Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 8
Lecture · Justin Wagner ·
published 2018-11-29 · 2:11:18 · 18,595 words
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ideologyliberalism-political-correctnesshistorygeopolitics-warphilosophy-generalfascism-populismpsychoanalysispoliticshegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturecapitalismcommunism-socialismdemocracyrevolution-violence
Žižek analyzes the controversy surrounding the Danish Muhammad caricatures, framing it as an 'antinomy of tolerant reason' where liberal arguments for free press clash with Muslim objections to blasphemy. He deconstructs the hypocrisy of Western tolerance by comparing it to Holocaust denial laws and the historical complicity of Zionists with Nazi emigration policies. The excerpt concludes by examining Alain Badiou’s dialectical view of Israel as both a revolutionary and colonial project, questioning whether a universalist state can exist without its nationalist bias. Žižek analyzes the political dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that both sides instrumentalize victimhood to legitimize expansion, proposing that true ethical acts involve admitting one's status as a local superpower or confronting internal authoritarianism. He then critiques contemporary populism as a necessary supplement to administrative post-politics, arguing it relies on a 'constitutive mystification' that avoids complex reality. Finally, he deconstructs the liberal-left's failure to mobilize passion, contrasting it with right-wing fundamentalism, which he interprets not as strength but as a manifestation of liberal resentment and self-hatred. Žižek analyzes Hannah Arendt’s concept of the 'banality of evil' as a moral inversion where duty supersedes pity, then applies Gilbert Chesterton’s paradox of God as both creator and rebel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy. He critiques Michel Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution, arguing it mirrors Heidegger’s support for Nazism through a 'Kantian' focus on the sublime enthusiasm of observers rather than material reality, ultimately exposing a Western progressive trap of enjoying the 'image' of revolution while avoiding its consequences. Žižek analyzes Michel Foucault’s contradictory coverage of the Iranian Revolution, highlighting how Foucault oscillates between celebrating the event’s novelty and retreating to justify its reactionary elements. He argues that Foucault’s defense of the revolution’s ‘historical shit’ (xenophobia, antifeminism) reveals a deeper psychoanalytic truth: radical political enthusiasm requires a ‘charge of chauvinism’ and exclusivity to sustain itself, as individuals cannot confront overwhelming power alone without feeling part of a collective, even a flawed one. This analysis serves as a critique of liberal dismissal of revolutionary movements and explores the dark underside of collective will. Žižek analyzes Foucault’s ambivalent support for the Iranian Revolution, arguing that its 'worst' elements (xenophobia, fundamentalism) were the necessary support for its revolutionary sublime, a split that led Foucault to retreat into neoliberal humanitarianism. He then critiques the 'indestructibility' of capitalism, arguing that obstacles like regulation and the welfare state are not hindrances but the very impetus for capitalist dynamism, as seen in Third Way Social Democracy and state capitalism. Finally, he redefines 'dictatorship of the proletariat' not as party rule, but as the recognition of the unconditional, non-representational excess of power inherent in all state functioning, which must be confronted rather than masked by liberal democracy. Žižek redefines 'dictatorship of the proletariat' not as minority rule but as a struggle for the fundamental frame of state power, contrasting this with liberal-democratic interest politics. He defends his role as a philosopher who diagnoses mystification rather than offering positive programs, citing Marx and Lenin to show that historical outcomes often diverge from plans. The segment concludes with a Q&A where Žižek engages with critics on the left's failure to provide positive visions, referencing the Miner's Strike and Poll Tax revolt.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 49
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “antinomy of tolerant reason”
Žižek's coinage for the irresolvable contradiction between the liberal defense of free speech and the Muslim demand for respect/blasphemy laws regarding the caricatures.
as “euthanasia of pure reason”
Kant's term for the state of hopeless skepticism resulting from the unresolved conflict of reason's antinomies.
Žižek's characterization of the Islamic prohibition on visual representation, contrasting it with the Western 'secularized writing' and carnivalesque tradition.
as “form and content”
A reference to a logical fallacy (arguing from a position one has no right to hold) used to describe Foucault’s two contradictory withdrawals in his analysis of Iran.
Badiou's formulation of Israel as simultaneously a revolutionary emancipatory event and a colonial counter-event.
as “instrumentalization of the Holocaust”
The manipulation of the Holocaust's absolute moral weight to justify contemporary political actions, implying that such actions are so horrific they require this 'trump card' for redemption.
