more than Hitler's antisemitism can be excused as 'really meaning capitalists.'Palestinian/Arab antisemitism and its apologetics
asserts
The Middle East conflict exhibits the structure of a neurotic symptom: everyone knows the viable solution yet no one wills to remove the obstacle because of hidden libidinal profit.the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
asserts
The recasting of the Israel-Palestine conflict as Israel versus all Arab states serves Israeli strategy by replacing the image of a strong state subduing a weaker colonized people with that of a heroic small victim surrounded by enemies.Israeli strategic framing of the conflict
reframes
In the Middle East, the true utopia is a realistic piecemeal approach; the only realistic solution is a radical gesture that appears impossible within current coordinates.pragmatic versus radical approaches to the Middle East
asserts
There are situations where the only truly practical thing to do is to resist the temptation to act immediately and instead wait and theorize patiently.the intellectual's duty and the rejection of false urgency
asserts
The pseudo-urgency of liberal humanitarian discourse ('children are dying while you theorize') has a fundamentally anti-emancipatory function that serves to short-circuit critique of capitalism.liberal humanitarianism and its ideological function
rejects
Badiou's proposal to separate the emancipatory dimension of Zionism from its colonial dimension is too easy—like the politician's 'if by wine you mean' answer.Badiou's analysis of the state of Israel
rejects
Stella Sandford misses Beauvoir's point: the violence of racism is not merely interpretive but constitutes its victims as actually inferior at the level of social reality.Sandford's reading of Beauvoir on racism
Quotes 15
“The first rule of an egalitarian emancipatory politics should be: no shibboleth please.”Slavoj Žižek · emancipatory politics and unwritten rules
“One is truly identified with one's social role precisely when one does not over-identify with it.”Slavoj Žižek · over-identification and true role-identification
“A madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is the king but also a king who is a king, or a waiter who really thinks that he is a waiter.”Slavoj Žižek · psychosis and the performative gap
“The ideology of 'beneath our different social roles, we all share the same human passions' is the most dangerous version of racism.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal humanist anti-racism as racism
“The overriding belief of the Serbsky Institute was that a person had to be insane to be against communism. Foxman's offer implies that a person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic.”Slavoj Žižek · pathologization of ideology
“Anti-Semitism in our Western societies was and is not an ideology displayed by insane people, but an ingredient of our spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people.”Slavoj Žižek · antisemitism as ideological normality
“What Harris aims at with his imagined truth pill is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the neighbor.”Slavoj Žižek · utilitarian torture and the neighbor
“The misfortune of the state of Israel is that it was established as a nation state a century or two too late, in conditions when such founding crimes are no longer acceptable.”Slavoj Žižek · Israel's founding violence and historical timing
“The very need to evoke Holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts in a way implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump card of Holocaust can redeem them.”Slavoj Žižek · Holocaust instrumentalization
“If power corrupts, the reverse is also true: persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”Arthur Koestler · victimhood and corruption
“In the Middle East, the true utopia is precisely that such a realistic approach will work. The only realistic solution is here the big one, to solve the problem at its roots.”Slavoj Žižek · radical realism versus pragmatism
“Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible.”Slavoj Žižek · May '68 slogan / radical realism
“There are situations when the only truly practical thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately. It is to wait and see by means of a patient critical analysis.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual duty and resistance to false urgency
“What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?”Slavoj Žižek · founding violence / Brecht
“The pedophilia of Catholic priests…concerns the Catholic Church as such. It is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution. It does not concern the private unconscious of individuals. It concerns the unconscious of the institution itself.”Slavoj Žižek · institutional unconscious
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Let me thank Wolfgang and at the same time in advance my apologies. As usual, I tend to be too long but to bribe Wolfgang for his patience, at the very end there is a big celebration of this EGS Institute. So if you interrupt me, you cut you cut your own celebration. Okay, so let me to begin because I really have something to say. As you may be know, or at least if you don't know it, you sense it, every legal order, or even every order of explicit social normativity, has to rely on a complex network of informal rules which tell us how are we to relate to the explicit rules, how are we to apply them, to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, some would say even expected, to disregard them, to violate them and so on. To know these unwritten rules of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit rules: when to use them or not to use them, when to violate them, when not to use a choice which is offered. For example, often we are obliged to do something, but we have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice. Recall the polite offer meant to be refused. It is a habit to refuse such an offer. Anyone who accepts it commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that you make the right choice. You are solemnly reminded that you can say no, but you are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one. The explicit no effectively functions as an implicit injunction: do it but in a discreet way. Let me give you a political example to make this logic clear. The problem during the chaotic post-Soviet years of the Boris Yeltsin rule in Russia, I think could be located at this level. Although the legal rules were known, largely the same as under Soviet Union, what disintegrated, so my friends told me, was the complex network of implicit unwritten rules which sustained the social edifice. For example, if in the good old Soviet Union you wanted to get a better hospital treatment, a new apartment, if you have a complaint against authorities, if you were summoned to a court and so on and so on, if you want your child to be accepted to a top school, if a factory manager needed raw materials not delivered on time by the state contractor, everyone knew what you really had to do, whom to address, whom to bribe and so on and so on. After the collapse of the Soviet power, one of the most frustrating aspects of the daily existence of ordinary people was that these unwritten rules largely got blurred. People simply did not know what to do, how to react. How are you to relate to explicit legal regulations? Somebody told you this is prohibited. Yes, but what did it mean? Is it really prohibited? Somebody told you go and do that. Were you really allowed to do that and so on and so on. And I think that one of the functions of the organized crime was precisely to provide a kind of ersatz legality and clear order. I had misfortune because he was patron of arts intellectual meetings, to speak with a middle-level businessman who told me, if a I have a mafia protection and I need it, it's not only that they extort profit from me, but for example if a contractor doesn't deliver me things or if somebody doesn't pay me, it's ridiculous even to bother with police, you call your mafia protectors and they deal with eventually with the one who protects the other guy and so on. And I claim that the stabilization in the last years under the Putin reign mostly amounts precisely to some kind of newly established transparency of these unwritten rules. It's not that now there is really more legality. It's simply that people are getting accustomed to new implicit rules. You again at least know whom to bribe, what you really can do, what you cannot do and so on and so on. Now, far from introducing a kind of a total oppression when you can't even do anything, every resistance is in advance integrated, I think that on the contrary, the awareness of this complex network of unwritten often obscene rules which sustain the explicit normativity is crucial today in two aspects. First, it accounts I think for maybe the crucial level at which homophobia, sexism, racism and so on operate today. It's not so much at the level of explicit rules but precisely at the level of these implicit obscene rules. Point two, sometimes you can violate these rules in a very productive way. I claim that the awareness of this gap even opens up a whole new space of, okay, resistance. I remember, if I may boast a little bit from my own youth in ex-Yugoslavia, we had under communists elections. They were not as bad as in Soviet Union, but the result was absolutely known in advance. It wasn't as in Soviet Union but usually, the Communist one. So I was a member of a committee of a small half-dissident, half-tolerated journal and we thought on the election night what to do to introduce some kind of a scandal and so on. One idea was the suicidal move: let's simply protest, these elections were not free. Then we got it, nothing would have happened. Probably the the issue of our journal would have been immediately confiscated and on the top of it, people would laugh at us, ha ha, big news as if we didn't know it. We did something much more effective. We said, okay, you pretend elections are free. Let's just treat them as free. So we simply on the election evening published an an a special issue of our journal with big front-page title, "Latest News: It Looks That Communists Have a Chance to Remain in Power," and so on, you know. Just the reaction was unbelievable. They were so mad at us. In the central committee, an old apparatchik called us and shouted at us, "Boys, no provocations like this!" Then we just played idiots. We said, "But what's wrong? You claim the elections are free, we just treated them." And I really sympathized with this apparatchik because when we asked him, "Tell us, what did we do wrong?" he wasn't able to say, he just said, "Don't fuck with me, you know very well what," and so on. So you can do things. The status of these sub-rules or meta-rules telling us how to deal with explicit rules is that of course of a shibboleth, the publicly non-proclaimed sign of distinction known only to those who are in. A sign whose very existence is invisible to those who are outside. So I think this is why the first rule of an egalitarian emancipatory politics should be, no shibboleth please. It is against this background that one should reread Jean-Paul Sartre's deservedly famous description, you know from L'être et le néant, of a waiter in a cafe who with exaggerated theatricality performs the clichéd gestures of a waiter and thus plays at being a waiter in a cafe. Here is a short quote from Sartre: "His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eager. His voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally, there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton." End of quote. Of course, as a Lacanian, I immediately recognize how Sartre's underlying ontological thesis—the waiter in the cafe cannot be immediately a cafe waiter in the sense that this table is a table—how this thesis points towards Lacan's classic definition of a madman who is not only a beggar who thinks he is the king but also a king who is a king, or a waiter who really thinks that he is a waiter. But nonetheless, there is a more more much more complexity in Sartre's description. Sartre's thesis is not simply the one about mauvaise foi, bad conscience, self-objectivization in order to cover up the void of his or her subjectivity, a subject escapes into a firm symbolic identity. What Sartre shows is how through the very exaggeration in his acting as a waiter, through his very over-identification with the role of the waiter, the waiter in question signals his distance from this role and thus asserts his subjectivity. Thus this French waiter plays at being a waiter by acting like an automaton, just as the role of the waiter incidentally in the United States is almost the opposite one: to play at acting like your friend, like, "Hi, my name is John, how are you today?" and so on. However, Sartre's point is that whatever game the waiter is called upon to play, the ultimate rule that the waiter follows is that he must break the rules and that he must do so by following them in an exaggerated manner. That is to say, the waiter does not simply follow the unwritten rules, which would be obedience to a certain kind of tyranny, but instead he goes overboard in following those rules. The waiter succeeds in rejecting the attempt to reduce him to nothing more than being a waiter, not by refusing the role but by highlighting the fact that he is playing it to the point that he escapes it. The waiter does this by overdoing things, by doing too much. So I think it's crucial to get at what Sartre is aiming here, to also supplement this description with its symmetrical opposite. One is truly identified with one's social role precisely when one does not over-identify with it, when one accompanies one's playing the role following its rules with small violations or idiosyncrasies destined to signal that beneath the role I'm playing there is a real person who cannot be directly identified with the role. That's the true identification. Which is why, to let you know an obscene incident that happened to me recently, one of my publishers proposed to me to do, you know, on the back cover of books you usually have the description, writer here does this, that, blah, blah, and then usually they add a line or two to give the personal touch, like "In her free time, Miss Highsmith likes to grow tulips and takes care of her pets," or whatever. So I said, okay, let's try the game here. So I proposed it, unfortunately as you can imagine they didn't want it, I proposed it as "In his free time, Professor Žižek surfs pornography for child pornography and teaches his son how to pull off legs from living spiders," or something, just to provoke, to show that this is precisely this false subjectivization is where you are caught into the game. Let me go now a step further. Sartre also draws attention to a crucial distinction between this kind of playing a role and a theatrical playing a role where the subject only imitates the gestures of a waiter for the amusement of spectators or as part of a stage performance. In clear opposition to the theatrical imitation, the waiter who plays being a waiter really is a waiter. As Sartre put it, the waiter realizes the condition of being a waiter while an actor who plays a waiter on stage is unrealized in his role. In linguistic terms, one can say that what accounts for this difference is the performative status of my acts. In the case of an actor, the performative efficiency is suspended. And I claim a psychotic