Slavoj Žižek - How to become free
Talk · fediak 22 ·
published 2024-05-24 · 1:35:15 · 9,318 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
ideologyfreedomlanguagecinema-art-culturehistoryphilosophy-generalhegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnessgeopolitics-warcapitalismethicsdemocracyrevolution-violenceecology-climatesexuality-gendercommunism-socialism
Žižek explores the paradoxes of freedom, arguing that true freedom is not merely the ability to choose between limited options but the capacity to change the rules of the game itself, often coinciding with necessity. He extends this to the concept of 'changing the past,' positing that historical meaning is retroactively determined by present symbolic interpretations, illustrated through examples from opera, cinema, and politics. Žižek distinguishes between 'freedom' (radical, concrete, requiring the violation of existing liberty/rules) and 'liberty' (abstract, formal, within social order), applying this to the war in Ukraine and critiquing modern 'neo-feudalism' and precarious work as forms of unfreedom experienced as freedom. He argues that contemporary knowledge is impotent because it fuels 'cynical reason' and hyperactivity without action, necessitating a shift from objective knowledge to subjective 'truth' that engages the subject, illustrated through critiques of charity, multiculturalism, and pacifism. Žižek analyzes the ongoing war in Ukraine not as a simple territorial conflict but as a metaphysical struggle between competing notions of liberty and world order. He critiques both Putin’s 'hot peace' sphere-of-influence model and the Ukrainian defense of a 'European civilization' that is itself in crisis, arguing instead for a universal, progressive struggle for liberty. The talk concludes with a redefinition of true patriotism as the capacity to feel shame and resist one’s own state when it acts wrongly, linking this to a global solidarity with anti-war Russians.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 33
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “illusion with real effects”
Shared ideological fictions (like a unified notion of 'freedom') are not mere errors but have tangible political consequences and unite groups.
Hegelian term for freedom defined by the absence of external constraints, which Žižek associates with 'liberty' and the formal rights of liberal capitalism.
as “freedom coincides with necessity”
The highest form of freedom (in art or love) feels like an inescapable fate or necessity rather than a calculated choice.
The cognitive science concept that the feeling of free will is an illusion generated by predetermined neuronal processes.
as “freedom as the freedom to change the rules”
True freedom is not choosing within existing parameters, but the ability to alter the very contours and definitions of what freedom means.
as “symbolic universe”
The realm of language and spirit where freedom exists, distinct from the determined elementary level of atomic interaction.
Great works of art and historical events are 'unfinished' and only gain their full meaning through later reinterpretations that fill in their gaps.
A theological joke used as a theory of ideology: the past is a constructed illusion (like a movie background) that gives meaning to the present.
as “coffee without milk / coffee without cream”
A metaphor for ideological deprivation: the physical reality (black coffee) is the same, but the symbolic lack (missing milk/cream) defines the subject's political demand.
The contradiction where scientists claim there is no free will while simultaneously arguing as if their audience has the freedom to be convinced by reason.
A distinction where 'liberty' is the abstract, formal freedom within existing social rules, while 'freedom' is the concrete, radical act of violating those rules to establish a new order, often requiring a point of no return.
Hegelian term for freedom embedded in and sustained by social rules and unwritten norms; Žižek argues true freedom requires breaking these contours in moments of radical choice.
as “false free choice”
A ritualized choice (like splitting a dinner bill) where the outcome is predetermined by social norms, serving to sustain social bonds rather than express genuine agency.
as “corporate neo-feudalism”
A socio-economic formation where power is exercised not through exploitation of labor but through the privatization of the 'commons' (platforms, software) via rent-seeking, creating a dependency on private masters.
Work characterized by instability and lack of benefits, which paradoxically offers a 'false freedom' (entrepreneurial self-management) while increasing total subordination to the system.
The most dangerous form of modern domination, where individuals feel free (e.g., via cryptocurrencies or gig work) while being more thoroughly controlled and manipulated than ever.
as “impotence of knowledge”
The phenomenon where knowing the truth (e.g., climate change) fails to produce action because the subject remains hyperactive in a way that prevents genuine engagement or change.
A psychoanalytic structure where constant activity and talking serve as a defense mechanism to ensure nothing really changes and to avoid the anxiety of true decision.
A state, following Sloterdijk, where people know what they are doing and that it is harmful, yet they continue to do it; knowing the truth is incorporated into the system rather than prompting action.
as “knowledge vs. truth”
A distinction where 'knowledge' is objective and obligates nothing, while 'truth' is knowledge that subjectively engages the subject and compels action.
as “vacuous pan-humanitarianism”
A critique of corporate charity (e.g., Gates Foundation) that alleviates symptoms of private property while reproducing the underlying system of inequality.
A multicultural critique suggesting one should despise one's own culture to connect with the 'barbarism' in others, rather than respecting all cultures equally.
The idea that the demand for 'peace' in conflict zones often serves the interests of the occupier who wishes to consolidate control over taken territory.
A replacement for the 'military-industrial complex,' referring to the role of poetry, nationalism, and high ideology in enabling decent people to commit atrocities.
A conflict not merely about territory or power, but about competing fundamental visions of reality and truth.
Putin’s conception of freedom, where individual liberties exist only within the secure boundaries of an authoritarian state.
The Russian justification for invading Ukraine, framing it as an internal policing action rather than an international war.
Putin's vision of global order: a marketplace of sovereign entities, each allowed to pursue its own 'stupidities' (cultural/religious practices) as long as they don't interfere externally.
A global order where local wars are permitted to maintain a broader stability, contrasting with the 'cold' stability of the Cold War.
A political stance refusing alignment with any specific 'way of life' (including conservative Europe) in favor of a universal struggle for progressive values.
The dangerous vision where different countries coexist peacefully while maintaining radically different, often oppressive, internal regimes (e.g., gay marriage vs. clitorodectomy).
Defined here not as blind loyalty ('my country right or wrong') but as the shame and resistance one feels when one's country acts wrongly.
as “fetishism (cynical)”
The psychoanalytic term for knowing the truth but acting as if one does not; knowledge serves as an excuse for inaction.
Stories he reaches for 14
In the film Brassed Off, a man asks for 'coffee without cream,' but the waiter says they are out of cream and offers 'coffee without milk.' The physical result is identical (black coffee), but the symbolic meaning differs, illustrating how ideological lack defines political demands.
“I cannot give you coffee without cream because we run out of cream. But we have milk so I can only give you coffee without milk.”
Gates became wealthy not by exploiting workers but by monopolizing the 'commons' (software) and charging rent, a key feature of neo-feudalism.
“He occupies an almost universal monopoly position... we pay him a rent.”
A guest pretends to offer to split the bill, knowing the host will pay; this empty offer sustains the social link and friendship.
“We both know that I will pay but to assert our link and friendship we have to go through this.”
Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation of Hamlet retroactively changes the meaning of Shakespeare's original by transposing it to modern Japan, showing how new art fills in the gaps of the past.
“Great works of art are retroactively recreated all the time.”
Libet showed brain activity precedes conscious decision by a split second. Žižek argues freedom lies not in initiating the action, but in the ability to say 'no' and veto the predetermined neural command.
“Your primordial form of freedom is to say no, to stop it.”
Weinberg states that while good people would be good without religion, we need religion to make good people do bad things.
“We need something like religion to make good people do bad things.”
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai stated it was 'too early to say' what the French Revolution was, arguing that its historical meaning is only determined by its later consequences (like the rise of socialism).
“It's too early to say. We don't yet know what was the French Revolution.”
A conservative theologian reconciled Darwinism with the Bible by claiming God created fossils to create the illusion of an old universe, just as a movie uses painted backgrounds. Žižek uses this as a literal theory of ideology.
“God directly created fossils in the same way that in a movie scene you have painted background to create a false temporal opening.”
Sartre claimed the French were most free under German occupation because they had to make radical, life-risking choices, unlike the comfortable liberty of peacetime.
“Never were we, French people, more free than under the German occupation.”
In Mozart's opera, all guests shout 'Long live freedom' but mean different things (peasants vs. nobles); this shared illusion unites them politically despite conceptual confusion.
“Viva la libertà, long live freedom.”
Recent protests in Europe were not desires to be more European, but signs of the crisis of existing European civilization.
“these were signs of a crisis of the existing European civilization itself.”
Groucho Marx defends an idiot by saying: 'This man looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot but this shouldn't deceive you this man really is an idiot.'
“This man looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot but this shouldn't deceive you this man really is an idiot.”
Wilde argues that charity is part of the disease, as it alleviates the evils of private property without reconstructing society to make poverty impossible.
“It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”
Žižek recalls how Slovenians united against Yugoslav aggression under 'freedom,' but immediately after independence, different groups (Church, capitalists, leftists) realized they meant completely different things by it.
“For the Church freedom was freedom to get back all our possessions... For new capitalists it was again freedom from capitalist expansion.”
Works invoked 8
Ninotchka film
Cited for a joke about 'coffee without cream' vs 'coffee without milk' to explain feminist demands and ideological deprivation.
Brassed Off film
Cited for a scene involving 'coffee without cream' that illustrates the creative freedom of language and symbolic lack.
Don Giovanni opera
Used to illustrate the paradox of 'Viva la libertà' where different social strata unite under a shared but ambiguous ideological signifier.
Hamlet play
Described as 'unfinished' and retroactively recreated by later adaptations, serving as an example of how art changes the past.
Don't Look Up film
Used to demonstrate how the democratic establishment turns danger into a spectacle without acting.
Oscar Wilde's essay, quoted to argue that charity is part of the disease of private property.
Duck Soup film
Used to illustrate cynical reasoning via Groucho Marx's defense of an idiot.
Refusal of Respect book
Sama Maani's book, cited to argue against multicultural respect and for despising one's own culture.
People invoked 28
Efimov Dmitri negative
A Russian state philosopher who predicts a world divided into four spheres of influence (American, Russian, Chinese, Indian).
Zhou Enlai positive
Cited for his statement that it is 'too early to say' what the French Revolution was, illustrating the retroactive determination of history.
Referenced in the context of his theory of evolution and the theologian's reaction to it.
Groucho Marx positive
Used in a joke from 'Duck Soup' to illustrate how we function in an era of cynical reasoning.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Slovene philosopher and friend who proposed the 'radical choice' experiment regarding smoking.
Ivan Ilyin negative
A 1920s conservative theologian whose ideas on authoritarian patriarchal order are now officially reprinted and distributed by the Russian state.
Mentioned by Putin as the 'Bolshevik inventor' of Ukraine, used by Žižek to debunk leftist sympathies for Putin.
Ezra Pound negative
Modern poet cited as an example of a fascist, illustrating the link between poetry and war.
Steven Weinberg positive
Quantum cosmologist quoted to explain how ideology/religion enables good people to do bad things.