A metaphorical ethical act of self-beating: first confronting one's own internal corruption (Arabs facing their regimes) before blaming an external enemy (Israelis admitting they are a superpower).
as “administrative post-politics”
The reduction of politics to expert rule and the rational administration of conflicting interests, which populism serves as a shadowy double or supplement.
as “constitutive mystification”
The inherent feature of populism where it refuses to confront complexity, reducing it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete enemy to avoid the impotence of dealing with difficult realities.
as “politicization on a depoliticized background”
The paradox of modern populism: it generates passionate mass mobilization ('us vs. them') but is sustained by a middle-class desire to 'live in peace' and avoid genuine political conflict.
George Lakoff's term for the liberal belief that people follow rational calculations of self-interest, which Žižek critiques as ignoring the role of subconscious narrative frames.
as “liberal resentment”
The core nature of right-wing fundamentalism, which is not true radical self-assertion but rather exploding envy, self-hatred, and a sense of inferiority toward the 'decadent' West.
A liberal tendency to 'look into the sun' (blind oneself) to preserve an idealized image of the Other, ignoring problematic realities like clitoridectomy to maintain a patronizing, racist love.
A Lacanian concept illustrated by the ventriloquist who becomes the dummy; Žižek uses it to describe how the radical left sometimes adopts the very pathology it opposes.
as “super-ego sacrificial logic”
The suspicious belief that suffering itself is a necessary signal of moral authenticity, leading to a disgusting form of ethics where pain validates the action.
Arendt's description of how Nazi executioners reinterpreted their actions as a heavy burden of duty, resisting the temptation of pity.
The perverse desire to prove one's ethical grandeur by assuming the 'heavy burden' of inflicting pain, turning violation of instinct into proof of duty.
The unity of the benevolent creator and the supreme criminal/rebel, where God is the 'greatest rebel against himself' and the 'supreme criminal anarchist'.
The extreme self-reflection where the anarchist outburst is not a transgression of law, but law and order itself is revealed as the mask of the highest criminal transgression.
Foucault’s theoretical framework which Žižek claims fails to account for the fact that in late capitalism, the transgression is already institutionalized.
as “Kantian enthusiasm”
The 'sublime image' or 'enthusiastic response' of observers to an event (French Revolution, Iranian Revolution), which constitutes the 'real' dimension of the event for the observer, distinct from empirical history.
The 'ultimate Western trap' of European progressives: the desire for an ideal where one remains a benevolent observer enjoying the 'sublime image' of revolution without engaging in its messy reality.
In Foucault's reading of revolt, the 'transnatural' aspect that interrupts historical causality, appearing as the 'magic' of the revolution itself.
Foucault's distinction where 'revolt' is the pure, unmediated event suspending causality, while 'revolution' is the subsequent reinscription into strategic political calculation and realpolitik.
The idea that when the pure, unperceivable noumenal will (Kant) attempts to appear in reality, it must do so through terror or horror, as pure unity is unsustainable without a negative, exclusionary force.
The paradoxical structure of revolutionary movements where a positive desire for radical change in ordinary life is inextricably bound to a negative, reactionary charge of nationalism, xenophobia, and exclusivity.
Žižek’s term for the reactionary, oppressive, or ‘dirty’ historical elements (racism, antifeminism) that Foucault excuses as necessary fuel for sustaining revolutionary enthusiasm.
Foucault’s concept of a new mode emerging from Iran that breaks out of European modernity, which Žižek critiques for ignoring its reactionary underpinnings.
The pure, unconditional form of revolutionary energy that sustains an event, distinct from pragmatic realpolitik.
Foucault’s late ethical turn, which Žižek interprets as a withdrawal from political struggle into private aesthetics, compatible with late capitalism.
The thesis that capitalism is not a system to be abolished but an eternal, resuscitating force that incorporates its own obstacles.
as “obstacle as impetus”
as “non-representative functioning of politics”
A code word for the proletariat, borrowed from Badiou and Rancière, referring to that part of society which is excluded but stands for universality by virtue of its exclusion.