is precisely the one who doesn't see, or rather doesn't feel, this difference. For him, both the real waiter and the actor playing being a waiter in a theater are both just playing the role. Now, I want to elaborate a little bit more, because this will bring us I claim to racism, sexism, symbolic violence. I want to elaborate the distinction between these two types of playing the role in Lacanian, but not far from by far not only Lacanian terms. This distinction is the one between simulacrum and appearance proper. Simulacrum operates on the axis between the imaginary and the real. It tries to reproduce reality at the imaginary level to such a degree that it becomes for our experience indistinguishable, the reproduction from proper reality. Exemplary simulacra are not only the realistic digital recreations of reality but also products on today's market deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, which all look and taste like it without being it. According to a recent report, a slow brief slip into vulgarity, I read on Reuters that scientists in a laboratory in Venezuela added a further element to this series. Through genetic manipulations, so it was proudly announced, they succeeded in growing beans which upon consumption do not generate the bad-smelling and socially embarrassing winds. So after decaf coffee, fat-free cakes, diet cola, alcohol-free beer, we get now wind-free beans, okay, whatever. Now, appearance proper is however something entirely different. It operates at the properly symbolic level. Exemplary of symbolic appearance is of course the enigmatic status of what we call politeness. When upon meeting an acquaintance, I say, "Glad to see you, how are you today?" it is clear to both of us that in a way I do not mean it seriously. If my partner suspects that I am really interested in how he is, he may even be unpleasantly surprised, as though I were aiming at something too intimate, of no concern to me. However, it would nonetheless be wrong to designate my act as simply hypocritical, since in another way I do mean it: the polite exchange does establish a kind of pact between the two of us. This brings us to another possible definition of a madman: the subject who is unable to enter this logic of sincere lies, so that when say a friend greets him, "Nice to see you, how are you?" he explodes: "Are you really glad to see me or are you just pretending? And who gave you the right to probe into my state?" and so on and so on. Such a sincere lie is appearance at its purest. And contrary to the doxa, it is this symbolic appearance, not reality, which is threatened in today's reign of simulacra. Furthermore, this structure of appearance accounts for at least one dimension—we will see later there are other dimensions—of symbolic violence. That is to say, appearance proper exerts what one usually refers to as performative power, or what Claude Lévi-Strauss called symbolic efficiency, efficacité symbolique. In a way, you are what you appear to be. That is to say, your symbolic identity determines your position in social reality. Let me explain this point with a maybe surprising reference, okay, I could have taken many examples from Judith Butler's work because it's obvious that I think that here there is a at least a partial overlapping between my work and her work. But let me go to for obvious reasons which concern the politically correct, incorrect borders of racism to Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote propos the United States racism against the Blacks in the late 40s when she for the first time visited United States how, quote from Beauvoir: "Many racists, ignoring the rigors of science, insist on declaring that even if the psychological reasons haven't been established, the fact is that Blacks are inferior. You only have to travel through America to be convinced of it." End of quote. Now, it's interesting how many feminist or postcolonial anti-racist readers, commentators, misunderstood here Beauvoir's point. For example, Stella Sandford in her recent book, "How to Read Beauvoir," claims that quote: "Nothing justifies Beauvoir's acceptance of the fact of this inferiority," of the Blacks with regard to whites. Brief quote from Stella Sandford: "With her existentialist philosophical framework, we might rather have expected Beauvoir to talk about the interpretation of existing physiological differences in terms of inferiority and superiority, or to point out the mistake involved in the use of the value judgments 'inferior' and 'superior' to name alleged properties of human beings, as if to confirm a given fact." End of quote. Now, I think Sandford here misses the point. It is of course clear what bothers her. She is aware that Beauvoir's claim about the factual inferiority of Blacks aims at something more than the simple social fact that in the United States south, of not only that time, Blacks were treated as inferior by the white majority. In a way, they effectively were inferior. But Sandford's solution, propelled by the care to avoid racist claims, is to relativize this inferiority into a matter of interpretation and judgment by the white racists. However, I think this sounds very politically correct: "No, no, no, Blacks are not really inferior, only the white racists construct them like this." Of course. But what I think this softening distinction misses is the truly trenchant, the most violent dimension of racism. The being of Blacks is a social symbolic being, what they and so that when they are treated by whites as inferior, this in a way does make them inferior, not only at the level of interpretation but at the level of social reality. You know, it's not only, "Oh, you see me as inferior." If I am Black, the whole social interaction makes them, in their being, inferior. To paraphrase Sartre, in this condition, a Black subject is forced to realize the condition of being Black, in exactly the same way that a waiter realizes the condition of being a waiter. Which is why I also think that, no wonder that as many Black activists learned, precisely in the way that the Sartrean waiter undermines his reduction to being a waiter by over-eagerly playing, following the rules, many Blacks got it that one of the ways, it doesn't work always but often in certain conditions to avoid to undermine the cliché is to do quite the opposite of the usual strategy: "No, I cannot be reduced to that Black cliché, I'm also a warm human person with feelings like you," but to over-eagerly, mockingly, ironically, in what Judith Butler would have called this performative imitation and so on, undermine it. I think that on the contrary, the ideology of "beneath our different social roles, we all share the same human passions" and so on, is the most dangerous version of racism. Now this then is one level of social violence, which I think it's one level but today it acts in interaction with another level. And it's crucial to bear in mind both. Which is the other level? Let me begin with a brief detour to our beloved good old Soviet Union. In Soviet times, Serbsky Institute in Moscow, I love it, was the psychiatric flagship for punitive political control. Its psychiatrists developed painful drug methods to make detainees talk and extract testimony for use in national security investigations. Underpinning the ability of psychiatrists to incarcerate people was an invented political mental disorder known as vyalo-tekushchaya, sluggish schizophrenia, vaguely translated into English. Psychiatrists described the disease as that of a person appearing quite normal most of the time, but who would break out from time to time with a severe case of inflexibility of convictions, or nervous exhaustion brought on by his or her search for justice, or a tendency to litigation or reformist delusions, and so on and so on. The treatment involved intravenous injections of psychotropic drugs that were so painfully administered that patients became lost consciousness. The overriding belief of course was that a person had to be insane to be against communism. Okay, we can laugh at it. But is this psychiatric approach to politically problematic positions really a thing of the past? Unfortunately no. Not only is, incidentally a checked it, Serbsky Institute today happily thriving in Putin's Russia, gaining even a politically privileged situation, the same guys, but as the recent incident with Mel Gibson indicates, Serbsky Institute will soon open a branch in Malibu, California. Why? Let's look at the incident. You probably followed it in the media. On Friday, July now barely days ago, Mel Gibson, intoxicated, heavily intoxicated, drove a car and was stopped by by the LA County Sheriffs. When arrested, he acted like a person completely out of control and started to shout at policemen, "Fucking Jews, the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Then he asked a deputy, "Are you a Jew?" and so on and so on. Gibson apologized, but his apology was first rejected by the Anti-Defamation League. Later, he offered a more substantial apology, announcing through a spokesman that he would undergo rehabilitation for alcohol abuse and added, quote: "Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. I am not just asking for forgiveness," so he's not just Woody Allen-ish but that's a way. "I'm like to take it one step further and meet with leaders in the Jewish community with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path of healing." Gibson said that he is caught in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display. This time, Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, accepted his apology as sincere. Quote: "Two years ago I was told by his [Gibson's] publicist that he wants to meet with me and have an understanding. I'm still waiting. There is no course, there is no curriculum. We need in-depth conversation, it's a therapy. And the most important step in any therapy is to admit that you have a problem, which is a step Gibson has already taken." End of quote. Now, you will say why lose our precious time on such a vulgar incident? Nonetheless, for an observer of today's ideological trends, this event displays I think almost a nightmarish dimension. The mutually reinforcing hypocrisy of the two sides: the anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and the aggressive Zionists is breathtaking. Political, the reconciliation between Gibson and Foxman signals an obscene pact between anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and aggressive Zionists, a pact whose expression is the growing support of the fundamentalists for the state of Israel. Recall Robert Robertson's claim that Sharon's, Israel ex-Prime Minister's, heart attack was the divine punishment for the evacuation of Gaza. What really worries me here is that Jews will pay dearly for such pacts with the devil. Can one only imagine what a boost to anti-Semitism Foxman's offer will give? Can you imagine a reaction of an ordinary guy: "My God, Jews are now really totally into control, you make a little bit fun of the Jews and you are forced into treatment, psychiatric treatment," and so on. Now, let me analyze this a little bit more close. What underlies this reconciliation is obviously an obscene quid pro quo. Foxman's reaction to Gibson's outburst was I think precisely it was not too severe, too demanding. It was on the contrary that he let Gibson all too easy off the the hook, namely, he accepted Gibson's refusal to take full personal responsibility for his anti-Semitic remarks. They were really not his own, it was pathology, some unknown force took over under the influence of alcohol and so on. However, the answer to Gibson's question—"My God, where where did those vicious words come from?"—is ridiculously simple. They were simply part of his ideological identity, formed as far as one can say in large extent by his father, virulently anti-Semitic Australian Catholic fundamentalist. So what underlies Gibson's remarks is not madness but simply a well-known ideology: anti-Semitism. Consequently, what Gibson needs is not therapy. It's not the admission that he has a problem, but the acceptance of his responsibility for his remarks. Concretely, what he has to do is to ask himself in what way his outbursts are linked to his version of Catholicism, in what way they function as its obscene underside. In other words, Gibson's hypocrisy is simply a small-scale replica of the hypocritical reaction of the Catholic Church to pedophilia flourishing in its ranks. When the church representatives insist that these cases of pedophilia, deplorable as they are, are church's internal problem, when they display great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigation, they are I claim in a way right. The pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that concerns simply the persons who because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation whatsoever to the church as an institution happen to choose the profession of a priest. It is this pedophilia a phenomenon which I claim concerns the Catholic Church as such. It is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution. It does not concern the private unconscious of individuals. It concerns the unconscious of the institution itself. It is not I'm not talking now with a Jungian way about any collective unconscious, but the set of unwritten obscene rules which supplement the explicit rules of an institution. Along these lines to make it clear, one can imagine a straight, non-pedophiliac priest who after years of service gets involved in pedophilia because the very logic of the institution seduces him into it. According to some investigations by my friends in Slovenia, this effectively was the case. They claim that they looked into the past of some priests and again it's not unfortunately they were privately pedophiliac. They were nice heterosexual guys, nothing to do with children's sex, that any Catholic preacher would love them, and it's the institution literally which redirected their interests. Such an institutional unconscious designates the obscene disavowed underside which precisely as disavowed sustains the public institution. In the army, this underside consists of the obscene sexualized rituals of fragging and so on which sustain the group solidarity. What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret side is a key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest. If a priest seriously, not just rhetorically, denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastical community. He is no longer "one of us," in exactly the same way as, for example, a citizen of a small town in the South of the United States in the late 20s if he denounced Ku Klux Klan to the police, excluded himself from his community, betraying its fundamental solidarity. So back to Foxman. When Foxman offered to treat Gibson's outburst as a case of individual pathology which needs a therapeutic approach, he not only committed the same error as those who want to reduce cases of pedophilia to individual pathologies. Much worse, he contributed to the revival of the Serbsky Institute way of dealing with problematic political ideological attitudes as phenomena which call for psychiatric intervention. In the same way that the overriding belief of the Serbsky Institute was that a person has to be insane to be against communism, Foxman's offer implies that a person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic. Now, I am not saying against this that it's healthy to be anti-Semitic. What I'm