Sama Maani positive
Austrian friend whose book 'Refusal of Respect' is cited to argue against multicultural respect.
Donald Trump negative
Cited as an example of how even the extreme right in Europe has shifted to support Putin/militarization.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart positive
Cited as the source of the 'Viva la libertà' example illustrating shared ideological identification.
Oscar Wilde positive
Author of 'The Soul of Man under Socialism', quoted to critique charity as part of the disease.
George Orwell positive
Žižek dislikes Orwell personally but uses his observation that leftists talk about change with a 'secret wish that nothing will really change' to illustrate obsessional neurosis.
Adam McKay positive
Director of 'Don't Look Up', which Žižek uses to demonstrate the impotence of knowledge.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Announced the Metaverse, which Žižek critiques as 'corporate neo-feudalism' due to its private ownership of social space.
Alexander Dugin negative
Putin's court philosopher who provides a post-modern spin to Russian fascism, arguing for 'special Russian truth'.
Ukrainians positive
Praised for heroic resistance but critiqued for ideologically framing the war as defending 'European civilization' rather than universal liberty.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Proposed the formula of 'cynical reason' (knowing what they do but doing it anyway).
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Cited as the director of Ninotchka, used to illustrate the symbolic difference between 'coffee without cream' and 'coffee without milk.'
Bill Gates negative
Criticized for 'vacuous pan-humanitarianism' and accumulating wealth through monopoly rent rather than exploitation.
Jack Butler Yeats negative
Modern poet cited as an example of a fascist, illustrating the link between poetry and war.
William Shakespeare positive
Cited as the author of Hamlet, which is 'unfinished' and retroactively filled in by later interpretations like Kurosawa's.
Vladimir Putin negative
Viewed as a dangerous national conservative with a well-elaborated, metaphysical vision of 'hot peace' and authoritarian liberty.
Akira Kurosawa positive
Cited as the director of a favorite film adaptation of Hamlet, demonstrating how new art retroactively changes the meaning of the past.
Benjamin Libet positive
Cited for his neuroscience experiment on free will; Žižek reinterprets Libet's findings to support a specific theory of freedom (the veto).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Philosopher whose distinction between abstract and concrete freedom underpins Žižek's argument.
Jean-Paul Sartre positive
Existentialist whose text on the French Resistance under occupation illustrates the concept of radical freedom.
Transcript 9 turns
Slavoj Žižek
When you are really free it's not just about free to choose I don't know strawberry cake or cheesecake. It means for example fighting for freedom. And there you don't have the same choice. Fighting for freedom means I have to sacrifice maybe my life, I have to do something although I am afraid of it, but basically I have no choice. I couldn't live with myself if I don't do it. In politics freedom means to act freely within the frame of existing customs and legal regulations. But there are times when to be truly free means you have to violate the sphere of what is legally permitted. And finally while we are free to circulate in the digital universe does this freedom not give birth to a non-transparent universe prone to manipulation? You are as free as you can imagine. You surf along the web, you do whatever you want, but the more you do it the more you experience how manipulated and controlled you are. I will not try to provide clear answers to all these questions, I would just try to bring out the complexity of freedom. So the first empirical observation with which I want to begin is that freedom can unite us, a whole nation can be united in a struggle for freedom. It can unite us but at the same time each of us has in his or her head a different concrete notion of freedom. For example a country fights against the aggression for freedom. We are all united, we shout freedom, we are ready to die for our freedom. But it's easy to see upon a closer look that each of us means something different by it. So the best example from art of this paradox is for me the finale of the first act of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni where the hero Don Giovanni invites his guests to a big reception and greets them with triumphant opening, Viva la libertà, long live freedom. And they all join, they are all from different strata, poor peasants, other noblemen and so on. It's an emphatic moment which as it were stops the development of the opera. They are all transfixed. But it's clear that they don't have the same idea of freedom. Now my point here is not simply that this is a confusion. No, such moments of emphatic identification with freedom have their own efficiency. Such freedom is not just an illusion. It's illusion with real effects. They all really fight for freedom. From my own experience I remember how here in Slovenia when we were under a much more modest than now in Ukraine but nonetheless aggression from the Yugoslav army, we were also all for freedom. But immediately after we achieved independence it was clear that each group had its own idea of freedom. For the Church freedom was freedom to get back all our possessions, freedom to organize ourselves as a central social power. For new capitalists it was again freedom from capitalist expansion. For new leftists it was a different thing and so on and so on. Be careful how in every epoch and also within the same epoch with different strata or states freedom means something different. As I already indicated in pre-modern times when people lived in a traditional way of life freedom simply meant the freedom to live the way they were used to live, the freedom to follow their traditions without disturbance. In modernity freedom became a freedom of commerce, abstract legal freedom. For socialists freedom is the freedom that has to be guaranteed by certain social rights. Freedom is only actually possible again with health care, with guaranteeing minimal standard of living, free education and so on and so on. And also today the typical freedom today is the freedom of choice which is often a false freedom because the choices you are given are very limited like it's a little bit like yes you have the freedom between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola but what if you want something more radically different? But my point here is that this is the reason that maybe the deepest ingredient of freedom is the very gap between abstract notion of freedom and concrete content of freedom. It is very good for you to experience that your concrete notion of freedom is not universal. When you become aware of this, that your concrete content of freedom, what freedom means to you is limited, this precisely gives you the freedom to change the very contours of what freedom is for you. True freedom is precisely the freedom to change the rules under which you are free. And I think this freedom is immanent to language, human language itself. This may sound complex but let me give you an example which I hope all of you know. Recently in the mid-March of a video was everywhere on social media, a video clip showing a woman being arrested by the Russian police for holding up a small piece of paper that read two words, dva slava in Russian. You know we all know what was behind it. It's prohibited to talk about war now in Russia. So the two words were in the mind of most of Russians nyet voine, no to war. This was prohibited to say. So the lady, this is freedom in language, gave just on a paper two words literally, not no to war but two words. It was written two words. And the irony is that the police still grabbed her and arrested her. Why? It was just two words written there. Of course everybody knew that two words meant no to war. But of course in the concrete situation this meant I am for peace, I am against war, but I also protest the fact that I am prohibited to say this publicly. But you see although she supported or didn't violate censorship she did get the message through. That's why she was arrested. And let's not forget that this freedom is the freedom of true human language. It's the freedom to make words mean almost everything that we want. In a brief scene from a British movie from mid-80s I think Brassed Off there is a wonderful short scene of a guy accompanying a girl after a date to their home. Do you want to come up for coffee? I don't drink coffee. I haven't got any. The erotic power of this brief exchange is wonderful. She makes it clear that she didn't mean coffee at all, it's an invitation to sex. It's clear. But what I want to say is that you see this is the incredible creative freedom of language. So to conclude with two paradoxes, the first one is that the highest form of freedom, we have to accept this paradox, is the point when freedom coincides with necessity. Let's take a great artist. He is free in his or her creativity. But he doesn't really have a choice. His inventive spirit tells him, he as it were knows exactly what he has to do. So he feels totally free but he totally follows a necessity. And isn't it the same again in love? Love of course has to be free, a free choice. But did you notice another paradox? That you never can give the reasons why you are in love. If I tell a lady I like your legs and eyes that's why I love you, it's already clear it's not love because then it's not freedom, it's a kind of comparative procedure. I like your eyes, I like your legs, I like your smile, okay let's make a comparison who wins. No, you fall in love for reasons but these reasons become clear to you only after you already fall in love. And once you are in love it's a fate, it's a necessity. Isn't this the beauty of love? That it's totally free but at the same time it's the most radical chain that you can imagine but it's a free chain. My last point to complicate things, I like to finish with bad news, is that at the same
When you are really free it's not just about free to choose I don't know strawberry cake or cheesecake. It means for example fighting for freedom. And there you don't have the same choice. Fighting for freedom means I have to sacrifice maybe my life, I have to do something although I am afraid of it, but basically I have no choice. I couldn't live with myself if I don't do it. In politics freedom means to act freely within the frame of existing customs and legal regulations. But there are times when to be truly free means you have to violate the sphere of what is legally permitted. And finally while we are free to circulate in the digital universe does this freedom not give birth to a non-transparent universe prone to manipulation? You are as free as you can imagine. You surf along the web, you do whatever you want, but the more you do it the more you experience how manipulated and controlled you are. I will not try to provide clear answers to all these questions, I would just try to bring out the complexity of freedom. So the first empirical observation with which I want to begin is that freedom can unite us, a whole nation can be united in a struggle for freedom. It can unite us but at the same time each of us has in his or her head a different concrete notion of freedom. For example a country fights against the aggression for freedom. We are all united, we shout freedom, we are ready to die for our freedom. But it's easy to see upon a closer look that each of us means something different by it. So the best example from art of this paradox is for me the finale of the first act of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni where the hero Don Giovanni invites his guests to a big reception and greets them with triumphant opening, Viva la libertà, long live freedom. And they all join, they are all from different strata, poor peasants, other noblemen and so on. It's an emphatic moment which as it were stops the development of the opera. They are all transfixed. But it's clear that they don't have the same idea of freedom. Now my point here is not simply that this is a confusion. No, such moments of emphatic identification with freedom have their own efficiency. Such freedom is not just an illusion. It's illusion with real effects. They all really fight for freedom. From my own experience I remember how here in Slovenia when we were under a much more modest than now in Ukraine but nonetheless aggression from the Yugoslav army, we were also all for freedom. But immediately after we achieved independence it was clear that each group had its own idea of freedom. For the Church freedom was freedom to get back all our possessions, freedom to organize ourselves as a central social power. For new capitalists it was again freedom from capitalist expansion. For new leftists it was a different thing and so on and so on. Be careful how in every epoch and also within the same epoch with different strata or states freedom means something different. As I already indicated in pre-modern times when people lived in a traditional way of life freedom simply meant the freedom to live the way they were used to live, the freedom to follow their traditions without disturbance. In modernity freedom became a freedom of commerce, abstract legal freedom. For socialists freedom is the freedom that has to be guaranteed by certain social rights. Freedom is only actually possible again with health care, with guaranteeing minimal standard of living, free education and so on and so on. And also today the typical freedom today is the freedom of choice which is often a false freedom because the choices you are given are very limited like it's a little bit like yes you have the freedom between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola but what if you want something more radically different? But my point here is that this is the reason that maybe the deepest ingredient of freedom is the very gap between abstract notion of freedom and concrete content of freedom. It is very good for you to experience that your concrete notion of freedom is not universal. When you become aware of this, that your concrete content of freedom, what freedom means to you is limited, this precisely gives you the freedom to change the very contours of what freedom is for you. True freedom is precisely the freedom to change the rules under which you are free. And I think this freedom is immanent to language, human language itself. This may sound complex but let me give you an example which I hope all of you know. Recently in the mid-March of a video was everywhere on social media, a video clip showing a woman being arrested by the Russian police for holding up a small piece of paper that read two words, dva slava in Russian. You know we all know what was behind it. It's prohibited to talk about war now in Russia. So the two words were in the mind of most of Russians nyet voine, no to war. This was prohibited to say. So the lady, this is freedom in language, gave just on a paper two words literally, not no to