The current political mode focused on the management of competing particular interests ('your interests, my interests'), which Žižek contrasts with the radical universalist mobilization of the proletariat.
as “ridiculing in an immanent way”
Žižek's method of critique: he does not measure political forces by his own standards, but by their own standards, revealing their failure from within.
as “Hegelian cunning of reason”
Used to describe how Žižek is forced into the open by the host's intervention, allowing him to claim he was 'deprived of the word' to cover his inability to finish, framing the interruption as a necessary dialectical moment.
The primary duty of the philosopher/intellectual: not to provide a program, but to expose how the very framing of problems is part of the problem.
A concept associated with Ernesto Laclau and postmodern leftists, which Žižek argues the left has already adopted desperately, yet fails to produce effective political events.
Stories he reaches for 10
Žižek notes the irony that Lenin planned for every 'cooking lady' to govern, but once in power, the Bolsheviks did something totally opposite, illustrating that historical outcomes often diverge from revolutionary plans.
“Lenin was writing in—in his State and Revolution? 'Every that, how do you call it, kitchen, cuisine, my God, cooking lady, cook, whatever.' Okay. should become, you know, should govern and so on.”
Žižek cites Edward Norton's character in Fight Club beating himself as a model for political ethics: Arabs must first beat themselves (confront their own corrupt regimes) before blaming Jews; Israelis must admit they are a superpower, not victims.
“what Edward Norton does in Fight Club, to first, you know that famous scene where he beats himself? That is to say, first for the Arabs then for the Jews.”
Žižek outlines three ways scholars excuse Heidegger's Nazism: 1) Contingent personal failure; 2) A sign his thought was not radical enough, leading to a 'better' later philosophy; 3) (Ernst Nolte) He was right, as Nazism was a justified reaction to economic crisis/Bolshevik terror.
“Heidegger's engagement was grounded in his philosophy and he was right.”
Nazi executioners justified their acts by framing them as a 'heavy burden' of duty, resisting the 'temptation' of pity, thus turning their violation of ethical instincts into proof of their ethical grandeur.
“what horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders.”
Citing Lenin’s last writings, Žižek argues Lenin foresaw a 'state capitalism' model (like modern China/Blair) as a necessary modernizing step, not a betrayal.
“What if the complete hopelessness of our situation, by stimulating our efforts, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”
A violent parody of Aristotle's 'friend of Plato but greater friend of truth,' illustrating the brutal reality of political betrayal and the truth of capitalism's indestructibility.
“I am your friend, bang-bang-bang, you are there”
Žižek redefines 'dictatorship of the proletariat' not as party rule, but as the recognition of the non-representational, unconditional excess of power inherent in the state.
“dictatorship means for me a non-representative functioning of politics”
Referencing Stalin’s praise of Hitler’s rise, Žižek argues that revolutions reveal the 'dictatorship aspect' (unconditional power) that liberal democracy masks.
“masks have fallen, now it's one brutal force against the other”
Citing Marx, Žižek notes that capitalism's limit is its own development, but argues Marx wrongly believed abolishing the capitalist form would unleash pure dynamics, ignoring that the obstacle is the impetus.
“the ultimate limit of capitalism is the capitalist himself”
Žižek argues that although Thatcher lost empirically to Blair, she 'won formally' because, as Peter Mandelson admitted, 'economically we are all Thatcherites today,' demonstrating that defining the entire space is more important than winning elections.
“what even if she lost empirically, by through Blair she won formally because as who was it, Peter Mandelson who said that 'economically we are all Thatcherites today,' blah blah blah.”
Works invoked 15
Fight Club film
Used as a positive example of an ethical act (self-beating) to illustrate the need for Arabs and Israelis to confront their own realities.
Frankenstein book
Analyzed via Chesterton's formula to resolve the God/Creator parallel; subtitle Or, the Modern Prometheus.
State and Revolution book
Cited by Lenin for the plan that every 'cooking lady' should govern, which Žižek uses to illustrate the gap between revolutionary plan and historical outcome.
Cited for Hannah Arendt's precise description of the moral twist enabling Nazi executioners.
Paradise Lost book
Source of the epigraph for Frankenstein, quoting Adam's complaint to God.
Used as an example of carnivalesque mocking of divinity, which Žižek argues is part of European religious tradition.
Kant's late writing on the French Revolution, used to explain the notion of 'enthusiasm'.
