Slavoj Žižek I Whose Servant is a Master?
Talk · Goethe-Institut Slowenien ·
2022-09 · 1:45:21 · 12,574 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsdemocracyrevolution-violencefascism-populismcapitalismsubjectivitygeopolitics-warcommunism-socialismecology-climateeveryday-life
Žižek argues that the decline of traditional paternal authority has led to a 'return of the repressed' in the form of new, often obscene or authoritarian, masters, rather than true emancipation. He analyzes various political responses, including the postmodern performance of Trump, the symbolic stability of the British monarchy, Stalinist knowledge-power, and anarchist self-organization, to demonstrate that the 'Big Other' and symbolic authority remain structurally necessary. He concludes that true freedom requires accepting a 'necessary excess' of power and 'good alienation' rather than striving for a transparent, non-alienated autonomy. Žižek argues that the non-existence of the Big Other necessitates a heroic assumption of authority, positing that true freedom lies in subjectively choosing what is predetermined. He critiques liberal democracy and anarcho-capitalism as cynical fictions, advocating instead for a 'new master' or strong state that serves as a necessary symbolic fiction to prevent social collapse. Through anecdotes about parental authority, military oaths, and political figures, he illustrates how power functions through a paradoxical blend of coercion and free choice. Žižek argues that revolutionary violence and the 'liquidation of leaders' are often necessary, tragic components of history, drawing on Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the Jacobin Terror. He critiques liberal 'formal freedom' as insufficient, contrasting it with 'actual freedom' secured by material guarantees like healthcare, and attacks the 'invisible hand' of capitalism for driving us toward collective suicide. He concludes that only a robust, long-term international federation can address global crises, dismissing liberal democracy as incapable of the required planning.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 27
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A postmodern figure (like Trump) who plays with traditional values through irony and performance, lacking substantial moral authority but exercising power through transgression.
The phenomenon where the decline of traditional authority does not lead to freedom but triggers a resurgence of domination in new, often pathological forms.
The symbolic paternal function that provides prohibition and structure; its decline leads to pathological narcissism and the specter of the primordial real father.
as “cynical stance”
Jacqueline Miller’s solution: acting as if the law is valid and sustaining its semblance, even while knowing it is not true, to protect the space for enjoyment.
Lacanian master signifier (s1) and expert knowledge (s2); in democracy, the people (s1) formally decide, while experts (s2) propose the choices.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order or substance of our being; Žižek argues it is not simply disintegrating into chaos but persisting in new forms like cancel culture or digital spaces.
A state (attributed to Roussel) where the Big Other no longer serves as a symbolic space, resulting in a 'carnival without limitation'; Žižek rejects this as misleading.
A master or leader who pushes subjects out of their inert hedonism into the abyss of their own freedom, delivering them to themselves.
The arbitrary, omnipotent threat inherent in state power; without this excess, power loses its authority, so limiting power to rational democratic extents undermines true power.
The idea that we risk our lives for a fiction (like authority or democracy) precisely because it is a fiction, which is existentially truer than the bare facts.
as “new master”
The heroic position one must assume after traversing the fantasy of the Big Other's absence; a symbolic authority that is known to be a fiction but is necessary for social cohesion.
as “redoubled order”
An order that commands you to freely choose to obey it, creating a double bind where freedom is the mechanism of coercion (e.g., the father telling you to visit grandmother 'if you really want').
The basic level of social existence where you are only given a choice if you make the 'right' choice, enforced by the threat of exclusion.
as “predestination and freedom”
Radical freedom is possible only under the condition of predestination; one must subjectively choose what is predetermined, creating a terrifying but real freedom.
as “stalinism of 34-35”
A specific historical moment in Stalin's rule where he appealed to ordinary people to denounce the higher bureaucracy, which Žižek ironically praises as a necessary 'terror' against the elite.
The two sides of the same coin: the illusion of total freedom in the market coincides with the strictest limits on political discourse and censorship.
An ethical shift where denouncing authorities is now valorized, contrasting with the past when it was considered bad, serving as a form of 'artificial terror' to check power.
The 'de facto anarchism' of current global capitalism, characterized by the end of the welfare state and generalized 'uberization' of life.
as “revolution against the revolution”
The necessary, tragic counter-movement where a revolution turns against its own initial goals or leaders to prevent stagnation, illustrated by the Jacobin Terror.
A state of constant talk about change (e.g., ecology) that functions to prevent actual change, ensuring the status quo remains intact.
as “actual freedom vs. formal freedom”
The distinction between abstract legal rights (formal) and the material capacity to exercise them (actual), which requires state intervention to limit formal market freedoms.
as “good alienation”
The goal of emancipatory struggle: not to eliminate alienation, but to ensure the smooth, invisible functioning of the thick institutional mechanisms (state, services) that sustain freedom.
as “stupidity of the symbolic order”
Following Lacan, the idea that participating in social reality requires a fundamental 'stupidity' or lack of awareness of the full effects of one's actions.
The capitalist market's 'invisible hand' is reinterpreted not as a benevolent regulator but as a 'bad hand' driving humanity toward collective suicide through uncontrolled systemic logic.
as “materialist reversal of Hegel into Marx into Hegel”
Žižek’s method: starting with Hegel, moving to Marx’s materialist critique, and returning to Hegel to recover the speculative insight that the future is open and unpredictable.
as “vulgar new rich (bourgeoisie)”
Hegel’s concept of the newly wealthy who manipulate the newly enfranchised poor, predicting modern democratic manipulation.
as “catch-up revolution (nachholende)”
Jürgen Habermas’s term for societies that have not yet undergone the fundamental structural transformations of modernity, which Žižek applies to Ukraine and parts of Europe.
Stories he reaches for 7
Despite acknowledging the threat to humanity’s survival at the Glasgow climate conference, absolutely nothing was done, illustrating the 'obsessional neurotic' state of talking without acting.
“we are approaching the end... and then absolutely nothing happened”
Friedrich Engels accurately predicted the duration, death toll, and geopolitical consequences of WWI in an 1882 fragment, demonstrating Hegel’s penetrating empirical judgment.
“he even said this war will count... there will be around 10 million deaths”
Trump is a postmodern politician performing conservatism as a gigantically ego-tripping spectacle, whereas Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist; this contrast highlights the postmodern nature of current right-wing populism.
“if we compare trump with let's say bernie sanders trump is a post-mod politician at its purest.. while sanders is an old-fashioned moralist.”
The 2021 heat dome in NW USA/Canada highlights the need for global state cooperation and public services (healthcare, electricity) which cannot be provided by local cooperatives, exposing the limits of anarchist self-organization.
“do you remember at the end of june twenty one a heat dome over the northwest of the united states”
Stalin is the opposite of a monarch: not a traditional or obscene master, but a pathological distortion of the 'university discourse' where the master signifier directly overlaps with knowledge/truth, lacking irony or post-truth multiplicity.
“this is why the stalinist leader is the very opposite of a monarch.”
Stalinism was brutal power but also a strict rule of appearances that must not be disturbed (no black chronicles/crime reports); this conjunction of terror and protected appearance is key to understanding the Big Other.
“what characterizes stalinism is precisely this conjunction of raw, brutal terror and the need to protect appearances.”
Cancel culture is not a state of 'generalized foreclosure' (chaos) but a strict form of the Big Other where the 'woke' stance imposes universal prohibition through permissiveness, creating a new symbolic order.
“this is why the description of the generalized foreclosure... is misleading.”
Works invoked 6
The Trial book
Cited for the formula 'The law is not true, it is just necessary,' used by Miller to describe the cynical psychoanalytic stance.
Cited for Hegel’s empirical predictions about Russia and the United States becoming the dominant powers of the 20th century.
Engels' 1882 Fragment paper
A fragment by Engels predicting WWI's death toll, the revolution in Russia, and a subsequent revenge war by Germany.
A text by George Orwell discussing how radical leftists’ talk of change is a 'superstitious wager' that nothing will happen.
Max Horkheimer's 1930s study cited for its analysis of the decline of paternal authority.
A text by Alenka Zupancic arguing why we must be against conspiracy theories, which Žižek engages with.
People invoked 49
Likely a transcription error for a philosopher (possibly 'Ambient' or a specific theorist) who called humans 'human animals' in a state of inert hedonism; context suggests a critique of natural state.
Franz Kafka positive
Cited for the formula 'The law is not true, it is just necessary,' which Miller uses to describe the psychoanalytic stance.
Yuval Kremnitzer positive
Colleague from abroad thanked for support.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Colleague thanked for intellectual support; relies heavily on her work.
David Graeber positive
Cited as part of the anarchist revival.
His skeleton's reburial is cited as evidence of the enduring power of royal fantasy.
Aaron Schuster positive
Colleague from abroad thanked for support.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for pointing out that Hitler is not a paternal figure, thus anti-patriarchal sentiments align with Hitler and Stalin.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the concept that 'stupidity' (not dominating the effects of one's speech) is a basic element of the symbolic order.
John Miller positive
Cited for the distinction between the cynical position (enjoyment is true) and the position where the fiction is more true than reality.
Mentioned in the context of British historians proving he was paid by the British, used to debunk the myth of the Jacobin Terror's origin.
English positive
Praised for accurately predicting WWI’s death toll and geopolitical consequences in an 1882 fragment.
Luka Mesec positive
A Slovene politician and friend who provided the example of state intervention in copyright to prevent monopoly.
Donald Trump negative
Described as the 'ultimate post-mod president,' an 'obscene master' enacting a postmodern performance of conservatism, a 'gigantic ego trip.'
Étienne Balibar positive
Cited for his critique of anarchist self-organization, emphasizing the necessity of the state and welfare services.
George Orwell positive
Cited from a text in the late 1930s about how radical leftists’ talk of change is a 'superstitious wager' that nothing will happen.
Cited as defining himself as the 'first servant of the state,' exemplifying the Enlightenment justification of rule through service.
Fredric Jameson positive
A friend who pointed out the necessity of opposing conspiracy theories while acknowledging that big conspiracies (like the 2008 crash) do exist.
Adolf Hitler negative
Contrasted with Stalin; Hitler had to compromise with Gauleiters, whereas Stalin had more absolute power.
Cited as an 'old-fashioned moralist' to contrast with Trump's postmodernism.
Julian Assange positive
Cited as an example of the strict limits on free speech in liberal democracies, despite the claim that 'you can say anything'.
Václav Havel positive
Described as a 'flat idiot' who served as a symbolic vessel for people's hope, not due to his personal wisdom.
Adrian Johnston positive
An American friend who formulated the paradox that the problem today is not ignorance of truth, but the lack of action despite knowing it.
Mladen Dolar positive
Colleague thanked for intellectual support.
Catherine Malabou positive
Hegelian neo-anarchist cited for her critique of anarchism's coexistence with anarcho-capitalism.
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited by Malabou for asserting radical equality between citizens.
Eric Santner positive
Colleague from abroad thanked for support.
Jacqueline Miller positive
Psychoanalyst whose 'cynical' solution (acting as if the law is valid) is cited and endorsed by Žižek.
Janez Janša negative
Slovenian government figure whose actions (sending judges to Europe) are compared to Žižek’s son’s literal refusal to pass salt.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited for her analysis of parental authority and the refusal to assume responsibility; used to illustrate the existential necessity of the 'fiction' of authority.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for the concept of the 'eternal transcendental choice' that is made a priori.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for the theological point that true religious authority requires believing before understanding; rational choice is the 'most atheist' act.
Mentioned in the context of Obamacare propaganda claiming it deprives us of freedom, which Žižek refutes.
Cited for the term 'nachholende' (catch-up revolution), which Žižek uses to describe Ukraine and parts of Europe.
Max Horkheimer positive
Cited for his 1930s study on authority and family, making the same point as Freud regarding the decline of paternal authority.
Vladimir Putin negative
Cited as stopping the 'political politeness' of the 1990s, signaling the disappearance of the symbolic substance of the Big Other.
Nelson Mandela positive
Described as a 'flat idiot' who served as a symbolic vessel for people's hope, not due to his personal wisdom.
Duane Rousselle negative
A thinker who maintains the notion of 'generalized foreclosure'; Žižek disagrees with this characterization of the current era.
Alexander the Great positive
Cited by Hegel as an example of the 'great wisdom of a master' being to die at the proper moment.
Hugo Chávez positive
Cited as a 'mega master' whose strong state allowed for local democratic experiments in Venezuela.
Joseph Stalin negative
Described as the 'very opposite of a monarch,' a pathological distortion of university discourse where master signifier overlaps with knowledge, lacking irony.
Cited as representing the antagonism in ancient Greece against Aristotle.
Cited as representing the particular experimental approach against Plato's radical universalism.
Noam Chomsky positive
Cited as part of the anarchist revival.
An 'old Marxist' who respects Marx’s materialism but critiques him for being 'too idealist' in believing the proletariat could achieve full transparency and control over history.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud identified the decline of paternal authority as an ambiguous process; his concept of the 'primordial father' (Urvater) is referenced.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the idea that monarchs should be idiots by definition.
Elizabeth II positive
Her funeral is used as an example of how symbolic authority (monarchy) sustains actual power relations through ideological fantasy.
Mentioned in the anecdote about Queen Elizabeth II’s supposed retirement.
Transcript 95 turns
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the speaker tonight requires no special introduction, which is why it is always a special task to introduce him nevertheless. i will keep it short. since it is impossible to follow the immense volume of works slavo zk has written in the field of political philosophy, let me just present two works which were most important for me, at least recently. the first one i would like to mention is called three lectures slavo jik held at the occasion of the establishment of the society for theoretical psychoanalysis end of quote. it's a pretty pretty long um title. uh... these lectures were held in 1982 and it is perhaps noteworthy that it is now 40 years since the establishment of the society for theoretical psychoanalysis. these lectures, i think, are incredibly contemporary, even though they were written in the 80s when self-management was still the name of the political game in yugoslavia. published in the legendary journal problemi, they include many of the characteristic Žižekian concepts. and secondly, a book of jk which i recently come to read quite a lot, it is called absolute recoil towards a new foundation of dialectical materialism, published by verso in 2014. the term absolute recoil appears in hegel's science of logic. in german it is called absoluter gegenstoss. and gk takes it as the concept of political community which is profoundly groundless. that is to say, the idea is that the political relations do not repose on any positive, affirmative ground. their legitimacy is always to be considered in a way a self-caused. finally, i think it is i will leave it at that and i will simply invite slavo jk to come to the stage and deliver his talk.
the speaker tonight requires no special introduction, which is why it is always a special task to introduce him nevertheless. i will keep it short. since it is impossible to follow the immense volume of works slavo zk has written in the field of political philosophy, let me just present two works which were most important for me, at least recently. the first one i would like to mention is called three lectures slavo jik held at the occasion of the establishment of the society for theoretical psychoanalysis end of quote. it's a pretty pretty long um title. uh... these lectures were held in 1982 and it is perhaps noteworthy that it is now 40 years since the establishment of the society for theoretical psychoanalysis. these lectures, i think, are incredibly contemporary, even though they were written in the 80s when self-management was still the name of the political game in yugoslavia. published in the legendary journal problemi, they include many of the characteristic Žižekian concepts. and secondly, a book of jk which i recently come to read quite a lot, it is called absolute recoil towards a new foundation of dialectical materialism, published by verso in 2014. the term absolute recoil appears in hegel's science of logic. in german it is called absoluter gegenstoss. and gk takes it as the concept of political community which is profoundly groundless. that is to say, the idea is that the political relations do not repose on any positive, affirmative ground. their legitimacy is always to be considered in a way a self-caused. finally, i think it is i will leave it at that and i will simply invite slavo jk to come to the stage and deliver his talk.