saying is that this way to dealing with the problem enables us to avoid the key issue, which is that precisely anti-Semitism in our Western societies was and is not an ideology displayed by insane people, but an ingredient of our spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people, of our ideological sanity itself. This then is where we stand today. A sad choice between Gibson and Foxman, between the obscene bigotry of fundamentalist beliefs and the no less obscene disqualification of problematic beliefs as cases of insanity that need therapy. Now let me go even darker in the newly emerging ideological obscenity. The ultimate irony is that—now I pass to a more theoretical general claim—what is threatened by such disqualifications, where if you have unacceptable ideologico-political views you are considered as the one who needs therapy, I claim is nothing less than the notion of another human being as neighbor. Neighbor in its full meaning in Jewish and also Christian legacy. The other who is to be treated psychiatrically for his opinions is deprived of the dignity of a neighbor. Now traces of this denigration of the neighbor are also found elsewhere. Say, recently I read with horror, I must admit, Sam Harris's bestseller "End of Belief," which a book arguing in a vulgar materialistic way about how beliefs today sustain terror, that we need a to break finally with religion. But it's a little bit terrifying to read in this book Harris's approach to torture, which is based on the distinction between our immediate being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract notion of others' suffering. According to Harris, and of course this is true, it is much more difficult for us to torture a singular person in front of us than to drop a bomb from a far distance that would cause the even more much more painful death of tens of thousands. We are thus all caught according to Harris in a kind of ethical illusion, parallel to perceptual illusions. The ultimate cause of these illusions is that although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional ethical responses remain conditioned by hundreds of thousands of years years old instinctual reactions of sympathy to suffering and pain that is directly witnessed. So to put it bluntly, his idea is the following one. In the same way that our visual illusion immediately our visual perception tells us sun is only a small yellow object there, but through science, astronomy and so on, we know that sun is much bigger than earth, that cognitively we progress, we know how to suspend, correct our spontaneous perceptions. But that unfortunately at a moral level we in the moral field we remain at the level of the primitives who think sun is really a small ball circulating up there in the sky. Sun standing here of course for the suffering of thousands which we don't immediately experience in front of us. This is why shooting someone point blank is for most of us much more repulsive than pressing a button that will kill tens of thousand absent persons. A quote from Harris: "Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture in certain circumstances would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem anymore acceptable in ethical terms than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky." So you are now informed. If you feel excessive sympathy when somebody is tortured in front of you, it's a neurological mistake at the same level when you think that moon is a small object. No wonder that Harris refers to Alan Dershowitz and his legitimization of torture. Now in order to suspend this evolutionary condition vulnerability to the physical display of others' suffering, Harris imagines an ideal truth pill, an effective torture equivalent to the decaf coffee, wind-free beans, diet coke, whatever you want. Quote, for me the most terrifying quote from Harris's book: he imagines, quote, "a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instruments of its utter concealment," in other words other words decaf coke torture. "The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each of the terrorists lay down for what appeared to be an hours nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a truth pill in the end?" End of quote. Now as already said, the very first lines indicate the typically postmodern logic of chocolate laxative. The torture imagined here is like a decaf coffee. You get the result without having to suffer the unpleasant side effects of sympathy and so on. Now, my first reaction to this is of course again we are back to Serbsky Institute. I read in a book on Serbsky Institute that they already had this. One of the ways to deal with dissidents was an inject injection which, for the outer of some stuff directly into your heart which for the outside observer it was nothing, you just doze a little bit. But for your inner experience it was nightmarish because the beating heartbeat was as if you felt a pressure was rather difficult, low, so it was as if you are living that extremely nightmarish and no wonder then they confessed whatever was necessary. There is, however, I claim, a much more disquieting prospect at work here. The proximity of the tortured subject which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not only a physical proximity, but at its most fundamental, the proximity of the neighbor. With all the Judeo-Christian-Freudian weight of this term. The proximity of something which no matter how far away it is physically is always by definition too close. Consequently, what Harris aims at with his imagined truth pill is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the neighbor. The tortured subject is no longer a neighbor, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus. So much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain and so on and so on. What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject. Okay, I don't have time now to go into how this reduction of the dimension of the neighbor can also be approached from the one who missed your emails from Giorgio Agamben's side as you know on the topic of Homo Sacer. I just to conclude, I want to now go even step further and against this background give you some thoughts of Middle East conflict. No, not news about politics, thoughts. Many conservative and not only conservative political thinkers from Pascal to Kant, from Joseph de Maistre to Walter Benjamin, elaborated or worked on the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of the founding crime on which states are founded, which is why one should offer to people noble lies in the guise of the heroic narratives of origin which of course render invisible the founding crime. With regard to these ideas, it is in a way true I claim what was often said. The misfortune of the state of Israel is that it was established as a nation state a century or two too late, in conditions when such founding crimes are no longer acceptable. And the ultimate irony, it was the Jewish intellectual influence which contributed, which made the greatest contribution to the price of this unacceptability. During my last visit to Israel, I was approached by an Israeli intellectual who, aware of my Palestinian sympathies, mockingly asked me: "Are you not ashamed to be here in Israel, in this illegal criminal state? Are you not afraid that your staying here will contaminate your leftist credentials and make you an accomplice in crime?" Now, in all honesty, I have to admit that every time I enter the state of Israel, I experience a strange thrill of entering some forbidden territory of illegitimate violence. Does this mean that I am secretly an anti-Semite? Maybe. But nonetheless, I think that what really disturbs me is precisely that I find myself in a state, state which did not yet obliterate, repress into a timeless past the founding violence of its illegitimate origins. In this way, the state of Israel confronts us with the obliterated past of every state power. This I think accounts, maybe at least partially, for the emblematic value of the Middle East conflict. It confronts us with the fragility and penetrability of the borders that separate illegitimate non-state power from the legitimate state power. Since, in the case of the state of Israel, its illegitimate origins are not yet obliterated, their effects are fully felt today. We all know Bertolt Brecht's motto from his "Beggar's Opera": "What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?" In short, what is the robbery that violates the law compared to the much greater robbery that takes place under the legitimization of the law? One is tempted to propose a new variation of this motto. What is committing an act of terror to a state power exerting the war on terror? When the desperate Western observers wonder why the Palestinians insist in their stubborn attachment to their land, refusing to dissolve their identity in the wide Arab Sea, they demand of Palestinians precisely to ignore the Israeli illegitimate state-founding violence. This is why in a very cruelly ironic display of poetic justice, Israel is getting from the Palestinians its own message in its inverted true form. Not only with regard to the pathologically strong attachment to land, that is to say a de facto denial of the deterritorialization that allegedly characterizes today's global capitalism—I don't have time now to go into it, but precisely struggles like those of Palestinians ask from us to rethink this fashionable phrase "deterritorialization." Maybe we should start to return to precisely territorialization, creating liberated territories as motto for the left. Now, what do I mean by this poetic justice? Imagine one were to read in today's media the following statement. Please listen carefully. "Our enemies call us terrorists. People who were neither our friends nor our enemies also use this Latin name. And yet we are not terrorists. The historical origins of the political term terror prove that it cannot be applied to a revolutionary war of liberation. Fighters for freedom must arm, otherwise they would be crushed overnight. What has a struggle for the dignity of men against oppression and subjugation to do with terrorism?" End of quote. Imagine this in today's media. One would automatically attribute such a statement to some Islamic terrorist group and condemn it. However, some of you may have guessed it, the author of these words, I quoted them literally, is of course Menachem Begin. They stem from the years after World War II immediately when Haganah was fighting the British forces in Palestine. Furthermore, it is interesting to note how in the years of the Jewish struggle against the British military in Palestine, the very term terrorist had for them a positive connotation. Again, another even a little bit more provocative mental experiment. Imagine reading today in a big media a paid ad with the headline, "Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine," which would contain these sentences. I quote: "My brave friends, you may not believe what I write you, for there is a lot of fertilizer in the air at the moment. But on my word as an old reporter, what I write is true. The Palestinians of America are for you. You are their champions. You are the green they wear. You are the feather in their heads. You are the first answer that makes sense to the New World. Every time you blow up an Israeli arsenal, or wreck an Israeli jail, or send an Israeli railroad sky high, or rob an Israeli bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the Israeli betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Palestinians of America make a little holiday in their hearts." Imagine reading this. However, such an ad with exactly the same headline, "Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine," was published in in the U.S. newspapers, written by none other than Ben Hecht, the celebrated Hollywood scenarist. All I did is of course I replaced Jews with Palestinians and British with Israeli. It is almost sympathetic against this background to see the first generation Israeli leaders openly confessing the fact that their claims to the land of Palestine cannot be grounded in universal justice, that we are dealing with a simple war of conquest between two groups where no mediation is possible. Here is what David Ben-Gurion wrote, quote: "Everyone can see the way of the problem in the relations between Arabs and Jews. But no one sees that there is no solution to these problems. There is no solution. Here is an abyss and nothing can link its two sides. We as a people want this land to be ours. The Arabs as a people want this land to be theirs." End of quote. Now the problem with this statement today is clear. Such an exemption of ethnic conflicts for land from moral considerations is simply no longer acceptable. This is why the way Simon Wiesenthal himself in his "Justice, Not Vengeance" approaches this problem appears today problematic. Quote from Wiesenthal: "One should finally take cognizance of the fact that one cannot found a state without curtailing the rights of those who were already settled at its territory. One should be satisfied with the fact that the violations were limited in that relatively small number of people was hurt. This is how it was when the state of Israel was founded. Eventually the Jewish population lived there for a long time while the Palestinians were in comparison with the Jewish ones sparsely settled and had great opportunities to withdraw. That is to say, the continually victorious state of Israel cannot forever rely on the sympathies that the world accords to victims." End of quote. We see that what Wiesenthal is advocating here is nothing else than a state-founding violence with a human face, with limited violations. Incidentally, as to the comparative sparsity of settlers, according to my Israel sources, the population of the Palestinian territory in just when the mass influx of Jews started, was Jews versus Palestinians. So much about the density of the population. However, from today's perspective, the truly interesting part of this passage is the last sentence. Its only consistent reading is that now that the state of Israel is continually victorious, it no longer needs to behave like a victim, but can fully assert its force. True in so far as one doesn't forget, I would add, that this position of power also involves new responsibilities. That is to say, the problem today is that the state of Israel, while continually victorious, still relies on the image of Jews as victims to legitimize its power politics and to denounce its critics as hidden Holocaust sympathizers and so on. Arthur Koestler proposed a profound insight: "If power corrupts, the reverse is also true. Persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways." End of quote. Cécile Winter, a collaborator of Alain Badiou, recently proposed along these lines a nice mental experiment. Imagine Israel as it is, in its destiny of the last half century, but ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatized by the signifier of the absolute victim and thus beyond moral reproach. What we thus get is a standard story of colonization. So why should we, as Alain Badiou proposed, proposes, abstract from the Holocaust when we judge the Israeli politics towards Palestinians? My answer: yes, we should, but not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the Holocaust was an incomparably stronger crime. I think that it is those who evoke Holocaust in this way as legitimization of Israeli