Slavoj Žižek: Love as a political category /// 16th May 2013
Talk · SkriptaTV ·
2013-05-16 · 2:01:45 · 15,051 words
ideologyreligion-theologyrevolution-violencephilosophy-generalgeopolitics-warhistorycapitalismsexuality-gendercinema-art-culturecommunism-socialismethicsfascism-populism
Žižek analyzes the political dimensions of love, contrasting the violent, exclusive nature of Christian Agape and passionate Eros with the homogenizing, hierarchical tendencies of totalitarian regimes and Eastern spiritualities. He argues that true love is inherently violent because it disrupts social balance and hierarchy, a concept he illustrates through quotes from Emily Brontë, G.K. Chesterton, and Che Guevara, as well as the paradoxical unity of love and hatred in revolutionary ethics. Žižek argues for an 'authentic' Christian political love (Agape) that justifies terror against hierarchical particularities, contrasting this with modern 'charity' which serves as false love to alleviate guilt without addressing structural causes. He critiques the 'golden age' narrative of global progress, arguing that rising expectations and uneven development fuel rebellion. Finally, he rehabilitates Marx’s colonial writings, positing that colonialism’s dissolution of traditional identities creates the universal subjectivity necessary for genuine emancipation, using examples from India, Malcolm X, and South Africa. Žižek argues against the 'Hölderlin paradigm' of crisis-as-opportunity, asserting instead that we must remain faithful to the ambiguous legacy of modernity and its violent rupture from tradition, rather than seeking a return to pre-modern roots. He illustrates the danger of 'healing' the wounds of modernity with a dirty joke about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and distinguishes between temporary political passion and the eternal prospect of authentic erotic love (Agape). In the Q&A, he critiques the 'impotence' of 20th-century totalitarian violence and analyzes the biopolitical absurdity of Foxconn's anti-suicide measures as the ultimate expression of capitalist alienation. Žižek argues against pre-modern solidarity, labeling it a fascist option, and critiques the hypocrisy of liberal media coverage regarding violence in India. He analyzes the film The Lives of Others as a liberal misrepresentation of Stasi horror, preferring Good Bye, Lenin!, and discusses the nature of human evil, arguing for 'miracles' of ethical change over inherent goodness. He concludes by asserting an ethics of external behavior and 'good manners' over inner spiritual authenticity, citing Brecht and Mark Twain.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 35
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “pseudo-Buddhist hedonism”
The current ideological command to be faithful to oneself and realize potential, which functions as a spiritualized, non-disruptive form of consumerist freedom.
The neoliberal attempt to enjoy love's benefits while avoiding its traumatic, disruptive loss of control and stability.
The way passionate love removes the beloved from the collective social space, creating a private, exclusive bond.
The dialectical unity in totalitarian power where infinite mercy is only possible because the regime has the absolute capacity to destroy everyone.
The pagan/holistic ethical view where evil is imbalance or derangement of the natural social order, and good is fulfilling one's proper place.
as “immediate access to universality”
The Christian revolutionary principle that bypasses social hierarchy, allowing every individual direct participation in the universal (Holy Spirit/human rights) regardless of their social station.
as “love with hatred”
The revolutionary/Christian paradox where true love requires the violent rejection of established social hierarchies and the 'hatred' of the enemy.
Universal, self-sacrificing love; Žižek contrasts this with 'pseudo-oriental' detachment, arguing for full engagement and falling into the worldly object.
The form of appearance of political love, identified here with the communist urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity.
Violence directed against particular hierarchical determinations in the name of universal solidarity; distinguished from fundamentalist terror by its lack of shirking from this authentic work of love.
as “charity as false love”
A form of non-love that aims to make the donor feel good and ignore political causes, exemplified by 'cappuccino' charity ads.
as “expectations vs. reality in rebellion”
The principle that social revolt is triggered not by absolute misery but by disappointed expectations following relative progress.
The mode of life where individuals relate to themselves as universal subjects, unrooted from particular social/ideological positions, experiencing their specific roles as contingent.
Marx’s concept that colonial powers, driven by vile interests, unintentionally act as instruments for historical revolution and the dissolution of traditional social states.
The outcome of colonization: liberation from the constraints of one's own traditions and liberation from the colonizer itself.
A quote from Wagner’s Parsifal ('The wound can only be healed by the spear that smote it'), used to illustrate that the disintegrative power of colonization opens the space for anti-colonial liberation.
as “identification as basic alienation”
The psychoanalytic concept that to identify with something (like Tiger Woods) is to locate oneself at a decentered point, missing one's own essence.
as “X unknown quantity”
Malcolm X’s surname choice, interpreted not as a loss of roots but as an embrace of the void/unknown as an opportunity to collectively reinvent identity and achieve freedom.
as “der absoluter Gegenstoß”
Hegel’s term for 'the absolute recoil counter-punch,' describing how the loss of something creates the lost dimension itself.
as “fake multiculturalism”
The apartheid justification of preserving 'precious cultural differences' to maintain control, contrasted with the universalist struggle for equality.
Heidegger's 'turn' or reversal; the moment where loss becomes the opportunity for salvation, used here to describe the Hölderlin paradigm.
The philosophical view that extreme danger/alienation (Kairos) inherently contains the seed of salvation/reversal (die Kehre), which Žižek rejects.
Žižek's critique of his younger self's view that sexual liberation is immediately political revolution, dismissing it as a form of bourgeois individualism.
The idea that authentic love requires the 'prospect of eternity', a structural commitment, even if the relationship is finite or ends in divorce.
Violence that is not heroic or transformative but stems from despair and impotence, such as Hitler's or Stalin's, which fails to change social relations.
The management of life and population by political power; Žižek cites Foucault to describe Foxconn's anti-suicide pacts as a form of moralized biopolitical control.
as “capitalism with the human face”
A sarcastic term for capitalist measures that attempt to mitigate human suffering (like safety nets) without changing the underlying exploitative relations, often resulting in obscene bureaucratic absurdity.
as “fascist option”
The stabilization of modernization through ancient hierarchy or religion, which Žižek identifies as the core mechanism of fascism.
as “scandalous lie”
A lie constructed from a plethora of small, verifiable truths, functioning ideologically to obscure a larger falsehood (citing Goebbels).
The ideological constraint in liberal narratives that locates evil in private vices (greed, lust) rather than systemic structural horror.
Rare, unpredictable moments where conformist or 'shit' individuals undergo a radical ethical break and act heroically, despite no inherent goodness.
as “ideology as self-deception”
The claim that we lie especially to ourselves, constructing a 'warm fragile human person' self-image to enable horrific public actions.
The self-deceptive narrative of vulnerability or fragility that brutal actors (dictators, bankers) invent to justify their public horrors.
An ethical framework (attributed to Jewish tradition and Brecht) that judges actions by their external social impact rather than internal spiritual states.
as “authentic self-experience”
The concept of inner spiritual growth or authentic feeling, which Žižek dismisses as 'bullshit' in favor of external behavioral ethics.
Stories he reaches for 4
Malcolm X chose 'X' not to mourn lost African roots, but to embrace the void of having no genuine tradition as an opportunity to collectively reinvent identity and find freedom in a new universalist frame (Islam).
“X means what if we grasp this very void into which our enslavement put us... as a unique opportunity of freedom.”
The apartheid regime justified segregation by claiming to preserve 'precious cultural differences' (Bushman, Hottentot), which Žižek calls 'fake multiculturalism' used to maintain control, contrasting it with Mandela’s universalist approach.
“It was the idea was strictly of course a fake multiculturalism, but nonetheless a multiculturalism.”
A Palestinian Christian tells a dirty joke where Mary Magdalene tries to seduce Jesus, but he is horrified by her 'terrible wound' (pussy) and heals it, making it whole. Žižek warns against those intent on healing the wounds of modernity, arguing the wound itself is our salvation.
“He said, 'What a terrible wound is there!' He put his hand in and healed it, made it whole”
Žižek describes Foxconn's biopolitical measures: employees must sign anti-suicide pacts, report depressed colleagues, and jump into safety nets. He calls this 'capitalism with the human face' and the boss comparing factory cohabitation to a zoo.
“Foxconn now makes their employees... sign an anti-suicide pact... you will quickly report him”
Works invoked 18
Parsifal opera
Cited for the quote 'Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug' to illustrate the dialectical nature of colonialism and liberation.
The Laws of Manu book
Described as a 'terrifying book' justifying the caste system, which the British re-established to keep India 'inert' and exploitable.
Orthodoxy book
Cited for G.K. Chesterton's argument that Christian love desires division and personality, contrasting it with Buddhist unity.
Cited as an example of the desire for a 'neo-Gothic universe' and unease with modernity.
The Gospels book
Cited for Jesus' statements about bringing a sword and dividing families, which Žižek uses to argue for the violent, hierarchical-rejecting nature of Christian love.
The Lives of Others film
Critiqued as 'kitschy' and having a 'liberal limit' that locates evil in private vices rather than the systemic horror of the Stasi; called a 'one-hit wonder'.
Die Walküre opera
Referenced for the scene where Siegmund chooses to stay as a mortal with Sieglinde rather than go to Valhalla, illustrating the ethical act of love.
Good Bye, Lenin! film
Preferred over The Lives of Others because its premise, that an honest communist must go crazy to survive, captures the reality of DDR better.
In Praise of Love book
Cited by Alain Badiou to argue that love is always traumatic and violent.
Spectator (Magazine) journal
A magazine cited by Varoufakis for celebrating 'golden age' growth despite human pain; Žižek critiques its optimism.
British rule in India essay
One of Marx’s texts, usually dismissed as racist, which Žižek rehabilitates to argue about the 'unconscious tool of history'.
The Economist journal
Cited alongside The Spectator for celebrating 'Bricks' countries and ignoring the structural crisis.
One of Marx’s texts, used to argue that colonization creates conditions for the 'double liberation' of India.
The Spectre of Marx book
Varoufakis quotes from this work by Žižek in the context of discussing suicide and discontinuity.
Wuthering Heights book
Used to provide a definition of unconditional erotic love through Cathy's characterization of her relation to Heathcliff.
Huck Finn book
Cited for the scene where Huck and Tom help a runaway slave, illustrating that external action matters more than internal 'authentic' feelings.
Letter to D book
A book by André Gorz, described as 'incredible' and illustrating the miracle of love.
Natural Born Killers film
Mentioned with the director present; Žižek jokes about not being ideal but being glad the director is there, rejecting the idea of inherent 'natural born killer' nature.
People invoked 46
Haitian dictator mentioned in an anecdote about a translator subverting his economic statements.
A young French historian/philosopher whose book on Mussolini and Hitler was mentioned by a questioner.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi negative
Described as a local king collaborating with apartheid forces and preaching a return to 'authentic African roots,' which Žižek rejects.
Siegmund Fraenkel positive
Referenced as a character in Wagner's Die Walküre who chooses mortal existence with his beloved over Valhalla, illustrating the ethical act of forsaking eternity for love.
Kim Jong-il negative
Cited for writing a poem comparing the Korean people to sunflowers turning toward him, illustrating totalitarian love.
Sieglinde positive
Referenced as Siegmund's beloved in Die Walküre.
Used in a joke to illustrate 'identification as basic alienation'; Jesus thinks he is Tiger Woods.
Richard Wagner positive
Cited for the quote from Parsifal about the wound and the spear, illustrating the dialectical healing through the same force that caused the wound.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for the insight that love is evoked in politics precisely when democratic legitimization is lacking.
Tristan Tzara positive
Referenced in the context of the 'ecstatic trance' of Tristan and Isolde, ready to obliterate social reality.
Jacques Lacan positive
Referenced in the context of 'lack of power in the Lacanian sense' regarding the power/love dynamic of dictators.
Reformist Prime Minister of Hungary, shot by Soviets, used as an example of rebellion after relative freedom was allowed.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Praised for assuming the violent aspect of Christian love, contrasting it with Buddhist indifference, and arguing that love desires division/personality.
Arundhati Roy positive
Cited as a friend and writer whose comment on the hypocrisy of media outrage regarding rape in India is 'wonderful' and agreed with.
Benito Mussolini positive
Analyzed as an example of a dictator whose 'intimate self-experience' of fragility is a lie invented to enable public horrors.
Jesus Christ positive
Cited for his 'scandalous' statements about bringing a sword and dividing families, which Žižek interprets as a violent rejection of social hierarchy.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'our good friend'; cited for the idea that love is a 'permanent emergency state' and traumatic/violent.
Terry Eagleton positive
Cited as the source for translating Agape as political love.
Egyptian leader under whom minimal economic progress led to the rise of an educated class and eventual rebellion.
Friedrich Engels positive
Cited for describing the Dickensian conditions of the English working class.
Adolf Hitler negative
Cited as an example of 'reactive violence' and impotence, killing millions but failing to change social relations.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Agrees with Brecht's view that humans are by nature evil and can only be changed by conditions; praises Brecht's refusal to allow 'beautiful deep profound careful person' private myths.
Asked a question about the discontinuity of love vs. suicide and the crisis of capitalism/Foxconn.
Kim Il-sung negative
Cited as an example of a totalitarian leader who evokes the infinite love of the people, illustrating the link between terror and mercy.
Joseph Goebbels positive
Used as an example of how ideology functions: building a 'scandalous lie' on a 'plethora of small truths'.
Evo Morales negative
An 'admired' figure who nonetheless represents the dangerous return to pre-modern values (capitalism killed mother nature) which Žižek critiques.
Malcolm X positive
Described as 'one of my heroes'; his choice of 'X' is interpreted as embracing the void of lost roots to reinvent identity.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited as a theorist who would have loved Foxconn's biopolitical measures as an example of moralization.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Described as a 'high guru of Zen' who supported militarism and advised soldiers on how to kill using Buddhist enlightenment to remove the sense of self.
Described as a 'Montenegrin friend' who told Žižek about the folklore origin of evil as a beautiful woman who destabilizes the universe.
Martin Heidegger negative
Mocked as a 'pseudo-Buddhist or Heideggerian' stance when suggesting silence is the answer to no questions.
Iseult positive
Referenced alongside Tristan as an example of passionate love's terror.
Che Guevara positive
Cited for the paradoxical unity of love and hatred in revolution: 'One must endure, become hard... without losing tenderness.'
Character in the dirty joke, representing the 'wound' of modernity that should not be healed/returned to.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for the idea that the truth of Christian love is the demand to 'hate the beloved out of love' to fulfill the law.
Mark Twain positive
Cited for the story of Huck Finn, which illustrates the superiority of external ethical action over internal 'authentic' racism.
Friedrich Hölderlin negative
Žižek uses Hölderlin's name to label a paradigm (danger/salvation) that he explicitly argues against.
Emily Brontë positive
Cited for the definition of unconditional erotic love in Wuthering Heights, which Žižek uses to illustrate the terror and exclusivity of passionate love.
Nelson Mandela positive
Praised for insisting on beating white people at their own game by being more universal than they are.
Mentioned briefly as a less violent fighter for black rights compared to Malcolm X.
André Gorz positive
A French ecologist/social theorist admired for his 'Letter to D' and his story of dying with his wife, representing authentic love.
Joseph Stalin negative
Cited as an example of 'reactive violence' (forced collectivization) born of despair and failure to include farmers in socialism.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as the source of the insight that modernization is ambiguous; his eschatology is based on the reversal of alienation.
Paul the Apostle positive
Cited for the passage about unplugging from social community to form an egalitarian community where there is neither Jew nor Greek.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the term 'der absoluter Gegenstoß' (absolute recoil counter-punch) to explain how loss creates the lost dimension.
An economist Žižek is trying to read to understand the current structural crisis.
Transcript 42 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Good evening everyone.
Good evening everyone.
unknown
Ne, reci im ti, dobra večer.
Ne, reci im ti, dobra večer.
Slavoj Žižek
Dobra večer svim prijateljima, oni koji me sada ne razumiju koji i tako dalje.
Dobra večer svim prijateljima, oni koji me sada ne razumiju koji i tako dalje.
unknown
So the translation, good evening to all our comrades... But please, complete translation. Yeah yeah, please, yeah. So, good evening to everyone, to all my comrades who don't understand me, fuck them.
So the translation, good evening to all our comrades... But please, complete translation. Yeah yeah, please, yeah. So, good evening to everyone, to all my comrades who don't understand me, fuck them.
Slavoj Žižek
Is it a correct translation? More or less, yeah.