Slavoj Žižek
thank you very much. it's a great honour i hope this works. it's a great honor for me to be here and since i usually. speak for too long, i will simply begin. i want to begin by thanking Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, as well as my colleagues from abroad, especially Yuval Kremnitzer, Eric Santner, and Aaron Schuster. i rely heavily on all of them in what we'll follow. there is a narrative gradually emerging of what is going on in the last decades. it is the return of what was repressed in the age of modernity and enlightenment. more precisely the antagonism is not just the one between enlightenment and its repress it is at its most basic. the antagonism which runs through the enlightenment edifice itself beck to the ancient greece the antagonism between plato and aristotle. french revolution and english reform politics and economy egalitarian freedom and liberty rooted in customs it is the antagonism between radical egalitarian universalism and particular experimental approach and the truth is by far not on the side of cautious empirical approach we are learning the hard way that the attempt of modernity to dispense with traditional forms of domination father of the family, master failed. and that the dimension of the master is returning with a vengeance in all its forms. patriarchal values, political authoritarianism, obscene master clown, religious fundamentalism and so on. it was clear already to sigmund freud. that the decline of the paternal authority is an ambiguous process father is a figure of moral authority. enables the child to adopt a stance of moral autonomy resisting the pressure of his or her or its peers and the pressure of the corrupted social environment. following freud, in his study on authority and family written back in the 1930s, max horkheimer made the same point while in the same spirit adorno pointed out that hitler is not a paternal figure so if you are anti-patriarchal, congratulations, you have hitler and stalin on your side. the most visible form of this return of the repressed is the obscene master. a new figure perhaps of freud's urvater primordial father once traditional authority loses its substantial power it is not possible to return to it. all such returns are today a postmodern fake. does donald trump enact traditional values no, his conservatism. is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. in this sense of obscenity, playing with traditional values of mixing references to them with public optionitis. donald trump is the ultimate post-mod president. if we compare trump with let's say bernie sanders trump is a post-mod politician at its purest.. while sanders is an old-fashioned moralist. this situation. makes what remains of the left desperate. there was a mix of fascination and horror present in the left liberal reaction to the trumpian crowd invading the capitol on january six twenty21. ordinary people breaking into the sacred seat of power, a carnival that momentarily suspended our rules of public life. there was a little bit of envy in their condemnation. of the event many of my leftist friends told me, we should have been doing this. so does this mean that the populist right stole from the left the last resort of their resistance to the existing system the popular attack on the seat of power the problem is that the people to which populism refers doesn't exist populism is by definition a mask of power. it is a fantasized entity evoked by the new masters to justify their rule as the servants of the people, enabling them to dismiss their opponents as the enemies of the people the first step towards populism was made centuries ago when to counter the loss of traditional authority the leader. king proclaimed himself a servant. it. friedrich the great defined himself as the first servant of the state. and this is how from the early enlightenment onwards a master justifies his rule he is in reality the greatest servant the servant of all his subjects servants. but there are different modalities of this position of serving the servant. from technocracy and liberal democracy to authoritarianism the reaction to this predicament. disintegration of traditional authority is double. we can reluctantly accept the need to return to some form of social authority. some lachenians claim that. the problem today is the decline of the name of the father of the paternal symbolic authority. in its absence, pathological narcissism explodes, evoking the specter of the primordial real father. consequently, that's their idea. we should try to restore some kind of law as the agent of prohibition. although this idea is to be rejected. it correctly points out how the decline of the master in no way automatically guarantees emancipation. but can well engender new much more oppressive figures of domination. each however the return to prohibition sustained by some new figure of the law the only way out it seems that the very last lacon. aware of this problem proposed another solution which jacqueline miller calls cynical. we cannot return to the authority of the law but what we can do is act. as if we sustain the law. we should maintain its authority as necessary although we know it is not true in short, miller's solution is, we are psych who try to play normal hysterics. miller has fearlessly spelled out the political implications of this stance a psychoanalyst quote from miller acts so that semblances remain at their places while making sure that the subjects under his psychoanalysts scared, do not take them as real. one should protect. the semblances of power for the good reason that one should be able to continue to enjoy the point is not to attach oneself to the semblances of the existing power, but to consider them necessary. i hope you notice that miller repeats here literally. the famous formula from kafka's trial the law is not true it is just necessary the tv spectacle we were able to watch a couple of days ago the ceremony of queen elizabeth burial provides another way of how authority survive. survives. the more not only the british monarchy, but also united kingdom as a state. lost its superpower status and became a local power the more the status of the british royal family. became the staff of ideological fantasies of all around the world according to some estimates, the ceremony of queen's funeral was watched by 4 billion people around the world. we should not dismiss this as ideology masking actual power relations. the british royal fantasy is one of the key components which. enable actual power relations to reproduce themselves. this fantasy doesn't concern only the present royal family. remember how in 2012 the skeleton excavated in a parking place in leicester was identified as that of richard iii. he was reburied in leicester cathedral on 26th of march thousand5 and again. the ceremony. where only a hundred or so people were expected was witnessed by over one hundred thousand people. facts like these cannot be dismissed as reactionary fantasies the correct insight they bear is the distinction between the symbolic top head of power and the actual executive power. kings and queens reign, they don't rule and their reign is ceremonial and as such crucial. this is why the stalinist leader is the very opposite of a monarch. he is definitely not a traditional master, also not an obscene master and also not an agent, of course, of liberal democratic stance or of contemporary scientific knowledge based on rational reasoning and experimentation. she is rather a pathological distortion of the university discourse, the return of its repressed. in stalinism, the master signifier directly overlaps with the space of knowledge. there is no post-truth here, no obscene multiplicity and self-irony. but a knowledge acting as truth itself this is why today's china in which appearances. of an all-knowing power are fully protected is the opposite to trump but within the same. space. the other way to deal with the decline of traditional authority is the anarchist way. the idea is let's go to the end and get rid of the master in all its dimensions. anarchism is having a revival today, from noam chomsky to David Graeber. anarchism is not against public power Catherine Malabou, another hegelian neo-anarchist. refers to Jacques Rancière who asserts radical equality between citizens who are considered able to both command and obey. there is an essential relationship between. the lot in the sense of lottery and democratic expression true democracy relies on the contingency of who governs and who is governed because governing does not require any particular skill. now, in his reply to malu. Étienne Balibar goes to the crux of the problem. quote from Balibar. the anarchists will say that we are able to imagine and realise in practice an alternative social fabric. because the whole society could one way or another emerge from forms of self-government and self-organization that can be experienced and experimented with at the level of cooperatives, towns and so on. today this idea is becoming increasingly influential and people give us examples of what the kurdish fighters tried in. rojava, what the zapatistas are trying in chiapas and so forth. from there they, anarchists extrapolate and say that work that's to say what works at the local level. could work at the global level provided you find the right form of federation end of quote. sorry. malabu herself points out two problems. with this anarchist stance. first. anarchism is becoming today a key feature of global capitalism. another quote from malou, our current epoch is characterized by a coexistence between a de facto anarchism and a dawning or awakening anarchism. de facto anarchism is the reign of anarcho-capitalism. which is contemporaneous with the end of the welfare state creating in citizens a feeling of abandonment just think of the state of hospitals and healthcare today. current capitalism is undertaking its anarchist or libertarian term a generalized uberization referring to uber of life end of quote second this anarcho-capitalism is the other side of new authoritarianism. another quote from malou. authoritarianism does not contradict the disappearance of the state it is its messenger the mask of this so-called of the so-called collaborative economy which, by bringing professionals and users into direct contact through technological platforms pulverizes all fixity end of. one should only add here that this mask is not only a mask, it is also the hidden truth of the anarchic collaborative economy. what this means is that the rising authoritarianism is the other side of the disappearance of the state. more precisely off. the state's most precious function that of providing public services do you remember at the end of june twenty one a heat dome over the northwest of the united states and the southwest of canada. cost temperatures to approach 50 degrees celsius. this local phenomenon was the result of a global disturbance of patterns which clearly depend on human interventions into the natural cycles. we have to act against it globally with a tight cooperation between states. a state is often all we have when we are in an emergency state, natural disaster, pandemic and so on. we thereby tap the vast domain of public services healthcare education which cannot be provided through expanding cooperatives and other forms of local self- organisation. balibar makes this point clear, a quote. if you look at the poor in american suburbs mainly. african americans and other migrant groups what they suffer from is the fact that america never really had a welfare state or a social state in the british french or german sense the catastrophe for them is not that there is too much state it is that there is not enough of the state so yes popular mobilisation outside party politics and state apparatuses is needed just recall the eight of march initiat here in slovenia. but communities evoked by anarchists rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms. where do electricity and water come from? what guarantees the rule of law to whom do we turn for healthcare the more a community is self-ruling the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation. achieving a smooth functioning of alienated invisible social mechanisms which sustain the space of non-alenated communities. critics of representative democracy endlessly vary the motive of how for a priori formal reasons. multiarty elections betray true democracy but it is because of such minimal alienation. signalled by the term representative debt a democracy eventually. functions does this mean that expertise doesn't matter no since another separation enters the frame here the separation between, in lacachenian terms, s1 and s2, master signifier and expert knowledge. the master. people in a democracy through voting formally decides makes the choice but the experts suggest then what to choose? people one to the appearance of choice not real choice making in this sense in a democracy every ordinary citizen is effectively a king but a king. in the sense of constitutional democracy a king who only formally decides whose function is to sign measures proposed by executive administration. this is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy. how to protect the constitutional monarchy how to protect the dignity of the king. how to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides when we all know this is not true. there is dust in. free elections always a minimal aspect of politeness. those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power and ask us to freely decide. if we want to give them power all this, i think, mirrors the status of russia in 1990s. it was still recognized as a superpower on condition that it didn't act that way. and putin stopped to play this game. uh. today this political politeness is disappearing and since politeness is a crucial feature of what laccon calls the big other the symbolic substance of our being. no wonder many lakians claim that the big order is disintegrating. we all know how absolutely crucial appearances were in stalinism. the stalinist regime reacted with total panic whenever there was a threat that appearances will be disturbed say that some accident will render clear the failure of the regime and so on. there were in the soviet media no black chronicles, no reports on crime and prostitution and so on. what characterizes stalinism is precisely this conjunction of raw, brutal terror and the need to protect appearances. even if we all know something is not true the big ard of appearances should not not. so we have no i'm sorry i don't have more time to develop this, but usually we say in the west we are. at least superficially, polite, manipulated under stalinism is real power. no, quite the opposite. stalinism was brutal power, but at the same time a rule of appearances which absolutely should not be disturbed. so we have to be very cautious. when we talk about the disintegration of the big other this disintegration is not a straightforward process of approaching what jacqueline miller called. generalized foreclosure, a state in which the big other no longer serves as the symbolic space in which subjects communicate. is bat. i disagree with this is the chaotic digital space of fake news, nonetheless not a new form of big other, a chaotic public space in which influencers fight for numbers of cliques. when we engage in spreading fake or not news on facebook we are not directly ourselves there we are playing a certain role in this new big order. end. is the space of cancel culture, also not a very strict form of the big other in which those cancelled are excluded from the public space. this is why. the description of the generalized foreclosure. as a carnival without limitation in which every entity is an exception is misleading. Roussel, one of those who maintain this notion of generalized disclosure claims. quote. today the exception has become universal the carnival has become a carnival without limitation of place thanks to the power of the virtual which has modified the category of perceptual space but is there really no limitation in this carnival? does the limitation, in some sense, much stronger than the paternal prohibition which at least solicits the desire to transgress it? is it not returning with vengeance in the politically correct, woke or cancel culture? the characterization of vogue as racism in the time of the many without the one may appear problematic, but i think it hits the mark. in an almost exact opposite. to the traditional racism which opposes a foreign intruder posing a threat to the unity. of the one say immigrants or jews v. riex. to those who are suspected not to truly abandon old forms of the one, patriots, proponents of patriarchal values, eurocentrists and so on. this is why the vogue stance provides the supreme case of how permissiveness turns over into universal prohibition. in a politically correct regime, we never know if and when some of us will be cancelled for his her his acts or words. the criteria themselves are murky. so to conclude. here are some points problematic to most of you no doubt on which i must insist first a true master is not an age of discipline and prohibition his message is not you cannot. and also note you have to. but uh... releasing you can. you can vote. do the impossible. do what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation. and today this means something very precise. you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. a master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself. who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom when you listen to a true leader. you discover that you want or rather you always. wanted something without knowing it. a master is needette. because we cannot acc our freedom directly for to gain this access. we have to be pushed from outside of our natural state, which is one of inert hedonism. one of what amb but you called human animal. the more we live as free individuals with no master the more we are effectively not free. gotott. within the existing frame of possibilities. we need we have to be pushed. disturbed into freedom. by a master. next point. we shouldn't strive for a self-transparent order with no alienation but... for an order of good alienation of our reliance on thick invisible cobweb of regulations which. sustain the space of our freedom we should be led to trust this cobweb and ignore it. focusing on how to invent a different mode of passivity focusing on how to cope with the unavoidable alienation of political life. the moment one takes a close look at an actual state power edifice one can easily detect an implicit but unmistakable signal. even if the state power is i don't know how democratic it. message between the lines is always forget about our limitations. ultimately we can do whatever we want. you. my position i like this excess. this excess is not a contingent supplement spoiling the purity of power, but its necessary constituent. without it. without the threat of arbitrary omnipotence state power is not a true power it loses its authority and again to make my point clear we have to stop playing games of limiting power to a rational democratic extent. we have to accept the excess of power fully. it is the trumpian populists who undermine it. so in all these cases a false opposition. is left behind we don't overcome alienation. weak. desalienation. we don't overcome master by eliminating. a master. we don't overcome public power by limiting it to useful public services. the non-alienated, autonomous, liberal individual is itself a product of alienation in capitalist society. a master. effectively serving the people taking care of them is a fetish created to prevent the possibility that individuals. will. take care of themselves the idea of power serving society justifies power and thus obfuscates its constitutive excess. but does does not involve a contradiction with. laccon's well-known claim that there is no big other how to read together the fact that big otherer. doesn't exist. end. the utter self-sacrificial reliance that i advocate on the figure of some big other. the obvious reading of the fact that there is no big other. would have been for the bearer of authority to admit openly to those subjected to him that he is not qualified to exert authority and to simply step down. leaving his subjects to confront reality as they can hannah arendt outlines this gesture apro propospos parental authority. quote. modern men could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world. for his disgust with things as they are than by his refusal to assume in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. it is as though parents daily said in this world even we are not very securely at home how to move about in it what to know, what skills to master are mysteries. for us too you must try. to make out as best as you can in any case, you are not entitled to call us to account. we are innocent. we wash our hands of you. now, although this imagined answer of the parents is factually more or less true, it is nonetheless existentially false. a parent cannot wash he her its hand in this way the same goes for saying, i have no free will, my decisions are the product of my brain signals, of social influences, so i wash my hands. i have no responsibility for crimes that i committed. even if this is factually true, it is false as my subjective stance. this means that, to quote aaron schuster, who, here. the ethical lesson is that the parent should pretend to know what to do and how the world works, for there is no way out of the problem of authority other than to assume it in its very fictionality, with all the difficulties and discontents this entails but again are we here not back at the cynical position authority is a fake but it's a necessary fake no because to quote miller himself the cynical position. resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true. but in the case evoked by hannah arendt the fiction is more true than reality. we are ready to risk our life for the fiction precisely because it is a fiction. we are here back at laccon's the truth has the structure of a fiction. the same goes for the relationship between determinism and freedom radical acts of freedom are possible only under the condition of predestination. in predestination. we know we are predestined. but we don't know how we are predestined. which of our choices is predetermined? and this terrifying situation where we have to decide what to do, knowing that our decision is decided in advance, is perhaps the only case of real freedom. i hope you understood what i'm saying here something crazy but i think it's existentially true. freedom, radical freedom is not, oh, i go to a patisserie, strawberry cake, cheesecake, i can choose. no, radical freedom is death. i know everything is predetermined. but i don't know in what way end. i. i have to decide what is predetermined. so we have to take. risk risk and subjectively choose what is predetermined. this is the paradox with which i want to conclude. there is no big order doesn't mean that. if there is no god, then everything is permitted. as lacon knew it, it means the exact opposite. everything is prohibited and to break out of this prohibition i have to act counterfactually. there is no big other, it is not a cold description of the state of things. such description implies that i occupy the place of a big other, a neutral view on reality in the same sense that universal historicism exempts me from historical. relativismo. there is no big other means that in a maximum of subjective engagement, i have to identify myself as a hole in the big other as a crack in its edifice. so, to go to the end. one has to correct lacon here the ultimate most radical subjective position. is not that of the analyst that's the usual psychoanalytic idea. when you discover there is no big other, that we are in an abyss, this is as far as we can go. no, i think that after achieving this, after traversing the fantasy and assuming that there is no big other, the only way to avoid cynicism is to heroically pass to the position of a new master. at this point where things get really philosophical, i want to stop. thank you very much.