politics that effectively manipulate it. They instrumentalize it for today's political uses. The very need to evoke Holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts in a way implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump card of Holocaust can redeem them. Now to establish a kind of a balance, I'm in no way justifying in this critique of the state of Israel even minimally any kind of anti-Semitism. I absolutely don't accept the the logic of, "You know we can understand, we should understand some Arab or Palestinian anti-Semitic statements in that context, it's just the reaction," I mean how to put it, that they don't really—that's how some Palestinians justify it. "Yes, we have anti-Semitic outbursts but they don't really mean Jews. What they mean is just the state of Israel" and so on. Well my stupid point, if they mean it why don't they say what they mean? That is to say, I'm sorry to tell you but in exactly the same terms, you can we all know that Hitler when he said Jews, every Marxist will tell you, he didn't really mean Jews, no? He meant capitalists or whatever rich people and he just used Jews as an effective metaphor, which in no way justifies it. What is wrong with the predominant Arab reaction? Recall the joke, I recall it all the time so you may be tired by it, evoked by Freud in order to render the strange logic of dreams: the borrowed kettle joke. A, I never borrowed the kettle from you. B, I returned it to you unbroken. the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Of course such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments confirms per negationem, negationem, what it wants to deny, that I returned to you a broken kettle. But does the same inconsistency not characterize the way radical Islamists respond to the Holocaust? A, Holocaust did not happen. Or it happened in a much smaller not million just whatever. it did happen, but the Jews deserved it. the Jews did not deserve it but they themselves lost the right to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis do to them. I cannot quote it now but it's unbelievable how sometimes in the same text you get all three. For example, as an obscene example of the ambiguity of shifting between these lines. You know how the scandal caused by the Iranian President Ahmadinejad when in his speech in Mecca in December he implied that guilt for the Holocaust led European countries to support the establishment of the state of Israel. Quote: "Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces. And they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw him in jail. Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? If the Europeans are honest, they should give some of their provinces in Europe, like in Germany, Austria, or other countries, to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it." End of quote. I think sincerely that this statement is a mixture of the most disgusting insinuations and of a correct insight. That is to say, the disgusting part is of course Holocaust denial, or even more problematic, the claim that Jews deserved it. Namely if you listen carefully, when Ahmadinejad says "we don't accept this claim," he's consciously, some Iranian friends confirmed this to me, ambiguous. Which claim? The claim that Hitler killed millions of Jews, or the claim that the Jews were innocent, you know, so he oscillates. They were not killed or maybe they were killed but they were not innocent. But what is correct in this statement is the reminder of European hypocrisy. The European maneuver effectively was to pay for its own guilt with another people's land. So when the Israeli government spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin, said in response, "Just to remind Mr. Ahmadinejad, we've been here long before his ancestors were here. Therefore we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here," he evoked a historical right which when applied universally would lead to universal slaughter. That is to say, can one imagine a world in which ethnic groups would be all the time reminding their neighbors that "we've been here before you, even if this means thousands or more years ago," and use this fact to justify their effort to seize the neighbor's land? The big mystery propos of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is I think why does it persist for so long when everybody knows the only viable solution: the withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, the establishment of a Palestinian state as well as some kind of compromise concerning Jerusalem. Whenever the agreement seems at hand, it inexplicably withdraws. How often did it happen that when peace seemed just a matter of finding proper formulation for some minor statement, everything suddenly collapsed, displaying the fragility of the negotiated compromise. There is effectively something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle East conflict. Everyone sees the way to get rid of the obstacle and yet no one wants to remove it. As if there is some kind of pathological libidinal profit gained gained by persisting in the deadlock. This is why the Middle East crisis is such a sensitive point for the pragmatic politics which aims at resolving problems peace by peace in a realistic mode. Here I claim in the Middle East, the true utopia is precisely that such a realistic approach will work. The only realistic solution is here the big one, to solve the problem at its roots. Here the old motto from the walls of Paris of '68 applies: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible. Only a radical gesture that has to appear impossible within the given coordinates will realistically do the job. One is really tempted to speak here of a symptomatic knot and as the story of the Gordian knot tells us, the only way to resolve such a deadlock is not to unravel the knot but to cut it. But how? Alain Badiou, since he is not here I will now do a little bit of critique of him because I'm a warm human person and don't like to hurt people criticizing them in face, so a warm person but a little bit bad behind the back, okay. Here is the quote. The founding of a Zionist state from Badiou was a mixed, truly complex reality. On the one hand, it is an event which is part of a larger event, the rise of great revolutionary communist socialist projects, the idea to found an entirely new society. On the other hand, it is a counter-event which is part of a larger counter-event: colonialism, the brutal conquest by the people who came from Europe of the new land where other people other people live. This creation is an extraordinary mixture, the creation of the state of Israel, of revolution and reaction, of emancipation and oppression. The Zionist state should become what it had in it of being just and new. It has to become the least racial, the least religious, and the least nationalist of states. The most universal of them all. End of quote. Now, while there is of course a truth in this insight, the problem remains. Can one really untie the knot in this direct way and simply separate the two aspects? In the sense of the possibility of the first one, the Zionist state, without the second one. To me frankly it sounds a little bit too much like the legendary "if" answer of, I forgot his name sorry, I think it's from the time of prohibition, of an American politician to the question "Do you support the prohibition of alcohol of wine or not?" His answer was, "If by wine you mean the terrible drink which ruined thousands of families, making husbands a wreck who were beating their wives and neglecting their children, then I'm fully for the prohibition. But if you mean by wine the noble drink with a wonderful taste which makes every meal such a pleasure, then I'm against the prohibition." Badiou is a little bit too much of this I think. So what is needed is perhaps more. Not only drawing the line of distinction between the good and the bad side, but an authentic act of changing the very coordinates of the situation. Like when Yitzhak Rabin decided—I still remember what a shock it was after decades of that rhetoric "we don't deal with Palestinian and PLO terrorists," simply, let's cut it, let's deal with it and so on and so on. Namely, recall the story about the Caucasian Chalk Circle on which Brecht based one of his great plays. In the ancient times, somewhere in Caucasus, a biological mother and a stepmother appealed to the judge to decide who should get the child. The judge drew a chalk with a chalk a circle in sand, okay on stone probably it's a little bit difficult to to place the baby in the middle and told the two women that the one who will be first to pull the child out of the circle will get it. When the stepmother saw that the child was of course screaming, getting hurt by being drawn in opposite directions, she let him go out of compassion. And of course the child gave the judge gave the child to her, claiming that she displayed true maternal love. I would like to imagine along these lines a Jerusalem chalk circle. The one who truly loves Jerusalem would rather let it go than see it torn apart by tensions. And the ultimate irony if you know a little bit of Old Testament is that this Brecht story is really a variation of that King Solomon judgment: cut it it's as if today those the bad mother who says cut it in two is predominant is predominant. That is to say what is happening now in and around the state of Israel, I think that the tragic thing is the recasting of the conflict in the terms of the war between Israel and the entire Arab community. This recasting is I think fits both sides. On the one hand, it's part of probably the new Israeli strategy. If the conflict is perceived as focused on the on Israel's relation with Palestinians, we get the image of a strong state subduing an inferior, I mean in the sense of numbers, smaller colonized population. If however, the conflict is recast as the conflict between the state of Israel and all other Arab states, then we get a much more heroic image of a small Israel as a victim encircled by the Arab Sea, million against hundreds of millions. While it is too early to say if this recasting is part of the larger United States plan to attack militarily Iran or Syria, what is clear today is that this strategy, which as I already said directly plays into the hands of the anti-Semitic Arab radicals, can dangerously backfire. Now just a concluding remark where I come to praising this EGS Institute. Now just a concluding general remark. Does this mean my conclusion, my God, a state of emergency, a new Armageddon is approaching? As a conclusion, I think that in so far as we are here where we are and also in so far as part of our general duty of intellectuals, it's precisely I claim to reject, problematize the sense of emergency which is more and more predominating today, which pervades the standard left-liberal humanitarian discourse in a where you have all the time this pseudo-concrete reference to to an emergency, like for example for me the typical thing would be to say: "Are you aware that for every word that I spoke here, children die of hunger in Africa," and so on and so on. You have also incidentally a positive aspect of this pseudo-urgency of the liberal discourse. For example, I remember in New York entering a Starbucks coffee place and at the entrance, posters were greeting customers pointing out that half or so of their profits go to the healthcare for the children of Guatemala from where their coffee originates, so that with every cup you drink you so to speak save a child's life and so on and so on. I claim that there is a fundamental anti-terrorist edge to it—the anti, sorry theoretical edge to it. I accept I'm here for Badiou. Theory terror whatever. The underlying point here is no time to reflect on it all, we have to act now. As Bill Gates recently put it, what do computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying of diarrhea? Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich living in their secluded virtual world not only do they not deny, not only do they not ignore the harsh reality outside their area, they actively refer to it all the time. I think that's the obscenity. You cannot play the old game, "Ooh you live up there, what about...?" This immediate reference which of course directly has an anti-emancipatory potential. The logic is: forget about your ideologies, capitalism, let's do something. You talk about ideology, deconstruction, but people are dying there. Forget about Hegel and so on. Here I'm a Marxist. Which Marxist? The one my favorite. There is a wonderful letter from Marx to Engels from around the time of the Paris Commune when Marx and some others of course naively thought that European revolution will explode at any moment. In this letter which is it's full of anxiety, Marx wrote: "My God, are they crazy? They want to start the revolution, I haven't yet finished Capital, can't they wait?" Okay. That's what we need today. That is to say where in a critical analysis of the present global constellation one offers no clear solution, no practical advice on what to do, when one paints no light at the end of the tunnel, well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us. One is usually reproached: "So what should we do? Nothing, just sit and wait?" I think one should garner the courage to answer: yes, there are situations when the only truly practical thing to do is to resist to engage, the temptation to engage immediately. It is to wait and see by means of a patient critical analysis. Engagement today seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his "Existentialism is a Humanism," Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in torn between the duty to help his lone ill mother and the duty to enter Resistance and fight the Germans. Sartre's point is of course that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man should make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom, assuming full responsibility for his decision. But nonetheless, an obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join Resistance and to tell his resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while in reality withdrawing to a secluded place and study. Now, I think there is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to my mind at least a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism, Lenin's words to young people, his answer to what they should do—"Learn, learn, and learn"—were evoked all the time, displayed on all school walls, even I remember them when I was young, like "Remember: Learn, learn, learn, Lenin." So here is how the joke goes. Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked what would they prefer to have, a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers a wife, while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. However, to everyone's surprise, Lenin says, "I would like to have both of them." "My God, why is there a hidden decadent joyeur in Lenin?" "No," he explains, "so that one can—one can say to one's wife that I'm going to my mistress and to my mistress that I have to be with my wife." "Then what do you do?" You get the joke. "I can go to a lone place and learn, learn, and learn." And is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe of the lowest catastrophe of his life? He retired to Switzerland and there to learn, learn, and learn reading Hegel's Logic. We are the successors of Lenin today here in EGS, where we learn, learn, and learn. Thank you.