Is it a correct translation? More or less, yeah.
unknown
So, what can I say? Welcome to the sixth Subversive Festival and thanks for being with us for six years. Thanks for everyone in this hall for being with us, or to the new people, thanks again. There is no need to present Slavoj in too detail, but I should mention that just two books were published during his visit to Croatia again. The first one is published by Meandar, it's Gledanje Iskosa, and the second one is The Year of Dreaming Dangerously published by Fraktura. But the topic of today's lecture is I think for all of you much more interesting. It's called Love as a Political Category. I remember when I was trying to convince Slavoj in Ljubljana to take this topic, he was first, "No, no, no, what can I say about love?" and then in the end I got a mail few weeks later and he said, "Okay, I will do this lecture." So, let's see. A big applause for
So, what can I say? Welcome to the sixth Subversive Festival and thanks for being with us for six years. Thanks for everyone in this hall for being with us, or to the new people, thanks again. There is no need to present Slavoj in too detail, but I should mention that just two books were published during his visit to Croatia again. The first one is published by Meandar, it's Gledanje Iskosa, and the second one is The Year of Dreaming Dangerously published by Fraktura. But the topic of today's lecture is I think for all of you much more interesting. It's called Love as a Political Category. I remember when I was trying to convince Slavoj in Ljubljana to take this topic, he was first, "No, no, no, what can I say about love?" and then in the end I got a mail few weeks later and he said, "Okay, I will do this lecture." So, let's see. A big applause for
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj. I hope you will not be disappointed because this time I will not do with any political interventions. It will really be about the concept of love, how can it be used politically. First a quote: "If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be. And if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it." End of quote. This is how in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff and provides a succinct definition of the unconditional erotic love. There is an unmistakable dimension of terror at work here. Think about the ecstatic trance of Tristan and Isolde, ready to obliterate the entire social reality in their immersion into the night of deadly enjoyment. Now, I could go on here about erotic love because I sincerely think that, in contrast to our youth—the youth of those who are already old here—when, you know, to fight for sexual freedom was experienced as liberating and even monogamous love was considered or dismissed as a bourgeois convention and so on, I think that today more and more love, simply passionate love, is emerging as something dangerous and precisely subversive. Think about how you are addressed in your everyday life by society, what society demands of you. It's basically a kind of slightly spiritual pseudo-Buddhist hedonism. Ideology is telling you, be faithful to yourself, realize your true potentials, and experiment with your life, try all different options, don't fixate yourself on a certain stable identity, life is dynamic, fluid, and so on and so on. And I claim within this economy, not only is stable love, passionate love, emerging as an obstacle to your authentic development, but even the crucial dimension of love is gradually disappearing. What is love? As Alain Badiou, our good friend who wasn't able to come here, put it in his wonderful book In Praise of Love: there is always something traumatic, extremely violent in love. Love is a permanent emergency state. You fall in love. And it's crucial that in English and in French we use this expression, "to fall in love." You lose control. It's really, I claim, that love, the experience of passionate love, is the most elementary metaphysical experience. It's a Platonic experience. In the sense of you lead your easy daily life, you meet friends, you go to parties whatever, everything is normal, maybe here and there a one-night stand, but whatever. And then you passionately fall in love. Everything is ruined. The entire balance of your life is lost. Everything is subordinated to this one person. I almost cannot imagine in normal daily life outside war and so on, a more violent experience than that of love. And I think, which is why all the advisors that we need today are trying precisely to domesticate or to erase this excess of love. It's as if love is too poisonous and then they tell you, you know, the trick that they try to offer you—all the marriage agencies, dating agencies—is how to find yourself in love without falling in love. This idea came to me when on one of the transatlantic flights I was in a—I read one of those stupid airline journals and there was a big text there claiming—a publicity text—claiming, "We will enable you to be in—to find yourself in love without the fall," without this dangerous exposure. And I think this fits perfectly our daily narcissistic metaphysics. You know the old story that I repeat all the time. We want coffee without caffeine, we want beer without alcohol, and we want love without its dangerous moment, where you get lost. But okay, enough of this. Now, this is Eros, erotic love. Then we have its counterpart in Christianity, Agape. Agape functions in a wholly different way. How? It may appear that in contrast to Eros, with its violent subtraction from the collective space, the love for a collective succeeds in getting rid of the excess of terrorizing violence. Does Agape not imply an emphatic yes to the beloved collective, ultimately to the entire humanity or even as in Buddhism, to the entire domain of suffering life? The first counter-argument is provided here by the reply to a simple question. Just think about it. Which political regimes in the 20th century legitimized their power by evoking the subjects' love for their leader? It was the so-called—I don't like the term—totalitarian ones. Today, remember, it is only and precisely North Korean regime which evokes all the time the infinite love of the Korean people for Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and so on. And vice versa, the radiating love of the leader for his people. Love expressed in continuous acts of grace. Kim Jong-il wrote a short poem along these lines. I will quote you the entire poem, just two lines: "In the same way that a sunflower can only thrive if it is turned towards the sun, the Korean people can only thrive if their eyes are turned upwards towards their leader"—towards himself of course. Terror and mercy are thus closely linked. They are effectively the front and the obverse of the same power structure. Only a power which asserts its full terrorist right, or capacity to destroy anything and anyone it wants—only such a power can systematically universalize mercy. Since this power could have destroyed everyone, those who survive are all still alive because of the mercy of those in power. Consequently, the very fact that we, the subjects of power, are alive is the proof of the power's infinite mercy. This is why the more a regime is terrorist, the more its leaders are praised for their infinite love, goodness and mercy. Theodor Adorno was right to emphasize that in politics, love is evoked precisely when another democratic legitimization is lacking. Loving a leader means you love him for what he is, not for what he does. Okay, we may agree with this. So how about the next candidate for love as a political category? The so-called oriental spirituality, Buddhism, with its, or so we are told, more gentle, balanced, holistic, ecological approach. You know all the stories about how say, when digging up earth for the foundation of a house, Tibetan Buddhists are careful not to kill any worms and so on. In the whole of the last years, Japan's rapid industrialization and militarization with the ethics of discipline and sacrifice was sustained by the large majority of Zen Buddhist thinkers. Who today knows that Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the United States of the 1960s, supported in his youth in Japan of the 1930s the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion? There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of some authentic compassionate insight. The attitude of total immersion into the selfless "now" of the instant, the so-called Buddhist enlightenment in which all reflexive distance is lost, in short, in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity, perfectly legitimizes our subordination to the militaristic social machine. It's quite interesting to read this, to read Buddhist texts on war where they claim that openly for ordinary people who don't have time to meditate for years, the best shortcut towards overcoming your false self and reaching Nirvana, Satori, however we call it, is total subordination to the military discipline. And Suzuki himself wrote a wonderful text where he even gives the advice to the military into how using Buddhism to make killing easier. He says if I persist in my everyday attitude of false belief that I have a self which is the free agent of its acts, then let us say I have to kill one of you. Then this is difficult because you are here, I see it, I look into your eyes, I find it difficult, should I stab the knife—the knife into you, I feel responsible. Then Suzuki says but if you reach Buddhist enlightenment, the thing gets much easier. You no longer believed in your autonomous self, you perceive yourself as just a void, an anonymous impassive observer of life around you where phenomena simply are engaged in their cosmic dance which is a totally neutral process. And from this distance as Suzuki puts it, you simply observe your knife in a cosmic dance of phenomena hitting the eye or the throat of your enemy and so on. Now this is no joking matter because I'm not blaming Buddhism for this. I'm just saying how even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we will not be doing horrible things in our daily life. So again, what this means is that the Buddhist all-encompassing compassion has to be opposed to the Christian intolerant violent love. I want to praise the Christian love. Although Christians would probably lynch me for what I will say now. The Buddhist stance is that of indifference, of quenching all passions which strive to establish differences, while the Christian love is a violent passion to introduce difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others. Love is violence, not in the vulgar sense of the well-known Balkan proverb, "If he doesn't beat me, he doesn't love me." Violence is already the love choice as such, which tears its object out of its contexts, elevating it to the sublime absolute thing. In Montenegro folklore, so I was told by Andrej Nikolaidis, my Montenegrin friend, the origin of evil is a beautiful woman. She makes men around her lose their balance, she literally destabilizes the universe, colors all things with a tone of partiality. Among Christian theologians it was Gilbert Keith Chesterton who fully assumed the consequences of this violent aspect of love. One has to get rid of the old Platonic topos of love as Eros which gradually elevates itself from love for a particular individual through the love for the beauty of a human body in general and then the love of the beautiful form as such to finally the love for the supreme good beyond all forms. True love is precisely the opposite move of forsaking the promise of eternity itself for an imperfect individual. What if the gesture of choosing temporal existence, of giving up eternal existence for the sake of love, from Jesus Christ to, for example, Siegmund in the act two of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, who Siegmund prefers to stay, to remain a common mortal if his beloved Sieglinde cannot follow him to Valhalla, the eternal dwelling of the dead heroes. What if this is the highest ethical act of them all? I think this is the message of Christianity which is still alive. Not forsake all terrestrial things for eternity but love means I know you are a miserable mortal being but I'm ready to forsake eternity itself for you. Based on this insight, Chesterton rejected the fashionable claim about the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity. Here is a well-known, I want to repeat it, quote from Chesterton from his Orthodoxy, quote: "Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity. That for the Buddhist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the theosophists or Buddhists asks men to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine center of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that we might love it. All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter. Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into different living souls." End of quote. A tremendous violence does dwell in the very heart of the Christian notion of love for one's neighbor. The violence which finds its most direct expression in a series of Christ's disturbing statements. Here are some of these passages from Gospels. Just listen to them. You may be surprised what you find in Gospels. Christ saying, talking all the time. "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and men's enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Next quote. "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Next quote, the best one I think: "Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be fire in a house. There will be three against two and two against three, father against son, son against father, and they will stand alone." The final quote. So how are we to read these statements? And believe me I know what I'm talking about. I'm asking all the time when I engage in debates with Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox priests, I'm asking them, "Okay, just tell me what this means." And it's incredible how they try to squeeze out, you know. One way is the, how should I call it, the linguistic one. They claim no, maybe hate is not the right translation, that Christ just wanted to say if you love some other people more than me, not to hate them. I claim this is a blasphemy for a true Christian. Christ, God, appears here then as a stupid jealous guy, you know, you can love others but be sure that you love me more, that's an obscenity. Or the best answer was given to me by a Polish priest in Warsaw during a debate. When I asked him, what does this mean, and he told me oh my God I didn't expect this question today, I would need more time to prepare the answer. To which I answered him, fuck you, you had years to prepare the answer, you know. I didn't pull out an unknown passage. And it's again absolutely incredible how they are really not ready to provide a clear answer. What do these lines mean? To put it in a somewhat simplified way, there are two basic attitudes discernible in the history of religions. On the one hand, there is the pagan cosmos, the divine hierarchical order of cosmic principles, which when copied onto society, gives the image of a congruent edifice in which each member is at its own place. The supreme good is here, the global balance of principles and evil stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one principle to the detriment of others, of the masculine to the detriment of the feminine, of reason to the detriment of feeling and so on. The cosmic balance is then re-established through the work of justice, which with inexorable necessity sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With regard to the social body, an individual is good when he or she acts in accordance with his special place within the social edifice, when he respects nature which provides food and shelter, when he shows respect for his superiors, when he takes care of his followers or children in a fatherly way and so on and so on. And evil is defined as a—evil occurs when some particular strata or individuals are no longer satisfied with their proper place. Children no longer obey parents, servants no longer obey masters, rulers no longer take care of their subjects and so on and so on. I think that this is the ethics which even now is re-emerging often in the guise of some New Age wisdom. It's called so-called holistic approach, you know, every element should remain at its proper place, evil is imbalance and so on and so on. I claim that Christianity does precisely the opposite. Christianity introduces into the global balanced order a principle totally foreign to it. A principle that, measured by the standards of the traditional—of a traditional cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion. The principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality, in Christianity the universality of the Holy Spirit or today the universality of human rights, freedoms and so on. I can participate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my special place within the global social order. So do Christ's scandalous words which I quoted not point in the same direction? Here of course we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God. When Christ says if you don't hate your father and mother you cannot be my follower, I think the point is not that you should simply hate them as living beings. I think that it's very—in a very simple way you can resolve this dilemma. Father, mother and so on here stand or condense the entire hierarchical social order, the network of relations of domination, subordination and so on. So that the hatred Christ mentions is simply the hatred of established social hierarchy. You are my follower if, instead of functioning as a part of social hierarchical order, you see as your true home, as it were, Holy Spirit, an unconditionally egalitarian community. Or as Saint Paul put it: it is love that enjoins us to unplug from our social community into which we were born so that, you know the passage, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks. This is I think the very—I'm simplifying of course but nonetheless—the very core of the Christian insight for me. God dies, Christ dies, at the same time the father dies, all that survives is Holy Spirit, which is the first name of the communist party as we know, an radically egalitarian society which violently opposes social hierarchy, an immediate violent assertion of universal equality. And it is against this Christian background that we should read Che Guevara's well-known statement on revolutionary love. A quote from Che Guevara: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality." End of quote. There is a further step to be made here. Guevara's statement that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love should be read together with his more problematic statement on revolutionaries as killing machines. Now comes the other statement: "Hatred is an element of struggle, relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines." That's the other quote. These two apparently opposite stances are united in Che Guevara's well-known motto: "One must endure, become hard, toughen oneself, without losing tenderness." End of quote. I think Guevara is here basically paraphrasing Christ's declaration of the unity of love and sword. In both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence. So while Guevara certainly believed in the transformative power of love, he would never have been caught humming "all you need is love." What you need is to love with hatred. Or, another strange bedfellow here, as Søren Kierkegaard put it long ago, the necessary consequence, the truth of the Christian demand to love one's enemy is, quote from Kierkegaard, is: "the demand to hate the beloved out of love and in love. So high, humanly speaking to a kind of madness, can Christianity press the demand of love if love is to be the fulfillment of the law. Therefore it teaches that the Christian shall, if it is demanded, be capable of hating his father and mother and sister and beloved." End of quote. With regard to social order, this means that the authentic Christian tradition rejects the wisdom that the hierarchical order is our fate, that all attempts to mess with it and to create another egalitarian order have to end up in destructive horror. Agape as political love—and following Terry Eagleton, this is how I would propose to translate Agape—is simply political love. Agape means that the unconditional egalitarian love for the new—for the neighbor can serve as the foundation for a new social order. The form of appearance of this love is the so-called apocalyptic millenarianism or the idea of communism, the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity. Love is the force of this universal link which in an emancipatory collective connects people directly in their singularity, bypassing their particular hierarchical determinations. Terror is terror out of love for the universal singular others against the particular. This terror names exactly the same as the work of love. So my reproach to the fundamentalist terrorists, Islamist or Christian, should be that precisely they are not terrorists in the right way, that they shirk from authentic terror of the work of love. Now you will be saying am I crazy? What distinguishes this from a murderous terrorist who kills but claiming I'm killing you because of your eternal soul and so on and so on? I will try to explain this in the remaining part by beginning with what is precisely the form of non-love today which poses as love: charity. One again of the names and practices of non-love today, charity. When we see an ad with starving children in Africa with a call to do something to help them, like something like for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can save their life and so on, I claim that the true message is something like: don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think. In short, the true message is: for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can continue your ignorant pleasurable life, not only not feeling any guilt but even feeling good for participating in the struggle against suffering. So how would this notion of love which is the opposite of charity—charity is false love because charity is love the true aim of which is to make you feel good. My God, what a great man I am you see, I'm helping all the children starving in Somalia and so on and so on. How would the authentic violent love help us to orient ourselves today? Let me begin with a wonderful quote from last Christmas issue of the magazine Spectator. In this issue there is an editorial entitled "Why was the best year ever." This editorial argues against the perception that we live in a dangerous cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. Here is the first paragraph of this editorial. I quote: "It may not feel like it but has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease, or more prosperity." "The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age." End of quote. Now the first thing to add here, even if I, why not? I always like to concede to the devil what belongs to the devil. Even many things are true in this statement. But the first thing to add is that people rebel not when things are really bad but when their expectations are disappointed. French Revolution took place after the king and the nobles were for decades gradually losing their full hold on power. The anti-communist revolt in Hungary exploded after Imre Nagy, the reformist Prime Minister later shot by the Soviets, was already Prime Minister for two years and after relatively free debates among intellectuals were allowed. Even a closer example, people rebelled in Egypt in because there was some minimal economic progress under Mubarak, given rise to a whole class of educated young people who participated in the universal digital culture. And this is why the Chinese communists are right to be in panic precisely because on average Chinese are now living considerably better than years ago. But the social antagonisms between the newly rich and the rest exploded, plus expectations are much higher. That's the problem with development and progress. They are always uneven, they give birth to new instabilities and antagonisms, they generate new expectations which cannot be met. In Tunisia or Egypt, just prior to the Arab Spring, the majority probably lived a little bit better than decades ago, but the standard by which they measured their dissatisfaction was much higher. So yes, the Spectator is in principle right claiming that we live in a golden era, but the very facts that Spectator emphasizes are creating conditions for revolt and rebellion. So again, what rebellion? There is a more down-to-earth version of this claim of Spectator which I often hear in mass media, especially when I visit non-European countries. They laugh at me and they say crisis, what crisis are you talking about? Look at the BRIC countries, Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states. They are all progressing. The losers are only West Europe and up to a point the United States. So we are not dealing with a global crisis but just with the shift of the dynamics of progress away from the West. Is a portent symbol of this shift not the fact that recently many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonizers? So what if our much-decried crisis is a mere local crisis in an overall progress? Even with regard to human rights, is the situation in China and Russia now not much better than years ago? Decrying the ongoing crisis as a global phenomenon is thus a typical Eurocentric view and the view coming from leftists who usually pride themselves on their anti-Eurocentrism. There is a partial truth in it. And again, admit what is true. It's true that globally economy is progressing. I mean, the crisis in some sense is not global. But nonetheless I think we should restrain here our anti-colonialist joy a little bit. The question to be raised is if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? Capitalism with Asian values, which of course has nothing to do with Asian people and everything with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such everywhere to suspend or at least limit, constrain democracy. From Marx on, the truly radical left was never simply progressivist. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the hidden price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed. He just insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms, and we should do the same with today's progress of global capitalism. Keep in view its dark underside. How? Where? First I want to note something about the status of universality because critics of Eurocentrism usually emphasize the ideological limitation, lie, deception of Western European universalism, claiming that for example—and they are right up to a point—when we talk about human rights, we privilege a certain ideological set of human rights specific of Western individualist societies and so on and so on. That's true but the situation is a little bit more complicated. Because in a properly dialectical Marxist perspective, yes, every universality can be false. It is always over-determined by some particular content. For example, human rights, yes, but if you look closely at it, human rights secretly privilege white, male, people of some property and so on and so on. So whenever we—it's clear that this is in some sense true. For example when we talk about Chinese philosophy, it's clear that we are doing a Eurocentric operation. Because philosophy as we know it emerged in Europe and if we apply the same notion to Chinese thought, the Chinese thought is automatically in a disadvantage and so on and so on. But this historicist relativism, beware how universality can be a false universality, is just one side of the story. Marx is saying something I think which is much more actual today: that we are not only less universal than we think—we think universal human rights we privilege European patriarchal whatever rights—we are also much more universal, much more universal than we think we are. For Marx, the uniqueness of capitalism is that as agents on a market, we ourselves as individuals occupy a universal position in the sense that we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, universal in the sense that we are no longer fully rooted in or identified with a particular social ideological and so on positions. It's not a universality with regard to others. It's I relate to myself as someone who for example today I'm an engineer, I lose this work tomorrow I can be a taxi driver then I don't know what. Our particular field of work is experienced as something ultimately contingent. The same goes for market commodities and so on. So universality is a way of life as it were. It's a mode of our immediate experience. And now the big question is what role with regard to the process of emancipation this brutal late capitalist universality, this unheard-of force of capitalism to dissolve our particular modes of life and so on has? I want now to do something extremely problematic. I want to rehabilitate a text of Marx, rather two texts which are usually dismissed by post-colonial studies as embarrassing cases of Marxist racism and Eurocentrism. His two short from articles on India: the British rule in India and the future results of British rule in India. Marx admits here without restraint the brutality and exploitative hypocrisy of the British colonization of India, which goes up to the systematic use of torture, prohibited in the West but outsourced to India. Really, nothing new under the sun. There were Guantánamos already in the midst of the 19th century British Empire. A quote from Marx: "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked." End of quote. All that Marx adds is, quote: "England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of its old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan ruled by Britain from all its ancient traditions and from the whole of its past history. England it is true is causing a social revolution in Hindustan, revolution which was actuated only by the vilest interests and was stupid in her manner of enforcing this interest. But that is not the question. The question is: can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crime of England, she was—England was—the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution." Now this is the Marx usually attacked. One should not dismiss here the talk of the unconscious tool of history. Marx is not a naive teleologist claiming oh the British brutal exploitation of India was a tool of some higher historical reason which made it an instrument of future progress and so on and so on. All Marx claims is that the British colonization of India unintentionally created conditions for the double liberation of India, from the constraints of its own traditions as well as from colonization itself. And there is even an empirical proof of this. Do you know that the British tried to—they were intelligent enough the British colonizers, they knew that if they allow their colonization to simply dissolve traditional ideological social Indian edifice, castes and so on, that this may create revolutionary upheavals in India. So it's interesting to notice how from the very beginning of their colonialist critics claim, British colonizers wanted for us to lose our tradition and to impose Western standards, no on the contrary! They put hard work into re-establishing some kind of ritual of resuscitating old stable value ideological religious systems which would keep India a stable inert society ready to be exploited. For example, the ultimate Indian ideological textbook, The Laws of Manu. A pretty terrifying book, a detailed justification of caste system, with detailed descriptions what where to do. You know I learned with surprise from my Indian friends that in 17th century at least this book was half forgotten. It was just lost in different transcriptions. It is in the earlier 19th century that the British colonizers re-established, resuscitated this book. So I claim in this sense all this topic about respect for local cultures and so on was from the very beginning the crucial part of the process of colonization. British didn't want for the Indians to become like them. They wanted them in their—in their inert traditional ways and they even went as far as to praise immensely the superiority of their spirituality. The standard memoir of a British colonizer in India read something like that: "Yes, we may be richer materially the British, yes we bring progress and industry to India, but when you see a simple yogi saint praying there don't you feel how worthless we are? Don't you feel the infinite depth of that simple spirituality" and so on and so on. I claim that this is absolutely crucial. You take this false respect from the other, for the other, from colonialism, you lose colonialism itself. What do we have to accept here? We have to accept that, a quote from another great dialectician Richard Wagner from his Parsifal: "Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug." The wound can only be healed by the very spear that smote it. That is to say we should insist on what Marx insists: on this radical brutal but radical ambiguity of colonization. That is to say that it is the very power of social disintegration brought by—unleashed by colonization, all traditional forms of identity, traditional ethical mores dissolve and so on, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation, also for anti-colonial liberation. What do I mean by this? Let me give you another example from India itself. When I was there two years ago I got into a heated debate with some Indian cultural theorists who complained about the fact that they had to use English language as their expression. They claimed this is already a form of cultural colonization which censors our true identity. They claim can you see how strong colonization is even now when we try to formulate our project of liberation from colonialism we have to do it in the language of the colonizer. This was a quote from one of them: "We have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity, and does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer." My answer to this was: yes, but this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very X unknown quantity which is oppressed by it. That is to say—and this was my message and it's typical what happened to me—I was shocked how this message was received differently among my partners in debate there. But in strict correlation to the social status. The top Brahmin intellectuals shouted at me as colonizer blah blah. The Dalits, the untouchables, immediately accepted it. Namely my message was: it's true when you are forced to speak a foreign language you feel deprived of the very core of your identity. But my thesis is here a much more radical one: it is that that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonial imposition of a foreign language. In other words, it's a very refined dialectical paradox. If some of you are philosophers, Hegel uses a wonderful term, der absoluter Gegenstoß, the absolute recoil counter-punch for this. How the very loss in a properly dialectical notion of history, the very loss of something creates the lost dimension. We don't have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization which makes the people aware what they lost and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. No! The pre-colonial India is something totally different, it's irredeemably lost. Insofar as it's not lost it precisely serves colonizers. This new dimension that you are craving for, for example in the case of India a new modern democratic India, the very program of de-colonization is something engendered by colonization itself as a reaction to it. Another example to make this clear. You know he is one of my heroes, Malcolm X, the great American—a little bit more violent than Martin Luther King—fighter for black rights. You know why he has chosen this no family name but just X, X unknown quantity instead of I don't know what family name. Of course at an immediate level he wanted to emphasize how the blacks by being torn out of their African ancestral homes, that they are deprived of their roots. But the program of Malcolm X was not so let's return to those roots. But X means what if we grasp this very void into which our enslavement put us, the fact that we don't have any genuine tradition to rely on, that we have to as it were collectively re-invent our identity, as a unique opportunity of freedom. And it's also clear that he followed this line. At the end, we may debate it if he was right, he found the new universalist frame in Islam. He became Muslim. So he had no dreams about returning to origins. If you want further proofs of what I'm saying, never forget in South Africa that it was the greatness of African National Congress that they absolutely resisted all the bullshit about returning to some authentic African roots. The one who was preaching return to African roots was King Buthelezi, a local king there who as we all know was collaborating with apartheid forces. He was even directly financed by the Pretoria apartheid government. No, to see the truth of what I'm saying, you should really read history. For example you should read the apartheid white racist justification of well, apartheid system. It was not we whites are more, of course it was this de facto, but the justification was something like: what a precious difference of cultures we have here! We have Bushman, Hottentot, this, that. If we allow them, if we give them equality in the modern sense, all these precious spiritual traditions all will get lost in our vulgar Western mechanical imperialist non-holistic whatever civilization. It was the idea was strictly of course a fake multiculturalism, but nonetheless a multiculturalism. And again, the greatness of Mandela and so on was always to insist: no, we should beat the white people at their own game by being more universal than they are. And so again, back to—sorry where are—yes, back to India. I think that the solution is not to look for some lost British identity, but—it's a crazy paradoxical solution, but accepted by Dalits and so on—to see the colonization as a welcome chance of getting rid of old rules, and to take the fact that India is lacking now, is being deprived of their proper tradition again, as a chance of achieving a much more open egalitarian democratic society. And believe me or not, Western conservatives are becoming aware of it. For example I read a wonderful complaint by an American conservative linguist who says we shouldn't be too glad about the primacy of English language because he says—and he was right—that the language, the English language which is now becoming lingua franca is no longer the old English of true British people, but it is an English spoken by Indian merchants in Bombay, by Singapore bankers and so on. The English itself as universal language is being stolen from British people themselves. So again, this is what I see as the core of Marxist insight. I don't believe in anti-colonial resistance on behalf of any return to some primordial lost roots and so on and so on. If anything we should advocate an even further universalization, further loss of our local or whatever roots. Next point, and now I'm approaching the end, I want to make very briefly is that what does this mean again for us concretely today? There is a certain how should I call it paradigm which unites many modern or not so modern philosophers. Let's call it Hölderlin paradigm. By Hölderlin I mean Friedrich Hölderlin, the great German poet whose best known hit line as you know is: "Wo das Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch," where the danger is, grows also what can save us. The idea is that our epoch is the epoch of extreme danger, extreme alienation for Marx or loss of our roots in global technology for Heidegger, but that this point of extreme loss is also the opportunity for what Heidegger calls die Kehre, for the reversal. You know when things are lost there is a chance of reversal. For example, the whole eschatology of Marx is based on this. Capitalism is utter alienation, workers are totally deprived of all of the substantial objective conditions of their work, but this very deprivation liberates them from all particular roots, creates them as universal subjects who may reappropriate the universal substance. The next my final thesis is that I think we should resist this paradigm of we are at the moment of Kairos, you know dangerous time, the very limit, everything is almost lost, but maybe there is a chance in this total enslavement for total liberation whatever. I think on the opposite that Hegel—we are—our situation is much closer to that experienced by Hegel. We had a revolution. For Hegel it was the French Revolution, for us the communist attempts of the 20th century and other attempts, and it's obvious, although Hegel's critique of French Revolution is a complex matter, but it's obvious that things went terribly wrong in Stalinism and so on, or for Hegel in the French revolutionary terror and so on. And the whole problem of Hegel, if we read him properly, is how in these conditions of failure, when for example communism the way we experienced it in the 20th century was a fiasco globally more or less, not totally, but nonetheless, how to save the legacy? How to remain faithful to it? How to do it again? How precisely not to betray what was worth fighting in it? Because the fiasco of communism was used not only by anti-communists but in a much wider sense by ruling ideology to put in question basically the entire legacy of modernity. You know first it began with communism is over, it was a dangerous utopia. Then as you probably know it went on into because of this lucky or unlucky coincidence years, that an era which began with the French Revolution is over with in this egalitarian modern era. Then you can go further, modernity, all modernity was a fiasco. No wonder that and you can feel this even in TV series, Game of Thrones or all this desire for a new neo-Gothic universe, that there is a big unease with modernity. And strange betfellows you find here, strange bedfellows. From extreme right which basically claims that it all began with Luther or European modernity, all horrors began there, up to a person for whom I have a great admiration, for example Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, who said capitalism killed mother nature. As if the catastrophe started there. No, it didn't. I think that more than ever today when we are faced with all horrors of global capitalism and so on and so on, more than ever I claim, we should remain faithful to this Marxist insight that modernization is a radically ambiguous process and that every any return to pre-modern values, traditions, only serves to accelerate, to strengthen what is most dangerous in modernization, that the only way out is through bringing modernization to its end. And now to conclude really, this brings me back to the beginning. We encounter here the very dilemma with which I began. The two ways. Either this holistic pseudo-oriental because with Buddhism things are much more complex but I will not go into it now—this idea of holistic global harmony, universal compassion which will close the wound of modernity, or to accept that the only the wound itself, by wound I mean this cut of modernity, violent irruption of traditional order by modern universalism beginning with Christianity and so on, or that this is our only salvation. Since there were no dirty jokes, I would nonetheless like to begin with a—or to end with a very dirty joke that I heard believe it or not in Ramallah from a Palestinian Christian. They are wonderful people, sense of humor. He told me this joke about Jesus Christ. The night before Jesus was arrested and crucified, he was there praying alone in the tent, Jesus Christ. His followers apostles gathered around the tent and started to worry like: Christ was still a virgin, he didn't have sex. And they say, "My God, our Lord did so much to us, so many great things and he will die tomorrow being crucified without any joy and happiness. So why don't we make at least the last evening of Jesus Christ, why don't we bring some joy to him?" So they call Mary Magdalene and ask her to go to the tent where Christ is resting and to seduce him. Of course being who she was Mary said, "Oh, with pleasure," and went there. Now after five minutes, Mary Magdalene came out running with a totally horrified cry. And apostles were wondering, what happened there my God? Is Christ secretly a pervert that we didn't—did he torture her or what? No no, she explains: "I slowly, everything went well at the beginning, I slowly undressed, I spread my legs, I showed to Christ my pussy, but then catastrophe started. He said, 'What a terrible wound is there!' He put his hand in and healed it, made it whole, no?" I am—so beware of the people too intent on healing other people's wounds. I claim in exactly the same way if today's advocates of anti-Eurocentrism were to find themselves in actual pre-colonial reality they would have undoubtedly uttered the same terrific scream as Mary Magdalene did. There is no way back, we have to play to the end the game of or whatever we call it of modernist project. I think this is the greatest temptation today precisely even if it's called anti-imperialism. The—I am totally against imperialism. I just think we should never never forget that anti-imperialism is also a very much misused word. Remember that when they started to fight the British and so on, German and Japanese fascists were regularly using the term anti-imperialism and so on and so on. You know, I'm against imperialism, but I am not ready to sacrifice the legacy of European modernity. Precisely that passionate model of love, Agape, universal love, love which is not the wisdom of keeping a distance but fully falling into it, full full engagement, losing oneself without reserve. For me wisdom is not all that Star Wars pseudo-oriental bullshit, you know, don't attach yourself too much to worldly objects. No, attach yourself to the end to worldly object. That's the only way out for me, with all the risks this involves. Thank you very much. Thanks Slavoj. What can I say after the joke with Magdalena—joke with Magdalena. We have I think enough time... You deserve it because the talk was boring. There is a better one also told to me but this one is not obscene, is very loving if you want to understand what is identification in psychoanalysis. Identification as basic alienation. You always identify with the decentered point. It's another story about Christ. The idea is when he was tired from all his work of religious blah blah stuff, Jesus Christ said: "I need a holiday." So he took one of the apostles and went to play golf on Gennesaret there. So okay he was not a good golf player, so when he hit the ball, the ball fell into the sea. Not a problem of Christ, you know, he knows how to walk on water so he went there, walked, looked down, ah, picked up the ball, went back. Came back and then the apostle told Christ: "But listen, this is simply too difficult a hit for you, you know, you cannot do it, even even Tiger Woods couldn't have done it." Christ says, "Wait a minute, Tiger Woods is an ordinary black guy, I'm a God, I can at least do what Tiger Woods can," and he tries again. But he misses again. And again goes to walk on the water. At that point, and I like this historical nonsense, I mean at that point a group of American tourists comes by on a tour there, step out of and look at it, and one of them looking goes to apostle and says: "Who is that idiot walking on the water there? What does he think, who does he think he is? Jesus Christ?" Apostle says, "No words. He thinks he is Tiger Woods, you know." So you see even God needs a foreign identification like even Christ needs Tiger. Questions? Okay there is a first question there already. The question is pretty short and simple. Yesterday you said that you do not want to be mobilized politically longer than two months in order to, I don't know, be able to