Dead of Night film
Described as an 'excellent film'; the episode with the ventriloquist is used to illustrate 'identifying with the symptom'.
The Second Coming poem
Cited by liberals to explain why the enemy has passion; Žižek rejects this description, arguing fundamentalists are driven by resentment, not conviction.
Cited as a bestseller by George Lakoff, which Žižek critiques for proposing a shallow, inoperative liberal philosophy.
Book by Afary and Anderson, quoted to show how Foucault's Iran writings are linked to his general theory of power.
Haaretz interview journal
Source of Badiou's quote on the founding of the Zionist state being a 'mixed, truly complex reality'.
Is it useless to revolt? essay
Foucault's last text on Iran, where he opposes the 'magic event' of revolt to the 'cold view' of historical reality.
The Mask of Anarchy book
Described as 'arguably for me greatest political poem in English,' illustrating the logic of social carnival.
Poll Tax Revolt book
A book by Danny Burns, cited by Žižek to point to the points raised about the positive vision (or lack thereof) of the Poll Tax revolt.
People invoked 55
Anarchy (Personified) positive
Figure in Percy Shelley's poem, riding a white horse with the mark 'I am God, and King, and Law'.
Cécile Winter positive
French Jewish social analyst collaborating with Badiou; proposed the mental experiment of viewing Israel as a standard colonial story.
Holocaust denier imprisoned in Austria; used as an example of Western limits on free speech regarding the Holocaust.
Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche negative
Nietzsche's 'crazy sister' who edited his works; Žižek sarcastically suggests 'rehabilitating' her to expose the absurdity of gendered moral blackmail.
Identified as one of Foucault’s official inheritors who became a right-center liberal state functionary.
Mary Shelley positive
Author of Frankenstein; Žižek critiques 'fake feminist' readings that blame her husband, arguing instead for a Chestertonian reading of hubris.
Slobodan Milošević negative
Referred to as 'corrupted ex-Communist functionary' who signed a secret law isolating dissidents in mid-80s Slovenia.
Used in a Hegelian example; his murder was necessary for the concept of 'Caesar' to emerge.
Danny Burns positive
Author of the book 'Poll Tax Revolt,' which Žižek points to for understanding the positive vision (or lack thereof) of the Poll Tax revolt.
Silvio Berlusconi positive
Žižek uses Berlusconi as an example of 'pure administrative post-political administrator' who simultaneously plays the populist card, illustrating the fusion of post-politics and populism.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited in his last writings as foreseeing a 'state capitalism' model (modernizing socialism) as a necessary step, similar to modern China or Third Way UK.
Augustus positive
Used in a Hegelian example to show how a successor (Augustus) repeats and conceptualizes the founder (Caesar).
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for admitting 'I don't have an idea, I don't know' when asked what to do, supporting Žižek's claim that intellectuals don't need to provide programs.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek uses Lacanian concepts like 'identifying with the symptom' to analyze the ventriloquist story and the left's political failures.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Used to resolve the Frankenstein/God dilemma via the 'unity of benevolent creator and rebel'.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Cited in the context of a 'good Foucault vs. bad Deleuze' narrative by neoliberal intellectuals, who label Deleuze as totalitarian/anti-Semitic.
George W. Bush negative
Žižek criticizes Bush's advocacy of 'free market' as actually exploding the state, and notes how the US uses its victimhood after 9/11 to justify expansion.
Lynn negative
An audience member who interrupts Žižek, reproaching him for not offering a positive program or strategy for change, and criticizing his views on Israel-Palestine and the left.
Victor Frankenstein positive
Character in Frankenstein, paralleled with God as a creator who commits the 'supreme crime' of creating life.
Nazi executioner used by Arendt to illustrate the 'banality of evil' and the moral twist of duty.
Biblical figure, paralleled with Frankenstein's monster as the 'male progeny' created by a single parent.
Co-author of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.
Peter Mandelson positive
Cited for the quote 'economically we are all Thatcherites today' to illustrate how Thatcher 'won formally' by defining the political space despite losing elections.
Alain Badiou positive
French philosopher; Žižek agrees with his book and cites his 'mixed, truly complex reality' formulation of Israel.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Described as a 'neoliberal humanitarian new philosopher' and 'darling' of the French establishment, representing the political fate of the 'good Foucault'.