war but two words. It was written two words. And the irony is that the police still grabbed her and arrested her. Why? It was just two words written there. Of course everybody knew that two words meant no to war. But of course in the concrete situation this meant I am for peace, I am against war, but I also protest the fact that I am prohibited to say this publicly. But you see although she supported or didn't violate censorship she did get the message through. That's why she was arrested. And let's not forget that this freedom is the freedom of true human language. It's the freedom to make words mean almost everything that we want. In a brief scene from a British movie from mid-80s I think Brassed Off there is a wonderful short scene of a guy accompanying a girl after a date to their home. Do you want to come up for coffee? I don't drink coffee. I haven't got any. The erotic power of this brief exchange is wonderful. She makes it clear that she didn't mean coffee at all, it's an invitation to sex. It's clear. But what I want to say is that you see this is the incredible creative freedom of language. So to conclude with two paradoxes, the first one is that the highest form of freedom, we have to accept this paradox, is the point when freedom coincides with necessity. Let's take a great artist. He is free in his or her creativity. But he doesn't really have a choice. His inventive spirit tells him, he as it were knows exactly what he has to do. So he feels totally free but he totally follows a necessity. And isn't it the same again in love? Love of course has to be free, a free choice. But did you notice another paradox? That you never can give the reasons why you are in love. If I tell a lady I like your legs and eyes that's why I love you, it's already clear it's not love because then it's not freedom, it's a kind of comparative procedure. I like your eyes, I like your legs, I like your smile, okay let's make a comparison who wins. No, you fall in love for reasons but these reasons become clear to you only after you already fall in love. And once you are in love it's a fate, it's a necessity. Isn't this the beauty of love? That it's totally free but at the same time it's the most radical chain that you can imagine but it's a free chain. My last point to complicate things, I like to finish with bad news, is that at the same
unknown
time you know the notion of freedom is self-contradictory. If you ask ordinary people do you want to be free, their
time you know the notion of freedom is self-contradictory. If you ask ordinary people do you want to be free, their
Slavoj Žižek
answer would have been usually yes of course. But then if you look at it closely you will see that the majority of people, me included, wouldn't really like to make radical choices all the time. What they want to maintain is the appearance of freedom. But discreetly they want to be told what choice to make. They want to be told by media, experts, leaders, whoever, that's the right thing to do and then they want to freely choose it in an appearance. So you see this is the paradox of freedom. Often to be free means to maintain the appearance of freedom and to choose what you feel it's necessary. This is not a bad thing, this is how our freedom actually works. Thank you. Now I will speak about our freedom to change the past. Of course from a scientific standpoint the notion of changing the past is a nonsense. What happens happens, science described it. And even science at its most radical, science which like quantum mechanics introduces contingency into nature itself so that nature is not fully determined by necessity, there is no space for freedom there because freedom doesn't mean contingency, freedom means a determinism but a determinism of your own. Freedom means to freely choose, determine something. Like if you grab a piece of candy by chance this is not freedom, this is contingency. But my thesis will be that nonetheless we can freely change the past. The problem is only in what precise sense. Of course from the scientific standpoint freedom is ultimately what they call in cognitive sciences a user's illusion. You think that you act freely which simply means you do what you want or what you intend, but the content is already determined by society or by neuronal processes in you. And there is even a well-known scientific experiment done already I think almost half a century ago by Benjamin Libet where he scientifically for some people demonstrates that there is no freedom. He asked people to do something in a totally contingent free way. He had measuring apparatuses connected with your neurons and he demonstrated that split of a second before you decide commands from your brain were already on the way to your hand. So when you made a free decision you just registered something that was already going on. But does this cancel freedom? Libet's answer is very interesting. He claims yes the content of decision is predetermined by neuronal processes. But you can say no, you sabotage the decision. And that is your freedom, your primordial form of freedom is to say no, to stop it. Then there are other attempts to save freedom. The classical one is to differentiate between many levels of reality. They claim of course at the elementary level of atomic interaction and so on there is no freedom. But then nature organizes itself into animal life, human mind and there at a higher level there is a space for freedom. Of course naturalist scientists would have said this is just an illusion, in reality there is no freedom. But what I want to prove today is that in the specifically symbolic universe, the universe of human spirit, of our symbolic language interaction, there is a space for freedom. So let me introduce this dimension with a quote from one of my favorite poets. What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. What does this mean? Let me take the example of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I think it is wrong to read Hamlet as a great work of art which contains in itself an incredible depth, all possible variations and so on. It's much more productive to read a great classical work of art as something unfinished in itself. Shakespeare didn't know what he is saying. Just deep thoughts came to him, he wasn't even aware what they can mean. I think that now we can know better than Shakespeare what is in Shakespeare. Great works of art are retroactively recreated all the time. The best cinema version of Hamlet I think is the one by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa from early sixties which transposes Hamlet into modern Japan where Hamlet is a Japanese student, he returns there from United States from the studies and then the same story as in Hamlet, his father the owner of a big company is murdered and so on and so on. But you see this is the mystery of changing the past. After seeing this version of course we transpose Hamlet in a different context, the situation is totally different. But in a way we fill in the gaps which were already there in the original. This retro-activity is crucial. Let me give you here a wonderful example which is my favorite one which scientifically it's madness. But I think it's the best theory of ideology that I can imagine. You know when Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution one of his friends who was a conservative theologian saw the truth in Darwin. Yes fossils prove that universe lasted for millions of years, that there was life on earth before humanity and so on. But he nonetheless this guy believed that the Bible is literally true. And if you count years in the Bible our universe should have been created a little bit over years ago. So how does this guy propose to bring together Darwinism and theology? An ingenious solution. God directly created fossils in the same way that in a movie scene you have painted background to create a false temporal opening. You know God created the illusion of the past. Now this of course is scientifically nonsense. But I think it is true literally as a theory of ideology. Ideology means that every historical epoch perceives the past in a different way. Here I would like to take an example from politics, it's my favorite example. When in ninety-three in Geneva there were negotiations about how to end the Korean War the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai who represented China there was asked by a French journalist what does he think about French Revolution? And he gave a wonderful answer. His answer was it's too early to say. We don't yet know what was the French Revolution. And he was right because when communist socialism disintegrated, incidentally you remember exactly years after French Revolution, French Revolution became the beginning of an epoch, revolutionary epoch of progress which ended in And so now when we are fighting for freedom we are still fighting for what the French Revolution is or was. The reality is the same, people were dying there and so on and so on. The reality is the same but the symbolic weight of this reality changes. Let me go here even a step further and give another example from cinema which makes this clear. In the Hollywood director who was of course an emigrant from Germany Ernst Lubitsch in his film Ninotchka there is a wonderful joke mentioned there. The hero of the film visits a cafeteria and orders coffee but he says coffee without cream please. And the waiter answers sorry I cannot give you coffee without cream because we run out of cream. But we have milk so I can only give you coffee without milk. Now you see the paradox. We have the same, in any case the guest will get, we have the cup of pure black coffee. But if you order just plain coffee this can be coffee, plain coffee, this can be coffee without cream and this can be coffee without milk. It's physically the same but in its symbolic impact it's not the same. How, why not? Let me give you a political example. The first step of feminism is always like my coffee is coffee without milk. In the sense of in a traditional society a woman who is trained to identify with her traditional position in a patriarchal society a woman simply accepts her position. It's natural for me to work at home, to obey husband and so on and so on, to be a good wife. Feminism begins when you say I don't want just to be coffee, I experience my position as coffee without milk. That is to say there is something which I should have, would like to have but is not there. And the difference between multiple versions of feminism is how do you define this dimension that is missing. For predominant American MeToo feminism unfortunately what the woman is missing is identified in typically upper middle class term. More manager positions, less violations of women's rights and so on. In Korea I noticed what women were demanding was much more deeply located in everyday life. Something unimaginable in United States happened. Women protested for multiple forms of being abused by men. There were big demonstrations about against this horrible fashion of men displaying on the web naked photos of their girlfriends and so on and so on. So again more radical feminists say no, we are not women without milk, without legal equality, we want more. We are women without cream. Cream means actual social power, responsibility, better jobs and so on and so on. And this is what today's feminism, conflicts in feminism are about. They are about the struggle of what women are without today. You as a feminist again feel deprived of things. But what are you deprived of? It's not enough legal equality, you want social power and so on, you want much more. In this sense we can change the past. The past remains the same, women were exploited all that stuff, but what the women were deprived of, so what they demand, right now in this is open to interpretation. The general lesson just to conclude is that the limit I think of scientific determinism is that it gets involved in what philosophers call pragmatic contradiction. Which means at the level of the object that you analyze you as a scientist can say we don't have free will, we are totally determined by natural laws and so on. But scientists argue with arguments for that. They try to convince each other. Which means that although they claim there is no free will in their very scientific debate they act as if they are free beings. If you are dealing with a person without freedom you wouldn't argue with that person because argumentation means I think you are free to decide, you listen to arguments and I will try to convince you. So this is a good philosophical point against natural determinism. Yes you may be right at the level of content, you give a correct description of our biological
answer would have been usually yes of course. But then if you look at it closely you will see that the majority of people, me included, wouldn't really like to make radical choices all the time. What they want to maintain is the appearance of freedom. But discreetly they want to be told what choice to make. They want to be told by media, experts, leaders, whoever, that's the right thing to do and then they want to freely choose it in an appearance. So you see this is the paradox of freedom. Often to be free means to maintain the appearance of freedom and to choose what you feel it's necessary. This is not a bad thing, this is how our freedom actually works. Thank you. Now I will speak about our freedom to change the past. Of course from a scientific standpoint the notion of changing the past is a nonsense. What happens happens, science described it. And even science at its most radical, science which like quantum mechanics introduces contingency into nature itself so that nature is not fully determined by necessity, there is no space for freedom there because freedom doesn't mean contingency, freedom means a determinism but a determinism of your own. Freedom means to freely choose, determine something. Like if you grab a piece of candy by chance this is not freedom, this is contingency. But my thesis will be that nonetheless we can freely change the past. The problem is only in what precise sense. Of course from the scientific standpoint freedom is ultimately what they call in cognitive sciences a user's illusion. You think that you act freely which simply means you do what you want or what you intend, but the content is already determined by society or by neuronal processes in you. And there is even a well-known scientific experiment done already I think almost half a century ago by Benjamin Libet where he scientifically for some people demonstrates that there is no freedom. He asked people to do something in a totally contingent free way. He had measuring apparatuses connected with your neurons and he demonstrated that split of a second before you decide commands from your brain were already on the way to your hand. So when you made a free decision you just registered something that was already going on. But does this cancel freedom? Libet's answer is very interesting. He claims yes the content of decision is predetermined by neuronal processes. But you can say no, you sabotage the decision. And that is your freedom, your primordial form of freedom is to say no, to stop