do your philosophy. Are you ready to be in love longer than two months? That's a real good question. That's a good question. If we were to live in a real democratic socialist Stalinist society, this would have been the last question you would ask and tomorrow the question would have been who was the last one to see you alive? Quite seriously. Let me answer like this. In matters of love, it may sound stupid and shocking, but yes, I'm extremely—I know it's difficult, but miracles do happen. By miracle I mean love which lasts for life. For example, there was a French ecologist social theorist whom we know. I'm sure that if he were to be still alive he would be here with us today. André Gorz. You know he wrote a wonderful—I forgot the title—a wonderful Letter to D. Is it translated here? No, it's in English, Letter to D. Yeah, it's an incredible book. When he was a young guy immediately after the war he fall passionately in love, he was Austrian Jew living in France with a British girl who was also in France. And for years they were absolutely in love and at the end when she was dying of cancer, when she was approaching the end, he killed himself with her together. It's an incredibly touching simple story. I'm not saying this happens regularly. But the miracle of love happens. And I think even that I'm absolutely not saying anything conservative here. I'm saying something very even leftist revolutionary. It's on the contrary, as I hinted at the beginning, the mass media propaganda who try to convince us, you know everything is changing, you have to experience life. No I don't want when I find the right woman, the right person, I don't want to experience too much other life. About—so I think simply that this is the difference. I am opposed to that cheap Freudo-Marxism from my youth where the idea is that sexual is political in the immediate sense, revolution should be a big fuck and you know like and so on, and if you are in love with one woman it's the elementary form of bourgeois individualism whatever and so on and so on. No—so as to politics: first I wouldn't say that what I was targeting at when I said I don't want to be more than two weeks—politically engaged fully—that I didn't target Agape love. What I target is this, a certain dismissal of ordinary people that I find here. I spoke with many leftists, sincere leftists who said look how easily people are corrupted. You you offer them something after two three months they get tired of mobilization. But wait a minute, can we even—I find nothing dismissive or cheap or corruptive in the fact that an ordinary person wants his peaceful decent life and so on and so on. I'm not ready to betray this as some form of alienation or whatever. That's was only my point. Not that nothing can be changed at that everyday level, but that on the contrary, the only changes which truly count are those changes at the very everyday level. They are the most difficult changes. There—and this also confirms my other point: that today maybe we no longer live in an ideological era in a big sense, like projects to die for, but you know true ideology is in everyday life. What you buy, how you consume, what you desire and so on. There, a change there. This is what Alexis who is now back in Greece was telling us before when he says that what is happening now in Greece is not just a political change, it is something at the level of everyday ethics that is changing. So to answer briefly and unambiguously to your question: I think that here precisely we get a difference between erotic love passion and political passion. Political passion is temporary limited. Erotic if it's authentic it's not. I'm here absolutely romantic. I think that even if it doesn't actually last forever—I still am for divorce and so on, myself having some practice in it—but even if it doesn't last, when you engage it should be how should I put it, within the prospect of eternity. When you are authentically in love you cannot be authentically in love and already counting, let's say that now ha ha we are in love and that you know like do you think shall we say two months, three months then we will have to rethink it or what. It's over. Even if it's an illusion, it's a structural illusion, it must be the prospect of eternity. So I have a question. You obviously divorce several times. Why do you marry again and again? You will end up in Gulag I know. You will disappear much faster than him. No answer. I mean we
Slavoj. I hope you will not be disappointed because this time I will not do with any political interventions. It will really be about the concept of love, how can it be used politically. First a quote: "If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be. And if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it." End of quote. This is how in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff and provides a succinct definition of the unconditional erotic love. There is an unmistakable dimension of terror at work here. Think about the ecstatic trance of Tristan and Isolde, ready to obliterate the entire social reality in their immersion into the night of deadly enjoyment. Now, I could go on here about erotic love because I sincerely think that, in contrast to our youth—the youth of those who are already old here—when, you know, to fight for sexual freedom was experienced as liberating and even monogamous love was considered or dismissed as a bourgeois convention and so on, I think that today more and more love, simply passionate love, is emerging as something dangerous and precisely subversive. Think about how you are addressed in your everyday life by society, what society demands of you. It's basically a kind of slightly spiritual pseudo-Buddhist hedonism. Ideology is telling you, be faithful to yourself, realize your true potentials, and experiment with your life, try all different options, don't fixate yourself on a certain stable identity, life is dynamic, fluid, and so on and so on. And I claim within this economy, not only is stable love, passionate love, emerging as an obstacle to your authentic development, but even the crucial dimension of love is gradually disappearing. What is love? As Alain Badiou, our good friend who wasn't able to come here, put it in his wonderful book In Praise of Love: there is always something traumatic, extremely violent in love. Love is a permanent emergency state. You fall in love. And it's crucial that in English and in French we use this expression, "to fall in love." You lose control. It's really, I claim, that love, the experience of passionate love, is the most elementary metaphysical experience. It's a Platonic experience. In the sense of you lead your easy daily life, you meet friends, you go to parties whatever, everything is normal, maybe here and there a one-night stand, but whatever. And then you passionately fall in love. Everything is ruined. The entire balance of your life is lost. Everything is subordinated to this one person. I almost cannot imagine in normal daily life outside war and so on, a more violent experience than that of love. And I think, which is why all the advisors that we need today are trying precisely to domesticate or to erase this excess of love. It's as if love is too poisonous and then they tell you, you know, the trick that they try to offer you—all the marriage agencies, dating agencies—is how to find yourself in love without falling in love. This idea came to me when on one of the transatlantic flights I was in a—I read one of those stupid airline journals and there was a big text there claiming—a publicity text—claiming, "We will enable you to be in—to find yourself in love without the fall," without this dangerous exposure. And I think this fits perfectly our daily narcissistic metaphysics. You know the old story that I repeat all the time. We want coffee without caffeine, we want beer without alcohol, and we want love without its dangerous moment, where you get lost. But okay, enough of this. Now, this is Eros, erotic love. Then we have its counterpart in Christianity, Agape. Agape functions in a wholly different way. How? It may appear that in contrast to Eros, with its violent subtraction from the collective space, the love for a collective succeeds in getting rid of the excess of terrorizing violence. Does Agape not imply an emphatic yes to the beloved collective, ultimately to the entire humanity or even as in Buddhism, to the entire domain of suffering life? The first counter-argument is provided here by the reply to a simple question. Just think about it. Which political regimes in the 20th century legitimized their power by evoking the subjects' love for their leader? It was the so-called—I don't like the term—totalitarian ones. Today, remember, it is only and precisely North Korean regime which evokes all the time the infinite love of the Korean people for Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and so on. And vice versa, the radiating love of the leader for his people. Love expressed in continuous acts of grace. Kim Jong-il wrote a short poem along these lines. I will quote you the entire poem, just two lines: "In the same way that a sunflower can only thrive if it is turned towards the sun, the Korean people can only thrive if their eyes are turned upwards towards their leader"—towards himself of course. Terror and mercy are thus closely linked. They are effectively the front and the obverse of the same power structure. Only a power which asserts its full terrorist right, or capacity to destroy anything and anyone it wants—only such a power can systematically universalize mercy. Since this power could have destroyed everyone, those who survive are all still alive because of the mercy of those in power. Consequently, the very fact that we, the subjects of power, are alive is the proof of the power's infinite mercy. This is why the more a regime is terrorist, the more its leaders are praised for their infinite love, goodness and mercy. Theodor Adorno was right to emphasize that in politics, love is evoked precisely when another democratic legitimization is lacking. Loving a leader means you love him for what he is, not for what he does. Okay, we may agree with this. So how about the next candidate for love as a political category? The so-called oriental spirituality, Buddhism, with its, or so we are told, more gentle, balanced, holistic, ecological approach. You know all the stories about how say, when digging up earth for the foundation of a house, Tibetan Buddhists are careful not to kill any worms and so on. In the whole of the last years, Japan's rapid industrialization and militarization with the ethics of discipline and sacrifice was sustained by the large majority of Zen Buddhist thinkers. Who today knows that Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the United States of the 1960s, supported in his youth in Japan of the 1930s the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion? There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of some authentic compassionate insight. The attitude of total immersion into the selfless "now" of the instant, the so-called Buddhist enlightenment in which all reflexive distance is lost, in short, in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity, perfectly legitimizes our subordination to the militaristic social machine. It's quite interesting to read this, to read Buddhist texts on war where they claim that openly for ordinary people who don't have time to meditate for years, the best shortcut towards overcoming your false self and reaching Nirvana, Satori, however we call it, is total subordination to the military discipline. And Suzuki himself wrote a wonderful text where he even gives the advice to the military into how using Buddhism to make killing easier. He says if I persist in my everyday attitude of false belief that I have a self which is the free agent of its acts, then let us say I have to kill one of you. Then this is difficult because you are here, I see it, I look into your eyes, I find it difficult, should I stab the knife—the knife into you, I feel responsible. Then Suzuki says but if you reach Buddhist enlightenment, the thing gets much easier. You no longer believed in your autonomous self, you perceive yourself as just a void, an anonymous impassive observer of life around you where phenomena simply are engaged in their cosmic dance which is a totally neutral process. And from this distance as Suzuki puts it, you simply observe your knife in a cosmic dance of phenomena hitting the eye or the throat of your enemy and so on. Now this is no joking matter because I'm not blaming Buddhism for this. I'm just saying how even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we will not be doing horrible things in our daily life. So again, what this means is that the Buddhist all-encompassing compassion has to be opposed to the Christian intolerant violent love. I want to praise the Christian love. Although Christians would probably lynch me for what I will say now. The Buddhist stance is that of indifference, of quenching all passions which strive to establish differences, while the Christian love is a violent passion to introduce difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others. Love is violence, not in the vulgar sense of the well-known Balkan proverb, "If he doesn't beat me, he doesn't love me." Violence is already the love choice as such, which tears its object out of its contexts, elevating it to the sublime absolute thing. In Montenegro folklore, so I was told by Andrej Nikolaidis, my Montenegrin friend, the origin of evil is a beautiful woman. She makes men around her lose their balance, she literally destabilizes the universe, colors all things with a tone of partiality. Among Christian theologians it was Gilbert Keith Chesterton who fully assumed the consequences of this violent aspect of love. One has to get rid of the old Platonic topos of love as Eros which gradually elevates itself from love for a particular individual through the love for the beauty of a human body in general and then the love of the beautiful form as such to finally the love for the supreme good beyond all forms. True love is precisely the opposite move of forsaking the promise of eternity itself for an imperfect individual. What if the gesture of choosing temporal existence, of giving up eternal existence for the sake of love, from Jesus Christ to, for example, Siegmund in the act two of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, who Siegmund prefers to stay, to remain a common mortal if his beloved Sieglinde cannot follow him to Valhalla, the eternal dwelling of the dead heroes. What if this is the highest ethical act of them all? I think this is the message of Christianity which is still alive. Not forsake all terrestrial things for eternity but love means I know you are a miserable mortal being but I'm ready to forsake eternity itself for you. Based on this insight, Chesterton rejected the fashionable claim about the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity. Here is a well-known, I want to repeat it, quote from Chesterton from his Orthodoxy, quote: "Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity. That for the Buddhist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the theosophists or Buddhists asks men to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine center of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that we might love it. All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter. Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into different living souls." End of quote. A tremendous violence does dwell in the very heart of the Christian notion of love for one's neighbor. The violence which finds its most direct expression in a series of Christ's disturbing statements. Here are some of these passages from Gospels. Just listen to them. You may be surprised what you find in Gospels. Christ saying, talking all the time. "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and men's enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Next quote. "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Next quote, the best one I think: "Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be fire in a house. There will be three against two and two against three, father against son, son against father, and they will stand alone." The final quote. So how are we to read these statements? And believe me I know what I'm talking about. I'm asking all the time when I engage in debates with Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox priests, I'm asking them, "Okay, just tell me what this means." And it's incredible how they try to squeeze out, you know. One way is the, how should I call it, the linguistic one. They claim no, maybe hate is not the right translation, that Christ just wanted to say if you love some other people more than me, not to hate them. I claim this is a blasphemy for a true Christian. Christ, God, appears here then as a stupid jealous guy, you know, you can love others but be sure that you love me more, that's an obscenity. Or the best answer was given to me by a Polish priest in Warsaw during a debate. When I asked him, what does this mean, and he told me oh my God I didn't expect this question today, I would need more time to prepare the answer. To which I answered him, fuck you, you had years to prepare the answer, you know. I didn't pull out an unknown passage. And it's again absolutely incredible how they are really not ready to provide a clear answer. What do these lines mean? To put it in a somewhat simplified way, there are two basic attitudes discernible in the history of religions. On the one hand, there is the pagan cosmos, the divine hierarchical order of cosmic principles, which when copied onto society, gives the image of a congruent edifice in which each member is at its own place. The supreme good is here, the global balance of principles and evil stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one principle to the detriment of others, of the masculine to the detriment of the feminine, of reason to the detriment of feeling and so on. The cosmic balance is then re-established through the work of justice, which with inexorable necessity sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With regard to the social body, an individual is good when he or she acts in accordance with his special place within the social edifice, when he respects nature which provides food and shelter, when he shows respect for his superiors, when he takes care of his followers or children in a fatherly way and so on and so on. And evil is defined as a—evil occurs when some particular strata or individuals are no longer satisfied with their proper place. Children no longer obey parents, servants no longer obey masters, rulers no longer take care of their subjects and so on and so on. I think that this is the ethics which even now is re-emerging often in the guise of some New Age wisdom. It's called so-called holistic approach, you know, every element should remain at its proper place, evil is imbalance and so on and so on. I claim that Christianity does precisely the opposite. Christianity introduces into the global balanced order a principle totally foreign to it. A principle that, measured by the standards of the traditional—of a traditional cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion. The principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality, in Christianity the universality of the Holy Spirit or today the universality of human rights, freedoms and so on. I can participate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my special place within the global social order. So do Christ's scandalous words which I quoted not point in the same direction? Here of course we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God. When Christ says if you don't hate your father and mother you cannot be my follower, I think the point is not that you should simply hate them as living beings. I think that it's very—in a very simple way you can resolve this dilemma. Father, mother and so on here stand or condense the entire hierarchical social order, the network of relations of domination, subordination and so on. So that the hatred Christ mentions is simply the hatred of established social hierarchy. You are my follower if, instead of functioning as a part of social hierarchical order, you see as your true home, as it were, Holy Spirit, an unconditionally egalitarian community. Or as Saint Paul put it: it is love that enjoins us to unplug from our social community into which we were born so that, you know the passage, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks. This is I think the very—I'm simplifying of course but nonetheless—the very core of the Christian insight for me. God dies, Christ dies, at the same time the father dies, all that survives is Holy Spirit, which is the first name of the communist party as we know, an radically egalitarian society which violently opposes social hierarchy, an immediate violent assertion of universal equality. And it is against this Christian background that we should read Che Guevara's well-known statement on revolutionary love. A quote from Che Guevara: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality." End of quote. There is a further step to be made here. Guevara's statement that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love should be read together with his more problematic statement on revolutionaries as killing machines. Now comes the other statement: "Hatred is an element of struggle, relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines." That's the other quote. These two apparently opposite stances are united in Che Guevara's well-known motto: "One must endure, become hard, toughen oneself, without losing tenderness." End of quote. I think Guevara is here basically paraphrasing Christ's declaration of the unity of love and sword. In both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence. So while Guevara certainly believed in the transformative power of love, he would never have been caught humming "all you need is love." What you need is to love with hatred. Or, another strange bedfellow here, as Søren Kierkegaard put it long ago, the necessary consequence, the truth of the Christian demand to love one's enemy is, quote from Kierkegaard, is: "the demand to hate the beloved out of love and in love. So high, humanly speaking to a kind of madness, can Christianity press the demand of love if love is to be the fulfillment of the law. Therefore it teaches that the Christian shall, if it is demanded, be capable of hating his father and mother and sister and beloved." End of quote. With regard to social order, this means that the authentic Christian tradition rejects the wisdom that the hierarchical order is our fate, that all attempts to mess with it and to create another egalitarian order have to end up in destructive horror. Agape as political love—and following Terry Eagleton, this is how I would propose to translate Agape—is simply political love. Agape means that the unconditional egalitarian love for the new—for the neighbor can serve as the foundation for a new social order. The form of appearance of this love is the so-called apocalyptic millenarianism or the idea of communism, the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity. Love is the force of this universal link which in an emancipatory collective connects people directly in their singularity, bypassing their particular hierarchical determinations. Terror is terror out of love for the universal singular others against the particular. This terror names exactly the same as the work of love. So my reproach to the fundamentalist terrorists, Islamist or Christian, should be that precisely they are not terrorists in the right way, that they shirk from authentic terror of the work of love. Now you will be saying am I crazy? What distinguishes this from a murderous terrorist who kills but claiming I'm killing you because of your eternal soul and so on and so on? I will try to explain this in the remaining part by beginning with what is