thank you very much. it's a great honour i hope this works. it's a great honor for me to be here and since i usually. speak for too long, i will simply begin. i want to begin by thanking Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, as well as my colleagues from abroad, especially Yuval Kremnitzer, Eric Santner, and Aaron Schuster. i rely heavily on all of them in what we'll follow. there is a narrative gradually emerging of what is going on in the last decades. it is the return of what was repressed in the age of modernity and enlightenment. more precisely the antagonism is not just the one between enlightenment and its repress it is at its most basic. the antagonism which runs through the enlightenment edifice itself beck to the ancient greece the antagonism between plato and aristotle. french revolution and english reform politics and economy egalitarian freedom and liberty rooted in customs it is the antagonism between radical egalitarian universalism and particular experimental approach and the truth is by far not on the side of cautious empirical approach we are learning the hard way that the attempt of modernity to dispense with traditional forms of domination father of the family, master failed. and that the dimension of the master is returning with a vengeance in all its forms. patriarchal values, political authoritarianism, obscene master clown, religious fundamentalism and so on. it was clear already to sigmund freud. that the decline of the paternal authority is an ambiguous process father is a figure of moral authority. enables the child to adopt a stance of moral autonomy resisting the pressure of his or her or its peers and the pressure of the corrupted social environment. following freud, in his study on authority and family written back in the 1930s, max horkheimer made the same point while in the same spirit adorno pointed out that hitler is not a paternal figure so if you are anti-patriarchal, congratulations, you have hitler and stalin on your side. the most visible form of this return of the repressed is the obscene master. a new figure perhaps of freud's urvater primordial father once traditional authority loses its substantial power it is not possible to return to it. all such returns are today a postmodern fake. does donald trump enact traditional values no, his conservatism. is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. in this sense of obscenity, playing with traditional values of mixing references to them with public optionitis. donald trump is the ultimate post-mod president. if we compare trump with let's say bernie sanders trump is a post-mod politician at its purest.. while sanders is an old-fashioned moralist. this situation. makes what remains of the left desperate. there was a mix of fascination and horror present in the left liberal reaction to the trumpian crowd invading the capitol on january six twenty21. ordinary people breaking into the sacred seat of power, a carnival that momentarily suspended our rules of public life. there was a little bit of envy in their condemnation. of the event many of my leftist friends told me, we should have been doing this. so does this mean that the populist right stole from the left the last resort of their resistance to the existing system the popular attack on the seat of power the problem is that the people to which populism refers doesn't exist populism is by definition a mask of power. it is a fantasized entity evoked by the new masters to justify their rule as the servants of the people, enabling them to dismiss their opponents as the enemies of the people the first step towards populism was made centuries ago when to counter the loss of traditional authority the leader. king proclaimed himself a servant. it. friedrich the great defined himself as the first servant of the state. and this is how from the early enlightenment onwards a master justifies his rule he is in reality the greatest servant the servant of all his subjects servants. but there are different modalities of this position of serving the servant. from technocracy and liberal democracy to authoritarianism the reaction to this predicament. disintegration of traditional authority is double. we can reluctantly accept the need to return to some form of social authority. some lachenians claim that. the problem today is the decline of the name of the father of the paternal symbolic authority. in its absence, pathological narcissism explodes, evoking the specter of the primordial real father. consequently, that's their idea. we should try to restore some kind of law as the agent of prohibition. although this idea is to be rejected. it correctly points out how the decline of the master in no way automatically guarantees emancipation. but can well engender new much more oppressive figures of domination. each however the return to prohibition sustained by some new figure of the law the only way out it seems that the very last lacon. aware of this problem proposed another solution which jacqueline miller calls cynical. we cannot return to the authority of the law but what we can do is act. as if we sustain the law. we should maintain its authority as necessary although we know it is not true in short, miller's solution is, we are psych who try to play normal hysterics. miller has fearlessly spelled out the political implications of this stance a psychoanalyst quote from miller acts so that semblances remain at their places while making sure that the subjects under his psychoanalysts scared, do not take them as real. one should protect. the semblances of power for the good reason that one should be able to continue to enjoy the point is not to attach oneself to the semblances of the existing power, but to consider them necessary. i hope you notice that miller repeats here literally. the famous formula from kafka's trial the law is not true it is just necessary the tv spectacle we were able to watch a couple of days ago the ceremony of queen elizabeth burial provides another way of how authority survive. survives. the more not only the british monarchy, but also united kingdom as a state. lost its superpower status and became a local power the more the status of the british royal family. became the staff of ideological fantasies of all around the world according to some estimates, the ceremony of queen's funeral was watched by 4 billion people around the world. we should not dismiss this as ideology masking actual power relations. the british royal fantasy is one of the key components which. enable actual power relations to reproduce themselves. this fantasy doesn't concern only the present royal family. remember how in 2012 the skeleton excavated in a parking place in leicester was identified as that of richard iii. he was reburied in leicester cathedral on 26th of march thousand5 and again. the ceremony. where only a hundred or so people were expected was witnessed by over one hundred thousand people. facts like these cannot be dismissed as reactionary fantasies the correct insight they bear is the distinction between the symbolic top head of power and the actual executive power. kings and queens reign, they don't rule and their reign is ceremonial and as such crucial. this is why the stalinist leader is the very opposite of a monarch. he is definitely not a traditional master, also not an obscene master and also not an agent, of course, of liberal democratic stance or of contemporary scientific knowledge based on rational reasoning and experimentation. she is rather a pathological distortion of the university discourse, the return of its repressed. in stalinism, the master signifier directly overlaps with the space of knowledge. there is no post-truth here, no obscene multiplicity and self-irony. but a knowledge acting as truth itself this is why today's china in which appearances. of an all-knowing power are fully protected is the opposite to trump but within the same. space. the other way to deal with the decline of traditional authority is the anarchist way. the idea is let's go to the end and get rid of the master in all its dimensions. anarchism is having a revival today, from noam chomsky to David Graeber. anarchism is not against public power Catherine Malabou, another hegelian neo-anarchist. refers to Jacques Rancière who asserts radical equality between citizens who are considered able to both command and obey. there is an essential relationship between. the lot in the sense of lottery and democratic expression true democracy relies on the contingency of who governs and who is governed because governing does not require any particular skill. now, in his reply to malu. Étienne Balibar goes to the crux of the problem. quote from Balibar. the anarchists will say that we are able to imagine and realise in practice an alternative social fabric. because the whole society could one way or another emerge from forms of self-government and self-organization that can be experienced and experimented with at the level of cooperatives, towns and so on. today this idea is becoming increasingly influential and people give us examples of what the kurdish fighters tried in. rojava, what the zapatistas are trying in chiapas and so forth. from there they, anarchists extrapolate and say that work that's to say what works at the local level. could work at the global level provided you find the right form of federation end of quote. sorry. malabu herself points out two problems. with this anarchist stance. first. anarchism is becoming today a key feature of global capitalism. another quote from malou, our current epoch is characterized by a coexistence between a de facto anarchism and a dawning or awakening anarchism. de facto anarchism is the reign of anarcho-capitalism. which is contemporaneous with the end of the welfare state creating in citizens a feeling of abandonment just think of the state of hospitals and healthcare today. current capitalism is undertaking its anarchist or libertarian term a generalized uberization referring to uber of life end of quote second this anarcho-capitalism is the other side of new authoritarianism. another quote from malou. authoritarianism does not contradict the disappearance of the state it is its messenger the mask of this so-called of the so-called collaborative economy which, by bringing professionals and users into direct contact through technological platforms pulverizes all fixity end of. one should only add here that this mask is not only a mask, it is also the hidden truth of the anarchic collaborative economy. what this means is that the rising authoritarianism is the other side of the disappearance of the state. more precisely off. the state's most precious function that of providing public services do you remember at the end of june twenty one a heat dome over the northwest of the united states and the southwest of canada. cost temperatures to approach 50 degrees celsius. this local phenomenon was the result of a global disturbance of patterns which clearly depend on human interventions into the natural cycles. we have to act against it globally with a tight cooperation between states. a state is often all we have when we are in an emergency state, natural disaster, pandemic and so on. we thereby tap the vast domain of public services healthcare education which cannot be provided through expanding cooperatives and other forms of local self- organisation. balibar makes this point clear, a quote. if you look at the poor in american suburbs mainly. african americans and other migrant groups what they suffer from is the fact that america never really had a welfare state or a social state in the british french or german sense the catastrophe for them is not that there is too much state it is that there is not enough of the state so yes popular mobilisation outside party politics and state apparatuses is needed just recall the eight of march initiat here in slovenia. but communities evoked by anarchists rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms. where do electricity and water come from? what guarantees the rule of law to whom do we turn for healthcare the more a community is self-ruling the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation. achieving a smooth functioning of alienated invisible social mechanisms which sustain the space of non-alenated communities. critics of representative democracy endlessly vary the motive of how for a priori formal reasons. multiarty elections betray true democracy but it is because of such minimal alienation. signalled by the term representative debt a democracy eventually. functions does this mean that expertise doesn't matter no since another separation enters the frame here the separation between, in lacachenian terms, s1 and s2, master signifier and expert knowledge. the master. people in a democracy through voting formally decides makes the choice but the experts suggest then what to choose? people one to the appearance of choice not real choice making in this sense in a democracy every ordinary citizen is effectively a king but a king. in the sense of constitutional democracy a king who only formally decides whose function is to sign measures proposed by executive administration. this is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy. how to protect the constitutional monarchy how to protect the dignity of the king. how to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides when we all know this is not true. there is dust in. free elections always a minimal aspect of politeness. those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power and ask us to freely decide. if we want to give them power all this, i think, mirrors the status of russia in 1990s. it was still recognized as a superpower on condition that it didn't act that way. and putin stopped to play this game. uh. today this political politeness is disappearing and since politeness is a crucial feature of what laccon calls the big other the symbolic substance of our being. no wonder many lakians claim that the big order is disintegrating. we all know how absolutely crucial appearances were in stalinism. the stalinist regime reacted with total panic whenever there was a threat that appearances will be disturbed say that some accident will render clear the failure of the regime and so on. there were in the soviet media no black chronicles, no reports on crime and prostitution and so on. what characterizes stalinism is precisely this conjunction of raw, brutal terror and the need to protect appearances. even if we all know something is not true the big ard of appearances should not not. so we have no i'm sorry i don't have more time to develop this, but usually we say in the west we are. at least superficially, polite, manipulated under stalinism is real power. no, quite the opposite. stalinism was brutal power, but at the same time a rule of appearances which absolutely should not be disturbed. so we have to be very cautious. when we talk about the disintegration of the big other this disintegration is not a straightforward process of approaching what jacqueline miller called. generalized foreclosure, a state in which the big other no longer serves as the symbolic space in which subjects communicate. is bat. i disagree with this is the chaotic digital space of fake news, nonetheless not a new form of big other, a chaotic public space in which influencers fight for numbers of cliques. when we engage in spreading fake or not news on facebook we are not directly ourselves there we are playing a certain role in this new big order. end. is the space of cancel culture, also not a very strict form of the big other in which those cancelled are excluded from the public space. this is why. the description of the generalized foreclosure. as a carnival without limitation in which every entity is an exception is misleading. Roussel, one of those who maintain this notion of generalized disclosure claims. quote. today the exception has become universal the carnival has become a carnival without limitation of place thanks to the power of the virtual which has modified the category of perceptual space but is there really no limitation in this carnival? does the limitation, in some sense, much stronger than the paternal prohibition which at least solicits the desire to transgress it? is it not returning with vengeance in the politically correct, woke or cancel culture? the characterization of vogue as racism in the time of the many without the one may appear problematic, but i think it hits the mark. in an almost exact opposite. to the traditional racism which opposes a foreign intruder posing a threat to the unity. of the one say immigrants or jews v. riex. to those who are suspected not to truly abandon old forms of the one, patriots, proponents of patriarchal values, eurocentrists and so on. this is why the vogue stance provides the supreme case of how permissiveness turns over into universal prohibition. in a politically correct regime, we never know if and when some of us will be cancelled for his her his acts or words. the criteria themselves are murky. so to conclude. here are some points problematic to most of you no doubt on which i must insist first a true master is not an age of discipline and prohibition his message is not you cannot. and also note you have to. but uh... releasing you can. you can vote. do the impossible. do what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation. and today this means something very precise. you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. a master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself. who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom when you listen to a true leader. you discover that you want or rather you always. wanted something without knowing it. a master is needette. because we cannot acc our freedom directly for to gain this access. we have to be pushed from outside of our natural state, which is one of inert hedonism. one of what amb but you called human animal. the more we live as free individuals with no master the more we are effectively not free. gotott. within the existing frame of possibilities. we need we have to be pushed. disturbed into freedom. by a master. next point. we shouldn't strive for a self-transparent order with no alienation but... for an order of good alienation of our reliance on thick invisible cobweb of regulations which. sustain the space of our freedom we