Let me thank Wolfgang and at the same time in advance my apologies. As usual, I tend to be too long but to bribe Wolfgang for his patience, at the very end there is a big celebration of this EGS Institute. So if you interrupt me, you cut you cut your own celebration. Okay, so let me to begin because I really have something to say. As you may be know, or at least if you don't know it, you sense it, every legal order, or even every order of explicit social normativity, has to rely on a complex network of informal rules which tell us how are we to relate to the explicit rules, how are we to apply them, to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, some would say even expected, to disregard them, to violate them and so on. To know these unwritten rules of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit rules: when to use them or not to use them, when to violate them, when not to use a choice which is offered. For example, often we are obliged to do something, but we have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice. Recall the polite offer meant to be refused. It is a habit to refuse such an offer. Anyone who accepts it commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that you make the right choice. You are solemnly reminded that you can say no, but you are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one. The explicit no effectively functions as an implicit injunction: do it but in a discreet way. Let me give you a political example to make this logic clear. The problem during the chaotic post-Soviet years of the Boris Yeltsin rule in Russia, I think could be located at this level. Although the legal rules were known, largely the same as under Soviet Union, what disintegrated, so my friends told me, was the complex network of implicit unwritten rules which sustained the social edifice. For example, if in the good old Soviet Union you wanted to get a better hospital treatment, a new apartment, if you have a complaint against authorities, if you were summoned to a court and so on and so on, if you want your child to be accepted to a top school, if a factory manager needed raw materials not delivered on time by the state contractor, everyone knew what you really had to do, whom to address, whom to bribe and so on and so on. After the collapse of the Soviet power, one of the most frustrating aspects of the daily existence of ordinary people was that these unwritten rules largely got blurred. People simply did not know what to do, how to react. How are you to relate to explicit legal regulations? Somebody told you this is prohibited. Yes, but what did it mean? Is it really prohibited? Somebody told you go and do that. Were you really allowed to do that and so on and so on. And I think that one of the functions of the organized crime was precisely to provide a kind of ersatz legality and clear order. I had misfortune because he was patron of arts intellectual meetings, to speak with a middle-level businessman who told me, if a I have a mafia protection and I need it, it's not only that they extort profit from me, but for example if a contractor doesn't deliver me things or if somebody doesn't pay me, it's ridiculous even to bother with police, you call your mafia protectors and they deal with eventually with the one who protects the other guy and so on. And I claim that the stabilization in the last years under the Putin reign mostly amounts precisely to some kind of newly established transparency of these unwritten rules. It's not that now there is really more legality. It's simply that people are getting accustomed to new implicit rules. You again at least know whom to bribe, what you really can do, what you cannot do and so on and so on. Now, far from introducing a kind of a total oppression when you can't even do anything, every resistance is in advance integrated, I think that on the contrary, the awareness of this complex network of unwritten often obscene rules which sustain the explicit normativity is crucial today in two aspects. First, it accounts I think for maybe the crucial level at which homophobia, sexism, racism and so on operate today. It's not so much at the level of explicit rules but precisely at the level of these implicit obscene rules. Point two, sometimes you can violate these rules in a very productive way. I claim that the awareness of this gap even opens up a whole new space of, okay, resistance. I remember, if I may boast a little bit from my own youth in ex-Yugoslavia, we had under communists elections. They were not as bad as in Soviet Union, but the result was absolutely known in advance. It wasn't as in Soviet Union but usually, the Communist one. So I was a member of a committee of a small half-dissident, half-tolerated journal and we thought on the election night what to do to introduce some kind of a scandal and so on. One idea was the suicidal move: let's simply protest, these elections were not free. Then we got it, nothing would have happened. Probably the the issue of our journal would have been immediately confiscated and on the top of it, people would laugh at us, ha ha, big news as if we didn't know it. We did something much more effective. We said, okay, you pretend elections are free. Let's just treat them as free. So we simply on the election evening published an an a special issue of our journal with big front-page title, "Latest News: It Looks That Communists Have a Chance to Remain in Power," and so on, you know. Just the reaction was unbelievable. They were so mad at us. In the central committee, an old apparatchik called us and shouted at us, "Boys, no provocations like this!" Then we just played idiots. We said, "But what's wrong? You claim the elections are free, we just treated them." And I really sympathized with this apparatchik because when we asked him, "Tell us, what did we do wrong?" he wasn't able to say, he just said, "Don't fuck with me, you know very well what," and so on. So you can do things. The status of these sub-rules or meta-rules telling us how to deal with explicit rules is that of course of a shibboleth, the publicly non-proclaimed sign of distinction known only to those who are in. A sign whose very existence is invisible to those who are outside. So I think this is why the first rule of an egalitarian emancipatory politics should be, no shibboleth please. It is against this background that one should reread Jean-Paul Sartre's deservedly famous description, you know from L'être et le néant, of a waiter in a cafe who with exaggerated theatricality performs the clichéd gestures of a waiter and thus plays at being a waiter in a cafe. Here is a short quote from Sartre: "His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eager. His voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally, there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton." End of quote. Of course, as a Lacanian, I immediately recognize how Sartre's underlying ontological thesis—the waiter in the cafe cannot be immediately a cafe waiter in the sense that this table is a table—how this thesis points towards Lacan's classic definition of a madman who is not only a beggar who thinks he is the king but also a king who is a king, or a waiter who really thinks that he is a waiter. But nonetheless, there is a more more much more complexity in Sartre's description. Sartre's thesis is not simply the one about mauvaise foi, bad conscience, self-objectivization in order to cover up the void of his or her subjectivity, a subject escapes into a firm symbolic identity. What Sartre shows is how through the very exaggeration in his acting as a waiter, through his very over-identification with the role of the waiter, the waiter in question signals his distance from this role and thus asserts his subjectivity. Thus this French waiter plays at being a waiter by acting like an automaton, just as the role of the waiter incidentally in the United States is almost the opposite one: to play at acting like your friend, like, "Hi, my name is John, how are you today?" and so on. However, Sartre's point is that whatever game the waiter is called upon to play, the ultimate rule that the waiter follows is that he must break the rules and that he must do so by following them in an exaggerated manner. That is to say, the waiter does not simply follow the unwritten rules, which would be obedience to a certain kind of tyranny, but instead he goes overboard in following those rules. The waiter succeeds in rejecting the attempt to reduce him to nothing more than being a waiter, not by refusing the role but by highlighting the fact that he is playing it to the point that he escapes it. The waiter does this by overdoing things, by doing too much. So I think it's crucial to get at what Sartre is aiming here, to also supplement this description with its symmetrical opposite. One is truly identified with one's social role precisely when one does not over-identify with it, when one accompanies one's playing the role following its rules with small violations or idiosyncrasies destined to signal that beneath the role I'm playing there is a real person who cannot be directly identified with the role. That's the true identification. Which is why, to let you know an obscene incident that happened to me recently, one of my publishers proposed to me to do, you know, on the back cover of books you usually have the description, writer here does this, that, blah, blah, and then usually they add a line or two to give the personal touch, like "In her free time, Miss Highsmith likes to grow tulips and takes care of her pets," or whatever. So I said, okay, let's try the game here. So I proposed it, unfortunately as you can imagine they didn't want it, I proposed it as "In his free time, Professor Žižek surfs pornography for child pornography and teaches his son how to pull off legs from living spiders," or something, just to provoke, to show that this is precisely this false subjectivization is where you are caught into the game. Let me go now a step further. Sartre also draws attention to a crucial distinction between this kind of playing a role and a theatrical playing a role where the subject only imitates the gestures of a waiter for the amusement of spectators or as part of a stage performance. In clear opposition to the theatrical imitation, the waiter who plays being a waiter really is a waiter. As Sartre put it, the waiter realizes the condition of being a waiter while an actor who plays a waiter on stage is unrealized in his role. In linguistic terms, one can say that what accounts for this difference is the performative status of my acts. In the case of an actor, the performative efficiency is suspended. And I claim a psychotic is precisely the one who doesn't see, or rather doesn't feel, this difference. For him, both the real waiter and the actor playing being a waiter in a theater are both just playing the role. Now, I want to elaborate a little bit more, because this will bring us I claim to racism, sexism, symbolic violence. I want to elaborate the distinction between these two types of playing the role in Lacanian, but not far from by far not only Lacanian terms. This distinction is the one between simulacrum and appearance proper. Simulacrum operates on the axis between the imaginary and the real. It tries to reproduce reality at the imaginary level to such a degree that it becomes for our experience indistinguishable, the reproduction from proper reality. Exemplary simulacra are not only the realistic digital recreations of reality but also products on today's market deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, which all look and taste like it without being it. According to a recent report, a slow brief slip into vulgarity, I read on Reuters that scientists in a laboratory in Venezuela added a further element to this series. Through genetic manipulations, so it was proudly announced, they succeeded in growing beans which upon consumption do not generate the bad-smelling and socially embarrassing winds. So after decaf coffee, fat-free cakes, diet cola, alcohol-free beer, we get now wind-free beans, okay, whatever. Now, appearance proper is however something entirely different. It operates at the properly symbolic level. Exemplary of symbolic appearance is of course the enigmatic status of what we call politeness. When upon meeting an acquaintance, I say, "Glad to see you, how are you today?" it is clear to both of us that in a way I do not mean it seriously. If my partner suspects that I am really interested in how he is, he may even be unpleasantly surprised, as though I were aiming at something too intimate, of no concern to me. However, it would nonetheless be wrong to designate my act as simply hypocritical, since in another way I do mean it: the polite exchange does establish a kind of pact between the two of us. This brings us to another possible definition of a madman: the subject who is unable to enter this logic of sincere lies, so that when say a friend greets him, "Nice to see you, how are you?" he explodes: "Are you really glad to see me or are you just pretending? And who gave you the right to probe into my state?" and so on and so on. Such a sincere lie is appearance at its purest. And contrary to the doxa, it is this symbolic appearance, not reality, which is threatened in today's reign of simulacra. Furthermore, this structure of appearance accounts for at least one dimension—we will see later there are other dimensions—of symbolic violence. That is to say, appearance proper exerts what one usually refers to as performative power, or what Claude Lévi-Strauss called symbolic efficiency, efficacité symbolique. In a way, you are what you appear to be. That is to say, your symbolic identity determines your position in social reality. Let me explain this point with a maybe surprising reference, okay, I could have taken many examples from Judith Butler's work because it's obvious that I think that here there is a at least a partial overlapping between my work and her work. But let me go to for obvious reasons which concern the politically correct, incorrect borders of racism to Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote propos the United States racism against the Blacks in the late 40s when she for the first time visited United States how, quote from Beauvoir: "Many