precisely the form of non-love today which poses as love: charity. One again of the names and practices of non-love today, charity. When we see an ad with starving children in Africa with a call to do something to help them, like something like for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can save their life and so on, I claim that the true message is something like: don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think. In short, the true message is: for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can continue your ignorant pleasurable life, not only not feeling any guilt but even feeling good for participating in the struggle against suffering. So how would this notion of love which is the opposite of charity—charity is false love because charity is love the true aim of which is to make you feel good. My God, what a great man I am you see, I'm helping all the children starving in Somalia and so on and so on. How would the authentic violent love help us to orient ourselves today? Let me begin with a wonderful quote from last Christmas issue of the magazine Spectator. In this issue there is an editorial entitled "Why was the best year ever." This editorial argues against the perception that we live in a dangerous cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. Here is the first paragraph of this editorial. I quote: "It may not feel like it but has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease, or more prosperity." "The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age." End of quote. Now the first thing to add here, even if I, why not? I always like to concede to the devil what belongs to the devil. Even many things are true in this statement. But the first thing to add is that people rebel not when things are really bad but when their expectations are disappointed. French Revolution took place after the king and the nobles were for decades gradually losing their full hold on power. The anti-communist revolt in Hungary exploded after Imre Nagy, the reformist Prime Minister later shot by the Soviets, was already Prime Minister for two years and after relatively free debates among intellectuals were allowed. Even a closer example, people rebelled in Egypt in because there was some minimal economic progress under Mubarak, given rise to a whole class of educated young people who participated in the universal digital culture. And this is why the Chinese communists are right to be in panic precisely because on average Chinese are now living considerably better than years ago. But the social antagonisms between the newly rich and the rest exploded, plus expectations are much higher. That's the problem with development and progress. They are always uneven, they give birth to new instabilities and antagonisms, they generate new expectations which cannot be met. In Tunisia or Egypt, just prior to the Arab Spring, the majority probably lived a little bit better than decades ago, but the standard by which they measured their dissatisfaction was much higher. So yes, the Spectator is in principle right claiming that we live in a golden era, but the very facts that Spectator emphasizes are creating conditions for revolt and rebellion. So again, what rebellion? There is a more down-to-earth version of this claim of Spectator which I often hear in mass media, especially when I visit non-European countries. They laugh at me and they say crisis, what crisis are you talking about? Look at the BRIC countries, Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states. They are all progressing. The losers are only West Europe and up to a point the United States. So we are not dealing with a global crisis but just with the shift of the dynamics of progress away from the West. Is a portent symbol of this shift not the fact that recently many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonizers? So what if our much-decried crisis is a mere local crisis in an overall progress? Even with regard to human rights, is the situation in China and Russia now not much better than years ago? Decrying the ongoing crisis as a global phenomenon is thus a typical Eurocentric view and the view coming from leftists who usually pride themselves on their anti-Eurocentrism. There is a partial truth in it. And again, admit what is true. It's true that globally economy is progressing. I mean, the crisis in some sense is not global. But nonetheless I think we should restrain here our anti-colonialist joy a little bit. The question to be raised is if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? Capitalism with Asian values, which of course has nothing to do with Asian people and everything with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such everywhere to suspend or at least limit, constrain democracy. From Marx on, the truly radical left was never simply progressivist. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the hidden price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed. He just insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms, and we should do the same with today's progress of global capitalism. Keep in view its dark underside. How? Where? First I want to note something about the status of universality because critics of Eurocentrism usually emphasize the ideological limitation, lie, deception of Western European universalism, claiming that for example—and they are right up to a point—when we talk about human rights, we privilege a certain ideological set of human rights specific of Western individualist societies and so on and so on. That's true but the situation is a little bit more complicated. Because in a properly dialectical Marxist perspective, yes, every universality can be false. It is always over-determined by some particular content. For example, human rights, yes, but if you look closely at it, human rights secretly privilege white, male, people of some property and so on and so on. So whenever we—it's clear that this is in some sense true. For example when we talk about Chinese philosophy, it's clear that we are doing a Eurocentric operation. Because philosophy as we know it emerged in Europe and if we apply the same notion to Chinese thought, the Chinese thought is automatically in a disadvantage and so on and so on. But this historicist relativism, beware how universality can be a false universality, is just one side of the story. Marx is saying something I think which is much more actual today: that we are not only less universal than we think—we think universal human rights we privilege European patriarchal whatever rights—we are also much more universal, much more universal than we think we are. For Marx, the uniqueness of capitalism is that as agents on a market, we ourselves as individuals occupy a universal position in the sense that we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, universal in the sense that we are no longer fully rooted in or identified with a particular social ideological and so on positions. It's not a universality with regard to others. It's I relate to myself as someone who for example today I'm an engineer, I lose this work tomorrow I can be a taxi driver then I don't know what. Our particular field of work is experienced as something ultimately contingent. The same goes for market commodities and so on. So universality is a way of life as it were. It's a mode of our immediate experience. And now the big question is what role with regard to the process of emancipation this brutal late capitalist universality, this unheard-of force of capitalism to dissolve our particular modes of life and so on has? I want now to do something extremely problematic. I want to rehabilitate a text of Marx, rather two texts which are usually dismissed by post-colonial studies as embarrassing cases of Marxist racism and Eurocentrism. His two short from articles on India: the British rule in India and the future results of British rule in India. Marx admits here without restraint the brutality and exploitative hypocrisy of the British colonization of India, which goes up to the systematic use of torture, prohibited in the West but outsourced to India. Really, nothing new under the sun. There were Guantánamos already in the midst of the 19th century British Empire. A quote from Marx: "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked." End of quote. All that Marx adds is, quote: "England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of its old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan ruled by Britain from all its ancient traditions and from the whole of its past history. England it is true is causing a social revolution in Hindustan, revolution which was actuated only by the vilest interests and was stupid in her manner of enforcing this interest. But that is not the question. The question is: can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crime of England, she was—England was—the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution." Now this is the Marx usually attacked. One should not dismiss here the talk of the unconscious tool of history. Marx is not a naive teleologist claiming oh the British brutal exploitation of India was a tool of some higher historical reason which made it an instrument of future progress and so on and so on. All Marx claims is that the British colonization of India unintentionally created conditions for the double liberation of India, from the constraints of its own traditions as well as from colonization itself. And there is even an empirical proof of this. Do you know that the British tried to—they were intelligent enough the British colonizers, they knew that if they allow their colonization to simply dissolve traditional ideological social Indian edifice, castes and so on, that this may create revolutionary upheavals in India. So it's interesting to notice how from the very beginning of their colonialist critics claim, British colonizers wanted for us to lose our tradition and to impose Western standards, no on the contrary! They put hard work into re-establishing some kind of ritual of resuscitating old stable value ideological religious systems which would keep India a stable inert society ready to be exploited. For example, the ultimate Indian ideological textbook, The Laws of Manu. A pretty terrifying book, a detailed justification of caste system, with detailed descriptions what where to do. You know I learned with surprise from my Indian friends that in 17th century at least this book was half forgotten. It was just lost in different transcriptions. It is in the earlier 19th century that the British colonizers re-established, resuscitated this book. So I claim in this sense all this topic about respect for local cultures and so on was from the very beginning the crucial part of the process of colonization. British didn't want for the Indians to become like them. They wanted them in their—in their inert traditional ways and they even went as far as to praise immensely the superiority of their spirituality. The standard memoir of a British colonizer in India read something like that: "Yes, we may be richer materially the British, yes we bring progress and industry to India, but when you see a simple yogi saint praying there don't you feel how worthless we are? Don't you feel the infinite depth of that simple spirituality" and so on and so on. I claim that this is absolutely crucial. You take this false respect from the other, for the other, from colonialism, you lose colonialism itself. What do we have to accept here? We have to accept that, a quote from another great dialectician Richard Wagner from his Parsifal: "Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug." The wound can only be healed by the very spear that smote it. That is to say we should insist on what Marx insists: on this radical brutal but radical ambiguity of colonization. That is to say that it is the very power of social disintegration brought by—unleashed by colonization, all traditional forms of identity, traditional ethical mores dissolve and so on, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation, also for anti-colonial liberation. What do I mean by this? Let me give you another example from India itself. When I was there two years ago I got into a heated debate with some Indian cultural theorists who complained about the fact that they had to use English language as their expression. They claimed this is already a form of cultural colonization which censors our true identity. They claim can you see how strong colonization is even now when we try to formulate our project of liberation from colonialism we have to do it in the language of the colonizer. This was a quote from one of them: "We have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity, and does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer." My answer to this was: yes, but this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very X unknown quantity which is oppressed by it. That is to say—and this was my message and it's typical what happened to me—I was shocked how this message was received differently among my partners in debate there. But in strict correlation to the social status. The top Brahmin intellectuals shouted at me as colonizer blah blah. The Dalits, the untouchables, immediately accepted it. Namely my message was: it's true when you are forced to speak a foreign language you feel deprived of the very core of your identity. But my thesis is here a much more radical one: it is that that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonial imposition of a foreign language. In other words, it's a very refined dialectical paradox. If some of you are philosophers, Hegel uses a wonderful term, der absoluter Gegenstoß, the absolute recoil counter-punch for this. How the very loss in a properly dialectical notion of history, the very loss of something creates the lost dimension. We don't have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization which makes the people aware what they lost and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. No! The pre-colonial India is something totally different, it's irredeemably lost. Insofar as it's not lost it precisely serves colonizers. This new dimension that you are craving for, for example in the case of India a new modern democratic India, the very program of de-colonization is something engendered by colonization itself as a reaction to it. Another example to make this clear. You know he is one of my heroes, Malcolm X, the great American—a little bit more violent than Martin Luther King—fighter for black rights. You know why he has chosen this no family name but just X, X unknown quantity instead of I don't know what family name. Of course at an immediate level he wanted to emphasize how the blacks by being torn out of their African ancestral homes, that they are deprived of their roots. But the program of Malcolm X was not so let's return to those roots. But X means what if we grasp this very void into which our enslavement put us, the fact that we don't have any genuine tradition to rely on, that we have to as it were collectively re-invent our identity, as a unique opportunity of freedom. And it's also clear that he followed this line. At the end, we may debate it if he was right, he found the new universalist frame in Islam. He became Muslim. So he had no dreams about returning to origins. If you want further proofs of what I'm saying, never forget in South Africa that it was the greatness of African National Congress that they absolutely resisted all the bullshit about returning to some authentic African roots. The one who was preaching return to African roots was King Buthelezi, a local king there who as we all know was collaborating with apartheid forces. He was even directly financed by the Pretoria apartheid government. No, to see the truth of what I'm saying, you should really read history. For example you should read the apartheid white racist justification of well, apartheid system. It was not we whites are more, of course it was this de facto, but the justification was something like: what a precious difference of cultures we have here! We have Bushman, Hottentot, this, that. If we allow them, if we give them equality in the modern sense, all these precious spiritual traditions all will get lost in our vulgar Western mechanical imperialist non-holistic whatever civilization. It was the idea was strictly of course a fake multiculturalism, but nonetheless a multiculturalism. And again, the greatness of Mandela and so on was always to insist: no, we should beat the white people at their own game by being more universal than they are. And so again, back to—sorry where are—yes, back to India. I think that the solution is not to look for some lost British identity, but—it's a crazy paradoxical solution, but accepted by Dalits and so on—to see the colonization as a welcome chance of getting rid of old rules, and to take the fact that India is lacking now, is being deprived of their proper tradition again, as a chance of achieving a much more open egalitarian democratic society. And believe me or not, Western conservatives are becoming aware of it. For example I read a wonderful complaint by an American conservative linguist who says we shouldn't be too glad about the primacy of English language because he says—and he was right—that the language, the English language which is now becoming lingua franca is no longer the old English of true British people, but it is an English spoken by Indian merchants in Bombay, by Singapore bankers and so on. The English itself as universal language is being stolen from British people themselves. So again, this is what I see as the core of Marxist insight. I don't believe in anti-colonial resistance on behalf of any return to some primordial lost roots and so on and so on. If anything we should advocate an even further universalization, further loss of our local or whatever roots. Next point, and now I'm approaching the end, I want to make very briefly is that what does this mean again for us concretely today? There is a certain how should I call it paradigm which unites many modern or not so modern philosophers. Let's call it Hölderlin paradigm. By Hölderlin I mean Friedrich Hölderlin, the great German poet whose best known hit line as you know is: "Wo das Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch," where the danger is, grows also what can save us. The idea is that our epoch is the epoch of extreme danger, extreme alienation for Marx or loss of our roots in global technology for Heidegger, but that this point of extreme loss is also the opportunity for what Heidegger calls die Kehre, for the reversal. You know when things are lost there is a chance of reversal. For example, the whole eschatology of Marx is based on this. Capitalism is utter alienation, workers are totally deprived of all of the substantial objective conditions of their work, but this very deprivation liberates them from all particular roots, creates them as universal subjects who may reappropriate the universal substance. The next my final thesis is that I think we should resist this paradigm of we are at the moment of Kairos, you know dangerous time, the very limit, everything is almost lost, but maybe there is a chance in this total enslavement for total liberation whatever. I think on the opposite that Hegel—we are—our situation is much closer to that experienced by Hegel. We had a revolution. For Hegel it was the French Revolution, for us the communist attempts of the 20th century and other attempts, and it's obvious, although Hegel's critique of French Revolution is a complex matter, but it's obvious that things went terribly wrong in Stalinism and so on, or for Hegel in the French revolutionary terror and so on. And the whole problem of Hegel, if we read him properly, is how in these conditions of failure, when for example communism the way we experienced it in the 20th century was a fiasco globally more or less, not totally, but nonetheless, how to save the legacy? How to remain faithful to it? How to do it again? How precisely not to betray what was worth fighting in it? Because the fiasco of communism was used not only by anti-communists but in a much wider sense by ruling ideology to put in question basically the entire legacy of modernity. You know first it began with communism is over, it was a dangerous utopia. Then as you probably know it went on into because of this lucky or unlucky coincidence years, that an era which began with the French Revolution is over with in this egalitarian modern era. Then you can go further, modernity, all modernity was a fiasco. No wonder that and you can feel this even in TV series, Game of Thrones or all this desire for a new neo-Gothic universe, that there is a big unease with modernity. And strange betfellows you find here, strange bedfellows. From extreme right which basically claims that it all began with Luther or European modernity, all horrors began there, up to a person for whom I have a great admiration, for example Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, who said capitalism killed mother nature. As if the catastrophe started there. No, it didn't. I think that more than ever today when we are faced with all horrors of global capitalism and so on and so on, more than ever I claim, we should remain faithful to this Marxist insight that modernization is a radically ambiguous process and that every any return to pre-modern values, traditions, only serves to accelerate, to strengthen what is most dangerous in modernization, that the only way out is through bringing modernization to its end. And now to conclude really, this brings me back to the beginning. We encounter here the very dilemma with which I began. The two ways. Either this holistic pseudo-oriental because with Buddhism things are much more complex but I will not go into it now—this idea of holistic global harmony, universal compassion which will close the wound of modernity, or to accept that the only the wound itself, by wound I mean this cut of modernity, violent irruption of traditional order by modern universalism beginning with Christianity and so on, or that this is our only salvation. Since there were no dirty jokes, I would nonetheless like to begin with a—or to end with a very dirty joke that I heard believe it or not in Ramallah from a Palestinian Christian. They are wonderful people, sense of humor. He told me this joke about Jesus Christ. The night before Jesus was arrested and crucified, he was there praying alone in the tent, Jesus Christ. His followers apostles gathered around the tent and started to worry like: Christ was still a virgin, he didn't have sex. And they say, "My God, our Lord did so much to us, so many great things and he will die tomorrow being crucified without any joy and happiness. So why don't we make at least the last evening of Jesus Christ, why don't we bring some joy to him?" So they call Mary Magdalene and ask her to go to the tent where Christ is resting and to seduce him. Of course being who she was Mary said, "Oh, with pleasure," and went there. Now after five minutes, Mary Magdalene came out running with a totally horrified cry. And apostles were wondering, what happened there my God? Is Christ secretly a pervert that we didn't—did he torture her or what? No no, she explains: "I slowly, everything went well at the beginning, I slowly undressed, I spread my legs, I showed to Christ my pussy, but then catastrophe started. He said, 'What a terrible wound is there!' He put his hand in and healed it, made it whole, no?" I am—so beware of the people too intent on healing other people's wounds. I claim in exactly the same way if today's advocates of anti-Eurocentrism were to find themselves in actual pre-colonial reality they would have undoubtedly uttered the same terrific scream as Mary Magdalene did. There is no way back, we have to play to the end the game of or whatever we call it of modernist project. I think this is the greatest temptation today precisely even if it's called anti-imperialism. The—I am totally against imperialism. I just think we should never never forget that anti-imperialism is also