it. Then there are other attempts to save freedom. The classical one is to differentiate between many levels of reality. They claim of course at the elementary level of atomic interaction and so on there is no freedom. But then nature organizes itself into animal life, human mind and there at a higher level there is a space for freedom. Of course naturalist scientists would have said this is just an illusion, in reality there is no freedom. But what I want to prove today is that in the specifically symbolic universe, the universe of human spirit, of our symbolic language interaction, there is a space for freedom. So let me introduce this dimension with a quote from one of my favorite poets. What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. What does this mean? Let me take the example of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I think it is wrong to read Hamlet as a great work of art which contains in itself an incredible depth, all possible variations and so on. It's much more productive to read a great classical work of art as something unfinished in itself. Shakespeare didn't know what he is saying. Just deep thoughts came to him, he wasn't even aware what they can mean. I think that now we can know better than Shakespeare what is in Shakespeare. Great works of art are retroactively recreated all the time. The best cinema version of Hamlet I think is the one by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa from early sixties which transposes Hamlet into modern Japan where Hamlet is a Japanese student, he returns there from United States from the studies and then the same story as in Hamlet, his father the owner of a big company is murdered and so on and so on. But you see this is the mystery of changing the past. After seeing this version of course we transpose Hamlet in a different context, the situation is totally different. But in a way we fill in the gaps which were already there in the original. This retro-activity is crucial. Let me give you here a wonderful example which is my favorite one which scientifically it's madness. But I think it's the best theory of ideology that I can imagine. You know when Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution one of his friends who was a conservative theologian saw the truth in Darwin. Yes fossils prove that universe lasted for millions of years, that there was life on earth before humanity and so on. But he nonetheless this guy believed that the Bible is literally true. And if you count years in the Bible our universe should have been created a little bit over years ago. So how does this guy propose to bring together Darwinism and theology? An ingenious solution. God directly created fossils in the same way that in a movie scene you have painted background to create a false temporal opening. You know God created the illusion of the past. Now this of course is scientifically nonsense. But I think it is true literally as a theory of ideology. Ideology means that every historical epoch perceives the past in a different way. Here I would like to take an example from politics, it's my favorite example. When in ninety-three in Geneva there were negotiations about how to end the Korean War the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai who represented China there was asked by a French journalist what does he think about French Revolution? And he gave a wonderful answer. His answer was it's too early to say. We don't yet know what was the French Revolution. And he was right because when communist socialism disintegrated, incidentally you remember exactly years after French Revolution, French Revolution became the beginning of an epoch, revolutionary epoch of progress which ended in And so now when we are fighting for freedom we are still fighting for what the French Revolution is or was. The reality is the same, people were dying there and so on and so on. The reality is the same but the symbolic weight of this reality changes. Let me go here even a step further and give another example from cinema which makes this clear. In the Hollywood director who was of course an emigrant from Germany Ernst Lubitsch in his film Ninotchka there is a wonderful joke mentioned there. The hero of the film visits a cafeteria and orders coffee but he says coffee without cream please. And the waiter answers sorry I cannot give you coffee without cream because we run out of cream. But we have milk so I can only give you coffee without milk. Now you see the paradox. We have the same, in any case the guest will get, we have the cup of pure black coffee. But if you order just plain coffee this can be coffee, plain coffee, this can be coffee without cream and this can be coffee without milk. It's physically the same but in its symbolic impact it's not the same. How, why not? Let me give you a political example. The first step of feminism is always like my coffee is coffee without milk. In the sense of in a traditional society a woman who is trained to identify with her traditional position in a patriarchal society a woman simply accepts her position. It's natural for me to work at home, to obey husband and so on and so on, to be a good wife. Feminism begins when you say I don't want just to be coffee, I experience my position as coffee without milk. That is to say there is something which I should have, would like to have but is not there. And the difference between multiple versions of feminism is how do you define this dimension that is missing. For predominant American MeToo feminism unfortunately what the woman is missing is identified in typically upper middle class term. More manager positions, less violations of women's rights and so on. In Korea I noticed what women were demanding was much more deeply located in everyday life. Something unimaginable in United States happened. Women protested for multiple forms of being abused by men. There were big demonstrations about against this horrible fashion of men displaying on the web naked photos of their girlfriends and so on and so on. So again more radical feminists say no, we are not women without milk, without legal equality, we want more. We are women without cream. Cream means actual social power, responsibility, better jobs and so on and so on. And this is what today's feminism, conflicts in feminism are about. They are about the struggle of what women are without today. You as a feminist again feel deprived of things. But what are you deprived of? It's not enough legal equality, you want social power and so on, you want much more. In this sense we can change the past. The past remains the same, women were exploited all that stuff, but what the women were deprived of, so what they demand, right now in this is open to interpretation. The general lesson just to conclude is that the limit I think of scientific determinism is that it gets involved in what philosophers call pragmatic contradiction. Which means at the level of the object that you analyze you as a scientist can say we don't have free will, we are totally determined by natural laws and so on. But scientists argue with arguments for that. They try to convince each other. Which means that although they claim there is no free will in their very scientific debate they act as if they are free beings. If you are dealing with a person without freedom you wouldn't argue with that person because argumentation means I think you are free to decide, you listen to arguments and I will try to convince you. So this is a good philosophical point against natural determinism. Yes you may be right at the level of content, you give a correct description of our biological
unknown
reality. But the way we do it implies freedom. You act as a free, you act as
reality. But the way we do it implies freedom. You act as a free, you act as
Slavoj Žižek
free beings. Here again even the hardest science displays in how it proceeds freedom. I will talk now about a crucial distinction I think politically between freedom and liberty. Unfortunately it works only in English. In French it's liberté, liberty, in German it's Freiheit, freedom. But I think the distinction between freedom and liberty is very useful. Let me begin with another paradox of freedom. Sometimes the awareness of freedom, the awareness that I have a free choice is precisely what prevents me from getting rid, getting free of something. It guarantees that I will not change. The example here of course I didn't make a scientific experiment but I checked with all of my friends is smoking. Many smokers want to stop smoking. But you know which is the logic of excusing yourself to go on smoking? You tell to yourself not a problem I'm free, anytime I can stop smoking. And you use this as an excuse never to stop smoking. You tell to yourself okay no problem I will stop tomorrow, at any point I have the chance to stop so you de facto never stop smoking. And my good friend Alenka Zupančič, a Slovene philosopher, proposed here a wonderful experiment. Let's say you are such a smoker who said I'm a free being I can smoke at any point and I can stop at any point that I want so you use this awareness of a choice never to stop smoking. Alenka Zupančič said but imagine a situation where somebody would make a choice more radical. Somebody an authority would tell you yes you are free to choose between smoking and not smoking but the choice you make will oblige you to the end. That is to say if you choose going on smoking you will never be allowed to go back to non-smoking and vice-versa. That would be the real choice. Then you would really have to decide. And I think true freedom would be this more difficult situation where you don't have the excuse okay I will decide tomorrow. You have to take the big decision now with no chance of undoing it later. This is what happens in wars for freedom like in Ukraine today. They are not just saying we are doing this today, tomorrow we have another choice. No, their choice is now. They have to decide now forever. Here enters the difference between liberty and freedom. This difference I think refers to what the German philosopher Hegel defined as the difference between abstract and concrete freedom. What we mean in our daily language as freedom is what Hegel calls concrete freedom which means freedom whose contours are determined by the existing space of not only explicit regulations and rules but especially even more unwritten rules. For example that's why I in a position which is very problematic for some that's why I was absolutely for obligatory vaccination. Because of course in some abstract sense you were not free if the state says you must get vaccinated. But a good argument for vaccination is for me that by not getting vaccinated you limit everyday freedom of other people. You expose them to danger and so on and so on. We are only free within a certain scope of rules. For example let's say I'm free at the most stupid level. I'm free to go into the city to walk around, to buy things, whatever. This presupposes that I can expect other people to follow certain rules of decency, that they will not beat me, attack me. This presupposes that everybody recognizes money and I have the normal space of social interaction. Even more important here is that to enjoy this concrete social freedom I have to obey unwritten rules. Written rules are not enough. I think our freedom only works if me and people around me support, sustain again unwritten rules. What do I mean by this? One beautiful example and there are many others here in Europe especially at least in my own country is that you have a strange phenomenon of what I called false free choice. For example let's say that I have more money than you. And I invite you out to dinner. It's clear to both of us that I will pay. But there is a ritual in my country that when the bill arrives you my guest you have to pretend oh let us split, let me pay and so on. It's pure politeness. The worst thing I can do to you is to say okay then you pay. I mean you know and this is what human culture is. I make an, you make an empty offer. We both know that I will pay but to assert our link and friendship we have to go through this. So again an even more radical example is language. We are only free within a language. To think freely means to totally obey the rules of language. Otherwise you cannot even think. So this is again concrete freedom. Be and here I am radically on the left. The left is right to point out that to be free a whole set of conditions have to be established. Like to be free you have to have some kind of social healthcare, social welfare and so on. Without all this you are formally free but in reality you are in total danger, in constant anxiety and so on and so on. So this is concrete freedom. Hegel was aware of them where liberty as concrete freedom, liberty to live the way you want within a social order, that liberty falls apart and you need the more radical freedom to act outside the contours of liberty as in a situation of social revolt, revolution, war and so on. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, put this in a wonderful way in a text that he wrote at the end of after France was liberated. Sartre wrote never were we, French people, more free than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights and first of all our right to speak. They, they, the Germans insulted us to our faces. And that is why the resistance was a true democracy. For the soldier as for his superior, the same danger, the same loneliness. So the situation Sartre is describing it's not of liberty. You were totally controlled by the German people, were liquidated, tortured, abducted and so on. But in some sense they were radically free. They had to make the radical choice, risk everything, fight for freedom. And I think the same holds now for Ukraine. They are certainly not living in liberty even in the parts which are not yet occupied by the Russian army they have to obey certain discipline and so on. But since their way of life is at stake they have to decide radically to choose a side to fight for their way of life and this is freedom. Now I come to our today's situation. I think something very strange is happening now. More and more people think that they have to practice radical freedom which means violating social rules and so on to retain their liberty. The distinction is no longer clear. What do I mean by this? Think about the attack on Capitol on the 6th of January last year, where the mob of Trump supporters did something which was an act of freedom. They violated the rules of liberty, of social order, they occupied the Capitol. So they think that the only way to retain their liberty is to exercise freedom. I think that we humanity, not just the developed world, are entering a new era in which liberal capitalism as we knew it is coming to an end. What it is replaced with is what some people call corporate neo-feudalism. It's a problematic term but there is some truth in it. There is at least one thing about this neo-feudalism that is well known. You remember now it's already half a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, Metaverse. What he proposes is a new social space where we all can communicate, do the all the exchanges from dating to business and so on. It's literally a meta-verse, no longer our material vulgar universe but a virtual space where we are free to play with our identities and so on and so on. But he forgot to add something. That this universe within which we cooperate is privately owned. This is feudalism and this is neo-feudalism. That the new masters are no longer capitalists who just take the profit, exploit us as common workers. I think we are returning more and more to a period of rent. How did Bill Gates become so wealthy? It's not that he exploits his workers and so on. No, he occupies an almost universal monopoly position. So in order for us to go on with our daily business collaborating with each other we pay him a rent by subscribing to Microsoft, one of his programs, by using his software and so on and so on. So the very what Marx called commons, the common space within which we interact gets privatized. And I think the other side of this neo-feudalism is something almost more horrible I would have said which is the more and more important role of precarious work. What's the trick of precarious work? It is that you get a false freedom in precarious work, no? Like look at an Uber driver. He owns his own means of production, he can work whenever he wants and so on. And although he never can be sure will it last his work and so on, he in a way acts as an entrepreneur on his or her own. So the paradox is that while he experiences his life as more free than ever, you just work when you want and so on and so on, his subordination to the existing order is much more total than at any point before. So the great danger today I think is not the traditional domination where you know my master is out there. The most dangerous form of unfreedom today is the unfreedom that you experience as freedom. And I think the latest most dangerous form of this is is cryptocurrencies. The idea of cryptocurrencies was of course anarchic freedom. We can make money which will not be dependent on any state institutions, it's like direct transparent exchange. The result of it is total impenetrability, we are more manipulated than ever and even the very structure of manipulation is not transparent. So this is our predicament today. I almost have a longing for the good old times which persist up to a point in China where you know you are not free. My friends from China who are under observation, police tell me, you know you're observed, you look back there is a secret policeman behind or whatever. But what about something much more horrible? You freely you freely run around on the web, you're totally free, you buy what you want etc. but you are totally denominated, your freedom is regulated. That's the danger today. And now I will talk about the impotence of knowledge. How knowing what the situation is can even prevent us from acting, from doing something. If you just follow the media I'm sure you have noticed a strange thing. We are all the time told what our situation is and what is wrong. There was a conference half a year ago in Glasgow about the dangers of global warming where all the right things were said, we need global cooperation, we need to change our entire way of life to cope with global catastrophe and so on. But these were just words. They adopted some empty rhetorical measures but nothing really changed. So we live in a strange time where we know what is wrong, pandemic, global warming, now the war, we know even vaguely what has to be done, but although we talk a lot of time about it we are unable to act. Why? We cannot act precisely because we are hyperactive all the time. Look at our daily life in today's global capitalism. All the time you have to be active, intervene, participate in something and so on and so on. But in order to properly act to change things you have to step back a little bit, to acquire a minimal distance. This we cannot do it. The system never leaves us alone. It's something that I know very well because in psychoanalysis we call it obsessional neurosis. And I know what I'm talking about because I think I'm one of them. An obsessional neurotic is active, talks all the time. But not in order to achieve something, but in order to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I'm sometimes like that. I talk all the time why? Because I am afraid that if for a short minute I stop talking you will maybe notice the vacuity of what I'm saying and ask me a real question. So you see the paradox. Being hyperactive is a way to make it sure that nothing will really change. You know who knew this clearly? George Orwell. He wrote already back in that progressive radical leftists talk all the time about how necessary it is to change society but he said they talk all the time about it but with the secret wish that nothing will really change. This is also why I think many public intellectuals today like to spread total pessimism like we are already five minutes past twelve, we are doomed. It means I'm in a comfortable position of knowing that everything points towards a catastrophe, I don't have to act, to do anything. In psychoanalysis we we call this cynical reason or in technical terms fetishism. We know what the situation is but instead of making us act, talking is here as an excuse not to do anything. If some of people viewing this show are in any way involved in art, art exhibitions, art biennales, they know what I'm talking about. If there is a form of art which is fully integrated into capitalist circulation are these big art biennales. Venice, Kassel and so on. And there ideology is strictly radical leftist. You have endless debates about how to fight global capitalism, how we are all manipulated by big capital. But they fit perfectly the global capital. The formula of cynical reason was proposed half a century ago by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who said people know what they are doing, horrors, dangers about what they are doing but they are nonetheless doing it. Did you already encounter a person who is properly cynical like this? I did when I was young in communist times at my department of philosophy there was a very cynical corrupted professor who openly told us students I know I'm a piece of shit. I cheat, I inform to police, but that's it, what can I do, I'm like that. You know where he was cheating? He thought that if he says this openly it in some way redeems him, it makes him better. No it doesn't. The formula that applies here is the wonderful formula a joke from one of the Marx Brothers movies, I think it's Duck Soup. Where Groucho Marx a lawyer in the movie defending an idiot says, this man looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot but this shouldn't deceive you this man really is an idiot. That's how we function today unfortunately. Again we live in an era of cynical reasoning where telling the truth is not enough. You can say the truth but it's immediately incorporated. There is a film which is not a great film but nonetheless it demonstrates this aspect of our predicament perfectly. It is Adam McKay's Don't Look Up about you know a comet approaching the earth threatening to destroy all life on the earth and the target of the film are not some kind of Donald Trump-like populists but precisely the democratic establishment and protesters who warn we are all in danger, look up, and they just make the spectacle out of the danger but they don't do anything really. Life goes on as normal and this is I think our again this is our problem today. Knowledge is not enough. What we need is truth. Truth is not simply knowledge. Truth is knowledge which subjectively engages you. And today we know everything but we don't really subjectively assume this knowledge. That's why I think today more than ever we need to distinguish between knowledge and truth. Again knowledge is objective knowledge but it doesn't oblige you to anything. We don't need just science telling us how things are. We need knowledge which is engaged knowledge. This is why I hate although they do some good work, I hate the logic of charity which is part of the big corporate capitalism today. Charity I think helps reproducing the very situation which it pretends to fight. What do I mean by this? Allow me to read you a quote the beginning of Oscar Wilde's excellent essay The Soul of Man under Socialism which tells it all. Oscar Wilde claims that quote, indeed their remedies, charity and so on, are part of the disease. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. This last sentence I think provides a nice formula of what is wrong with for example Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates first in a very brutal capitalist tactic amasses enormous amount of money and then gives part of it back. I think that we should attack also Bill Gates' vacuous pan-humanitarianism. The answer to Bill Gates should be the title of a book published by an Austrian friend of mine Sama Maani. The title of the book is Refusal of Respect, why we should not respect foreign cultures and our own also not. I think this multicultural formula of all cultures are worth of respect and so on is totally deceiving and false. No, behind every culture there is a barbarism. So the solution is not respect other cultures but despise your own. It's also not of course the racist formula of only our culture is great one despise others. No, we should be universal in the sense of sharing what is wrong, connecting what is wrong in our culture with what is wrong in other culture. I that's why I will go to the end here it may shock you. The citizens of a developed country who thinks that most that he can do is to open his land to immigrants is in a way wrong. No, I'm not saying that I am against immigrants. But I'm saying that already to formulate the problem in this way as if the big dilemma is open our limits to immigrants or not is to accept the basic mystification. To confront the true problem. But why are there why are there immigrants? We should fight to change the social order which makes some people immigrants. Humanitarianism again is not enough and especially to go even more to the end pacifism is not enough. It's horrible to say this apropos Ukrainian war, but I really despise all those who are saying these days we need peace and so on. Are we aware that peace, the desire for peace is always the desire of occupiers. Israel doesn't want anything more than peace on the West Bank. Peace means you firmly have under your hand the terrain that you occupied. And I'm totally convinced that Russia now wants peace in Ukraine. Peace means we occupy it, we have the firm hold over it. No, we live in a crazy time where wars are no longer the old wars between nation states but they are really in some sense peacekeeping interventions. So we need a total mobilization against this type of false peace. So to conclude I want to destroy another of your maybe illusions which is yes we have to step out of these political manipulations and so on, we need poets and thinkers. No they are the worst. I hope to shock you here a little bit. My formula is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. You know most of us we are relatively decent people and take any of you since you are probably normally human and me also, if I were to kill you, obliged to kill you, it would be very difficult for me. I see you in your eye, I see you are another human being. I cannot do it. And here poetry and thinking or religion, some high ideology enters. As Steven Weinberg, the well-known quantum cosmologist said, he said without religion good people would have been good people and bad people would have been bad people, but we need something like religion to make good people do bad things. I'm speaking here from my own experience, the horrible civil war in ex-Yugoslavia where we can clearly see how the war was grounded decades ago in nationalist poets and so on. Just look at modern poetry how many of them from Yeats to Ezra Pound and so on were fascists. So again since we are minimally decent people we need poetry or national mythology to make us ready to do horrible things. Again the horror of today's wars is that they express
free beings. Here again even the hardest science displays in how it proceeds freedom. I will talk now about a crucial distinction I think politically between freedom and liberty. Unfortunately it works only in English. In French it's liberté, liberty, in German it's Freiheit, freedom. But I think the distinction between freedom and liberty is very useful. Let me begin with another paradox of freedom. Sometimes the awareness of freedom, the awareness that I have a free choice is precisely what prevents me from getting rid, getting free of something. It guarantees that I will not change. The example here of course I didn't make a scientific experiment but I checked with all of my friends is smoking. Many smokers want to stop smoking. But you know which is the logic of excusing yourself to go on smoking? You tell to yourself not a problem I'm free, anytime I can stop smoking. And you use this as an excuse never to stop smoking. You tell to yourself okay no problem I will stop tomorrow, at any point I have the chance to stop so you de facto never stop smoking. And my good friend Alenka Zupančič, a Slovene philosopher, proposed here a wonderful experiment. Let's say you are such a smoker who said I'm a free being I can smoke at any point and I can stop at any point that I want so you use this awareness of a choice never to stop smoking. Alenka Zupančič said but imagine a situation where somebody would make a choice more radical. Somebody an authority would tell you yes you are free to choose between smoking and not smoking but the choice you make will oblige you to the end. That is to say if you choose going on smoking you will never be allowed to go back to non-smoking and vice-versa. That would be the real choice. Then you would really have to decide. And I think true freedom would be this more difficult situation where you don't have the excuse okay I will decide tomorrow. You have to take the big decision now with no chance of undoing it later. This is what happens in wars for freedom like in Ukraine today. They are not just saying we are doing this today, tomorrow we have another choice. No, their choice is now. They have to decide now forever. Here enters the difference between liberty and freedom. This difference I think refers to what the German philosopher Hegel defined as the difference between abstract and concrete freedom. What we mean in our daily language as freedom is what Hegel calls concrete freedom which means freedom whose contours are determined by the existing space of not only explicit regulations and rules but especially even more unwritten rules. For example that's why I in a position which is very problematic for some that's why I was absolutely for obligatory vaccination. Because of course in some abstract sense you were not free if the state says you must get vaccinated. But a good argument for vaccination is for me that by not getting vaccinated you limit everyday freedom of other people. You expose them to danger and so on and so on. We are only free within a certain scope of rules. For example let's say I'm free at the most stupid level. I'm free to go into the city to walk around, to buy things, whatever. This presupposes that I can expect other people to follow certain rules of decency, that they will not beat me, attack me. This presupposes that everybody recognizes money and I have the normal space of social interaction. Even more important here is that to enjoy this concrete social freedom I have to obey unwritten rules. Written rules are not enough. I think our freedom only works if me and people around me support, sustain again unwritten rules. What do I mean by this? One beautiful example and there are many others here in Europe especially at least in my own country is that you have a strange phenomenon of what I called false free choice. For example let's say that I have more money than you. And I invite you out to dinner. It's clear to both of us that I will pay. But there is a ritual in my country that when the bill arrives you my guest you have to pretend oh let us split, let me pay and so on. It's pure politeness. The worst thing I can do to you is to say okay then you pay. I mean you know and this is what human culture is. I make an, you make an empty offer. We both know that I will pay but to assert our link and friendship we have to go through this. So again an even more radical example is language. We are only free within a language. To think freely means to totally obey the rules of language. Otherwise you cannot even think. So this is again concrete freedom. Be and here I am radically on the left. The left is right to point out that to be free a whole set of conditions have to be established. Like to be free you have to have some kind of social healthcare, social welfare and so on. Without all this you are formally free but in reality you are in total danger, in constant anxiety and so on and so on. So this is concrete freedom. Hegel was aware of them where liberty as concrete freedom, liberty to live the way you want within a social order, that liberty falls apart and you need the more radical freedom to act outside the contours of liberty as in a situation of social revolt, revolution, war and so on. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, put this in a wonderful way in a text that he wrote at the end of after France was liberated. Sartre wrote never were we, French people, more free than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights and first of all our right to speak. They, they, the Germans insulted us to our faces. And that is why the resistance was a true democracy. For the soldier as for his superior, the same danger, the same loneliness. So the situation Sartre is describing it's not of liberty. You were totally controlled by the German people, were liquidated, tortured, abducted and so on. But in some sense they were radically free. They had to make the radical choice, risk everything, fight for freedom. And I think the same holds now for Ukraine. They are certainly not living in liberty even in the parts which are not yet occupied by the Russian army they have to obey certain discipline and so on. But since their way of life is at stake they have to decide radically to choose a side to fight for their way of life and this is freedom. Now I come to our today's situation. I think something very strange is happening now. More and more people think that they have to practice radical freedom which means violating social rules and so on to retain their liberty. The distinction is no longer clear. What do I mean by this? Think about the attack on Capitol on the 6th of January last year, where the mob of Trump supporters did something which was an act of freedom. They violated the rules of liberty, of social order, they occupied the Capitol. So they think that the only way to retain their liberty is to exercise freedom. I think that we humanity, not just the developed world, are entering a new era in which liberal capitalism as we knew it is coming to an end. What it is replaced with is what some people call corporate neo-feudalism. It's a problematic term but there is some truth in it. There is at least one thing about this neo-feudalism that is well known. You remember now it's already half a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, Metaverse. What he proposes is a new social space where we all can communicate, do the all the exchanges from dating to business and so on. It's literally a meta-verse, no longer our material vulgar universe but a virtual space where we are free to play with our identities and so on and so on. But he forgot to add something. That this universe within which we cooperate is privately owned. This is feudalism and this is neo-feudalism. That the new masters are no longer capitalists who just take the profit, exploit us as common workers. I think we are returning more and more to a period of rent. How did Bill Gates become so wealthy? It's not that he exploits his workers and so on. No, he occupies an almost universal monopoly position. So in order for us to go on with our daily business collaborating with each other we pay him a rent by subscribing to Microsoft, one of his programs, by using his software and so on and so on. So the very what Marx called commons, the common space within which we interact gets privatized. And I think the other side of this neo-feudalism is something almost more horrible I would have said which is the more and more important role of precarious work. What's the trick of precarious work? It is that you get a false freedom in precarious work, no? Like look at an Uber driver. He owns his own means of production, he can work whenever he wants and so on. And although he never can be sure will it last his work and so on, he in a way acts as an entrepreneur on his or her own. So the paradox is that while he experiences his life as more free than ever, you just work when you want and so on and so on, his subordination to the existing order is much more total than at any point before. So the great danger today I think is not the traditional domination where you know my master is out there. The most dangerous form of unfreedom today is the unfreedom that you experience as freedom. And I think the latest most dangerous form of this is is cryptocurrencies. The idea of cryptocurrencies was of course anarchic freedom. We can make money which will not be dependent on any state institutions, it's like direct transparent exchange. The result of it is total impenetrability, we are more manipulated than ever and even the very structure of manipulation is not transparent. So this is our predicament today. I almost have a longing for the good old times which persist up to a point in China where you know you are not free. My friends from China who are under observation, police tell me, you know you're observed, you look back there is a secret policeman behind or whatever. But what about something much more horrible? You freely you freely run around on the web, you're totally free, you buy what you want etc. but you are totally denominated, your freedom is regulated. That's the danger today. And now I will talk about the impotence of knowledge. How knowing what the situation is can even prevent us from acting, from doing something. If you just follow the media I'm sure you have noticed a strange thing. We are all the time told what our situation is and what is wrong. There was a conference half a year ago in Glasgow about the dangers of global warming where all the right things were said, we need global cooperation, we need to change our entire way of life to cope with global catastrophe and so on. But these were just words. They adopted some empty rhetorical measures but nothing really changed. So we live in a strange time where we know what is wrong, pandemic, global warming, now the war, we know even vaguely what has to be done, but although we talk a lot of time about it we are unable to act. Why? We cannot act precisely because we are hyperactive all the time. Look at our daily life in today's global capitalism. All the time you have to be active, intervene, participate in something and so on and so on. But in order to properly act to change things you have to step back a little bit, to acquire a minimal distance. This we cannot do it. The system never leaves us alone. It's something that I know very well because in psychoanalysis we call it obsessional neurosis. And I know what I'm talking about because I think I'm one of them. An obsessional neurotic is active, talks all the time. But not in order to achieve something, but in order to make it sure that nothing will really change. And I'm sometimes like that. I talk all the time why? Because I am afraid that if for a short minute I stop talking you will maybe notice the vacuity of what I'm saying and ask me a real question. So you see the paradox. Being hyperactive is a way to make it sure that nothing will really change. You know who knew this clearly? George Orwell. He wrote already back in that progressive radical leftists talk all the time about how necessary it is to change society but he said they talk all the time about it but with the secret wish that nothing will really change. This is also why I think many public intellectuals today like to spread total pessimism like we are already five minutes past twelve, we are doomed. It means I'm in a comfortable position of knowing that everything points towards a catastrophe, I don't have to act, to do anything. In psychoanalysis we we call this cynical reason or in technical terms fetishism. We know what the situation is but instead of making us act, talking is here as an excuse not to do anything. If some of people viewing this show are in any way involved in art, art exhibitions, art biennales, they know what I'm talking about. If there is a form of art which is fully integrated into capitalist circulation are these big art biennales. Venice, Kassel and so on. And there ideology is strictly radical leftist. You have endless debates about how to fight global capitalism, how we are all manipulated by big capital. But they fit perfectly the global capital. The formula of cynical reason was proposed half a century ago by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who said people know what they are doing, horrors, dangers about what they are doing but they are nonetheless doing it. Did you already encounter a person who is properly cynical like this? I did when I was young in communist times at my department of philosophy there was a very cynical corrupted professor who openly told us students I know I'm a piece of shit. I cheat, I inform to police, but that's it, what can I do, I'm like that. You know where he was cheating? He thought that if he says this openly it in some way redeems him, it makes him better. No it doesn't. The formula that applies here is the wonderful formula a joke from one of the Marx Brothers movies, I think it's Duck Soup. Where Groucho Marx a lawyer in the movie defending an idiot says, this man looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot but this shouldn't deceive you this man really is an idiot. That's how we function today unfortunately. Again we live in an era of cynical reasoning where telling the truth is not enough. You can say the truth but it's immediately incorporated. There is a film which is not a great film but nonetheless it demonstrates this aspect of our predicament perfectly. It is Adam McKay's Don't Look Up about you know a comet approaching the earth threatening to destroy all life on the earth and the target of the film are not some kind of Donald Trump-like populists but precisely the democratic establishment and protesters who warn we are all in danger, look up, and they just make the spectacle out of the danger but they don't do anything really. Life goes on as normal and this is I think our again this is our problem today. Knowledge is not enough. What we need is truth. Truth is not simply knowledge. Truth is knowledge which subjectively engages you. And today we know everything but we don't really subjectively assume this knowledge. That's why I think today more than ever we need to distinguish between knowledge and truth. Again knowledge is objective knowledge but it doesn't oblige you to anything. We don't need just science telling us how things are. We need knowledge which is engaged knowledge. This is why I hate although they do some good work, I hate the logic of charity which is part of the big corporate capitalism today. Charity I think helps reproducing the very situation which it pretends to fight. What do I mean by this? Allow me to read you a quote the beginning of Oscar Wilde's excellent essay The Soul of Man under Socialism which tells it all. Oscar Wilde claims that quote, indeed their remedies, charity and so on, are part of the disease. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. This last sentence I think provides a nice formula of what is wrong with for example Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates first in a very brutal capitalist tactic amasses enormous amount of money and then gives part of it back. I think that we should attack also Bill Gates' vacuous pan-humanitarianism. The answer to Bill Gates should be the title of a book published by an Austrian friend of mine Sama Maani. The title of the book is Refusal of Respect, why we should not respect foreign cultures and our own also not. I think this multicultural formula of all cultures are worth of respect and so on is totally deceiving and false. No, behind every culture there is a barbarism. So the solution is not respect other cultures but despise your own. It's also not of course the racist formula of only our culture is great one despise others. No, we should be universal in the sense of sharing what is wrong, connecting what is wrong in our culture with what is wrong in other culture. I that's why I will go to the end here it may shock you. The citizens of a developed country who thinks that most that he can do is to open his land to immigrants is in a way wrong. No, I'm not saying that I am against immigrants. But I'm saying that already to formulate the problem in this way as if the big dilemma is open our limits to immigrants or not is to accept the basic mystification. To confront the true problem. But why are there why are there immigrants? We should fight to change the social order which makes some people immigrants. Humanitarianism again is not enough and especially to go even more to the end pacifism is not enough. It's horrible to say this apropos Ukrainian war, but I really despise all those who are saying these days we need peace and so on. Are we aware that peace, the desire for peace is always the desire of occupiers. Israel doesn't want anything more than peace on the West Bank. Peace means you firmly have under your hand the terrain that you occupied. And I'm totally convinced that Russia now wants peace in Ukraine. Peace means we occupy it, we have the firm hold over it. No, we live in a crazy time where wars are no longer the old wars between nation states but they are really in some sense peacekeeping interventions. So we need a total mobilization against this type of false peace. So to conclude I want to destroy another of your maybe illusions which is yes we have to step out of these political manipulations and so on, we need poets and thinkers. No they are the worst. I hope to shock you here a little bit. My formula is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. You know most of us we are relatively decent people and take any of you since you are probably normally human and me also, if I were to kill you, obliged to kill you, it would be very difficult for me. I see you in your eye, I see you are another human being. I cannot do it. And here poetry and thinking or religion, some high ideology enters. As Steven Weinberg, the well-known quantum cosmologist said, he said without religion good people would have been good people and bad people would have been bad people, but we need something like religion to make good people do bad things. I'm speaking here from my own experience, the horrible civil war in ex-Yugoslavia where we can clearly see how the war was grounded decades ago in nationalist poets and so on. Just look at modern poetry how many of them from Yeats to Ezra Pound and so on were fascists. So again since we are minimally decent people we need poetry or national mythology to make us ready to do horrible things. Again the horror of today's wars is that they express