racists, ignoring the rigors of science, insist on declaring that even if the psychological reasons haven't been established, the fact is that Blacks are inferior. You only have to travel through America to be convinced of it." End of quote. Now, it's interesting how many feminist or postcolonial anti-racist readers, commentators, misunderstood here Beauvoir's point. For example, Stella Sandford in her recent book, "How to Read Beauvoir," claims that quote: "Nothing justifies Beauvoir's acceptance of the fact of this inferiority," of the Blacks with regard to whites. Brief quote from Stella Sandford: "With her existentialist philosophical framework, we might rather have expected Beauvoir to talk about the interpretation of existing physiological differences in terms of inferiority and superiority, or to point out the mistake involved in the use of the value judgments 'inferior' and 'superior' to name alleged properties of human beings, as if to confirm a given fact." End of quote. Now, I think Sandford here misses the point. It is of course clear what bothers her. She is aware that Beauvoir's claim about the factual inferiority of Blacks aims at something more than the simple social fact that in the United States south, of not only that time, Blacks were treated as inferior by the white majority. In a way, they effectively were inferior. But Sandford's solution, propelled by the care to avoid racist claims, is to relativize this inferiority into a matter of interpretation and judgment by the white racists. However, I think this sounds very politically correct: "No, no, no, Blacks are not really inferior, only the white racists construct them like this." Of course. But what I think this softening distinction misses is the truly trenchant, the most violent dimension of racism. The being of Blacks is a social symbolic being, what they and so that when they are treated by whites as inferior, this in a way does make them inferior, not only at the level of interpretation but at the level of social reality. You know, it's not only, "Oh, you see me as inferior." If I am Black, the whole social interaction makes them, in their being, inferior. To paraphrase Sartre, in this condition, a Black subject is forced to realize the condition of being Black, in exactly the same way that a waiter realizes the condition of being a waiter. Which is why I also think that, no wonder that as many Black activists learned, precisely in the way that the Sartrean waiter undermines his reduction to being a waiter by over-eagerly playing, following the rules, many Blacks got it that one of the ways, it doesn't work always but often in certain conditions to avoid to undermine the cliché is to do quite the opposite of the usual strategy: "No, I cannot be reduced to that Black cliché, I'm also a warm human person with feelings like you," but to over-eagerly, mockingly, ironically, in what Judith Butler would have called this performative imitation and so on, undermine it. I think that on the contrary, the ideology of "beneath our different social roles, we all share the same human passions" and so on, is the most dangerous version of racism. Now this then is one level of social violence, which I think it's one level but today it acts in interaction with another level. And it's crucial to bear in mind both. Which is the other level? Let me begin with a brief detour to our beloved good old Soviet Union. In Soviet times, Serbsky Institute in Moscow, I love it, was the psychiatric flagship for punitive political control. Its psychiatrists developed painful drug methods to make detainees talk and extract testimony for use in national security investigations. Underpinning the ability of psychiatrists to incarcerate people was an invented political mental disorder known as vyalo-tekushchaya, sluggish schizophrenia, vaguely translated into English. Psychiatrists described the disease as that of a person appearing quite normal most of the time, but who would break out from time to time with a severe case of inflexibility of convictions, or nervous exhaustion brought on by his or her search for justice, or a tendency to litigation or reformist delusions, and so on and so on. The treatment involved intravenous injections of psychotropic drugs that were so painfully administered that patients became lost consciousness. The overriding belief of course was that a person had to be insane to be against communism. Okay, we can laugh at it. But is this psychiatric approach to politically problematic positions really a thing of the past? Unfortunately no. Not only is, incidentally a checked it, Serbsky Institute today happily thriving in Putin's Russia, gaining even a politically privileged situation, the same guys, but as the recent incident with Mel Gibson indicates, Serbsky Institute will soon open a branch in Malibu, California. Why? Let's look at the incident. You probably followed it in the media. On Friday, July now barely days ago, Mel Gibson, intoxicated, heavily intoxicated, drove a car and was stopped by by the LA County Sheriffs. When arrested, he acted like a person completely out of control and started to shout at policemen, "Fucking Jews, the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Then he asked a deputy, "Are you a Jew?" and so on and so on. Gibson apologized, but his apology was first rejected by the Anti-Defamation League. Later, he offered a more substantial apology, announcing through a spokesman that he would undergo rehabilitation for alcohol abuse and added, quote: "Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. I am not just asking for forgiveness," so he's not just Woody Allen-ish but that's a way. "I'm like to take it one step further and meet with leaders in the Jewish community with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path of healing." Gibson said that he is caught in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display. This time, Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, accepted his apology as sincere. Quote: "Two years ago I was told by his [Gibson's] publicist that he wants to meet with me and have an understanding. I'm still waiting. There is no course, there is no curriculum. We need in-depth conversation, it's a therapy. And the most important step in any therapy is to admit that you have a problem, which is a step Gibson has already taken." End of quote. Now, you will say why lose our precious time on such a vulgar incident? Nonetheless, for an observer of today's ideological trends, this event displays I think almost a nightmarish dimension. The mutually reinforcing hypocrisy of the two sides: the anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and the aggressive Zionists is breathtaking. Political, the reconciliation between Gibson and Foxman signals an obscene pact between anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and aggressive Zionists, a pact whose expression is the growing support of the fundamentalists for the state of Israel. Recall Robert Robertson's claim that Sharon's, Israel ex-Prime Minister's, heart attack was the divine punishment for the evacuation of Gaza. What really worries me here is that Jews will pay dearly for such pacts with the devil. Can one only imagine what a boost to anti-Semitism Foxman's offer will give? Can you imagine a reaction of an ordinary guy: "My God, Jews are now really totally into control, you make a little bit fun of the Jews and you are forced into treatment, psychiatric treatment," and so on. Now, let me analyze this a little bit more close. What underlies this reconciliation is obviously an obscene quid pro quo. Foxman's reaction to Gibson's outburst was I think precisely it was not too severe, too demanding. It was on the contrary that he let Gibson all too easy off the the hook, namely, he accepted Gibson's refusal to take full personal responsibility for his anti-Semitic remarks. They were really not his own, it was pathology, some unknown force took over under the influence of alcohol and so on. However, the answer to Gibson's question—"My God, where where did those vicious words come from?"—is ridiculously simple. They were simply part of his ideological identity, formed as far as one can say in large extent by his father, virulently anti-Semitic Australian Catholic fundamentalist. So what underlies Gibson's remarks is not madness but simply a well-known ideology: anti-Semitism. Consequently, what Gibson needs is not therapy. It's not the admission that he has a problem, but the acceptance of his responsibility for his remarks. Concretely, what he has to do is to ask himself in what way his outbursts are linked to his version of Catholicism, in what way they function as its obscene underside. In other words, Gibson's hypocrisy is simply a small-scale replica of the hypocritical reaction of the Catholic Church to pedophilia flourishing in its ranks. When the church representatives insist that these cases of pedophilia, deplorable as they are, are church's internal problem, when they display great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigation, they are I claim in a way right. The pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that concerns simply the persons who because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation whatsoever to the church as an institution happen to choose the profession of a priest. It is this pedophilia a phenomenon which I claim concerns the Catholic Church as such. It is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution. It does not concern the private unconscious of individuals. It concerns the unconscious of the institution itself. It is not I'm not talking now with a Jungian way about any collective unconscious, but the set of unwritten obscene rules which supplement the explicit rules of an institution. Along these lines to make it clear, one can imagine a straight, non-pedophiliac priest who after years of service gets involved in pedophilia because the very logic of the institution seduces him into it. According to some investigations by my friends in Slovenia, this effectively was the case. They claim that they looked into the past of some priests and again it's not unfortunately they were privately pedophiliac. They were nice heterosexual guys, nothing to do with children's sex, that any Catholic preacher would love them, and it's the institution literally which redirected their interests. Such an institutional unconscious designates the obscene disavowed underside which precisely as disavowed sustains the public institution. In the army, this underside consists of the obscene sexualized rituals of fragging and so on which sustain the group solidarity. What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret side is a key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest. If a priest seriously, not just rhetorically, denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastical community. He is no longer "one of us," in exactly the same way as, for example, a citizen of a small town in the South of the United States in the late 20s if he denounced Ku Klux Klan to the police, excluded himself from his community, betraying its fundamental solidarity. So back to Foxman. When Foxman offered to treat Gibson's outburst as a case of individual pathology which needs a therapeutic approach, he not only committed the same error as those who want to reduce cases of pedophilia to individual pathologies. Much worse, he contributed to the revival of the Serbsky Institute way of dealing with problematic political ideological attitudes as phenomena which call for psychiatric intervention. In the same way that the overriding belief of the Serbsky Institute was that a person has to be insane to be against communism, Foxman's offer implies that a person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic. Now, I am not saying against this that it's healthy to be anti-Semitic. What I'm saying is that this way to dealing with the problem enables us to avoid the key issue, which is that precisely anti-Semitism in our Western societies was and is not an ideology displayed by insane people, but an ingredient of our spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people, of our ideological sanity itself. This then is where we stand today. A sad choice between Gibson and Foxman, between the obscene bigotry of fundamentalist beliefs and the no less obscene disqualification of problematic beliefs as cases of insanity that need therapy. Now let me go even darker in the newly emerging ideological obscenity. The ultimate irony is that—now I pass to a more theoretical general claim—what is threatened by such disqualifications, where if you have unacceptable ideologico-political views you are considered as the one who needs therapy, I claim is nothing less than the notion of another human being as neighbor. Neighbor in its full meaning in Jewish and also Christian legacy. The other who is to be treated psychiatrically for his opinions is deprived of the dignity of a neighbor. Now traces of this denigration of the neighbor are also found elsewhere. Say, recently I read with horror, I must admit, Sam Harris's bestseller "End of Belief," which a book arguing in a vulgar materialistic way about how beliefs today sustain terror, that we need a to break finally with religion. But it's a little bit terrifying to read in this book Harris's approach to torture, which is based on the distinction between our immediate being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract notion of others' suffering. According to Harris, and of course this is true, it is much more difficult for us to torture a singular person in front of us than to drop a bomb from a far distance that would cause the even more much more painful death of tens of thousands. We are thus all caught according to Harris in a kind of ethical illusion, parallel to perceptual illusions. The ultimate cause of these illusions is that although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional ethical responses remain conditioned by hundreds of thousands of years years old instinctual reactions of sympathy to suffering and pain that is directly witnessed. So to put it bluntly, his idea is the following one. In the same way that our visual illusion immediately our visual perception tells us sun is only a small yellow