a very much misused word. Remember that when they started to fight the British and so on, German and Japanese fascists were regularly using the term anti-imperialism and so on and so on. You know, I'm against imperialism, but I am not ready to sacrifice the legacy of European modernity. Precisely that passionate model of love, Agape, universal love, love which is not the wisdom of keeping a distance but fully falling into it, full full engagement, losing oneself without reserve. For me wisdom is not all that Star Wars pseudo-oriental bullshit, you know, don't attach yourself too much to worldly objects. No, attach yourself to the end to worldly object. That's the only way out for me, with all the risks this involves. Thank you very much. Thanks Slavoj. What can I say after the joke with Magdalena—joke with Magdalena. We have I think enough time... You deserve it because the talk was boring. There is a better one also told to me but this one is not obscene, is very loving if you want to understand what is identification in psychoanalysis. Identification as basic alienation. You always identify with the decentered point. It's another story about Christ. The idea is when he was tired from all his work of religious blah blah stuff, Jesus Christ said: "I need a holiday." So he took one of the apostles and went to play golf on Gennesaret there. So okay he was not a good golf player, so when he hit the ball, the ball fell into the sea. Not a problem of Christ, you know, he knows how to walk on water so he went there, walked, looked down, ah, picked up the ball, went back. Came back and then the apostle told Christ: "But listen, this is simply too difficult a hit for you, you know, you cannot do it, even even Tiger Woods couldn't have done it." Christ says, "Wait a minute, Tiger Woods is an ordinary black guy, I'm a God, I can at least do what Tiger Woods can," and he tries again. But he misses again. And again goes to walk on the water. At that point, and I like this historical nonsense, I mean at that point a group of American tourists comes by on a tour there, step out of and look at it, and one of them looking goes to apostle and says: "Who is that idiot walking on the water there? What does he think, who does he think he is? Jesus Christ?" Apostle says, "No words. He thinks he is Tiger Woods, you know." So you see even God needs a foreign identification like even Christ needs Tiger. Questions? Okay there is a first question there already. The question is pretty short and simple. Yesterday you said that you do not want to be mobilized politically longer than two months in order to, I don't know, be able to do your philosophy. Are you ready to be in love longer than two months? That's a real good question. That's a good question. If we were to live in a real democratic socialist Stalinist society, this would have been the last question you would ask and tomorrow the question would have been who was the last one to see you alive? Quite seriously. Let me answer like this. In matters of love, it may sound stupid and shocking, but yes, I'm extremely—I know it's difficult, but miracles do happen. By miracle I mean love which lasts for life. For example, there was a French ecologist social theorist whom we know. I'm sure that if he were to be still alive he would be here with us today. André Gorz. You know he wrote a wonderful—I forgot the title—a wonderful Letter to D. Is it translated here? No, it's in English, Letter to D. Yeah, it's an incredible book. When he was a young guy immediately after the war he fall passionately in love, he was Austrian Jew living in France with a British girl who was also in France. And for years they were absolutely in love and at the end when she was dying of cancer, when she was approaching the end, he killed himself with her together. It's an incredibly touching simple story. I'm not saying this happens regularly. But the miracle of love happens. And I think even that I'm absolutely not saying anything conservative here. I'm saying something very even leftist revolutionary. It's on the contrary, as I hinted at the beginning, the mass media propaganda who try to convince us, you know everything is changing, you have to experience life. No I don't want when I find the right woman, the right person, I don't want to experience too much other life. About—so I think simply that this is the difference. I am opposed to that cheap Freudo-Marxism from my youth where the idea is that sexual is political in the immediate sense, revolution should be a big fuck and you know like and so on, and if you are in love with one woman it's the elementary form of bourgeois individualism whatever and so on and so on. No—so as to politics: first I wouldn't say that what I was targeting at when I said I don't want to be more than two weeks—politically engaged fully—that I didn't target Agape love. What I target is this, a certain dismissal of ordinary people that I find here. I spoke with many leftists, sincere leftists who said look how easily people are corrupted. You you offer them something after two three months they get tired of mobilization. But wait a minute, can we even—I find nothing dismissive or cheap or corruptive in the fact that an ordinary person wants his peaceful decent life and so on and so on. I'm not ready to betray this as some form of alienation or whatever. That's was only my point. Not that nothing can be changed at that everyday level, but that on the contrary, the only changes which truly count are those changes at the very everyday level. They are the most difficult changes. There—and this also confirms my other point: that today maybe we no longer live in an ideological era in a big sense, like projects to die for, but you know true ideology is in everyday life. What you buy, how you consume, what you desire and so on. There, a change there. This is what Alexis who is now back in Greece was telling us before when he says that what is happening now in Greece is not just a political change, it is something at the level of everyday ethics that is changing. So to answer briefly and unambiguously to your question: I think that here precisely we get a difference between erotic love passion and political passion. Political passion is temporary limited. Erotic if it's authentic it's not. I'm here absolutely romantic. I think that even if it doesn't actually last forever—I still am for divorce and so on, myself having some practice in it—but even if it doesn't last, when you engage it should be how should I put it, within the prospect of eternity. When you are authentically in love you cannot be authentically in love and already counting, let's say that now ha ha we are in love and that you know like do you think shall we say two months, three months then we will have to rethink it or what. It's over. Even if it's an illusion, it's a structural illusion, it must be the prospect of eternity. So I have a question. You obviously divorce several times. Why do you marry again and again? You will end up in Gulag I know. You will disappear much faster than him. No answer. I mean we
unknown
remember the old... don't you have that point in American constitution that those who were accused of being communist in the witch hunt that the fifth amendment, no? I refuse to answer this question because the answer may incriminate me,
remember the old... don't you have that point in American constitution that those who were accused of being communist in the witch hunt that the fifth amendment, no? I refuse to answer this question because the answer may incriminate me,
Slavoj Žižek
no? Something along these lines. Okay give us some political questions then. Yanis Varoufakis has a question. Wait can I add something very briefly? To avoid what I'm—no no no—that I'm not advocating with—when I spoke about terror—physical violence. On the contrary, I think it can be nicely proven how all brutal violence done in the 20th century was on the contrary a sign of impotence only. This is what brought me so much trouble in United States when I said to provoke people the problem with Hitler was that he wasn't violent enough. That is to say he killed millions but why? Because he was afraid to really change social relations. His violence was not a heroic violence, Hitler's violence was in Nietzsche's terms a reactive violence, a protective violence. Even with Stalin: his single most violent act probably, the forced collectivization in the late twenties. It was a clear act of despair in the sense of the violence unleashed there was an enactment of the utter failure to find a solution to how to include farmers into the process of socialism. It was just an—so you see my point? I think that brutal direct physical violence is as a rule a sign of impotence. When you are really strong you don't need physical violence. I thought you wanted to avoid Yanis Varoufakis' question but you won't. Please. Slavoj, a most wonderful representation of the wondrous discontinuity which the act of falling in love is. But let me add juxtapose it against another discontinuity: suicide, which is also a major break with the self. And I'm mentioning that in the context of your quotation from The Spectator. Because as we speak, Foxconn which produces our iPhones has electrified the roof because of suicides that happened by Chinese
no? Something along these lines. Okay give us some political questions then. Yanis Varoufakis has a question. Wait can I add something very briefly? To avoid what I'm—no no no—that I'm not advocating with—when I spoke about terror—physical violence. On the contrary, I think it can be nicely proven how all brutal violence done in the 20th century was on the contrary a sign of impotence only. This is what brought me so much trouble in United States when I said to provoke people the problem with Hitler was that he wasn't violent enough. That is to say he killed millions but why? Because he was afraid to really change social relations. His violence was not a heroic violence, Hitler's violence was in Nietzsche's terms a reactive violence, a protective violence. Even with Stalin: his single most violent act probably, the forced collectivization in the late twenties. It was a clear act of despair in the sense of the violence unleashed there was an enactment of the utter failure to find a solution to how to include farmers into the process of socialism. It was just an—so you see my point? I think that brutal direct physical violence is as a rule a sign of impotence. When you are really strong you don't need physical violence. I thought you wanted to avoid Yanis Varoufakis' question but you won't. Please. Slavoj, a most wonderful representation of the wondrous discontinuity which the act of falling in love is. But let me add juxtapose it against another discontinuity: suicide, which is also a major break with the self. And I'm mentioning that in the context of your quotation from The Spectator. Because as we speak, Foxconn which produces our iPhones has electrified the roof because of suicides that happened by Chinese
unknown
workers jumping off. At the same time we know
workers jumping off. At the same time we know
unknown
that in India, the number of farmers that have committed suicide victims of genetically modified experiments with their crops by Monsanto and the rest—and these suicides both in Foxconn and in India which
that in India, the number of farmers that have committed suicide victims of genetically modified experiments with their crops by Monsanto and the rest—and these suicides both in Foxconn and in India which
unknown
I'm just using paradigmatically
I'm just using paradigmatically
Slavoj Žižek
here go completely hand in hand with spectacular economic growth. Because the farming communities that use these GM crops, statistically speaking, are booming and so is Foxconn. And despite the fact that workers in Foxconn worked for hours in Dickensian conditions, conditions that Engels described so well about Manchester in the conditions of the English working class, that in macroeconomic statistics that The Spectator takes properly—seriously—represents the golden age that that article mentions. But we need to stiffen our lip. Beside saying what Engels were saying and what Marx was saying, that the industrial revolution and capitalism is wonderfully ambiguous in that it simultaneously and dialectically generates immense unprecedented wealth and unheard-of depravity and the privation. Despite that, you are quite right to insist and we are quite right to insist that this is nevertheless a crisis of capitalism even measured by GDP standards. Because let's face it, you mentioned the Bricks which they celebrate in The Spectator and The Economist and so on. None of these countries are self-sustaining. All of them are net exporters depending on the capacity of the Atlanticist states on the one hand the United States on the other Europe to absorb those net exports. Neither Brazil nor China can maintain that growth. They are in the in the sense completely embroiled in the capitalist crisis which is unfolding in Europe and America. So we have a growth which is utterly corrupted by massive rises in human pain and at the same time we have a growth which is not even sustainable in its own by its own criteria. So you need to stiffen your lip a bit. Let me emphasize this, I totally agree with you. Let me begin with things that you said about Foxconn. Because I already wrote about it, I even didn't know about this detail but already what I knew about what I knew long ago, two years ago about Foxconn, it's wonderful, wonderful in the terrifying sense. For example do you know I read in a report given to me by a Chinese friend, do you know that as a reaction to this suicide, Foxconn—it's a wonderful measure that Michel Foucault would have loved as biopolitics, moralization—that Foxconn now makes their employees—it's the condition of getting employed there—sign an anti-suicide pact, where you promise that you will not kill yourself. Okay that's ridiculous, but now comes the better part: and you must oblige yourself that if you see any of your neighbors, colleagues at work in a too depressed mood that you will quickly report him. That's the other thing is that this electrification that you mention is a further step from what I heard a year or two ago and I love this, is that since these buildings they are putting together iPads blah blah are multi-story buildings and they were jumping from up, that they were placing around the windows large networks, you know. That's what I call capitalism with the human face, you know, so that if you jump down maybe you will not die you get caught in a network. And but do you know then the most obscene thing which caused scandal even in China? Is that the boss of network visited somewhere, was it Shanghai or Taipei I don't know where, one of the big zoos, zoological gardens there and in an extremely open tasteless way he directly commented at it: I have to organize the cohabitation in my factory of so many living beings, animals, that I would like a lesson from a zoo park how you get this and so on and so on. But—so I totally agree with you. Also absolutely agree with your second point. Which is that of course there is a growing crisis and it's a structural crisis. I'm trying to read economists you, Lazzarato, my American friends to understand what it is about but I absolutely I absolutely agree with you. I simply think that it's a dream and it's the most dangerous utopia that we have today. It's a dream that
here go completely hand in hand with spectacular economic growth. Because the farming communities that use these GM crops, statistically speaking, are booming and so is Foxconn. And despite the fact that workers in Foxconn worked for hours in Dickensian conditions, conditions that Engels described so well about Manchester in the conditions of the English working class, that in macroeconomic statistics that The Spectator takes properly—seriously—represents the golden age that that article mentions. But we need to stiffen our lip. Beside saying what Engels were saying and what Marx was saying, that the industrial revolution and capitalism is wonderfully ambiguous in that it simultaneously and dialectically generates immense unprecedented wealth and unheard-of depravity and the privation. Despite that, you are quite right to insist and we are quite right to insist that this is nevertheless a crisis of capitalism even measured by GDP standards. Because let's face it, you mentioned the Bricks which they celebrate in The Spectator and The Economist and so on. None of these countries are self-sustaining. All of them are net exporters depending on the capacity of the Atlanticist states on the one hand the United States on the other Europe to absorb those net exports. Neither Brazil nor China can maintain that growth. They are in the in the sense completely embroiled in the capitalist crisis which is unfolding in Europe and America. So we have a growth which is utterly corrupted by massive rises in human pain and at the same time we have a growth which is not even sustainable in its own by its own criteria. So you need to stiffen your lip a bit. Let me emphasize this, I totally agree with you. Let me begin with things that you said about Foxconn. Because I already wrote about it, I even didn't know about this detail but already what I knew about what I knew long ago, two years ago about Foxconn, it's wonderful, wonderful in the terrifying sense. For example do you know I read in a report given to me by a Chinese friend, do you know that as a reaction to this suicide, Foxconn—it's a wonderful measure that Michel Foucault would have loved as biopolitics, moralization—that Foxconn now makes their employees—it's the condition of getting employed there—sign an anti-suicide pact, where you promise that you will not kill yourself. Okay that's ridiculous, but now comes the better part: and you must oblige yourself that if you see any of your neighbors, colleagues at work in a too depressed mood that you will quickly report him. That's the other thing is that this electrification that you mention is a further step from what I heard a year or two ago and I love this, is that since these buildings they are putting together iPads blah blah are multi-story buildings and they were jumping from up, that they were placing around the windows large networks, you know. That's what I call capitalism with the human face, you know, so that if you jump down maybe you will not die you get caught in a network. And but do you know then the most obscene thing which caused scandal even in China? Is that the boss of network visited somewhere, was it Shanghai or Taipei I don't know where, one of the big zoos, zoological gardens there and in an extremely open tasteless way he directly commented at it: I have to organize the cohabitation in my factory of so many living beings, animals, that I would like a lesson from a zoo park how you get this and so on and so on. But—so I totally agree with you. Also absolutely agree with your second point. Which is that of course there is a growing crisis and it's a structural crisis. I'm trying to read economists you, Lazzarato, my American friends to understand what it is about but I absolutely I absolutely agree with you. I simply think that it's a dream and it's the most dangerous utopia that we have today. It's a dream that
unknown
if we somehow, how should I put it, just concentrate and
if we somehow, how should I put it, just concentrate and
Slavoj Žižek
don't do too much and just ameliorate things here and there then somehow we will manage and the world the way it is will survive. No! I think we already are in an incredible social change of deteriorating ethical standards, political standards and so on and so on. For example what I
don't do too much and just ameliorate things here and there then somehow we will manage and the world the way it is will survive. No! I think we already are in an incredible social change of deteriorating ethical standards, political standards and so on and so on. For example what I
unknown
always like to mention: are
always like to mention: are
unknown
we aware what kind of ethical counter-revolution this is that all of a sudden now in a silent way although there are some resistance torture is—of political pri—of prisoners is—silently it publicly became publicly acceptable and so on and so on. So no, I think that it's not just that the system is going on, things are changing, things are changing, we are in the middle of the change and as with all great changes we are not even aware how things are changing. The only thing I maybe didn't quite get is—what do you mean by that stiffen lips? I agree with you, it's this terrifying impact and so on
we aware what kind of ethical counter-revolution this is that all of a sudden now in a silent way although there are some resistance torture is—of political pri—of prisoners is—silently it publicly became publicly acceptable and so on and so on. So no, I think that it's not just that the system is going on, things are changing, things are changing, we are in the middle of the change and as with all great changes we are not even aware how things are changing. The only thing I maybe didn't quite get is—what do you mean by that stiffen lips? I agree with you, it's this terrifying impact and so on
Slavoj Žižek
and so on. But okay, then just if you can shout back at me quickly, can you just then answer but then do you where I stand is that I'm again fully aware of all of this, but I sincerely don't believe that any reference to or reliance on some pre-modern forms of solidarity will help. That's what the Chinese are precisely trying to do it. I spoke in China with their low-level I admit functionaries and they told me that's the basis of their you know support for religion. Don't be deceived by that anti-Buddhist campaigns and so on. This is only when religion is politicized. But basically Chinese government is spending billions on religion because they are fully aware that with this violent destabilization, social disintegration—and they are at the same time aware that communist ideology can no longer seriously provide social homogeneity, so they play either with patriotism, a kind of Confucian patriotism, or directly with religion. I think they are absolutely sincere in their appraisal of religion. All I'm saying is that I don't believe in this option because it's for me at its most elementary a fascist option. This is fascism: we can get modernization if we stabilize it with some forms of ancient hierarchy and so on and so on. That's the only thing on which I would insist as it were. That there is nonetheless no way back. But the irony of what you said I'm fully aware of, even do you know that the this is the most brutal sad thing: the greatest number of farmers' suicides in India are in how is called the area it's Bengal around Calcutta or Kolkata. West Bengal I think. No, east. Whatever. Okay there where the irony is that for years or more local communist power, communist were in power there. And they did a very successful thing I was told. They distributed land to small farmers and West Bengal for long time importer of food within India started to export food. Now and that's the sad thing. It's the communist in power who became this global market modernizers, claiming oh it's no longer good enough, small far—farmers, we have to modernize and again they triggered I think it's in the tens of thousands farmers head of families who cannot take care of their family and simply kill themselves. And we have to be very careful here about what we read in our media. For example you remember it was reported all around our media a couple of gang rapes, you know, a girl, I don't know where, raped with five men in a bus and the whole—yeah, but my friend from India Arundhati Roy, the writer, wrote a wonderful comment where she pointed out: why was there such a universal outcry? Because the five rapists were pull poor lower-class people. She wrote if you are really horrified by it, my God go to Bombay and look at the totally tolerated by those in power structure of their whorehouses, prostitution houses. It's a complicated network where regularly agents are sent to poor parts of India or Nepal buying girls aged from five six years already, who are simply sold by poor farmers and then they are either immediately used in bordellos or even worse, kept as slaves reserved for rich customers and so on and so on. You know when you have all that horror there and everyone knows it, it is a little bit hypocritical to focus so much on that rape. I mean, if you really worry about suffering of sexually abused women, just go to Bombay and look around a little bit in those... Well since you ask I'll just tell you very quickly. Yeah. Um, when I said stiffen your lip what I meant was when we read articles like that from the Spectator, what we should say is yes, you have a plethora of small truths on which however you are building a scandalous lie, just like Joseph Goebbels has taught you. I totally agree here with you and there are—okay, sorry. No no, here here I totally agree with you and this is a nice example of how ideology functions today you know. It's in the selection you don't even you don't even have to tell the truth and so on. And I think when you used the Goebbels here you used a wonderful example. Because you know I like to say this to shock my friends. For example when you debate with a Nazi who is ferociously anti-Semitic the Jews: you should never limit debate simply just to facts. Facts can be manipulated. For example if a Nazi from late thirties in Germany tells you, Jews are seducing our German girls, well of course, probably and I hope they did, some of them did it and so on. It's at least partially true. If they say Jews are exploiting German workers, where not all