should be led to trust this cobweb and ignore it. focusing on how to invent a different mode of passivity focusing on how to cope with the unavoidable alienation of political life. the moment one takes a close look at an actual state power edifice one can easily detect an implicit but unmistakable signal. even if the state power is i don't know how democratic it. message between the lines is always forget about our limitations. ultimately we can do whatever we want. you. my position i like this excess. this excess is not a contingent supplement spoiling the purity of power, but its necessary constituent. without it. without the threat of arbitrary omnipotence state power is not a true power it loses its authority and again to make my point clear we have to stop playing games of limiting power to a rational democratic extent. we have to accept the excess of power fully. it is the trumpian populists who undermine it. so in all these cases a false opposition. is left behind we don't overcome alienation. weak. desalienation. we don't overcome master by eliminating. a master. we don't overcome public power by limiting it to useful public services. the non-alienated, autonomous, liberal individual is itself a product of alienation in capitalist society. a master. effectively serving the people taking care of them is a fetish created to prevent the possibility that individuals. will. take care of themselves the idea of power serving society justifies power and thus obfuscates its constitutive excess. but does does not involve a contradiction with. laccon's well-known claim that there is no big other how to read together the fact that big otherer. doesn't exist. end. the utter self-sacrificial reliance that i advocate on the figure of some big other. the obvious reading of the fact that there is no big other. would have been for the bearer of authority to admit openly to those subjected to him that he is not qualified to exert authority and to simply step down. leaving his subjects to confront reality as they can hannah arendt outlines this gesture apro propospos parental authority. quote. modern men could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world. for his disgust with things as they are than by his refusal to assume in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. it is as though parents daily said in this world even we are not very securely at home how to move about in it what to know, what skills to master are mysteries. for us too you must try. to make out as best as you can in any case, you are not entitled to call us to account. we are innocent. we wash our hands of you. now, although this imagined answer of the parents is factually more or less true, it is nonetheless existentially false. a parent cannot wash he her its hand in this way the same goes for saying, i have no free will, my decisions are the product of my brain signals, of social influences, so i wash my hands. i have no responsibility for crimes that i committed. even if this is factually true, it is false as my subjective stance. this means that, to quote aaron schuster, who, here. the ethical lesson is that the parent should pretend to know what to do and how the world works, for there is no way out of the problem of authority other than to assume it in its very fictionality, with all the difficulties and discontents this entails but again are we here not back at the cynical position authority is a fake but it's a necessary fake no because to quote miller himself the cynical position. resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true. but in the case evoked by hannah arendt the fiction is more true than reality. we are ready to risk our life for the fiction precisely because it is a fiction. we are here back at laccon's the truth has the structure of a fiction. the same goes for the relationship between determinism and freedom radical acts of freedom are possible only under the condition of predestination. in predestination. we know we are predestined. but we don't know how we are predestined. which of our choices is predetermined? and this terrifying situation where we have to decide what to do, knowing that our decision is decided in advance, is perhaps the only case of real freedom. i hope you understood what i'm saying here something crazy but i think it's existentially true. freedom, radical freedom is not, oh, i go to a patisserie, strawberry cake, cheesecake, i can choose. no, radical freedom is death. i know everything is predetermined. but i don't know in what way end. i. i have to decide what is predetermined. so we have to take. risk risk and subjectively choose what is predetermined. this is the paradox with which i want to conclude. there is no big order doesn't mean that. if there is no god, then everything is permitted. as lacon knew it, it means the exact opposite. everything is prohibited and to break out of this prohibition i have to act counterfactually. there is no big other, it is not a cold description of the state of things. such description implies that i occupy the place of a big other, a neutral view on reality in the same sense that universal historicism exempts me from historical. relativismo. there is no big other means that in a maximum of subjective engagement, i have to identify myself as a hole in the big other as a crack in its edifice. so, to go to the end. one has to correct lacon here the ultimate most radical subjective position. is not that of the analyst that's the usual psychoanalytic idea. when you discover there is no big other, that we are in an abyss, this is as far as we can go. no, i think that after achieving this, after traversing the fantasy and assuming that there is no big other, the only way to avoid cynicism is to heroically pass to the position of a new master. at this point where things get really philosophical, i want to stop. thank you very much.
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umwe, thank you very much for your thoughts. a lot of things that you said resonates really well with how the discussions today have been turning. there has been some movement, especially in the afternoon session, towards the idea that maybe master isn't so bad. absolutely.
umwe, thank you very much for your thoughts. a lot of things that you said resonates really well with how the discussions today have been turning. there has been some movement, especially in the afternoon session, towards the idea that maybe master isn't so bad. absolutely.
Slavoj Žižek
but not only this, are you aware, sorry to interrupt you, are people aware of what i was really saying? a, democracy functions only as a fake. fake in the sense that it's the play of politeness. i want the appearance to decide as an ordinary man. i don't want really to decide. point two, i totally reject this liberal just repeating my provocative ideas, this liberal view that government, yes, it's necessary but in a limited way. we ordinary people should say, okay, we allow the government to do this that. no, i think that what makes a government functioning is precisely this excessive threat. ultimately forget about democratic limitations i can do whatever i want. and i think i don't have time to develop this now that precisely in stalinism this is not the case they always the whole. the whole machinery there, symbolic machinery, is that of serving the people. so my position is here very clear. and we not only need, and third point, now i'm addressing you personally. can you imagine, i cannot, it's a rhetorical question, to live in a real local community where there is no higher power, where every afternoon you have some boring self-management meetings where you have to decide how to get a no. i want to live in a good.
but not only this, are you aware, sorry to interrupt you, are people aware of what i was really saying? a, democracy functions only as a fake. fake in the sense that it's the play of politeness. i want the appearance to decide as an ordinary man. i don't want really to decide. point two, i totally reject this liberal just repeating my provocative ideas, this liberal view that government, yes, it's necessary but in a limited way. we ordinary people should say, okay, we allow the government to do this that. no, i think that what makes a government functioning is precisely this excessive threat. ultimately forget about democratic limitations i can do whatever i want. and i think i don't have time to develop this now that precisely in stalinism this is not the case they always the whole. the whole machinery there, symbolic machinery, is that of serving the people. so my position is here very clear. and we not only need, and third point, now i'm addressing you personally. can you imagine, i cannot, it's a rhetorical question, to live in a real local community where there is no higher power, where every afternoon you have some boring self-management meetings where you have to decide how to get a no. i want to live in a good.
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aliaation. okay, but let me press you on this. let me press. okay, that's what i. how do you imagine this? master i remember a joke that you told many years ago which was a very effective joke, but it was a joke nevertheless. the joke went. the old pre-modern father says, you have to go to your grandmother and then you just had to go. but then the modern, the postmodern father says, you know how your grandmother loves you. so you still have to go. but now you also have to like it. i'm telling your joke. this is one of the famous slavic jokes. however, i mean, are you saying that you want the pre-modern father back? you are probably not saying that. i want, of course.
aliaation. okay, but let me press you on this. let me press. okay, that's what i. how do you imagine this? master i remember a joke that you told many years ago which was a very effective joke, but it was a joke nevertheless. the joke went. the old pre-modern father says, you have to go to your grandmother and then you just had to go. but then the modern, the postmodern father says, you know how your grandmother loves you. so you still have to go. but now you also have to like it. i'm telling your joke. this is one of the famous slavic jokes. however, i mean, are you saying that you want the pre-modern father back? you are probably not saying that. i want, of course.
Slavoj Žižek
i want neither of these. thank you. but i.
i want neither of these. thank you. but i.
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no, no, no, no.
no, no, no, no.
Slavoj Žižek
that to be really clear this doesn't mean somewhere in between i hope you told it for understandable reason in a. shortened way, no? you know what's my point? i experienced it myself. there is a certain type of authority when the father, it's sunday afternoon, we have to visit grandmother. a really oppressive father will not tell you, behave properly, you have to go. a really oppressive father will tell you, you know how much your visit would have meant to your grandmother, but go only if you really want. beneath this free choice there is a redoubled order. you not only have to. visit grandmother, you have to freely decide to visit it. and as an american friend of mine, forgot his name now, develop. this is uberization and so on. this is the everyday life of today's capitalism. uh... more and more companies where you have precarious workers work in this way you... can choose to work, how do you call it, more than your work time additionally. and you are free to choose. but if you don't choose this, you can be fired.
that to be really clear this doesn't mean somewhere in between i hope you told it for understandable reason in a. shortened way, no? you know what's my point? i experienced it myself. there is a certain type of authority when the father, it's sunday afternoon, we have to visit grandmother. a really oppressive father will not tell you, behave properly, you have to go. a really oppressive father will tell you, you know how much your visit would have meant to your grandmother, but go only if you really want. beneath this free choice there is a redoubled order. you not only have to. visit grandmother, you have to freely decide to visit it. and as an american friend of mine, forgot his name now, develop. this is uberization and so on. this is the everyday life of today's capitalism. uh... more and more companies where you have precarious workers work in this way you... can choose to work, how do you call it, more than your work time additionally. and you are free to choose. but if you don't choose this, you can be fired.
·
h.
h.
Slavoj Žižek
so literally your job relies on your j free decision. two
so literally your job relies on your j free decision. two
·
do more now my totalitarian but then i want to press you on this, on the question of freedom, because this is also something you mentioned, that you do not believe in freedom in the sense of going to the block. you, you will get my provocation.
do more now my totalitarian but then i want to press you on this, on the question of freedom, because this is also something you mentioned, that you do not believe in freedom in the sense of going to the block. you, you will get my provocation.
Slavoj Žižek
answer at some level basic level and we should isolate this point i think that this is not just a crazy neo-totalitarian phenomenon on this. to cut a long story short, you are given a choice only if you make the right choice. i think. this is what i call civilization. at a certain basic level that's our stance towards society and i totally accept it i endorse it. i will repeat, if i may, probably most of you know it, but you do. my hero is a colleague of mine. 40 years ago almost, he went to serve the yugoslav army. and in the army, it was after the first two weeks there, we have the oath, you know. everybody had to repeat, i am ready to sacrifice blah, blah, blah, my life, and then to sign it. and my friend did an ingenious thing. link. he when he confronted the officer with the big fat book where he would have to sign his name, he said, am i compelled? are you ordering me to sign this? officer says, of course not. oath must be a free oath. then my friend said, then i will not sign it. then the officer told him, are you crazy? you will be arrested. and he got into a debate and since the officer was rather stupid, at the end he produced a paper which my friend still has. ordering my friend to freely sign the oath. and what i'm trying to tell you is that yes, at a certain basic level, we need this. because, you know, we can go here into theology even. let's do it. yeah, because kierkegaard says this very nicely. he says that the worst, most atheist thing is to behave as a free reasonable being. it's to say. okay, i read quran. old testament, new testament, buddhist, and i think christianity is the best, it convinced me. kierkegaard says this is the worst. the true religious authority works in exactly the opposite way. in order to. really, in order to understand the arguments for christianity, you already have to believe it. if you think in the other way around, you are already a secular atheist. now, idiots will say, my god, but are you middle-age obscurantes? what has this to do with enlightenment? the whole point of marx is exactly the same. what marx calls emancipatory. radical proletarian position. it's not stalin speaks like this. stalin says, as a marxist, how do you become a marxist? you look around, you see historical necessity goes towards communism. oh, let's choose to bet on the winning horse. you choose that. no, marx says the exactly opposite. to understand marxism you have already to be a marxist and i want to insist on the irreducibility of. this so you see here my position gets more complicated. i i think that the problem now i will be very brutal the problem of this post-mod father is that he is right but what he should do is to become openly. oppressive. my father is not the one who tells you, go to your grandmother, i don't care what you feel. my father tells you but openly not look deep but you have to like to go to your grand okay thank but you will say this is madness. but just to conclude the vit study before you dismiss me as an authoritarian madman aren't we. aren't we encountering similar positions? this is what fascinates me most. at everyday level all the time. for example, let's say i invite you, another old joke you know of mine, at a dinner. and it's clear since let us say, who knows what will be ten years from now, i have much more money than you, i invite you. but don't we have the ritual that when the bill arrives, you have... to say okay let's split it and so on. i have to make the gesture of reaching yeah the no i have to pretend and but then we all know then in half a minute you will conceit which is why here i will show you my true evil sometimes i like to do to my friends and say okay you pay then the usual idea is you reach into your pocket and say, oh my god, i forgot the credit card. it's another game. you see what i mean? i want to assert that being a member of society is not, as liberals think, a simple free choice. you are never outside. the moment you speak and so on, a certain basic choice, which is in the strictick schellingian and freudian way, an eternal transcendental choice, it's an a priori, is already. make. so this is one aspect of the master, but my solution to go to the end is this one. there are normal states or low. very and they can be states of emergency in normal states. master of course should be reduced to an idiot. that's why i have even a certain sympathy for monarchy and so on. schegel knew it. monarchs are idiots by definition. god save us from monarchs who are too wise. monarchs have to have good manners, say some wise platitudes and so on. and as, the stuff of monarchs are like proverbs, deep wisdoms. and i'm sorry, just the last of my jokes, very brief. like i hate proverbs and wisdoms. my eternal example, sorry if you know you. let's say that i do something risky. and i check. and sorry, not you, you. let's say you are the wise idiot. and i succeed. and then you are immediately able to quote some proverb. we in slovene have profit. only those who risk profit. like let's say that i fail. then you will be immediately able to quote another, like we have in slovene this vulgar one, the most, you cannot urinate against the wind. this is the staff of a monarch.