object there, but through science, astronomy and so on, we know that sun is much bigger than earth, that cognitively we progress, we know how to suspend, correct our spontaneous perceptions. But that unfortunately at a moral level we in the moral field we remain at the level of the primitives who think sun is really a small ball circulating up there in the sky. Sun standing here of course for the suffering of thousands which we don't immediately experience in front of us. This is why shooting someone point blank is for most of us much more repulsive than pressing a button that will kill tens of thousand absent persons. A quote from Harris: "Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture in certain circumstances would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem anymore acceptable in ethical terms than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky." So you are now informed. If you feel excessive sympathy when somebody is tortured in front of you, it's a neurological mistake at the same level when you think that moon is a small object. No wonder that Harris refers to Alan Dershowitz and his legitimization of torture. Now in order to suspend this evolutionary condition vulnerability to the physical display of others' suffering, Harris imagines an ideal truth pill, an effective torture equivalent to the decaf coffee, wind-free beans, diet coke, whatever you want. Quote, for me the most terrifying quote from Harris's book: he imagines, quote, "a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instruments of its utter concealment," in other words other words decaf coke torture. "The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each of the terrorists lay down for what appeared to be an hours nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a truth pill in the end?" End of quote. Now as already said, the very first lines indicate the typically postmodern logic of chocolate laxative. The torture imagined here is like a decaf coffee. You get the result without having to suffer the unpleasant side effects of sympathy and so on. Now, my first reaction to this is of course again we are back to Serbsky Institute. I read in a book on Serbsky Institute that they already had this. One of the ways to deal with dissidents was an inject injection which, for the outer of some stuff directly into your heart which for the outside observer it was nothing, you just doze a little bit. But for your inner experience it was nightmarish because the beating heartbeat was as if you felt a pressure was rather difficult, low, so it was as if you are living that extremely nightmarish and no wonder then they confessed whatever was necessary. There is, however, I claim, a much more disquieting prospect at work here. The proximity of the tortured subject which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not only a physical proximity, but at its most fundamental, the proximity of the neighbor. With all the Judeo-Christian-Freudian weight of this term. The proximity of something which no matter how far away it is physically is always by definition too close. Consequently, what Harris aims at with his imagined truth pill is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the neighbor. The tortured subject is no longer a neighbor, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus. So much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain and so on and so on. What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject. Okay, I don't have time now to go into how this reduction of the dimension of the neighbor can also be approached from the one who missed your emails from Giorgio Agamben's side as you know on the topic of Homo Sacer. I just to conclude, I want to now go even step further and against this background give you some thoughts of Middle East conflict. No, not news about politics, thoughts. Many conservative and not only conservative political thinkers from Pascal to Kant, from Joseph de Maistre to Walter Benjamin, elaborated or worked on the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of the founding crime on which states are founded, which is why one should offer to people noble lies in the guise of the heroic narratives of origin which of course render invisible the founding crime. With regard to these ideas, it is in a way true I claim what was often said. The misfortune of the state of Israel is that it was established as a nation state a century or two too late, in conditions when such founding crimes are no longer acceptable. And the ultimate irony, it was the Jewish intellectual influence which contributed, which made the greatest contribution to the price of this unacceptability. During my last visit to Israel, I was approached by an Israeli intellectual who, aware of my Palestinian sympathies, mockingly asked me: "Are you not ashamed to be here in Israel, in this illegal criminal state? Are you not afraid that your staying here will contaminate your leftist credentials and make you an accomplice in crime?" Now, in all honesty, I have to admit that every time I enter the state of Israel, I experience a strange thrill of entering some forbidden territory of illegitimate violence. Does this mean that I am secretly an anti-Semite? Maybe. But nonetheless, I think that what really disturbs me is precisely that I find myself in a state, state which did not yet obliterate, repress into a timeless past the founding violence of its illegitimate origins. In this way, the state of Israel confronts us with the obliterated past of every state power. This I think accounts, maybe at least partially, for the emblematic value of the Middle East conflict. It confronts us with the fragility and penetrability of the borders that separate illegitimate non-state power from the legitimate state power. Since, in the case of the state of Israel, its illegitimate origins are not yet obliterated, their effects are fully felt today. We all know Bertolt Brecht's motto from his "Beggar's Opera": "What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?" In short, what is the robbery that violates the law compared to the much greater robbery that takes place under the legitimization of the law? One is tempted to propose a new variation of this motto. What is committing an act of terror to a state power exerting the war on terror? When the desperate Western observers wonder why the Palestinians insist in their stubborn attachment to their land, refusing to dissolve their identity in the wide Arab Sea, they demand of Palestinians precisely to ignore the Israeli illegitimate state-founding violence. This is why in a very cruelly ironic display of poetic justice, Israel is getting from the Palestinians its own message in its inverted true form. Not only with regard to the pathologically strong attachment to land, that is to say a de facto denial of the deterritorialization that allegedly characterizes today's global capitalism—I don't have time now to go into it, but precisely struggles like those of Palestinians ask from us to rethink this fashionable phrase "deterritorialization." Maybe we should start to return to precisely territorialization, creating liberated territories as motto for the left. Now, what do I mean by this poetic justice? Imagine one were to read in today's media the following statement. Please listen carefully. "Our enemies call us terrorists. People who were neither our friends nor our enemies also use this Latin name. And yet we are not terrorists. The historical origins of the political term terror prove that it cannot be applied to a revolutionary war of liberation. Fighters for freedom must arm, otherwise they would be crushed overnight. What has a struggle for the dignity of men against oppression and subjugation to do with terrorism?" End of quote. Imagine this in today's media. One would automatically attribute such a statement to some Islamic terrorist group and condemn it. However, some of you may have guessed it, the author of these words, I quoted them literally, is of course Menachem Begin. They stem from the years after World War II immediately when Haganah was fighting the British forces in Palestine. Furthermore, it is interesting to note how in the years of the Jewish struggle against the British military in Palestine, the very term terrorist had for them a positive connotation. Again, another even a little bit more provocative mental experiment. Imagine reading today in a big media a paid ad with the headline, "Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine," which would contain these sentences. I quote: "My brave friends, you may not believe what I write you, for there is a lot of fertilizer in the air at the moment. But on my word as an old reporter, what I write is true. The Palestinians of America are for you. You are their champions. You are the green they wear. You are the feather in their heads. You are the first answer that makes sense to the New World. Every time you blow up an Israeli arsenal, or wreck an Israeli jail, or send an Israeli railroad sky high, or rob an Israeli bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the Israeli betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Palestinians of America make a little holiday in their hearts." Imagine reading this. However, such an ad with exactly the same headline, "Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine," was published in in the U.S. newspapers, written by none other than Ben Hecht, the celebrated Hollywood scenarist. All I did is of course I replaced Jews with Palestinians and British with Israeli. It is almost sympathetic against this background to see the first generation Israeli leaders openly confessing the fact that their claims to the land of Palestine cannot be grounded in universal justice, that we are dealing with a simple war of conquest between two groups where no mediation is possible. Here is what David Ben-Gurion wrote, quote: "Everyone can see the way of the problem in the relations between Arabs and Jews. But no one sees that there is no solution to these problems. There is no solution. Here is an abyss and nothing can link its two sides. We as a people want this land to be ours. The Arabs as a people want this land to be theirs." End of quote. Now the problem with this statement today is clear. Such an exemption of ethnic conflicts for land from moral considerations is simply no longer acceptable. This is why the way Simon Wiesenthal himself in his "Justice, Not Vengeance" approaches this problem appears today problematic. Quote from Wiesenthal: "One should finally take cognizance of the fact that one cannot found a state without curtailing the rights of those who were already settled at its territory. One should be satisfied with the fact that the violations were limited in that relatively small number of people was hurt. This is how it was when the state of Israel was founded. Eventually the Jewish population lived there for a long time while the Palestinians were in comparison with the Jewish ones sparsely settled and had great opportunities to withdraw. That is to say, the continually victorious state of Israel cannot forever rely on the sympathies that the world accords to victims." End of quote. We see that what Wiesenthal is advocating here is nothing else than a state-founding violence with a human face, with limited violations. Incidentally, as to the comparative sparsity of settlers, according to my Israel sources, the population of the Palestinian territory in just when the mass influx of Jews started, was Jews versus Palestinians. So much about the density of the population. However, from today's perspective, the truly interesting part of this passage is the last sentence. Its only consistent reading is that now that the state of Israel is continually victorious, it no longer needs to behave like a victim, but can fully assert its force. True in so far as one doesn't forget, I would add, that this position of power also involves new responsibilities. That is to say, the problem today is that the state of Israel, while continually victorious, still relies on the image of Jews as victims to legitimize its power politics and to denounce its critics as hidden Holocaust sympathizers and so on. Arthur Koestler proposed a profound insight: "If power corrupts, the reverse is also true. Persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways." End of quote. Cécile Winter, a collaborator of Alain Badiou, recently proposed along these lines a nice mental experiment. Imagine Israel as it is, in its destiny of the last half century, but ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatized by the signifier of the absolute victim and thus beyond moral reproach. What we thus get is a standard story of colonization. So why should we, as Alain Badiou proposed, proposes, abstract from the Holocaust when we judge the Israeli politics towards Palestinians? My answer: yes, we should, but not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the Holocaust was an incomparably stronger crime. I think that it is those who evoke Holocaust in this way as legitimization of Israeli politics that effectively manipulate it. They instrumentalize it for today's political uses. The very need to evoke Holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts in a way implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump card of Holocaust can redeem them. Now to establish a kind of a balance, I'm in no way justifying in this critique of the state of Israel even minimally any kind of anti-Semitism. I absolutely don't accept the the logic of, "You know we can understand, we should understand some Arab or Palestinian anti-Semitic statements in that context, it's just the reaction," I mean how to put it, that they don't really—that's how some Palestinians justify it. "Yes, we have anti-Semitic outbursts but they don't really mean Jews. What they mean is just the state of Israel" and so on. Well my stupid point, if they mean it why don't they say what they mean? That is to say, I'm sorry to tell you but in exactly the same terms, you can we all know that Hitler when he said Jews, every Marxist will tell you, he didn't really mean Jews, no? He meant capitalists or whatever rich people and he just used Jews as an effective metaphor, which in no way justifies it. What is wrong with the predominant Arab reaction? Recall the joke, I recall it all the time so you may be tired by it, evoked by Freud in order to render the strange logic of dreams: the borrowed kettle joke. A, I never borrowed the kettle from you. B, I returned it to you unbroken. the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Of course such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments confirms per negationem, negationem, what it wants to deny, that I returned to you a broken kettle. But does the same inconsistency not characterize the way radical Islamists respond to the Holocaust? A, Holocaust did not happen. Or it happened in a much smaller not million just whatever. it did happen, but the Jews deserved it. the Jews did not deserve it but they themselves lost the right to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis do to them. I cannot quote it now but it's unbelievable how sometimes in the same text you get all three. For example, as an obscene example of the ambiguity of shifting between these lines. You know how the scandal caused by the Iranian President Ahmadinejad when in his speech in Mecca in December he implied that guilt for the Holocaust led European countries to support the establishment of the state of Israel. Quote: "Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces. And they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw him in jail. Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? If the Europeans are honest, they should give some of their provinces in Europe, like in Germany, Austria, or other countries, to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it." End of quote. I think sincerely that this statement is a mixture of the most disgusting insinuations and of a correct insight. That is to say, the disgusting part is of course Holocaust denial, or even more problematic, the claim that Jews deserved it. Namely if you listen carefully, when Ahmadinejad says "we don't accept this claim," he's consciously, some Iranian friends confirmed this to me, ambiguous. Which claim? The claim that Hitler killed millions of Jews, or the claim that the Jews were innocent, you know, so he oscillates. They were not killed or maybe they were killed but they were not innocent. But what is correct in this statement is the reminder of European hypocrisy. The European maneuver effectively was to pay for its own guilt with another people's land. So when the Israeli government spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin, said in response, "Just to remind Mr. Ahmadinejad, we've been here long before his ancestors were here. Therefore we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here," he evoked a historical right which when applied universally would lead to universal slaughter. That is to say, can one imagine a world in which ethnic groups would be all the time reminding their neighbors that "we've been here before you, even if this means thousands or more years ago," and use this fact to justify their effort to seize the neighbor's land? The big mystery propos of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is I think why does it persist for so long when everybody knows the only viable solution: the withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, the establishment of a Palestinian state as well as some kind of compromise concerning Jerusalem. Whenever the agreement seems at hand, it inexplicably withdraws. How often did it happen that when peace seemed just a matter of finding proper formulation for some minor statement, everything suddenly collapsed, displaying the fragility of the negotiated compromise. There is effectively something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle East conflict. Everyone sees the way to get rid of the obstacle and yet no one wants to remove it. As if there is some kind of pathological libidinal profit gained gained by persisting in the deadlock. This is why the Middle East crisis is such a sensitive point for the pragmatic politics which aims at resolving problems peace by peace in a realistic mode. Here I claim in the Middle East, the true utopia is precisely that such a realistic approach will work. The only realistic solution is here the big one, to solve the problem at its roots. Here the old motto from the walls of Paris of '68 applies: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible. Only a radical gesture that has to appear impossible within the given coordinates will realistically do the job. One is really tempted to speak here of a symptomatic knot and as the story of the Gordian knot tells us, the only way to resolve such a deadlock is not to unravel the knot but to cut it. But how? Alain Badiou, since he is not here I will now do a little bit of critique of him because I'm a warm human person and don't like to hurt people criticizing them in face, so a warm person but a little bit bad behind the back, okay. Here is the quote. The founding of a Zionist state from Badiou was a mixed, truly complex reality. On the one hand, it is an event which is part of a larger event, the rise of great revolutionary communist socialist projects, the idea to found an entirely new society. On the other hand, it is a counter-event which is part of a larger counter-event: colonialism, the brutal conquest by the people who came from Europe of the new land where other people other people live. This creation is an extraordinary mixture, the creation of the state of Israel, of revolution and reaction, of emancipation and oppression. The Zionist state should become what it had in it of being just and new. It has to become the least racial, the least religious, and the least nationalist of states. The most universal of them all. End of quote. Now, while there is of course a truth in this insight, the problem remains. Can one really untie the knot in this direct way and simply separate the two aspects? In the sense of the possibility of the first one, the Zionist state, without the second one. To me frankly it sounds a little bit too much like the legendary "if" answer of, I forgot his name sorry, I think it's from the time of prohibition, of an American politician to the question "Do you support the prohibition of alcohol of wine or not?" His answer was, "If by wine you mean the terrible drink which ruined thousands of families, making husbands a wreck who were beating their wives and neglecting their children, then I'm fully for the prohibition. But if you mean by wine the noble drink with a wonderful taste which makes every meal such a pleasure, then I'm against the prohibition." Badiou is a little bit too much of this I think. So what is needed is perhaps more. Not only drawing the line of distinction between the good and the bad side, but an authentic act of changing the very coordinates of the situation. Like when Yitzhak Rabin decided—I still remember what a shock it was after decades of that rhetoric "we don't deal with Palestinian and PLO terrorists," simply, let's cut it, let's deal with it and so on and so on. Namely, recall the story about the Caucasian Chalk Circle on which Brecht based one of his great plays. In the ancient times, somewhere in Caucasus, a biological mother and a stepmother appealed to the judge to decide who should get the child. The judge drew a chalk with a chalk a circle in sand, okay on stone probably it's a little bit difficult to to place the baby in the middle and told the two women that the one who will be first to pull the child out of the circle will get it. When the stepmother saw that the child was of course screaming, getting hurt by being drawn in opposite directions, she let him go out of compassion. And of course the child gave the judge gave the child to her, claiming that she displayed true maternal love. I would like to imagine along these lines a Jerusalem chalk circle. The one who truly loves Jerusalem would rather let it go than see it torn apart by tensions. And the ultimate irony if you know a little bit of Old Testament is that this Brecht story is really a variation of that King Solomon judgment: cut it it's as if today those the bad mother who says cut it in two is predominant is predominant. That is to say what is happening now in and around the state of Israel, I think that the tragic thing is the recasting of the conflict in the terms of the war between Israel and the entire Arab community. This recasting is I think fits both sides. On the one hand, it's part of probably the new Israeli strategy. If the conflict is perceived as focused on the on Israel's relation with Palestinians, we get the image of a strong state subduing an inferior, I mean in the sense of numbers, smaller colonized population. If however, the conflict is recast as the conflict between the state of Israel and all other Arab states, then we get a much more heroic image of a small Israel as a victim encircled by the Arab Sea, million against hundreds of millions. While it is too early to say if this recasting is part of the larger United States plan to attack militarily Iran or Syria, what is clear today is that this strategy, which as I already said directly plays into the hands of the anti-Semitic Arab radicals, can dangerously backfire. Now just a concluding remark where I come to praising this EGS Institute. Now just a concluding general remark. Does this mean my conclusion, my God, a state of emergency, a new Armageddon is approaching? As a conclusion, I think that in so far as we are here where we are and also in so far as part of our general duty of intellectuals, it's precisely I claim to reject, problematize the sense of emergency which is more and more predominating today, which pervades the standard left-liberal humanitarian discourse in a where you have all the time this pseudo-concrete reference to to an emergency, like for example for me the typical thing would be to say: "Are you aware that for every word that I spoke here, children die of hunger in Africa," and so on and so on. You have also incidentally a positive aspect of this pseudo-urgency of the liberal discourse. For example, I remember in New York entering a Starbucks coffee place and at the entrance, posters were greeting customers pointing out that half or so of their profits go to the healthcare for the children of Guatemala from where their coffee originates, so that with every cup you drink you so to speak save a child's life and so on and so on. I claim that there is a fundamental anti-terrorist edge to it—the anti, sorry theoretical edge to it. I accept I'm here for Badiou. Theory terror whatever. The underlying point here is no time to reflect on it all, we have to act now. As Bill Gates recently put it, what do computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying of diarrhea? Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich living in their secluded virtual world not only do they not deny, not only do they not ignore the harsh reality outside their area, they actively refer to it all the time. I think that's the obscenity. You cannot play the old game, "Ooh you live up there, what about...?" This immediate reference which of course directly has an anti-emancipatory potential. The logic is: forget about your ideologies, capitalism, let's do something. You talk about ideology, deconstruction, but people are dying there. Forget about Hegel and so on. Here I'm a Marxist. Which Marxist? The one my favorite. There is a wonderful letter from Marx to Engels from around the time of the Paris Commune when Marx and some others of course naively thought that European revolution will explode at any moment. In this letter which is it's full of anxiety, Marx wrote: "My God, are they crazy? They want to start the revolution, I haven't yet finished Capital, can't they wait?" Okay. That's what we need today. That is to say where in a critical analysis of the present global constellation one offers no clear solution, no practical advice on what to do, when one paints no light at the end of the tunnel, well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us. One is usually reproached: "So what should we do? Nothing, just sit and wait?" I think one should garner the courage to answer: yes, there are situations when the only truly practical thing to do is to resist to engage, the temptation to engage immediately. It is to wait and see by means of a patient critical analysis. Engagement today seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his "Existentialism is a Humanism," Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in torn between the duty to help his lone ill mother and the duty to enter Resistance and fight the Germans. Sartre's point is of course that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man should make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom, assuming full responsibility for his decision. But nonetheless, an obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join Resistance and to tell his resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while in reality withdrawing to a secluded place and study. Now, I think there is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to my mind at least a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism, Lenin's words to young people, his answer to what they should do—"Learn, learn, and learn"—were evoked all the time, displayed on all school walls, even I remember them when I was young, like "Remember: Learn, learn, learn, Lenin." So here is how the joke goes. Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked what would they prefer to have, a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers a wife, while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. However, to everyone's surprise, Lenin says, "I would like to have both of them." "My God, why is there a hidden decadent joyeur in Lenin?" "No," he explains, "so that one can—one can say to one's wife that I'm going to my mistress and to my mistress that I have to be with my wife." "Then what do you do?" You get the joke. "I can go to a lone place and learn, learn, and learn." And is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe of the lowest catastrophe of his life? He retired to Switzerland and there to learn, learn, and learn reading Hegel's Logic. We are the successors of Lenin today here in EGS, where we learn, learn, and learn. Thank you.