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something
something
Slavoj Žižek
that we no longer can call as when I was young apropos Vietnam War the military-industrial complex, but I think we should call it the poetic-military complex. The army
that we no longer can call as when I was young apropos Vietnam War the military-industrial complex, but I think we should call it the poetic-military complex. The army
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doing the work outlined by poets
doing the work outlined by poets
Slavoj Žižek
and thinkers. And it's the case today in Russia. You cannot understand Putin without Russian nationalist artists doing propaganda for him, convincing Russians that they have a special vision or without his court philosophers like Alexander Dugin who claim there is a special Russian truth against opposed to European truth and that only war can decide. So we are in a very difficult situation. Both obvious solutions, that is to say poetry, thinking, but also its opposite, brutal pragmatism, they don't work. And I think this is why a true revolution is needed. Not the old communist revolution, but we have to change the basic paradigms of how we perceive reality. In 20th century we tried to change the world too quickly too much. Now we have to step back and interpret, understand our world in a different way. Thank you. Today we conclude with a topic which unfortunately is on all our minds, war again. So what has the ongoing war in Ukraine to do with freedom? I think that ultimately this is some kind of metaphysical war in the sense that it's not just a war about controlling territory, exercise of power, it is ultimately a war between different notions of not freedom but liberty. Who is Putin here? I don't underestimate Putin. He's not just a paranoiac maniac who wants to occupy all of Europe. He is supported by a well-elaborated metaphysical vision. And I oppose Putin already at this philosophical level. I don't know how many of those who follow me now how many of you did notice a very important detail. When Putin announced military intervention in Ukraine he mentioned critically only one name, Lenin. He said you remember Ukraine was a Bolshevik invention. It doesn't exist as a nation and so on and so on. So for all those leftists who still think nonetheless the great enemy today is American imperialism so even if Putin is not exactly a model of democracy he opposes the greatest threat NATO and United States, so we can be his allies, if you think like this this should ruin your last illusions. Putin is simply a dangerous national conservative who is thinking in what terms. Remember many people don't know this which is liberty provided by a safe network of authoritarian power. It's interesting to know who is Putin's official philosopher, it's Ivan Ilyin, a conservative Russian theologian from 1920s he escaped Soviet Union and then he developed something that he directly called a new Russian fascism which was an authoritarian patriarchal order. Ilyin said we only vote in order to affirm our collective support for our leader. Isn't this incidentally how elections effectively work now in Russia? So no wonder Ilyin is really the official philosopher now. Do you know that I heard from Russian friends his books are now reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies by the state, every military conscript is given them, every state administrator is given his books and so on and so on. Then the present court philosopher of Putin, Alexander Dugin follows this line but with the post-modern spin of historicist relativism. A quote, you have to hear it to believe that it's true. I'm quoting Alexander Dugin, post-modernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept. If the United States does not want to start a war you should recognize that United States is not anymore a unique master. This is the question of who rules the world, only war could decide really. That's Putin's official philosopher. So what's important to note here is that when Dugin says we have our own truth and so on and so on, he reduces this truth nonetheless to a couple of big spheres like we can ask what about Ukrainian truth? What about Syrian truth? No, they don't they don't care, Russians, about them. Another Russian state philosopher, Efimov Dmitri said brutally in the next couple of decades the world will be changed into four great spheres of influence, American, Russian, Chinese and Indian. All other sovereign states will disappear. They will maybe continue to exist formally but they will be subordinated to this. This is the vision which you should bear in mind this which is no longer the vision of war as a war between nation states. No, this is why I think within their view of the world Russia is right to claim that their attack on Ukraine is not a war. For them war would have been the direct war between Russia and NATO or United States. But they are now just on a peacekeeping mission within what they consider their sphere of influence. Why is this situation so tragic? Because if anything is clear it is that we, all of us, the global capitalist order, we are at a moment of crisis. I would be even a little bit critical not of Ukrainian heroic resistance to Russia but of how they sometimes ideologically formulate it. Their formula is we are defending Europe, European civilization. My God my reaction is if they say this are they not aware that they are already speaking Putin's and Dugin's language. As if there is a European American sphere and Russian sphere and we defend our sphere. No, I think that the battle going on in Ukraine is a universal global battle. It's a battle for what the new world order will be. I almost have a nostalgia for the Cold War which was cold war in the sense that it was war but it was cold, kept cold by fixed rules that all sides obeyed. Now we don't have yet new rules, big powers are making experiments. Of course experiments at the expense of smaller nations, what the new rules will what the new rules will be. And the madness is this one. Exactly in the situation which is today's where our very existence is under threat. First we have global warming, it's one cannot even imagine how we will all be affected years from now. We will have other pandemics, we have social problems even in developed countries. At this point war returned. War which precisely prevents what we need, a global cooperation to deal with global warming. Just think what is clearly happening. Even if there will be no further big wars if a compromise will be found in Ukraine, there will be refugees because of global warming. New deserts are forming and so on and so on. So where will millions of people go? In the old times this was decided by wars. Today because many states have atomic weapons, chemical weapons and so on we cannot afford this. Cooperation is a matter of survival. So let me give you an interpretation of what is going on today. I think that the mistake of Ukrainians who think they are defending Europe is that they don't see that what they call Europe, the European civilization is in itself in a deep crisis. Remember protests like yellow vests in France, Podemos in Spain and other places, these were not protests which articulated a desire to be more European. These were signs of a crisis of the existing European civilization itself. I think that if or let's hope when Ukraine wins then they will confront the real problem, which is what kind of Europe do they want to join? Do they want this new fundamentalist Europe, neo-conservative Europe which excludes immigrants and so on or do they want what really is the best in Europe, feminism, human rights, social democratic tradition, welfare state and so on and so on. So again now I come to my really please listen to this really crucial point. The tragedy of the ongoing war is for me that it's not the moment of truth in the sense of now we were fighting wrong battles, who cares today about feminism, global warming, all this is forgotten, now we have the real conflict there, Europe or Russia. No, this war is in some sense the deepest lie. Because true long-term problems disappeared. You know where you can feel this or see this clearly. Something which really made me sad happened recently among European conservatives. Till now they had some understanding for Putin, some of them even said yeah we understand Putin, he has his own right on his side as you probably remember Donald Trump openly first praised Putin. But now even the extreme right in Europe militarized itself but with an implicit argumentation which I find terrifying. The logic is this one, this war finally enables us to get rid of all the pseudo problems, global warming, sexual oppression, feminism and so on. Now the situation is real war. Neo-conservatives follow Dugin and European conservatives for whom war is the only true ethical moment. In war you make the basic choice you do what is needed to do and it's incredible how neo-conservatives celebrate what is going on in Ukraine now where they claim the proper sexual difference is again established. They say forget about transgender and so on, now sexual roles are again affirmed. Women escape Ukraine with children to do in safety their proper job which is of course raising children and so on while men even return to Ukraine fighting. This is the real conflict and that's for me again the tragedy of this war. Exactly the wrong interpretation is prevailing. Against this we should I think adopt some very sad insight. What the first one is that again this is not just a war between Russia and the West or whatever, this is a war for a new world order, what will be the new world order. And the Russian project is clear. That's why they don't even call the attack on Ukraine war. For them this is limited intervention into their own sphere. What they want is global peace, but peace in the sense in which each country, big country is allowed to maintain peace within its sphere of influence to what the Russians call peaceful limited military operation. The vision of Russia is that why this is what Putin says again and again, I don't get it, why doesn't life go on. Putin is all the time saying we still deliver oil to the West. Their vision is as I call it not cold war but hot peace. Global peace where there are always local wars here and there which maintain peace. And this I think is the catastrophe that we should avoid at any point. Something like new non-alignment is needed. By this I mean we should not just say we protect the European way of life in Ukraine. No, our struggle there when we support Ukraine is a global struggle. A global struggle for a certain notion of liberty which includes again welfare state, feminist human rights, feminism human rights and all that is progressive in European legacy. What Russia and China unfortunately more and more stand for including some European conservatives who join them is a type of multiculturalism which is very dangerous. Which is peaceful coexistence of as they say different ways of life. The message of Putin repeatedly to the West is let's coexist. You have countries where you do your own stupidities. You allow gay marriages and so on all that. There are other countries, Arab countries where you can do cliterodectomy, beat women whatever. Why don't we all peacefully exist together. So it's a version of global market but between countries each of which has its own way of life. I think the new non-alignment should mean non-alignment in the sense that we are not aligned to a specific way of life. I don't like when Ukrainians are saying but we belong to you, we are white people like you, you should support us. No, I don't care about that. White Europeans also can do horrible things. Should we forget that Nazism was done by Germans by the nation which embodies the highest European culture? So I'm for globalism, for universal struggle. But again the universalism which is universalism of a shared struggle. We should not isolate Russia today. We should establish all connections possible with maybe the true heroes of this war. Russians who risk their lives and dare to protest in all possible way against Putin's war. And we should do the same in our own countries. This is the solidarity we should strive for. So I think that that's crucial to say. Our message to Russians who protest against the war in Ukraine is not oh thanks that you are not patriots you are universalists. No, they are the true patriots. A true patriot the one who truly loves his country is a person who is ashamed of his own country when his country is doing something wrong. That's the difficult thing to do today. I think that there is no more disgusting slogan than the well-known saying my country right or wrong. If you say this you are not a true patriot. And now to conclude I'm coming back to freedom. The first act of freedom is to be able to resist your own country when it goes wrong. That's even that's why patriotism and freedom are not opposed. If patriotism is a true patriotism. For example my Israeli friends who they oppose terrorism but they understand the difficult plight of Palestinians in the West Bank. They are for me the true inheritors of the great Jewish legacy. That's what we should be able to do. This is where true patriotism is not opposed to internationalism. You can be a true patriot and an internationalist. And if you are ready to be ashamed of your own country this is the first step towards freedom today. Today you cannot be really free without being at least a little bit ashamed of your own country. Thank you very much for your patience for watching the great minds and although I have some doubts if I'm really among the great minds I hope at least that I perplexed you a little bit. I didn't want to bring you clear answers so that you can say okay now we know it let's go to sleep. I want to disorient you. To make you think. If I succeeded in this even if you don't agree with me I think I achieved what I wanted. So it was an honor for me. Thank you very much.