answer at some level basic level and we should isolate this point i think that this is not just a crazy neo-totalitarian phenomenon on this. to cut a long story short, you are given a choice only if you make the right choice. i think. this is what i call civilization. at a certain basic level that's our stance towards society and i totally accept it i endorse it. i will repeat, if i may, probably most of you know it, but you do. my hero is a colleague of mine. 40 years ago almost, he went to serve the yugoslav army. and in the army, it was after the first two weeks there, we have the oath, you know. everybody had to repeat, i am ready to sacrifice blah, blah, blah, my life, and then to sign it. and my friend did an ingenious thing. link. he when he confronted the officer with the big fat book where he would have to sign his name, he said, am i compelled? are you ordering me to sign this? officer says, of course not. oath must be a free oath. then my friend said, then i will not sign it. then the officer told him, are you crazy? you will be arrested. and he got into a debate and since the officer was rather stupid, at the end he produced a paper which my friend still has. ordering my friend to freely sign the oath. and what i'm trying to tell you is that yes, at a certain basic level, we need this. because, you know, we can go here into theology even. let's do it. yeah, because kierkegaard says this very nicely. he says that the worst, most atheist thing is to behave as a free reasonable being. it's to say. okay, i read quran. old testament, new testament, buddhist, and i think christianity is the best, it convinced me. kierkegaard says this is the worst. the true religious authority works in exactly the opposite way. in order to. really, in order to understand the arguments for christianity, you already have to believe it. if you think in the other way around, you are already a secular atheist. now, idiots will say, my god, but are you middle-age obscurantes? what has this to do with enlightenment? the whole point of marx is exactly the same. what marx calls emancipatory. radical proletarian position. it's not stalin speaks like this. stalin says, as a marxist, how do you become a marxist? you look around, you see historical necessity goes towards communism. oh, let's choose to bet on the winning horse. you choose that. no, marx says the exactly opposite. to understand marxism you have already to be a marxist and i want to insist on the irreducibility of. this so you see here my position gets more complicated. i i think that the problem now i will be very brutal the problem of this post-mod father is that he is right but what he should do is to become openly. oppressive. my father is not the one who tells you, go to your grandmother, i don't care what you feel. my father tells you but openly not look deep but you have to like to go to your grand okay thank but you will say this is madness. but just to conclude the vit study before you dismiss me as an authoritarian madman aren't we. aren't we encountering similar positions? this is what fascinates me most. at everyday level all the time. for example, let's say i invite you, another old joke you know of mine, at a dinner. and it's clear since let us say, who knows what will be ten years from now, i have much more money than you, i invite you. but don't we have the ritual that when the bill arrives, you have... to say okay let's split it and so on. i have to make the gesture of reaching yeah the no i have to pretend and but then we all know then in half a minute you will conceit which is why here i will show you my true evil sometimes i like to do to my friends and say okay you pay then the usual idea is you reach into your pocket and say, oh my god, i forgot the credit card. it's another game. you see what i mean? i want to assert that being a member of society is not, as liberals think, a simple free choice. you are never outside. the moment you speak and so on, a certain basic choice, which is in the strictick schellingian and freudian way, an eternal transcendental choice, it's an a priori, is already. make. so this is one aspect of the master, but my solution to go to the end is this one. there are normal states or low. very and they can be states of emergency in normal states. master of course should be reduced to an idiot. that's why i have even a certain sympathy for monarchy and so on. schegel knew it. monarchs are idiots by definition. god save us from monarchs who are too wise. monarchs have to have good manners, say some wise platitudes and so on. and as, the stuff of monarchs are like proverbs, deep wisdoms. and i'm sorry, just the last of my jokes, very brief. like i hate proverbs and wisdoms. my eternal example, sorry if you know you. let's say that i do something risky. and i check. and sorry, not you, you. let's say you are the wise idiot. and i succeed. and then you are immediately able to quote some proverb. we in slovene have profit. only those who risk profit. like let's say that i fail. then you will be immediately able to quote another, like we have in slovene this vulgar one, the most, you cannot urinate against the wind. this is the staff of a monarch.
·
okay.
okay.
Slavoj Žižek
the less intelligent the monarch is, so there is a chance to reduce the monarch to this symbolic empty. but sometimes in exceptional states, we need a more real master, but this master has to be, it's still a figure of transference. look at great figures. i spoke with people, i'm not totally bluffing, don't be afraid i will end. with people i was lucky who knew mandela and vclav havel. and they all told me, don't overestimate them. they were rather flat idiots. the point was what we put in them, the message we got from them. not obey me, but yes, we can. yes, you can do it. that's all. so at the same time, all the glory to the master, but just ceremonial, but this ceremony is empty, but necessary. all right. sorry
the less intelligent the monarch is, so there is a chance to reduce the monarch to this symbolic empty. but sometimes in exceptional states, we need a more real master, but this master has to be, it's still a figure of transference. look at great figures. i spoke with people, i'm not totally bluffing, don't be afraid i will end. with people i was lucky who knew mandela and vclav havel. and they all told me, don't overestimate them. they were rather flat idiots. the point was what we put in them, the message we got from them. not obey me, but yes, we can. yes, you can do it. that's all. so at the same time, all the glory to the master, but just ceremonial, but this ceremony is empty, but necessary. all right. sorry
·
no, no, no, this is fantastic. again.
no, no, no, this is fantastic. again.
Slavoj Žižek
oh, i wouldn't. with.
oh, i wouldn't. with.
·
with what you were oh no no no, it was fantastic. it reson.
with what you were oh no no no, it was fantastic. it reson.
Slavoj Žižek
it's really
it's really
·
well with what we
well with what we
Slavoj Žižek
i.
i.
·
fantastic in the sense that you were dreaming, fantasizing. um... since this is an international conference and it's a scientific conference, we want to invite the audience to ask questions as well. so i'd like to have some more light in the audience, if that's possible.
fantastic in the sense that you were dreaming, fantasizing. um... since this is an international conference and it's a scientific conference, we want to invite the audience to ask questions as well. so i'd like to have some more light in the audience, if that's possible.
Slavoj Žižek
that.
that.
·
the gut st.
the gut st.
Slavoj Žižek
you the.
you the.
·
i'm in advance. i am actually a protestant on that, which means that i actually want people to ask questions. sorry for being a protestant. no, no, no.
i'm in advance. i am actually a protestant on that, which means that i actually want people to ask questions. sorry for being a protestant. no, no, no.
Slavoj Žižek
i totally agree. i'm so sorry we don't have time for this.
i totally agree. i'm so sorry we don't have time for this.
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the.
the.
Slavoj Žižek
no, please, let's we do have time.
no, please, let's we do have time.
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base.
base.
Slavoj Žižek
no, no, no no no, no. you know why? because you know that protestantism is for me one step from atheism. predestination means god doesn't care for us. it means god you are in advance, lost or saved it doesn't matter what you do. i'm losing
no, no, no no no, no. you know why? because you know that protestantism is for me one step from atheism. predestination means god doesn't care for us. it means god you are in advance, lost or saved it doesn't matter what you do. i'm losing
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no, no, no, no, it's good. it's just that, so think of a question. the lights are going to shine in the audience.
no, no, no, no, it's good. it's just that, so think of a question. the lights are going to shine in the audience.
Slavoj Žižek
that would be good.
that would be good.
·
luči tudi v dvorani. Vid? Ali kdorkoli drug? um and you know, when the lights are there and if you have a question, please raise your hand and people will bring you a microphone and this is how it will operate. is anyone back there? is there a master or someone on the switchboard that can actually put lights in the audience? are we alone here? they left us sl what are we going. to do. oh, so the the general director of this institution will bring delight. until then, slavo, i stopped you, but you were on a roll, i think. you had some really... oh, another thing that i wanted to ask you more a little bit was about alienation.
luči tudi v dvorani. Vid? Ali kdorkoli drug? um and you know, when the lights are there and if you have a question, please raise your hand and people will bring you a microphone and this is how it will operate. is anyone back there? is there a master or someone on the switchboard that can actually put lights in the audience? are we alone here? they left us sl what are we going. to do. oh, so the the general director of this institution will bring delight. until then, slavo, i stopped you, but you were on a roll, i think. you had some really... oh, another thing that i wanted to ask you more a little bit was about alienation.
Slavoj Žižek
yes.
yes.
·
you stressed this idea, oh, thank you, we have the light. so if you have a question, raise your hand. alienation, this is another thing that you kept stressing in your talk. and you also made a subtle but not really so subtle move against the praxis school of the the yugoslavian marxists who kind of liked desalienation, who kind of liked marx of the manuscripts of 1844.
you stressed this idea, oh, thank you, we have the light. so if you have a question, raise your hand. alienation, this is another thing that you kept stressing in your talk. and you also made a subtle but not really so subtle move against the praxis school of the the yugoslavian marxists who kind of liked desalienation, who kind of liked marx of the manuscripts of 1844.
Slavoj Žižek
which are for me the worst, the most dangerous marx, if you ask me. if you are looking in marx for the roots of later stalinism, they are there.
which are for me the worst, the most dangerous marx, if you ask me. if you are looking in marx for the roots of later stalinism, they are there.
·
mm-hmm.
mm-hmm.
Slavoj Žižek
and. no.
and. no.
·
you know what no, because they were obviously like i mean, they hated stalin with all their guts. okay, i also have, let's say, some problems.
you know what no, because they were obviously like i mean, they hated stalin with all their guts. okay, i also have, let's say, some problems.
Slavoj Žižek
but but you know now for those who are from here and old enough to remember it you know what was for me the moment of truth of praxis that when socialism began disintegrating. they were totally powerless totally unable to offer an alternative even a minimal one if anything they become nostalgically they quickly made a pact with even with communist party apparatus like my god now everything is in danger and let's pull together all our forces' this utter utter inability to find a new. formula there but just another thing about master that's the master i don't like you know like usually when i say ha, show me one example of anarchism which worked. anarchism. local prepresentative democracy now no longer but a couple of years ago the answer i was given was venezuela
but but you know now for those who are from here and old enough to remember it you know what was for me the moment of truth of praxis that when socialism began disintegrating. they were totally powerless totally unable to offer an alternative even a minimal one if anything they become nostalgically they quickly made a pact with even with communist party apparatus like my god now everything is in danger and let's pull together all our forces' this utter utter inability to find a new. formula there but just another thing about master that's the master i don't like you know like usually when i say ha, show me one example of anarchism which worked. anarchism. local prepresentative democracy now no longer but a couple of years ago the answer i was given was venezuela
·
mm-hmm.
mm-hmm.
Slavoj Žižek
now, i just laugh, if there was a mega master there, it was hugo chavez. extremely strong state mega master and it was only within that stage that local authorities work and so on and so on
now, i just laugh, if there was a mega master there, it was hugo chavez. extremely strong state mega master and it was only within that stage that local authorities work and so on and so on
·
mm.
mm.
Slavoj Žižek
so now you will say, is there a danger against, nonetheless, i'm well aware that with alienation comes the danger that the alienated power but i think there are ways to prevent it, terror. but not terror towards the people. terror the other way around. i'm for a limit. even artificial terror if those in power here if there is a stalin i like. it. it's the stalin of 34-35. because till that point, stalin got it that in per just higher bureaucracy is sacrificing the lower. and then stalin turned it around and appealed to ordinary people. to denounce those up. mm the.
so now you will say, is there a danger against, nonetheless, i'm well aware that with alienation comes the danger that the alienated power but i think there are ways to prevent it, terror. but not terror towards the people. terror the other way around. i'm for a limit. even artificial terror if those in power here if there is a stalin i like. it. it's the stalin of 34-35. because till that point, stalin got it that in per just higher bureaucracy is sacrificing the lower. and then stalin turned it around and appealed to ordinary people. to denounce those up. mm the.
·
were incredibly. okay, losing time you have a question. no no. yes, there is a question. there's a couple of them. the i think there is a microphone coming. i hear you, but... thank you.
were incredibly. okay, losing time you have a question. no no. yes, there is a question. there's a couple of them. the i think there is a microphone coming. i hear you, but... thank you.
Slavoj Žižek
sorry, just i will let you finish, but do you know the irony that every good english nationalist will tell you that the english language that is now the world language is something so specific that many englishmen and americans don't recognize themselves in it. that sayxit happened yeah they are the true losers. the english that we are speaking is i write an analysis is the closest real. group of people. which is identified with this international english are probably singapore bankers sorry please go on sorry.
sorry, just i will let you finish, but do you know the irony that every good english nationalist will tell you that the english language that is now the world language is something so specific that many englishmen and americans don't recognize themselves in it. that sayxit happened yeah they are the true losers. the english that we are speaking is i write an analysis is the closest real. group of people. which is identified with this international english are probably singapore bankers sorry please go on sorry.