George Lakoff negative
Žižek mocks Lakoff as 'stupid' for proposing a liberal ten-word philosophy that is 'totally inoperative' because it lacks genuine political division, despite Lakoff's expertise in metaphors.
Terry Eagleton positive
Agrees with Eagleton that the Miner's Strike was the only serious social movement, despite its failure, because it represented 'old-fashioned antagonism' rather than postmodern embarrassment.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad positive
Iranian President; Žižek finds his statement on Europe's guilt and the creation of Israel to contain 'correct insight' despite being disgusting.
Referenced in the context of the Holocaust and the paradoxical fulfillment of his plan through the creation of Israel.
William Butler Yeats negative
Žižek cites Yeats' 'The Second Coming' ('the best lack all conviction...') as a liberal cliché that misdescribes the situation, failing to see that fundamentalists are driven by resentment, not conviction.
Evo Morales negative
Bolivian leader cited as dancing to a 'primordial maternal goddess,' representing the superficial 'nice' image of populism without addressing international capitalism.
Co-author of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, quoted by Žižek to show how scholars link Foucault's Iran writings to his general theory.
Michel Foucault negative
Critiqued for his 'transgressive model' and his engagement with the Iranian Revolution, which Žižek argues mirrors Heidegger's Nazi engagement by focusing on 'Kantian enthusiasm' rather than reality.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Žižek cites Laclau as advocating populism to fight post-politics, but finds this problematic, arguing populism is a supplement to post-politics rather than its opposite.
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited alongside Badiou for formulating the proletariat as 'part of no part.'
Martin Heidegger negative
Used as a foil to Foucault; his support for Nazism is analyzed as a 'proper gesture' in form but wrong in content, driven by a desire for 'releasement' and a 'modernizing conservative revolutionary' tradition.
Cited alongside Jünger as part of the German intellectual tradition endorsing Heidegger's leadership.
Mao Zedong negative
Used as an example of the 'Cultural Revolution' whose 'sublime image' excited Western critics despite the destruction of cultural heritage.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited for her precise description of the moral twist enabling Nazi executioners to frame their evil as a 'heavy burden' of duty.
Ernst Nolte negative
German historian who argues Heidegger's Nazism was 'grounded in his philosophy and he was right,' a view Žižek finds 'sympathetic' but 'violently disagrees with.'
Mentioned in the context of 'fake feminism' claiming Joyce stole 'stream of consciousness' from his wife Nora.
Margaret Thatcher positive
The empirical instigator whose chaotic policies were stabilized into a concept by Blair.
Cited as part of the German tradition of 'modernizing conservative revolutionary thought' that endorsed Heidegger.
John Milton positive
Author of Paradise Lost, quoted in Frankenstein's epigraph regarding Adam's complaint to God.
Hugo Chávez negative
Latin American leader used as an example of 'new populism' that Žižek dismisses ('screw Chávez') as another instance of the 'Western trap' of enjoying the image of revolution.
Joseph Stalin negative
Cited for praising Hitler’s rise as 'masks have fallen,' illustrating the 'dictatorship aspect' of power.
Referenced in the Aristotle quote.
Aristotle positive
Cited for the phrase 'friend of Plato but greater friend of truth,' which Žižek parodies.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek claims fidelity to Marx to argue that Marx underestimated the positive role of obstacles (like the capitalist form) in propelling dynamics.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek employs a 'Hegelian tautological way' to describe fundamentalism: its problem is not that it is too fundamentalist, but that it is not fundamentalist enough (lacking self-assertion).
Simon Critchley positive
A friend and debate opponent who honestly admitted that capitalism is eternal and always resuscitates, a truth Žižek agrees with.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for developing the notion of Antinomies of Pure Reason and the term 'euthanasia of pure reason'.
Percy Bysshe Shelley positive
Hailed as the author of 'the arguably for me greatest political poem in English,' The Mask of Anarchy.
Tony Blair positive
Described as the figure who institutionalized Thatcherism, elevating it into a concept, and representing the 'Third Way' that works best for global capital.
Described as a 'wet Tory' who returned to soft Toryism, contrasting with Blair's Thatcherism.