and thinkers. And it's the case today in Russia. You cannot understand Putin without Russian nationalist artists doing propaganda for him, convincing Russians that they have a special vision or without his court philosophers like Alexander Dugin who claim there is a special Russian truth against opposed to European truth and that only war can decide. So we are in a very difficult situation. Both obvious solutions, that is to say poetry, thinking, but also its opposite, brutal pragmatism, they don't work. And I think this is why a true revolution is needed. Not the old communist revolution, but we have to change the basic paradigms of how we perceive reality. In 20th century we tried to change the world too quickly too much. Now we have to step back and interpret, understand our world in a different way. Thank you. Today we conclude with a topic which unfortunately is on all our minds, war again. So what has the ongoing war in Ukraine to do with freedom? I think that ultimately this is some kind of metaphysical war in the sense that it's not just a war about controlling territory, exercise of power, it is ultimately a war between different notions of not freedom but liberty. Who is Putin here? I don't underestimate Putin. He's not just a paranoiac maniac who wants to occupy all of Europe. He is supported by a well-elaborated metaphysical vision. And I oppose Putin already at this philosophical level. I don't know how many of those who follow me now how many of you did notice a very important detail. When Putin announced military intervention in Ukraine he mentioned critically only one name, Lenin. He said you remember Ukraine was a Bolshevik invention. It doesn't exist as a nation and so on and so on. So for all those leftists who still think nonetheless the great enemy today is American imperialism so even if Putin is not exactly a model of democracy he opposes the greatest threat NATO and United States, so we can be his allies, if you think like this this should ruin your last illusions. Putin is simply a dangerous national conservative who is thinking in what terms. Remember many people don't know this which is liberty provided by a safe network of authoritarian power. It's interesting to know who is Putin's official philosopher, it's Ivan Ilyin, a conservative Russian theologian from 1920s he escaped Soviet Union and then he developed something that he directly called a new Russian fascism which was an authoritarian patriarchal order. Ilyin said we only vote in order to affirm our collective support for our leader. Isn't this incidentally how elections effectively work now in Russia? So no wonder Ilyin is really the official philosopher now. Do you know that I heard from Russian friends his books are now reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies by the state, every military conscript is given them, every state administrator is given his books and so on and so on. Then the present court philosopher of Putin, Alexander Dugin follows this line but with the post-modern spin of historicist relativism. A quote, you have to hear it to believe that it's true. I'm quoting Alexander Dugin, post-modernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept. If the United States does not want to start a war you should recognize that United States is not anymore a unique master. This is the question of who rules the world, only war could decide really. That's Putin's official philosopher. So what's important to note here is that when Dugin says we have our own truth and so on and so on, he reduces this truth nonetheless to a couple of big spheres like we can ask what about Ukrainian truth? What about Syrian truth? No, they don't they don't care, Russians, about them. Another Russian state philosopher, Efimov Dmitri said brutally in the next couple of decades the world will be changed into four great spheres of influence, American, Russian, Chinese and Indian. All other sovereign states will disappear. They will maybe continue to exist formally but they will be subordinated to this. This is the vision which you should bear in mind this which is no longer the vision of war as a war between nation states. No, this is why I think within their view of the world Russia is right to claim that their attack on Ukraine is not a war. For them war would have been the direct war between Russia and NATO or United States. But they are now just on a peacekeeping mission within what they consider their sphere of influence. Why is this situation so tragic? Because if anything is clear it is that we, all of us, the global capitalist order, we are at a moment of crisis. I would be even a little bit critical not of Ukrainian heroic resistance to Russia but of how they sometimes ideologically formulate it. Their formula is we are defending Europe, European civilization. My God my reaction is if they say this are they not aware that they are already speaking Putin's and Dugin's language. As if there is a European American sphere and Russian sphere and we defend our sphere. No, I think that the battle going on in Ukraine is a universal global battle. It's a battle for what the new world order will be. I almost have a nostalgia for the Cold War which was cold war in the sense that it was war but it was cold, kept cold by fixed rules that all sides obeyed. Now we don't have yet new rules, big powers are making experiments. Of course experiments at the expense of smaller nations, what the new rules will what the new rules will be. And the madness is this one. Exactly in the situation which is today's where our very existence is under threat. First we have global warming, it's one cannot even imagine how we will all be affected years from now. We will have other pandemics, we have social problems even in developed countries. At this point war returned. War which precisely prevents what we need, a global cooperation to deal with global warming. Just think what is clearly happening. Even if there will be no further big wars if a compromise will be found in Ukraine, there will be refugees because of global warming. New deserts are forming and so on and so on. So where will millions of people go? In the old times this was decided by wars. Today because many states have atomic weapons, chemical weapons and so on we cannot afford this. Cooperation is a matter of survival. So let me give you an interpretation of what is going on today. I think that the mistake of Ukrainians who think they are defending Europe is that they don't see that what they call Europe, the European civilization is in itself in a deep crisis. Remember protests like yellow vests in France, Podemos in Spain and other places, these were not protests which articulated a desire to be more European. These were signs of a crisis of the existing European civilization itself. I think that if or let's hope when Ukraine wins then they will confront the real problem, which is what kind of Europe do they want to join? Do they want this new fundamentalist Europe, neo-conservative Europe which excludes immigrants and so on or do they want what really is the best in Europe, feminism, human rights, social democratic tradition, welfare state and so on and so on. So again now I come to my really please listen to this really crucial point. The tragedy of the ongoing war is for me that it's not the moment of truth in the sense of now we were fighting wrong battles, who cares today about feminism, global warming, all this is forgotten, now we have the real conflict there, Europe or Russia. No, this war is in some sense the deepest lie. Because true long-term problems disappeared. You know where you can feel this or see this clearly. Something which really made me sad happened recently among European conservatives. Till now they had some understanding for Putin, some of them even said yeah we understand Putin, he has his own right on his side as you probably remember Donald Trump openly first praised Putin. But now even the extreme right in Europe militarized itself but with an implicit argumentation which I find terrifying. The logic is this one, this war finally enables us to get rid of all the pseudo problems, global warming, sexual oppression, feminism and so on. Now the situation is real war. Neo-conservatives follow Dugin and European conservatives for whom war is the only true ethical moment. In war you make the basic choice you do what is needed to do and it's incredible how neo-conservatives celebrate what is going on in Ukraine now where they claim the proper sexual difference is again established. They say forget about transgender and so on, now sexual roles are again affirmed. Women escape Ukraine with children to do in safety their proper job which is of course raising children and so on while men even return to Ukraine fighting. This is the real conflict and that's for me again the tragedy of this war. Exactly the wrong interpretation is prevailing. Against this we should I think adopt some very sad insight. What the first one is that again this is not just a war between Russia and the West or whatever, this is a war for a new world order, what will be the new world order. And the Russian project is clear. That's why they don't even call the attack on Ukraine war. For them this is limited intervention into their own sphere. What they want is global peace, but peace in the sense in which each country, big country is allowed to maintain peace within its sphere of influence to what the Russians call peaceful limited military operation. The vision of Russia is that why this is what Putin says again and again, I don't get it, why doesn't life go on. Putin is all the time saying we still deliver oil to the West. Their vision is as I call it not cold war but hot peace. Global peace where there are always local wars here and there which maintain peace. And this I think is the catastrophe that we should avoid at any point. Something like new non-alignment is needed. By this I mean we should not just say we protect the European way of life in Ukraine. No, our struggle there when we support Ukraine is a global struggle. A global struggle for a certain notion of liberty which includes again welfare state, feminist human rights, feminism human rights and all that is progressive in European legacy. What Russia and China unfortunately more and more stand for including some European conservatives who join them is a type of multiculturalism which is very dangerous. Which is peaceful coexistence of as they say different ways of life. The message of Putin repeatedly to the West is let's coexist. You have countries where you do your own stupidities. You allow gay marriages and so on all that. There are other countries, Arab countries where you can do cliterodectomy, beat women whatever. Why don't we all peacefully exist together. So it's a version of global market but between countries each of which has its own way of life. I think the new non-alignment should mean non-alignment in the sense that we are not aligned to a specific way of life. I don't like when Ukrainians are saying but we belong to you, we are white people like you, you should support us. No, I don't care about that. White Europeans also can do horrible things. Should we forget that Nazism was done by Germans by the nation which embodies the highest European culture? So I'm for globalism, for universal struggle. But again the universalism which is universalism of a shared struggle. We should not isolate Russia today. We should establish all connections possible with maybe the true heroes of this war. Russians who risk their lives and dare to protest in all possible way against Putin's war. And we should do the same in our own countries. This is the solidarity we should strive for. So I think that that's crucial to say. Our message to Russians who protest against the war in Ukraine is not oh thanks that you are not patriots you are universalists. No, they are the true patriots. A true patriot the one who truly loves his country is a person who is ashamed of his own country when his country is doing something wrong. That's the difficult thing to do today. I think that there is no more disgusting slogan than the well-known saying my country right or wrong. If you say this you are not a true patriot. And now to conclude I'm coming back to freedom. The first act of freedom is to be able to resist your own country when it goes wrong. That's even that's why patriotism and freedom are not opposed. If patriotism is a true patriotism. For example my Israeli friends who they oppose terrorism but they understand the difficult plight of Palestinians in the West Bank. They are for me the true inheritors of the great Jewish legacy. That's what we should be able to do. This is where true patriotism is not opposed to internationalism. You can be a true patriot and an internationalist. And if you are ready to be ashamed of your own country this is the first step towards freedom today. Today you cannot be really free without being at least a little bit ashamed of your own country. Thank you very much for your patience for watching the great minds and although I have some doubts if I'm really among the great minds I hope at least that I perplexed you a little bit. I didn't want to bring you clear answers so that you can say okay now we know it let's go to sleep. I want to disorient you. To make you think. If I succeeded in this even if you don't agree with me I think I achieved what I wanted. So it was an honor for me. Thank you very much.