and so on. But okay, then just if you can shout back at me quickly, can you just then answer but then do you where I stand is that I'm again fully aware of all of this, but I sincerely don't believe that any reference to or reliance on some pre-modern forms of solidarity will help. That's what the Chinese are precisely trying to do it. I spoke in China with their low-level I admit functionaries and they told me that's the basis of their you know support for religion. Don't be deceived by that anti-Buddhist campaigns and so on. This is only when religion is politicized. But basically Chinese government is spending billions on religion because they are fully aware that with this violent destabilization, social disintegration—and they are at the same time aware that communist ideology can no longer seriously provide social homogeneity, so they play either with patriotism, a kind of Confucian patriotism, or directly with religion. I think they are absolutely sincere in their appraisal of religion. All I'm saying is that I don't believe in this option because it's for me at its most elementary a fascist option. This is fascism: we can get modernization if we stabilize it with some forms of ancient hierarchy and so on and so on. That's the only thing on which I would insist as it were. That there is nonetheless no way back. But the irony of what you said I'm fully aware of, even do you know that the this is the most brutal sad thing: the greatest number of farmers' suicides in India are in how is called the area it's Bengal around Calcutta or Kolkata. West Bengal I think. No, east. Whatever. Okay there where the irony is that for years or more local communist power, communist were in power there. And they did a very successful thing I was told. They distributed land to small farmers and West Bengal for long time importer of food within India started to export food. Now and that's the sad thing. It's the communist in power who became this global market modernizers, claiming oh it's no longer good enough, small far—farmers, we have to modernize and again they triggered I think it's in the tens of thousands farmers head of families who cannot take care of their family and simply kill themselves. And we have to be very careful here about what we read in our media. For example you remember it was reported all around our media a couple of gang rapes, you know, a girl, I don't know where, raped with five men in a bus and the whole—yeah, but my friend from India Arundhati Roy, the writer, wrote a wonderful comment where she pointed out: why was there such a universal outcry? Because the five rapists were pull poor lower-class people. She wrote if you are really horrified by it, my God go to Bombay and look at the totally tolerated by those in power structure of their whorehouses, prostitution houses. It's a complicated network where regularly agents are sent to poor parts of India or Nepal buying girls aged from five six years already, who are simply sold by poor farmers and then they are either immediately used in bordellos or even worse, kept as slaves reserved for rich customers and so on and so on. You know when you have all that horror there and everyone knows it, it is a little bit hypocritical to focus so much on that rape. I mean, if you really worry about suffering of sexually abused women, just go to Bombay and look around a little bit in those... Well since you ask I'll just tell you very quickly. Yeah. Um, when I said stiffen your lip what I meant was when we read articles like that from the Spectator, what we should say is yes, you have a plethora of small truths on which however you are building a scandalous lie, just like Joseph Goebbels has taught you. I totally agree here with you and there are—okay, sorry. No no, here here I totally agree with you and this is a nice example of how ideology functions today you know. It's in the selection you don't even you don't even have to tell the truth and so on. And I think when you used the Goebbels here you used a wonderful example. Because you know I like to say this to shock my friends. For example when you debate with a Nazi who is ferociously anti-Semitic the Jews: you should never limit debate simply just to facts. Facts can be manipulated. For example if a Nazi from late thirties in Germany tells you, Jews are seducing our German girls, well of course, probably and I hope they did, some of them did it and so on. It's at least partially true. If they say Jews are exploiting German workers, where not all
unknown
but some of the Jews
but some of the Jews
Slavoj Žižek
were rich and so on and so on. So you see the point is not this, the moment you accept the debate at this point, you know, you are—you are lost. So but still, you know what's the problem for me of the left? It is nonetheless and I ask you now as an economist and so on: like what—it's a stupid question and it's the one million dollar question as in a TV show because all of us—where, in what do you see the solution? In a more socially controlled neo-Keynesian capitalism, in this, in this? Can you give us a general sense of orientation? You want me to do it now? Yeah but in like seconds. Ha ha! Okay in two sentences. Yeah. We need a Keynesian stabilization just because the freefall is not revolutionary and it only helps the Nazis. The second question: once stabilization is achieved that buys us breathing ground in order to dream dangerously about the good society. Of course. There was another question here, yeah. Thank you. I'll change the topic
were rich and so on and so on. So you see the point is not this, the moment you accept the debate at this point, you know, you are—you are lost. So but still, you know what's the problem for me of the left? It is nonetheless and I ask you now as an economist and so on: like what—it's a stupid question and it's the one million dollar question as in a TV show because all of us—where, in what do you see the solution? In a more socially controlled neo-Keynesian capitalism, in this, in this? Can you give us a general sense of orientation? You want me to do it now? Yeah but in like seconds. Ha ha! Okay in two sentences. Yeah. We need a Keynesian stabilization just because the freefall is not revolutionary and it only helps the Nazis. The second question: once stabilization is achieved that buys us breathing ground in order to dream dangerously about the good society. Of course. There was another question here, yeah. Thank you. I'll change the topic
unknown
back to love and... And while you were speaking I was thinking
back to love and... And while you were speaking I was thinking
unknown
of a movie that brings up this love as a political category. I don't know if you have seen it, this Lives of Others, which I think it's a rather stupid movie about this police officer, secret police officer— I know, I know. —Oh you know! Okay. So you know that there is this particular transformation of the secret police officer when he watches the couple being completely in love making passionate love and so on and so forth. So basically the message is that okay once you are exposed even as an evil secret police officer, once you are exposed to this beautiful miracle of love, you transform yourself and basically break with your institution and everyday life rules and you turn good. And I was wondering to what extent or where do you draw the line with your own theory of love from this bourgeois or if you want
of a movie that brings up this love as a political category. I don't know if you have seen it, this Lives of Others, which I think it's a rather stupid movie about this police officer, secret police officer— I know, I know. —Oh you know! Okay. So you know that there is this particular transformation of the secret police officer when he watches the couple being completely in love making passionate love and so on and so forth. So basically the message is that okay once you are exposed even as an evil secret police officer, once you are exposed to this beautiful miracle of love, you transform yourself and basically break with your institution and everyday life rules and you turn good. And I was wondering to what extent or where do you draw the line with your own theory of love from this bourgeois or if you want
unknown
modern bourgeois category of love which is in itself also sort of claiming universal and claiming this particular break with the mundane reality. So where is the particular gap that you see? Nice question. First I would say the Stasi officer: he doesn't fall in love, he falls with a—he's an observer. But now if you permit me, we all know what we are talking about. Leben der Anderen, Lives of Others, the well-known German film blah blah got the Oscar and so on. I am also like you totally opposed to this film. The first—my first reading is that it's almost a modern version of Casablanca. Beneath official topic of heterosexual love it's clearly the final line of the film could have been: this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Between the writer and the Stasi agent, and clearly the woman has to be sacrificed, no? Like we get rid of the woman, the true couple is created. Second thing: the movie—that's the paradox. Although the author is ferociously anti-communist, and a friend of mine in Germany who knows the director even explained to me why. He comes from this complicated von Donnersmarck I
modern bourgeois category of love which is in itself also sort of claiming universal and claiming this particular break with the mundane reality. So where is the particular gap that you see? Nice question. First I would say the Stasi officer: he doesn't fall in love, he falls with a—he's an observer. But now if you permit me, we all know what we are talking about. Leben der Anderen, Lives of Others, the well-known German film blah blah got the Oscar and so on. I am also like you totally opposed to this film. The first—my first reading is that it's almost a modern version of Casablanca. Beneath official topic of heterosexual love it's clearly the final line of the film could have been: this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Between the writer and the Stasi agent, and clearly the woman has to be sacrificed, no? Like we get rid of the woman, the true couple is created. Second thing: the movie—that's the paradox. Although the author is ferociously anti-communist, and a friend of mine in Germany who knows the director even explained to me why. He comes from this complicated von Donnersmarck I
Slavoj Žižek
don't know what, he comes from East Prussian family who never forgave the Soviets to take their castle from them, no? So this film is a personal revenge. But the irony is that the movie is not harsh enough against the horror of police rule. You know why not? What's the hypothesis of the woman? You know the story. Young successful, not so young successful writer with a beautiful woman, some high political—some high political minister even whatever functionary falls in love with the woman and he orders secret police to cover the husband totally, to discover something so that he will get rid of the husband to have the woman. What a terrible—what a terrible falsification. The whole—listen what happens in this film could have happened in any society. If you are—if you have a relatively powerful position, a CIA agent can do this, top executive... that is to say the liberal limit of the film is that it locates evil in one of these private vices. You want money, you want sex, whatever, you do something criminal. But the true horror of Stasi in DDR was the following one: imagine that there is no wicked minister who wanted if you are the writer—sorry to be personal—imagine there is no secret—there is no high nomenclature guy who wants to fuck your wife. There are only under quotation marks good policemen like the hero, and you would still be under observation. You know, instead of showing how total control was part of the system... Imagine a writer like the hero of the film whose plays are performed in the West and so on, it's unimaginable in DDR that such a person irrespective of who wants to fuck his wife would not be under permanent observation. And again so you see the paradox. This film paints the portrait of horror of DDR—it's much too—it's much too modest. Which is why although it's a little bit kitschy I prefer the other film, Good Bye, Lenin!. Why? Because the fundamental premise embodied in the fate of the mother of that film is that the only way to survive if you are an honest communist is that you go crazy, to put it bluntly, no? It's a—you know, but it's not just Ostalgie as they criticized it. And but you know did you see the third film by I forgot the director, Barbara? It's a third a newer film about an East German women doctor being displaced onto some Baltic sea resort, falling in love with a local guy who is has to report on her but is also half dissident. This is also definitely better film than Leben der Anderen, no? I think that was hopefully for us a one-hit wonder of that guy. Didn't he do that von whatever the Prussian castle owner? Didn't he do some horrible film with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp? Sorry? Yeah, didn't he do that one? And it's horrible, so we are rid of that guy. So there is another question here, yeah. Hello, I'm want to ask you about imagine that everything goes like you say, like the perfect love, the perfect world, the perfect earth, the perfect everything. What happened next when we are living each others and appears our really nature? Our real nature is like everybody can be an assassin, you know? It's like everybody can be like a murderer. You must just push a button and our nature is like we are natural born killers. I wouldn't be—no I'm not ideal, I'm glad that the director of the natural born killers is here, yeah. No, first I would have said that you know I have no great belief in what you call human nature. I always opposed this spontaneous communist idea that if you are for new more solidary society that you must somehow believe in essential goodness of humans and so on. No I tend to agree spontaneously like many intelligent Marxists like look at Bertolt Brecht. He said in a wonderful short text that humans are by nature evil, you cannot change humans you can only change conditions to take from the people the possibility to actualize their evil or whatever. But on the other hand you know things are a little bit more complicated. When you say we are all natural born killers, I wouldn't put it like this. I would put it like we have maybe a certain propensity for violence, for acting out, which can be put to many different uses. It can be turned into—you know what I mean? The problem, I don't see a great problem here. I think it's the same problem as for example if you talk with intelligent geneticists, biologists, and they tell you all of them who are real professional scientists, and they tell me forget about all that bullshit, we discovered a gene for homosexuality, for jealousy, for religion, it's all bullshit. These are very vague tendencies and it turns on the combination with other genes how they turn out. And it's the same I think with this human human nature. I I doubt that there are I'm not saying I never let me be clear in this way when I talk about communism and so on: no, I'm not even saying there will be, if there will be, a society which will overcome capitalism, I'm not even saying there will be more happiness there and so on or whatever, less suffering and so on and so on. I'm totally a the most brutal realist you can imagine here. On on the top of it, I think so I didn't use the word ideal, I used the word miracle. I believe in miracles. I think life is shit but I believe in a materialist way miracles happen. And that's for me the greatness of ethics. I knew people who were total shit, conformists and so on, and at some point they say fuck it, I have it enough, I will not
don't know what, he comes from East Prussian family who never forgave the Soviets to take their castle from them, no? So this film is a personal revenge. But the irony is that the movie is not harsh enough against the horror of police rule. You know why not? What's the hypothesis of the woman? You know the story. Young successful, not so young successful writer with a beautiful woman, some high political—some high political minister even whatever functionary falls in love with the woman and he orders secret police to cover the husband totally, to discover something so that he will get rid of the husband to have the woman. What a terrible—what a terrible falsification. The whole—listen what happens in this film could have happened in any society. If you are—if you have a relatively powerful position, a CIA agent can do this, top executive... that is to say the liberal limit of the film is that it locates evil in one of these private vices. You want money, you want sex, whatever, you do something criminal. But the true horror of Stasi in DDR was the following one: imagine that there is no wicked minister who wanted if you are the writer—sorry to be personal—imagine there is no secret—there is no high nomenclature guy who wants to fuck your wife. There are only under quotation marks good policemen like the hero, and you would still be under observation. You know, instead of showing how total control was part of the system... Imagine a writer like the hero of the film whose plays are performed in the West and so on, it's unimaginable in DDR that such a person irrespective of who wants to fuck his wife would not be under permanent observation. And again so you see the paradox. This film paints the portrait of horror of DDR—it's much too—it's much too modest. Which is why although it's a little bit kitschy I prefer the other film, Good Bye, Lenin!. Why? Because the fundamental premise embodied in the fate of the mother of that film is that the only way to survive if you are an honest communist is that you go crazy, to put it bluntly, no? It's a—you know, but it's not just Ostalgie as they criticized it. And but you know did you see the third film by I forgot the director, Barbara? It's a third a newer film about an East German women doctor being displaced onto some Baltic sea resort, falling in love with a local guy who is has to report on her but is also half dissident. This is also definitely better film than Leben der Anderen, no? I think that was hopefully for us a one-hit wonder of that guy. Didn't he do that von whatever the Prussian castle owner? Didn't he do some horrible film with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp? Sorry? Yeah, didn't he do that one? And it's horrible, so we are rid of that guy. So there is another question here, yeah. Hello, I'm want to ask you about imagine that everything goes like you say, like the perfect love, the perfect world, the perfect earth, the perfect everything. What happened next when we are living each others and appears our really nature? Our real nature is like everybody can be an assassin, you know? It's like everybody can be like a murderer. You must just push a button and our nature is like we are natural born killers. I wouldn't be—no I'm not ideal, I'm glad that the director of the natural born killers is here, yeah. No, first I would have said that you know I have no great belief in what you call human nature. I always opposed this spontaneous communist idea that if you are for new more solidary society that you must somehow believe in essential goodness of humans and so on. No I tend to agree spontaneously like many intelligent Marxists like look at Bertolt Brecht. He said in a wonderful short text that humans are by nature evil, you cannot change humans you can only change conditions to take from the people the possibility to actualize their evil or whatever. But on the other hand you know things are a little bit more complicated. When you say we are all natural born killers, I wouldn't put it like this. I would put it like we have maybe a certain propensity for violence, for acting out, which can be put to many different uses. It can be turned into—you know what I mean? The problem, I don't see a great problem here. I think it's the same problem as for example if you talk with intelligent geneticists, biologists, and they tell you all of them who are real professional scientists, and they tell me forget about all that bullshit, we discovered a gene for homosexuality, for jealousy, for religion, it's all bullshit. These are very vague tendencies and it turns on the combination with other genes how they turn out. And it's the same I think with this human human nature. I I doubt that there are I'm not saying I never let me be clear in this way when I talk about communism and so on: no, I'm not even saying there will be, if there will be, a society which will overcome capitalism, I'm not even saying there will be more happiness there and so on or whatever, less suffering and so on and so on. I'm totally a the most brutal realist you can imagine here. On on the top of it, I think so I didn't use the word ideal, I used the word miracle. I believe in miracles. I think life is shit but I believe in a materialist way miracles happen. And that's for me the greatness of ethics. I knew people who were total shit, conformists and so on, and at some point they say fuck it, I have it enough, I will not
unknown
take this, and they become momentarily heroes. A great figure from history for this: Giordano Bruno. We only know about his you know how he was burned, but you know that till that final moment he was
take this, and they become momentarily heroes. A great figure from history for this: Giordano Bruno. We only know about his you know how he was burned, but you know that till that final moment he was
Slavoj Žižek
just walking around slandering, compromising and so on, all of a sudden you have the moment of a miracle. And I read a wonderful similar story of a top German Nazi officer. He was not a mega anti-Semite, but he was a pretty nasty guy. He was helping organizing Holocaust blah blah. At a certain point in '43 something broke in him. And he said no inact I cannot go on with this anymore. And he risked his life to save Jews and so on and so on. So no I'm don't believe in any good human nature. I believe in miracles. I believe that while life is generally shit, things happen here and there, you know. We all I don't you, we all cheat our wives our husbands it's all bullshit. Fuck it, once here and there you find André Gorz. You know? And that's enough for me almost. I'm very modest.