·
yes, that's a very good question.
yes, that's a very good question.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah i think that if there is something to learn today is that this. beak. what you called big tech. that the only realist way we have to contain it is a stronger state. do you have another solution? under the control of the people of course all that but strong state regulation i think i will give you even another version here my good friend he's also known as a slovene politician, but this doesn't matter. my good friend, Luka, how do you say, if we speak english, Luka Mesec. gave me an idea that when this something not tv but i think this infrared or whatever infrared infrared to bake things and some invention one company developed it and wanted to monopolize it and it was the american state which wisely. c the copyright so that we have competition and so on. the paradox is that yes market sometimes has good effects if it's tightly controlled by the state. without the state. we would already have been in neo-feudalism without the market. so in this sense, i think that i like this ethical shift that happened in the last twenty years. maybe this is my secret stalinism, where you know how till twenty years ago to denounce people to authorities was considered bad. now whistleblowers are our. heroes. practically what i just want to with all my criticism of russia and so on want to point out is that again, that was my basic point. this anarcho-capitalism and new forms of censorship and so on are two sides of the same thing. at the level of political discourse, when people say, but you can say anything, or look what happened with julian assange. i mean there are such strict limits and i will give you if i may in a slightly arrogant way my own example here i wrote text defending ukraine. they were. so so here and there published. then i wrote two texts, the last two, where i was critical not so much against ukraine is against the way some political aspects of the crisis like are you aware how the west is using the war to force ukraine into really neoocolonialist privatization. do you know that over one third of the best land in ukraine, the chernozium and so on, if it's not occupied by russians, is already in western hands and all that, i couldn't publish it. they say no, it's too one-sided and so on. or unfortunately ukraine is here wrong they totally support israel they claimed ukraine is like israel, which is for me, madness. nobody wanted to publish it. you can, of course, in some marginal, but it's good to become aware of how. censored! the space is the public space, it's us, ours in liberal democracies. it's absolutely
yeah i think that if there is something to learn today is that this. beak. what you called big tech. that the only realist way we have to contain it is a stronger state. do you have another solution? under the control of the people of course all that but strong state regulation i think i will give you even another version here my good friend he's also known as a slovene politician, but this doesn't matter. my good friend, Luka, how do you say, if we speak english, Luka Mesec. gave me an idea that when this something not tv but i think this infrared or whatever infrared infrared to bake things and some invention one company developed it and wanted to monopolize it and it was the american state which wisely. c the copyright so that we have competition and so on. the paradox is that yes market sometimes has good effects if it's tightly controlled by the state. without the state. we would already have been in neo-feudalism without the market. so in this sense, i think that i like this ethical shift that happened in the last twenty years. maybe this is my secret stalinism, where you know how till twenty years ago to denounce people to authorities was considered bad. now whistleblowers are our. heroes. practically what i just want to with all my criticism of russia and so on want to point out is that again, that was my basic point. this anarcho-capitalism and new forms of censorship and so on are two sides of the same thing. at the level of political discourse, when people say, but you can say anything, or look what happened with julian assange. i mean there are such strict limits and i will give you if i may in a slightly arrogant way my own example here i wrote text defending ukraine. they were. so so here and there published. then i wrote two texts, the last two, where i was critical not so much against ukraine is against the way some political aspects of the crisis like are you aware how the west is using the war to force ukraine into really neoocolonialist privatization. do you know that over one third of the best land in ukraine, the chernozium and so on, if it's not occupied by russians, is already in western hands and all that, i couldn't publish it. they say no, it's too one-sided and so on. or unfortunately ukraine is here wrong they totally support israel they claimed ukraine is like israel, which is for me, madness. nobody wanted to publish it. you can, of course, in some marginal, but it's good to become aware of how. censored! the space is the public space, it's us, ours in liberal democracies. it's absolutely
·
there's many more questions, gentlemen. but oh yeah, there's a microphone for you
there's many more questions, gentlemen. but oh yeah, there's a microphone for you
·
thank you for the talk, professor. my name is anish. i recently finished my phd from dublin city university. and i am visiting university of ljubljana. originally, i'm from the maoist insurgency, india, like slovo would know. we have been fighting against the indian state for a very long time. and now we have accepted that we need a master. what i wanted to ask you is, i agree with you. could you speak a little slower? okay yeah. um... so what i was trying to say is that i come from a part of india that has been against the indian state. we have been fighting the maoist insurgency and now we have accepted the fact that we need a government and we have been trying to participate. but the question is, true that we need a state and true that expertise is important, but what do you do when the master is stupid? like in the india's case, like you know, our prime minister has been going around asking people to drink cow piss. like what do you do in that case?
thank you for the talk, professor. my name is anish. i recently finished my phd from dublin city university. and i am visiting university of ljubljana. originally, i'm from the maoist insurgency, india, like slovo would know. we have been fighting against the indian state for a very long time. and now we have accepted that we need a master. what i wanted to ask you is, i agree with you. could you speak a little slower? okay yeah. um... so what i was trying to say is that i come from a part of india that has been against the indian state. we have been fighting the maoist insurgency and now we have accepted the fact that we need a government and we have been trying to participate. but the question is, true that we need a state and true that expertise is important, but what do you do when the master is stupid? like in the india's case, like you know, our prime minister has been going around asking people to drink cow piss. like what do you do in that case?
·
could you just repeat, i didn't catch it too well either. could you just repeat when the master is, what do you do when the master is?
could you just repeat, i didn't catch it too well either. could you just repeat when the master is, what do you do when the master is?
·
when the master is stupid, we or when the expert surrounding the master is stupid, are we allowed to overthrow then? are we allowed to have a revolution then?
when the master is stupid, we or when the expert surrounding the master is stupid, are we allowed to overthrow then? are we allowed to have a revolution then?
Slavoj Žižek
my god, i'm always for violent revolutions. that's not a problem. what i'm saying is that if you are in a regime when if the master is stupid. things go bad. then this is a bad regime. i want a master in a position where it doesn't matter if he is stupid or not. look, do you think elizabeth ii was not stupid? okay, she had some sense for proper measure and so on and so on. but... uh. but hegel was the first one who, precisely we are here as hegelians, who knew this. we should learn something from this. paradox that emancipatory revolutions like october revolutions and others who were meant to dispense with the master. ended up with the figure of the master which is much harsher than the usual. western master in some sense i'm ready to say although still nazism is worse than soviet union but in some sense in stalinism the master had had more power than hitler. i studied this in detail. hitler still had to make compromises with gauleiter in this that region and so on and so on and was a different position. so again my point is that i i'm even ready to go a step further. i'm a pessimist here. let's say, and this was the usual story from zimbabwe to i don't know where. you get a master reach at the beginning, brought hope. and then he turned most corrupted and so on well kill him there is no problem kill him liquidate him and so on and so on i think maybe this is even a necessary step of every revolution. that revolution have to end by. by killilling their own. the problem is. leaders the problem is only does this have to happen because i'm an old pro-jacobin does this have to, i mean, i think that three quarters of jacobin terror in france is a myth. and i'm so glad to learn from british historians you know usually. those who want to prove that the origin of revolutionary terror, ultra-stalinism is the liquidation of danton. read the british historians, they were right. it's proven now by english archives. danton was paid by the british. but that's another story. what i want to say is my vision is much more tragic here. as hegel says about alexander the great. the great wisdom of a master is to die. at the proper moment
my god, i'm always for violent revolutions. that's not a problem. what i'm saying is that if you are in a regime when if the master is stupid. things go bad. then this is a bad regime. i want a master in a position where it doesn't matter if he is stupid or not. look, do you think elizabeth ii was not stupid? okay, she had some sense for proper measure and so on and so on. but... uh. but hegel was the first one who, precisely we are here as hegelians, who knew this. we should learn something from this. paradox that emancipatory revolutions like october revolutions and others who were meant to dispense with the master. ended up with the figure of the master which is much harsher than the usual. western master in some sense i'm ready to say although still nazism is worse than soviet union but in some sense in stalinism the master had had more power than hitler. i studied this in detail. hitler still had to make compromises with gauleiter in this that region and so on and so on and was a different position. so again my point is that i i'm even ready to go a step further. i'm a pessimist here. let's say, and this was the usual story from zimbabwe to i don't know where. you get a master reach at the beginning, brought hope. and then he turned most corrupted and so on well kill him there is no problem kill him liquidate him and so on and so on i think maybe this is even a necessary step of every revolution. that revolution have to end by. by killilling their own. the problem is. leaders the problem is only does this have to happen because i'm an old pro-jacobin does this have to, i mean, i think that three quarters of jacobin terror in france is a myth. and i'm so glad to learn from british historians you know usually. those who want to prove that the origin of revolutionary terror, ultra-stalinism is the liquidation of danton. read the british historians, they were right. it's proven now by english archives. danton was paid by the british. but that's another story. what i want to say is my vision is much more tragic here. as hegel says about alexander the great. the great wisdom of a master is to die. at the proper moment
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mm-hmm
mm-hmm
Slavoj Žižek
not too late. now, you know that my friends in england, i love this theory, paranoiac, claim that maybe elizabeth ii is not dead, but just charles got nervous, like, you live forever when i will be king, so they retired her to some home and. but you see what i mean. i am more and more tempted in my pessimism to say that we have a revolution which does the necessary job and then you... unique. revolution against the revolution and the true problem is there how this revolution against the first revolution. how to prevent it from simply becoming the counter revolution but my view is here tragic which means illusion revolutionary illusion is necessary i i don't believe in. realist revolution you know in advance your limitation and so on and so on but sorry.
not too late. now, you know that my friends in england, i love this theory, paranoiac, claim that maybe elizabeth ii is not dead, but just charles got nervous, like, you live forever when i will be king, so they retired her to some home and. but you see what i mean. i am more and more tempted in my pessimism to say that we have a revolution which does the necessary job and then you... unique. revolution against the revolution and the true problem is there how this revolution against the first revolution. how to prevent it from simply becoming the counter revolution but my view is here tragic which means illusion revolutionary illusion is necessary i i don't believe in. realist revolution you know in advance your limitation and so on and so on but sorry.
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no, great. i have a question on that, but i want to open it to the audience as much as possible. please raise your hand and... yes, a microphone will be brought to you. they already behind you. yeah.
no, great. i have a question on that, but i want to open it to the audience as much as possible. please raise your hand and... yes, a microphone will be brought to you. they already behind you. yeah.
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thank you. so i agree with you. back, go to back. no, there is no light. oh, okay. yet i agree with you, state is necessary, strong state. i like to have electricity, i like to have healthcare, i want someone to take care of this. but we don't have just domestic capital domestic
thank you. so i agree with you. back, go to back. no, there is no light. oh, okay. yet i agree with you, state is necessary, strong state. i like to have electricity, i like to have healthcare, i want someone to take care of this. but we don't have just domestic capital domestic
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have that in mexico or sorry, could you be domestic, domestic.
have that in mexico or sorry, could you be domestic, domestic.
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we don't have domestic capitalism. we don't have domestic problems, only domestic markets that the state should take care of. we live in a globalized capitalism. we have excesses in global markets. we have excesses in nature. we have climate change well, basically my question is, is state enough? who is the ultimate master? who will... fix these things.
we don't have domestic capitalism. we don't have domestic problems, only domestic markets that the state should take care of. we live in a globalized capitalism. we have excesses in global markets. we have excesses in nature. we have climate change well, basically my question is, is state enough? who is the ultimate master? who will... fix these things.
Slavoj Žižek
uh. the situation is much more tragic i didn't have time to develop the whole line but i'm well aware if i that's how i, in the longer version of the text, interpret that quote from hannah arendt and aaron schuster. you know, master is not a real master. i don't believe in the master in the traditional sense that something has real authority. to act as a master is always a moment of madness. it's a fake. you fail so what do we have to do if this is your point i namely that. theh. i totally agree with you and that's why i mentioned that, but it's not the only problem that northwest of united states, southwest of canada. this is what i always ask. my green ecological friends were for local action okay. what would you do locally? look there at the countryside and you would discover that probably. the area around seattle and vancouver southwest canada, northwest united states. by common standards ecologically relatively well protected they're doing proper and so on and that what happened there is just a local effect heat dome of a global process which. is affecting at least i don't know what is happening in the south the whole of northern hemisphere but in the south also i read that in the southern third of chile they have now dropped already. for a decade or more and it's again it's some disturbance in the air circulation which doesn't have anything to do with them so precisely i think if this was your point i agree. de. the crucial thing is some kind of a federation that's why i am... absolutely against a state in the sense of full sovereignty. the only way out that i see for all problems that we have war global warming immigration and so on is some. much tighter much more obligatory even form of international federation and so on otherwise i simply don't see how imagine a new immigrant crisis, millions coming and so on. how will this be done? it's a formula of new war. now leftists are saying open the borders. yes, then you will have everywhere what now will happen in italy and already did happen in sweden you will simply have popul in power. i think that. i think that the task is clear again, new forms of global international cooperation and the problem is that the direction now goes exactly in the opposite direction in the stronger state. sovereignty. so,... here. i. i don't. have a clear solution i am more and more a pessimist one solution is we didn't at least in the developed countries we didn't yet suffer enough even ukraine, which is closer, it's still something that you watch there on the screen and so on, you know, it's not part of our reality. we will have to suffer more. we need a stronger shock because our ability to okay, i'll put it like this. another one who is not here, who did this, adrian johnston, american friend. i don't always agree with him theoretically, but he nicely formulated this paradox. how today the problem is not that we don't know. the truth is out there, even the most disgusting conference that i know, it was over a year ago, i think, in glasgow. global warming. they said all things. we are approaching the end, humanity survival is under threat and so on and so on. and then absolutely nothing happened. even so this reminds me. of something that i learned if some of you are old enough in the old self-management yugoslav socialism which was a very interesting system i am more and more fascinated by it not in any sense of being for it but you know i don't want to name names to get involved but the system i can guarantee this to you at least in the last ten fifteen years functioned not only independently of do you believe in it or not. but the condition of its functioning was that people didn't take it seriously. i had two friends at the central committee, young guys rather stupid although very honest they believed in the system they thought it's true self-management. they lost their job because they were considered dangerous. like, my god, if they take it seriously, it's one step from dissidents and so on. so i think that this what was once self-management yugoslavia is now. all world all the world is moving into what i call with very cynical reference towards myself, because if i'm something clinically, i think. it's an obsessional neurotic. obsessional neurotic das think. for a precise reason to prevent that. not to change something, but to make it sure that nothing will change. immediately i will finish. mladen dollar long ago drew my attention to that wonderful text by george orwell who already in late th30s said this, that radical leftists talk all the time about the necessity to change, but it's kind of a superstitious wager. let's talk about change and maybe nothing. will clink. and i am like this, sorry, all the time. this is, i remember when i was in an analysis. i talked all the time why? because i was afraid that if i stop talking for a second, the analyst may ask me a really. question you are not in analysis right now so i'm not but you see what i mean i think we are in that terrible state where we talk about ecology and so on.