just walking around slandering, compromising and so on, all of a sudden you have the moment of a miracle. And I read a wonderful similar story of a top German Nazi officer. He was not a mega anti-Semite, but he was a pretty nasty guy. He was helping organizing Holocaust blah blah. At a certain point in '43 something broke in him. And he said no inact I cannot go on with this anymore. And he risked his life to save Jews and so on and so on. So no I'm don't believe in any good human nature. I believe in miracles. I believe that while life is generally shit, things happen here and there, you know. We all I don't you, we all cheat our wives our husbands it's all bullshit. Fuck it, once here and there you find André Gorz. You know? And that's enough for me almost. I'm very modest.
unknown
I just need a miracle here and there. Can we stop it slowly? Yeah. Since our simultaneous translators are working all the day and please a big applause for them as well.
I just need a miracle here and there. Can we stop it slowly? Yeah. Since our simultaneous translators are working all the day and please a big applause for them as well.
unknown
I know what they will be doing now. They will hate me so much for me talking fast that immediately they will go home or to a store, buy a voodoo doll of me and they will be putting needles in you know to so that then I will awaken with pains as a revenge. And I understand you fully for doing that. But the question is what did they do translate right now? I hope you did what I once saw when I was young, a wonderful documentary on remember if you are old enough there was Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti and then there was Baby Doc, the stupid son, big fat guy who was a dictator and I saw once I saw on TV a press conference with him and a Western journalist asked him what's
I know what they will be doing now. They will hate me so much for me talking fast that immediately they will go home or to a store, buy a voodoo doll of me and they will be putting needles in you know to so that then I will awaken with pains as a revenge. And I understand you fully for doing that. But the question is what did they do translate right now? I hope you did what I once saw when I was young, a wonderful documentary on remember if you are old enough there was Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti and then there was Baby Doc, the stupid son, big fat guy who was a dictator and I saw once I saw on TV a press conference with him and a Western journalist asked him what's
Slavoj Žižek
the economic situation in Haiti. And Duvalier just said, buh, it's not too bad. And then the translator translated this in view of the recent stock exchange trends and that theory and so on. I hope you did the opposite, no? I go on for minutes and you say he's just bullshitting he doesn't have a good answer. So one last question. Who will it be? If there are no questions... No I will be the pseudo-Buddhist or Heideggerian: if there are no questions then you should listen to silence itself as the ultimate answer you know and clap with one hand to it, okay? Unfortunately there is a question without a title. There's one brief question, I'll try to make it brief. Uh, it's about a book written by a young French historian and philosopher. I think her last name's Decreux. I bought the book for my mom's birthday so I haven't read all of it but I've read the main part. Anyway, it's about the main part is about Mussolini as such and Hitler, which really made a quite made a quite impression on me. My point is, they were major leaders, they were seen as strong characters, Il Duce, Der Führer and all that, whilst when we read their letters to their mistresses, they were quite fragile, very unstable and even there's a letter from Mussolini to one of his mistresses where he says that he's so miserable, poor, he doesn't know how to cope, how to manage without her. And there's this notion of love and yet power, which reflects this lack of power, lack of power in the Lacanian sense we could say. And how would you how would you comment that? That a person is on one side a great leader and on the other side very weak person and has no friends, has numerous mistresses and so on, but he's a very he's a person that has no self-confidence but on the other side a great leader. No no, I got it. Okay, I think I can give you a very brief and precise answer. What I don't believe in is that this intimate self-experience is some kind of a deeper truth about that person. I think that the truth is outside, in what Mussolini was doing, and I think that this self-image of a vulnerable fragile person is precisely the lie he invented for himself to be able to do the horrors he was doing publicly out there. And this goes generally, you know I don't think that—because if you approach it in this way, it's not only Hitler and Mussolini. I'm absolutely sure that Stalin played and loved his daughter Svetlana and so on and so on. All dictators, or generally men, bad evil men, the more they are brutal the more they need some private fetish when they can say or for example the in in managers, sorry in with big bank managers and so on. I think that the same role is played by private donations
the economic situation in Haiti. And Duvalier just said, buh, it's not too bad. And then the translator translated this in view of the recent stock exchange trends and that theory and so on. I hope you did the opposite, no? I go on for minutes and you say he's just bullshitting he doesn't have a good answer. So one last question. Who will it be? If there are no questions... No I will be the pseudo-Buddhist or Heideggerian: if there are no questions then you should listen to silence itself as the ultimate answer you know and clap with one hand to it, okay? Unfortunately there is a question without a title. There's one brief question, I'll try to make it brief. Uh, it's about a book written by a young French historian and philosopher. I think her last name's Decreux. I bought the book for my mom's birthday so I haven't read all of it but I've read the main part. Anyway, it's about the main part is about Mussolini as such and Hitler, which really made a quite made a quite impression on me. My point is, they were major leaders, they were seen as strong characters, Il Duce, Der Führer and all that, whilst when we read their letters to their mistresses, they were quite fragile, very unstable and even there's a letter from Mussolini to one of his mistresses where he says that he's so miserable, poor, he doesn't know how to cope, how to manage without her. And there's this notion of love and yet power, which reflects this lack of power, lack of power in the Lacanian sense we could say. And how would you how would you comment that? That a person is on one side a great leader and on the other side very weak person and has no friends, has numerous mistresses and so on, but he's a very he's a person that has no self-confidence but on the other side a great leader. No no, I got it. Okay, I think I can give you a very brief and precise answer. What I don't believe in is that this intimate self-experience is some kind of a deeper truth about that person. I think that the truth is outside, in what Mussolini was doing, and I think that this self-image of a vulnerable fragile person is precisely the lie he invented for himself to be able to do the horrors he was doing publicly out there. And this goes generally, you know I don't think that—because if you approach it in this way, it's not only Hitler and Mussolini. I'm absolutely sure that Stalin played and loved his daughter Svetlana and so on and so on. All dictators, or generally men, bad evil men, the more they are brutal the more they need some private fetish when they can say or for example the in in managers, sorry in with big bank managers and so on. I think that the same role is played by private donations
unknown
and charities, you know. You're a manager of a big bank brutally destroying lives of tens of thousand, then in the afternoon you say my it's horrible what is
and charities, you know. You're a manager of a big bank brutally destroying lives of tens of thousand, then in the afternoon you say my it's horrible what is
unknown
happening in
happening in
Slavoj Žižek
Somalia, let me give on my wealth to them and you feel so good and you can tell yourself you see that's just business that I'm ruining hundreds of thousand, this is the true me, this fragile person who is ready to cry with you. This is it. So again, to put it very brutally, I think that we don't lie just to others. We lie especially to ourselves. And especially when we do horrible things we need as it were a private myth how we present ourselves to ourselves. My God, this is a dream of very great men who does horrible things, to present himself, "but you see, if you were to see me alone, you would see that I'm also a modest person with all the weaknesses and so on and so on." Which is why I claim that maybe even the fundamental form of ideology today is: I'm not just embodiment of economic or ideological categories, I'm also a warm fragile human person. That's the lie. And that's why I like Brecht where in a brutal way he doesn't allow for that. He precisely reduces capitalists or people to their social roles. Like the big rule of Brecht is please don't come up with that bullshit what a beautiful deep profound careful person you are privately for yourself and so on and so on. That's that's for me not even something specifically communist, this is what I see even already the legacy, the great legacy of Jewish ethics. It's a totally intersubjective ethics. It's not... Oh no no wait a minute, I am very critical of wait a minute, I am usually accused in Israel of up to preparing a new Holocaust and so on. I'm part of the boycott there so I'm not... but my criticism of state of Israel is I think more intelligent. What I'm claiming is that the greatest threat to what was great in Jewish identity comes from the state of Israel the way it works now. If the tendency if whatever they are doing now will go on in one two generations Jews will be just another boring colonialist nation like all the other all that was
Somalia, let me give on my wealth to them and you feel so good and you can tell yourself you see that's just business that I'm ruining hundreds of thousand, this is the true me, this fragile person who is ready to cry with you. This is it. So again, to put it very brutally, I think that we don't lie just to others. We lie especially to ourselves. And especially when we do horrible things we need as it were a private myth how we present ourselves to ourselves. My God, this is a dream of very great men who does horrible things, to present himself, "but you see, if you were to see me alone, you would see that I'm also a modest person with all the weaknesses and so on and so on." Which is why I claim that maybe even the fundamental form of ideology today is: I'm not just embodiment of economic or ideological categories, I'm also a warm fragile human person. That's the lie. And that's why I like Brecht where in a brutal way he doesn't allow for that. He precisely reduces capitalists or people to their social roles. Like the big rule of Brecht is please don't come up with that bullshit what a beautiful deep profound careful person you are privately for yourself and so on and so on. That's that's for me not even something specifically communist, this is what I see even already the legacy, the great legacy of Jewish ethics. It's a totally intersubjective ethics. It's not... Oh no no wait a minute, I am very critical of wait a minute, I am usually accused in Israel of up to preparing a new Holocaust and so on. I'm part of the boycott there so I'm not... but my criticism of state of Israel is I think more intelligent. What I'm claiming is that the greatest threat to what was great in Jewish identity comes from the state of Israel the way it works now. If the tendency if whatever they are doing now will go on in one two generations Jews will be just another boring colonialist nation like all the other all that was
unknown
great in Jewish tradition there implicit universality
great in Jewish tradition there implicit universality
Slavoj Žižek
and so on will be lost. But what I want to say that the greatness of traditional Jewish ethics is the total externalization like the truth is not
and so on will be lost. But what I want to say that the greatness of traditional Jewish ethics is the total externalization like the truth is not
unknown
but how did what did this no the truth is
but how did what did this no the truth is
Slavoj Žižek
in how you interact with others not in how did you experience it in your insight what did it mean to your spiritual growth. I think that all these categories of authentic self-experience inner spiritual growth and so on are bullshit. I believe in total externality. To give you another from my old books example, my favorite story about ethics is how it was told by an old black friend for me from South Africa. In the old days of apartheid police was dispersing
in how you interact with others not in how did you experience it in your insight what did it mean to your spiritual growth. I think that all these categories of authentic self-experience inner spiritual growth and so on are bullshit. I believe in total externality. To give you another from my old books example, my favorite story about ethics is how it was told by an old black friend for me from South Africa. In the old days of apartheid police was dispersing
unknown
a black demonstration and one
a black demonstration and one
Slavoj Žižek
policeman was running after and she was trying to escape him a black lady, probably middle class with high
policeman was running after and she was trying to escape him a black lady, probably middle class with high
unknown
heel shoes
heel shoes
unknown
and so on. Then something weird happened. Trying to run away with high heel shoes which doesn't work well made the lady drop she lost one shoe. And at that point the policeman—and I must emphasize this, it's not that he was inherently a good person or what, but these totally superficial manners took over. When you see a lady in distress and he stopped, took the shoe, and give it to her: "Here it is, lady." And then they looked each other and they felt stupid like: now that she has the shoes on what should do, okay now we start running again. So embarrassed he said, "Goodbye lady," and turned around and walked away. That's the morality I believe in. I'm not making the point that's crucial that this black policeman was deep in his heart a good person. No, deep in his heart he was probably a shitty
and so on. Then something weird happened. Trying to run away with high heel shoes which doesn't work well made the lady drop she lost one shoe. And at that point the policeman—and I must emphasize this, it's not that he was inherently a good person or what, but these totally superficial manners took over. When you see a lady in distress and he stopped, took the shoe, and give it to her: "Here it is, lady." And then they looked each other and they felt stupid like: now that she has the shoes on what should do, okay now we start running again. So embarrassed he said, "Goodbye lady," and turned around and walked away. That's the morality I believe in. I'm not making the point that's crucial that this black policeman was deep in his heart a good person. No, deep in his heart he was probably a shitty
unknown
racist and so on. But you know superficial
racist and so on. But you know superficial
Slavoj Žižek
manners can do miracles. You do this times and maybe your deep deep heart will change a little bit. This is for me the greatest case of Mark Twain I think in Huck Finn. There is a legendary scene where I think that Huck or Tom Sawyer I don't know who they help a runaway black slave and then they feel morally bad for doing something blah you know how what they did externally was right but precisely their inner bad feeling is what is non-authentic. Like how they are not racist on the outside, on the outside they did a different thing, on the inside they are racist. Which is why again I believe in surfaces in good manners, you know. I don't believe in that's why I don't believe in I mean I don't believe in really loving others. I I hate this idea of we should love other races, other nations. No we should hate them. We should just learn to pretend to act as if we care for them and to be in this way to maintain a proper distance and so on. I think that the most disgusting motto is this politically correct one "do we know others enough, we should get to know them." No I think people are boring I don't want to know too many thing about them. It's quite enough to have a respectful distance. This idea we should know the other. How can we know the other when the others don't know themselves I mean you know what I mean. I believe in superficial manners. I saw that the applause were not was not too warrant, it's okay, when we communists will take power you will learn how to clap. Not more not more. Okay a bigger applause please. No no. No no. Our man our love is over. I divorce you now.
manners can do miracles. You do this times and maybe your deep deep heart will change a little bit. This is for me the greatest case of Mark Twain I think in Huck Finn. There is a legendary scene where I think that Huck or Tom Sawyer I don't know who they help a runaway black slave and then they feel morally bad for doing something blah you know how what they did externally was right but precisely their inner bad feeling is what is non-authentic. Like how they are not racist on the outside, on the outside they did a different thing, on the inside they are racist. Which is why again I believe in surfaces in good manners, you know. I don't believe in that's why I don't believe in I mean I don't believe in really loving others. I I hate this idea of we should love other races, other nations. No we should hate them. We should just learn to pretend to act as if we care for them and to be in this way to maintain a proper distance and so on. I think that the most disgusting motto is this politically correct one "do we know others enough, we should get to know them." No I think people are boring I don't want to know too many thing about them. It's quite enough to have a respectful distance. This idea we should know the other. How can we know the other when the others don't know themselves I mean you know what I mean. I believe in superficial manners. I saw that the applause were not was not too warrant, it's okay, when we communists will take power you will learn how to clap. Not more not more. Okay a bigger applause please. No no. No no. Our man our love is over. I divorce you now.