uh. the situation is much more tragic i didn't have time to develop the whole line but i'm well aware if i that's how i, in the longer version of the text, interpret that quote from hannah arendt and aaron schuster. you know, master is not a real master. i don't believe in the master in the traditional sense that something has real authority. to act as a master is always a moment of madness. it's a fake. you fail so what do we have to do if this is your point i namely that. theh. i totally agree with you and that's why i mentioned that, but it's not the only problem that northwest of united states, southwest of canada. this is what i always ask. my green ecological friends were for local action okay. what would you do locally? look there at the countryside and you would discover that probably. the area around seattle and vancouver southwest canada, northwest united states. by common standards ecologically relatively well protected they're doing proper and so on and that what happened there is just a local effect heat dome of a global process which. is affecting at least i don't know what is happening in the south the whole of northern hemisphere but in the south also i read that in the southern third of chile they have now dropped already. for a decade or more and it's again it's some disturbance in the air circulation which doesn't have anything to do with them so precisely i think if this was your point i agree. de. the crucial thing is some kind of a federation that's why i am... absolutely against a state in the sense of full sovereignty. the only way out that i see for all problems that we have war global warming immigration and so on is some. much tighter much more obligatory even form of international federation and so on otherwise i simply don't see how imagine a new immigrant crisis, millions coming and so on. how will this be done? it's a formula of new war. now leftists are saying open the borders. yes, then you will have everywhere what now will happen in italy and already did happen in sweden you will simply have popul in power. i think that. i think that the task is clear again, new forms of global international cooperation and the problem is that the direction now goes exactly in the opposite direction in the stronger state. sovereignty. so,... here. i. i don't. have a clear solution i am more and more a pessimist one solution is we didn't at least in the developed countries we didn't yet suffer enough even ukraine, which is closer, it's still something that you watch there on the screen and so on, you know, it's not part of our reality. we will have to suffer more. we need a stronger shock because our ability to okay, i'll put it like this. another one who is not here, who did this, adrian johnston, american friend. i don't always agree with him theoretically, but he nicely formulated this paradox. how today the problem is not that we don't know. the truth is out there, even the most disgusting conference that i know, it was over a year ago, i think, in glasgow. global warming. they said all things. we are approaching the end, humanity survival is under threat and so on and so on. and then absolutely nothing happened. even so this reminds me. of something that i learned if some of you are old enough in the old self-management yugoslav socialism which was a very interesting system i am more and more fascinated by it not in any sense of being for it but you know i don't want to name names to get involved but the system i can guarantee this to you at least in the last ten fifteen years functioned not only independently of do you believe in it or not. but the condition of its functioning was that people didn't take it seriously. i had two friends at the central committee, young guys rather stupid although very honest they believed in the system they thought it's true self-management. they lost their job because they were considered dangerous. like, my god, if they take it seriously, it's one step from dissidents and so on. so i think that this what was once self-management yugoslavia is now. all world all the world is moving into what i call with very cynical reference towards myself, because if i'm something clinically, i think. it's an obsessional neurotic. obsessional neurotic das think. for a precise reason to prevent that. not to change something, but to make it sure that nothing will change. immediately i will finish. mladen dollar long ago drew my attention to that wonderful text by george orwell who already in late th30s said this, that radical leftists talk all the time about the necessity to change, but it's kind of a superstitious wager. let's talk about change and maybe nothing. will clink. and i am like this, sorry, all the time. this is, i remember when i was in an analysis. i talked all the time why? because i was afraid that if i stop talking for a second, the analyst may ask me a really. question you are not in analysis right now so i'm not but you see what i mean i think we are in that terrible state where we talk about ecology and so on.
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just not to do it. there's another question by the gentleman with a hat. gentlemen or comrade take your side i said gentlemen. not good for you, but okay.
just not to do it. there's another question by the gentleman with a hat. gentlemen or comrade take your side i said gentlemen. not good for you, but okay.
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i just have one question.
i just have one question.
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yes, please be, for some reason we don't hear very well, so be slow and eloquent.
yes, please be, for some reason we don't hear very well, so be slow and eloquent.
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can you hear me? we.
can you hear me? we.
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hear you but try to be
hear you but try to be
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yeah, sorry. so i just have one question. you said that... the true freedom doesn't come from selecting from the outside. the different forms of ideology and seeing marxism as the best thing
yeah, sorry. so i just have one question. you said that... the true freedom doesn't come from selecting from the outside. the different forms of ideology and seeing marxism as the best thing
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
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but you must already believe in it to understand it as freedom. so if i understood it, does this mean that it's not the selection of experiences that gives you freedom, it's the intensity of an experience that gives you freedom. and if this analogy is true, what is the greatest danger today to intensity of experience, to being like a true proletariat that believes in proletarianism and that finds freedom? in in all the different forms in whether it's catholicism, atheism, what is killing the freedom in all these things that the potential of their freedom. no i want.
but you must already believe in it to understand it as freedom. so if i understood it, does this mean that it's not the selection of experiences that gives you freedom, it's the intensity of an experience that gives you freedom. and if this analogy is true, what is the greatest danger today to intensity of experience, to being like a true proletariat that believes in proletarianism and that finds freedom? in in all the different forms in whether it's catholicism, atheism, what is killing the freedom in all these things that the potential of their freedom. no i want.
Slavoj Žižek
two. with all my authoritarian excesses, i believe me, i remain an old marxist but in a liberal good sense. you know. what marx, i never had this. dismissal, hardline marxist of liberal freedom doesn't matter, it's just a fake. no, this freedom of the press, blah, blah blah, these are very precious things. the lesson of the left is just that you have to have certain material institutional conditions, not just written rules, but also unwritten rules. and the true problem for the left is... freedom, even if it's guaranteed by the law and so on, is not enough. like, what is your freedom if you don't have health? so that you have to, and this is where ideological struggle, here i am for my totalitarian side comes. do you remember why obamacare was cancelled? all the propaganda against obamacare was it deprives us of freedom. no. the state will decide. first this was not true you would have been still able to choose. but the point is that. that in some sense actual freedom means a limitation of formal freedom in for me, but now it works less and less we are again in slovenia also becoming. too free in the best sense. for example, for healthcare, you know. yeah, the state system still exists, but you have to wait for two, three years at least. and so a cynic liberal would have said, no problem, you have a freedom. either you choose your health or you choose to die. yeah, to die or whatever. no, i don't want this freedom. i want basic things. education. healthcare and some others to be, this is what i meant by good alienation, to simply be there. available so that you don't have to think about them i have friends for example i have friends i will not name him not to embarrass him from the united states one of them is even maybe here i think. who had a difficult heart disease and. it was just above although he had very good healthcare at a university, but it was just above what his healthcare system covered. so it was a desperate situation. his wife helped him by playing on the stock market and somehow. they you know... this is... what i meant by good alienation. there are freedoms which are false freedoms. in my last text on ukraine, maybe some of you knew it, although it was only in english, i quote the example of my evil son. he is really evil. he is my son, no dna needed. you know, he played this childish game with me already 15 years ago. we were at a table. there was on his side of the table, salt. and i ask him, can you pass me? the sch. he said, yes, i can, and did nothing. yes, but you know, in some sense he had another freedom that i denounced. that i sorry denounced that i abandoned the freedom to read this statement in a different way. she had another choice. he decided to take my demand literally and answered it literally or simply do it. now you will say this is an abstract example but for those of you who are slovenian, you remember that complication jansa, the government, some judges that slovenia sent to europe. did they not do exactly the same thing as my son? the government should only, how do you pronounce uz?
two. with all my authoritarian excesses, i believe me, i remain an old marxist but in a liberal good sense. you know. what marx, i never had this. dismissal, hardline marxist of liberal freedom doesn't matter, it's just a fake. no, this freedom of the press, blah, blah blah, these are very precious things. the lesson of the left is just that you have to have certain material institutional conditions, not just written rules, but also unwritten rules. and the true problem for the left is... freedom, even if it's guaranteed by the law and so on, is not enough. like, what is your freedom if you don't have health? so that you have to, and this is where ideological struggle, here i am for my totalitarian side comes. do you remember why obamacare was cancelled? all the propaganda against obamacare was it deprives us of freedom. no. the state will decide. first this was not true you would have been still able to choose. but the point is that. that in some sense actual freedom means a limitation of formal freedom in for me, but now it works less and less we are again in slovenia also becoming. too free in the best sense. for example, for healthcare, you know. yeah, the state system still exists, but you have to wait for two, three years at least. and so a cynic liberal would have said, no problem, you have a freedom. either you choose your health or you choose to die. yeah, to die or whatever. no, i don't want this freedom. i want basic things. education. healthcare and some others to be, this is what i meant by good alienation, to simply be there. available so that you don't have to think about them i have friends for example i have friends i will not name him not to embarrass him from the united states one of them is even maybe here i think. who had a difficult heart disease and. it was just above although he had very good healthcare at a university, but it was just above what his healthcare system covered. so it was a desperate situation. his wife helped him by playing on the stock market and somehow. they you know... this is... what i meant by good alienation. there are freedoms which are false freedoms. in my last text on ukraine, maybe some of you knew it, although it was only in english, i quote the example of my evil son. he is really evil. he is my son, no dna needed. you know, he played this childish game with me already 15 years ago. we were at a table. there was on his side of the table, salt. and i ask him, can you pass me? the sch. he said, yes, i can, and did nothing. yes, but you know, in some sense he had another freedom that i denounced. that i sorry denounced that i abandoned the freedom to read this statement in a different way. she had another choice. he decided to take my demand literally and answered it literally or simply do it. now you will say this is an abstract example but for those of you who are slovenian, you remember that complication jansa, the government, some judges that slovenia sent to europe. did they not do exactly the same thing as my son? the government should only, how do you pronounce uz?
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cake.
cake.
Slavoj Žižek
of of whatever. register. no, they took this literally. they took this literally. that in this sense i think freedom matters actual freedom. freedom which effectively works effectively works. not this abstractism. and i think today this freedom that all this mask of freedom take precarious workers. in some sense, of course, they are much more free than us. you choose the time of your work. if you are uber driver, you do it or not. you are free to get health or not. they have a lot of freedom. but no, thank you, i won't order there so that sorry. no, no, no, no, don't be sorry.
of of whatever. register. no, they took this literally. they took this literally. that in this sense i think freedom matters actual freedom. freedom which effectively works effectively works. not this abstractism. and i think today this freedom that all this mask of freedom take precarious workers. in some sense, of course, they are much more free than us. you choose the time of your work. if you are uber driver, you do it or not. you are free to get health or not. they have a lot of freedom. but no, thank you, i won't order there so that sorry. no, no, no, no, don't be sorry.
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more questions.
more questions.
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yes, where do you place the media in the modern power dynamic?
yes, where do you place the media in the modern power dynamic?
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thank you for very short time. media.
thank you for very short time. media.
Slavoj Žižek
media, yeah, the media. a very... my spontaneous reaction, but this is my private style in islam, is that in my ideal state, i would prohibit facebook instagram and all that and if you are caught using it more than ten minutes a day in the stalinist way, you would be compelled to, i don't know, one month, five hours a day to clean public toilets, something.
media, yeah, the media. a very... my spontaneous reaction, but this is my private style in islam, is that in my ideal state, i would prohibit facebook instagram and all that and if you are caught using it more than ten minutes a day in the stalinist way, you would be compelled to, i don't know, one month, five hours a day to clean public toilets, something.
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i think a lot of parents would agree with you. yeah, yeah.
i think a lot of parents would agree with you. yeah, yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
this i just think my only problem here is that uh... you know what the problem here is double first don't exaggerate the problem people say post-truth era but think about the cold war fifty seventy years ago okay, it wasn't this pluralized post-truth. but it was... still! alternate truth. if you listen to the western version it was totally different. there were not less lies at that point. there was one clearly. hegemonic lie.'t exaggerate. my problem is still another one. here i remain a traditional marxist. it is not that i wouldn't put the blame on. d. media es z. i think something is changing economical, social structure of our society and so on, you know. and this is why media are used the way they are used. so i i think to see this under quotation marks bad role that the media are playing i wouldn't blame the media
this i just think my only problem here is that uh... you know what the problem here is double first don't exaggerate the problem people say post-truth era but think about the cold war fifty seventy years ago okay, it wasn't this pluralized post-truth. but it was... still! alternate truth. if you listen to the western version it was totally different. there were not less lies at that point. there was one clearly. hegemonic lie.'t exaggerate. my problem is still another one. here i remain a traditional marxist. it is not that i wouldn't put the blame on. d. media es z. i think something is changing economical, social structure of our society and so on, you know. and this is why media are used the way they are used. so i i think to see this under quotation marks bad role that the media are playing i wouldn't blame the media
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themselves. okay, so do we have more questions? a gentleman wants another question so we'll take it. i'm disappointed that only you it's only the right wingers which have. priority i just noted. for them it's left-wingers.
themselves. okay, so do we have more questions? a gentleman wants another question so we'll take it. i'm disappointed that only you it's only the right wingers which have. priority i just noted. for them it's left-wingers.
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yeah, so talking about anarcho-capitalism, clash between the strong state and the global tech. where does the traditional concept of invisible hand of capitalism fit into this being a master and kind of keeping everything in harmony? itler... very good question again.
yeah, so talking about anarcho-capitalism, clash between the strong state and the global tech. where does the traditional concept of invisible hand of capitalism fit into this being a master and kind of keeping everything in harmony? itler... very good question again.
Slavoj Žižek
uh. first, if we don't idealize the invisible hand i like this notion because it points and jacques laccon uses, i only discovered the quote now this, he said, i am stupid, not more than others, but he said that a certain stupidity is very basic element of being part of a symbolic order. stupidity means you don't dominate the effects of what you are saying and so on and so on. so in this sense, yes, invisible hand, but on the. other hand there so if invisible hand means we are caught in processes and we cannot count on the. effect of our act. we don't know what will come out of them. and here i'm very critical of marx. marx thought that hegel's notion of l der vernunft cunning kon only holds for alienated societies. my god, but if the whole point of communist revolutions, especially soviet union, tells us something is that precisely there also you get something totally different from what you from what you plan and so on and so on. your question about invisible hand, you know what interests me? frederick jameson, my friend, pointed this out, that of course we have to be against conspiracy. alka zupancic wrote on this nice text. of course we have to be against conspiracy theories for a very precise reason, how they function and so on. but this absolutely doesn't mean that there are no conspiracies and even big conspiracies. for example, there are now thisudies this is another censored domain, incidentally. you remember the two thousand and eight financial crackdown or what? it wasn't things just ran out of the hand. it's now absolutely proven that it was done as a well-planned maneuver by some big banks and so on and so on. and of course nobody was punished and so on and so on. so while all the entire process is... run by invisible hand in not in the sense that there is a higher power, but in the sense that we don't control the effects that system has its own logic. i would just nevertheless like to add two things. first uh. within this global invisibility, there are things which are happening and where one has to look for very concrete speculations and so on. and second thing, which is really a sad one, but what is the invisible hand is the bad hand. what is invisible hand is pushing us against collective suicide. we no longer can rely on invisible hand bringing out the ultimate the best conclusion. no, i think if the system is left to its own logic we are approaching some kind of
uh. first, if we don't idealize the invisible hand i like this notion because it points and jacques laccon uses, i only discovered the quote now this, he said, i am stupid, not more than others, but he said that a certain stupidity is very basic element of being part of a symbolic order. stupidity means you don't dominate the effects of what you are saying and so on and so on. so in this sense, yes, invisible hand, but on the. other hand there so if invisible hand means we are caught in processes and we cannot count on the. effect of our act. we don't know what will come out of them. and here i'm very critical of marx. marx thought that hegel's notion of l der vernunft cunning kon only holds for alienated societies. my god, but if the whole point of communist revolutions, especially soviet union, tells us something is that precisely there also you get something totally different from what you from what you plan and so on and so on. your question about invisible hand, you know what interests me? frederick jameson, my friend, pointed this out, that of course we have to be against conspiracy. alka zupancic wrote on this nice text. of course we have to be against conspiracy theories for a very precise reason, how they function and so on. but this absolutely doesn't mean that there are no conspiracies and even big conspiracies. for example, there are now thisudies this is another censored domain, incidentally. you remember the two thousand and eight financial crackdown or what? it wasn't things just ran out of the hand. it's now absolutely proven that it was done as a well-planned maneuver by some big banks and so on and so on. and of course nobody was punished and so on and so on. so while all the entire process is... run by invisible hand in not in the sense that there is a higher power, but in the sense that we don't control the effects that system has its own logic. i would just nevertheless like to add two things. first uh. within this global invisibility, there are things which are happening and where one has to look for very concrete speculations and so on. and second thing, which is really a sad one, but what is the invisible hand is the bad hand. what is invisible hand is pushing us against collective suicide. we no longer can rely on invisible hand bringing out the ultimate the best conclusion. no, i think if the system is left to its own logic we are approaching some kind of
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collective this is actually the question that i wanted to pose to you, and it will be the last question for tonight.
collective this is actually the question that i wanted to pose to you, and it will be the last question for tonight.
Slavoj Žižek
so there is still hope for you, a stalinist.
so there is still hope for you, a stalinist.
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oh, okay, yes, yes, absolutely the last question for tonight. it's a little bit, well, maybe it's a little bit philosophical, but in practical terms it's not. it's called what is to be done. basically, the lenin position the answer is clear in a way we know what is to be done.. and for marx, it's also obvious what is to be done. whereas i think for hegel you could make the argument that you can never know. what is to be done in the sense that you can never know, and this is somehow related of course to the question of the invisible hand of the theodicy. that you can never know, that you cannot jump over your own time and therefore you cannot know what goal you should be oriented towards. this is a wonderful question. you know why?
oh, okay, yes, yes, absolutely the last question for tonight. it's a little bit, well, maybe it's a little bit philosophical, but in practical terms it's not. it's called what is to be done. basically, the lenin position the answer is clear in a way we know what is to be done.. and for marx, it's also obvious what is to be done. whereas i think for hegel you could make the argument that you can never know. what is to be done in the sense that you can never know, and this is somehow related of course to the question of the invisible hand of the theodicy. that you can never know, that you cannot jump over your own time and therefore you cannot know what goal you should be oriented towards. this is a wonderful question. you know why?
Slavoj Žižek
because this for me is the ultimate reason that i consider myself a hegelian. for me. what we need today, i use sometimes this phrase, is the materialist reversal of hegel into marx into hegel, back to hegel. because, you know, hegel is usually that idiot, absolute knowing who thought he knew everything. no,gel hegel says openly, the future, we cannot talk about it. he accepted that all our projections for future there there is no meta-language. hegel knew that. we cannot step on our back and look into the future. our idea of future is always somehow contained into our present situation that's why the effect is always another one and here marx. is too idealist for me because marx thought that this holds for the entire history but. with the proletarian revolution, i simplify it very much, we have the first historical subject who is doing something and knows what her day is doing. he thought that proletarian revolution is the moment of transparency. and that's why i think hegel is needed more than ever today because. although this doesn't mean that hegel, that's very interesting. hegel is usually dismissed as a crazy speculative idealist, but you must notice that in his empirical judgments on concrete things, hegel is something something so incredibly penetrative looking into the future. check his philosophy of history. introduction. when he speaks there, this was given as a lecture in 1820 ar. when? uh he speaks about russia and at another point united states you know what hegel said it's too early to say next century. twentyth will be their epoch of united states and russia he saw this and even with the best of marxists you find this for example he was, although less than marx, but you know what angles, angles, the stupid angles, nobody like him, wrote around i think, eighty2. brereataking. he not only predicted one of the few, there were just two, three. sociologist, general. world war i. but then in one fragment engel said and if germany will fight a war against russia and france britain at the same time and since germany will probably lose he even said this war will count, he was probably lucky here, that there will be around 10 million deaths. today's official number is 9,800,000. then he said, this may lead to a revolution in russia. sorry, eng. and then he said, it's breathtaking, if germany will lose... some two decades later there will be another revenge war. from germany so being a speculative idealist that's what i want to say doesn't mean you are. caught in stupid situations and a true genius of hegel, only today we can read it. you know what is hegel's last text? it's a critique of british this new election which spreads wider towards larger participation of voter voting. first step towards reform bill or what? sgel's critique is not, as people simply think, reactionary. it is basically but he says what may happen is that the lot of people who will now be included will be manipulated. and then hegel introduces there or in another text, another wonderful notion, not just pe as pe proletarians, but pe bourgeoisie, this vulgar new rich. and they may manipulate. the new poor so that the manipulation will be even worse than now. so, in this sense, i think that for hegel, to analyze society after his death. we are in his water. hegel, this is hegel's story. hegel is always interested in how things which are well meant turn into their opposite. for example hegel would have been enthusiastic about this. how come that the second half of 19th century, which was perceived as the era of, at least in europe, not elsewhere, gradual progress and so on, out of nowhere world war i exploded. hegel would have loved to analyze this. or why fascism, why stalinism and so on and so on. hegel's point is precisely this. how can the best ideas go wrong? so in this is for me again but now i come to final point thank you no no no with you that this doesn't mean you can feel this in hegel that we should do nothing or it will always go wrong. no, hegel at the same time knew that if you do nothing, it will be even worse. you have to take a risk. it will turn wrong, and then maybe the second time something better will emerge. for example, people read hegel in a totally wrong way when they think in his critique that he is rejecting jacobin terror. yes, he is critical, but critical in the sense that it was necessary. it was not a choice in the sense that, oh, shall we go into jacobin way or shall we just make a gradual? no, you had to go through it. in this sense, i think hegel's time is just arriving.
because this for me is the ultimate reason that i consider myself a hegelian. for me. what we need today, i use sometimes this phrase, is the materialist reversal of hegel into marx into hegel, back to hegel. because, you know, hegel is usually that idiot, absolute knowing who thought he knew everything. no,gel hegel says openly, the future, we cannot talk about it. he accepted that all our projections for future there there is no meta-language. hegel knew that. we cannot step on our back and look into the future. our idea of future is always somehow contained into our present situation that's why the effect is always another one and here marx. is too idealist for me because marx thought that this holds for the entire history but. with the proletarian revolution, i simplify it very much, we have the first historical subject who is doing something and knows what her day is doing. he thought that proletarian revolution is the moment of transparency. and that's why i think hegel is needed more than ever today because. although this doesn't mean that hegel, that's very interesting. hegel is usually dismissed as a crazy speculative idealist, but you must notice that in his empirical judgments on concrete things, hegel is something something so incredibly penetrative looking into the future. check his philosophy of history. introduction. when he speaks there, this was given as a lecture in 1820 ar. when? uh he speaks about russia and at another point united states you know what hegel said it's too early to say next century. twentyth will be their epoch of united states and russia he saw this and even with the best of marxists you find this for example he was, although less than marx, but you know what angles, angles, the stupid angles, nobody like him, wrote around i think, eighty2. brereataking. he not only predicted one of the few, there were just two, three. sociologist, general. world war i. but then in one fragment engel said and if germany will fight a war against russia and france britain at the same time and since germany will probably lose he even said this war will count, he was probably lucky here, that there will be around 10 million deaths. today's official number is 9,800,000. then he said, this may lead to a revolution in russia. sorry, eng. and then he said, it's breathtaking, if germany will lose... some two decades later there will be another revenge war. from germany so being a speculative idealist that's what i want to say doesn't mean you are. caught in stupid situations and a true genius of hegel, only today we can read it. you know what is hegel's last text? it's a critique of british this new election which spreads wider towards larger participation of voter voting. first step towards reform bill or what? sgel's critique is not, as people simply think, reactionary. it is basically but he says what may happen is that the lot of people who will now be included will be manipulated. and then hegel introduces there or in another text, another wonderful notion, not just pe as pe proletarians, but pe bourgeoisie, this vulgar new rich. and they may manipulate. the new poor so that the manipulation will be even worse than now. so, in this sense, i think that for hegel, to analyze society after his death. we are in his water. hegel, this is hegel's story. hegel is always interested in how things which are well meant turn into their opposite. for example hegel would have been enthusiastic about this. how come that the second half of 19th century, which was perceived as the era of, at least in europe, not elsewhere, gradual progress and so on, out of nowhere world war i exploded. hegel would have loved to analyze this. or why fascism, why stalinism and so on and so on. hegel's point is precisely this. how can the best ideas go wrong? so in this is for me again but now i come to final point thank you no no no with you that this doesn't mean you can feel this in hegel that we should do nothing or it will always go wrong. no, hegel at the same time knew that if you do nothing, it will be even worse. you have to take a risk. it will turn wrong, and then maybe the second time something better will emerge. for example, people read hegel in a totally wrong way when they think in his critique that he is rejecting jacobin terror. yes, he is critical, but critical in the sense that it was necessary. it was not a choice in the sense that, oh, shall we go into jacobin way or shall we just make a gradual? no, you had to go through it. in this sense, i think hegel's time is just arriving.
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all right. well this has been brilliant.
all right. well this has been brilliant.
Slavoj Žižek
thank you.
thank you.
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but before we officially thank you, i want to invite you tomorrow to more talks, to more philosophy. Mladen Dolar will speak at 11 o'clock in Kosovelova dvorana, followed by Jamila Mascat, two of my very favorite people in the world. so please come join us for more.
but before we officially thank you, i want to invite you tomorrow to more talks, to more philosophy. Mladen Dolar will speak at 11 o'clock in Kosovelova dvorana, followed by Jamila Mascat, two of my very favorite people in the world. so please come join us for more.
Slavoj Žižek
why jamila is feminine. why is she your favorite?
why jamila is feminine. why is she your favorite?
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person in the world. sorry just one of them. favorite person
person in the world. sorry just one of them. favorite person
Slavoj Žižek
i just wanted to be dirty.
i just wanted to be dirty.
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okay, okay so it's really time for us to finish. uh please come tomorrow uh please come on sunday and uh yes before we.
okay, okay so it's really time for us to finish. uh please come tomorrow uh please come on sunday and uh yes before we.
Slavoj Žižek
say good night.
say good night.
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sorry, saturday, yes, i'm already also beyond but
sorry, saturday, yes, i'm already also beyond but
Slavoj Žižek
yes, thank you, sl. no, i'm sorry if i disappointed you, but i think if we do not, do you agree at least with this, maybe some that i said are crazy, but if we are not ready to confront all this antagonisms, problems, if we still play the game of, we just need to stick to the old liberal democracy, we are lost. just one thing to. finished i'm sorry. you know, the tragedy is this one. here i feel sorry for ukrainians and others. they still are within what jürgen habermas called nachholende, the catch-up revolution. although not all of them they are not stupid but many of them think we just want to join europe. but europe itself is in a deep crisis we have more and more that's for me the fundamental fact of the united states and europe that we have discontent podemos in spain, in france and so on. there is a large public discontent which cannot be translated into existing liberal democratic political form point two, something will have to be done with our electoral system because i spoke with a chinese guy who was very cynical, official but intelligent. he told me you know what's your problem? ecology and all this now needs planning for twenty thirty years ahead and your electoral system is pushing you into how will i be re-elected in two years and he told me cynically that we in china you know we know who we in power we don't worry about this but this enables us to make plans we are thinking about two thousand and fifty even later and with the problems that we have now i don't know how but i hope we all agree we will have to find a way to enact this long-term and more global planning otherwise we are lost. now i believe we are not really finished. thank you very much.
yes, thank you, sl. no, i'm sorry if i disappointed you, but i think if we do not, do you agree at least with this, maybe some that i said are crazy, but if we are not ready to confront all this antagonisms, problems, if we still play the game of, we just need to stick to the old liberal democracy, we are lost. just one thing to. finished i'm sorry. you know, the tragedy is this one. here i feel sorry for ukrainians and others. they still are within what jürgen habermas called nachholende, the catch-up revolution. although not all of them they are not stupid but many of them think we just want to join europe. but europe itself is in a deep crisis we have more and more that's for me the fundamental fact of the united states and europe that we have discontent podemos in spain, in france and so on. there is a large public discontent which cannot be translated into existing liberal democratic political form point two, something will have to be done with our electoral system because i spoke with a chinese guy who was very cynical, official but intelligent. he told me you know what's your problem? ecology and all this now needs planning for twenty thirty years ahead and your electoral system is pushing you into how will i be re-elected in two years and he told me cynically that we in china you know we know who we in power we don't worry about this but this enables us to make plans we are thinking about two thousand and fifty even later and with the problems that we have now i don't know how but i hope we all agree we will have to find a way to enact this long-term and more global planning otherwise we are lost. now i believe we are not really finished. thank you very much.
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thank you, sl.
thank you, sl.