Transcript 34 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Will you give us the end of the book? Will you give us the final line, the punchline today or not? Yes, but it's kind of... it's kind of this empty gesture, like you know in the Book of Job when God appears at the end. His final line is kind of a fake answer which really says nothing, which is really, "who are you to complain?" and so on. Joak, something along those lines. But I'd like to hear from you that the questions will be organized. I hope you mean this in a good Stalinist way, that you will distribute the questions, give a wink, give a boom there, start a plot there or what, I hope that. It will be a Stalinist. I'll try my best impression of a Latin American dictator, don't worry. Okay, or a Stalinist with a Latino twist. A Latino twist. We have a distinctiveness. Okay, without further ado, Slavoj. Thank you very much. So, here we are and again, don't expect too much, but nonetheless, expect something. Okay, I will try—so many things I had to leave out—I will what I will try to do is to go into different political dimensions, a little bit maybe problematic for some of you and then nonetheless at the end provide some kind of a minimal link of why nonetheless that torturous, confused, maybe for some of you boring way through some Hegelian motives was important for this political aspect. Okay, let me first approach a problem which for some of you will be either boring or problematic in the way I approach it. I want to start with a reference to Kant, who as you know developed the notion of the Antinomies of Pure Reason. All reason, in its exercise, necessarily falls into self-contradiction when it attempts to go beyond our concrete sensible experience to address such questions as: Does the universe have a beginning in time? A limit in space? An initial cause? Or is it infinite? and so on. The antinomy arises because it is possible to construct valid arguments to argue for both sides of the question. We can, according to Kant, conclusively demonstrate that the universe is finite and that it is infinite, and so on and so on. Kant argues that if this conflict of reason is not resolved, humanity would lapse into hopeless skepticism which he called, beautiful term, the euthanasia of pure reason. What I claim, let me return to what was here in Europe a trauma, perceived as a trauma half a year ago—even a little bit more—that the reactions in Europe to the Muslim outrage at the Danish caricatures of Muhammad, I claim that they confront us with a similar antinomy of not pure but tolerant reason. Two opposite stories can be told about the caricatures, each of them convincing and well-argued for, without any mediation or reconciliation between the two. My point, of course, is not that we should resign ourselves to this euthanasia of tolerant reason, but that we should shift the entire field—that maybe to approach the problem as the one of tolerance, respect, etc., is in itself a wrong approach. So, let me go through, and just to provoke you, I hope you will find problematic some of my reasoning. Let me present first to you how I see the dilemma. On the one hand, for a Western liberal for whom the freedom of the press, of expression, expressing one's opinions and so on is one of the highest values, the case is clear. Even if we reject in disgust the caricatures, their publication in no way justifies murderous mob violence and the stigmatization of a whole country, Denmark in this case. I wonder if you know how some companies are already caught up with the new rules of the game, like Nestlé or Carrefour. Nestlé all of a sudden started to emphasize in their propaganda, publicity in Arab countries, that no milk of Danish cows is used in their products. The French chain Carrefour in Egypt informs their dear clients that out of solidarity with Islamic community they don't carry Danish products, and so on and so on. The horror is that they both accepted the stigmatization of a whole country. Going even a step further, I was really again ashamed to be Slovene, the Slovene president apologized to Muslims on behalf of European civilization. First, I call it a corrupted ex-Communist functionary who one of his last acts in the mid-80s—it was disclosed by right-wing dissidents but here I agree with them—was that he signed a secret, how do you call it, sorry I don't know the English term, that official publication of government where laws are published? [Inaudible comment] Statute? Yeah, you know they have to be published and when they are published there they become laws. Official Gazette? Statute? Yeah, yeah. Okay, he signed there a law allowing for—it was even a secret issue of this journal, it was a secret law. So we, we get involved here in these wonderful legalities how then we discovered that there was a public law which in a small footnote allowed for secret laws to be passed. This secret law allowed, to cut a long story short, for dissidents, problematic people to be without any court just to be isolated for a period of time, and this happened in the mid-80s. And the irony is that he defended this measure as "it's still better than shooting them," how should I put it, you know, as a liberal step or whatever. Okay, so let me go on. On the other hand, those—the European idea, liberal idea is that those offended by the caricatures should go to a court and prosecute the offender, not demand apologies from the state. According to this European liberal view, the Muslim reaction does display the blatant lack of understanding of the Western principle of an independent civil society. Now, what underlies this attitude—this would be the European liberal reasoning—is the sacred status of writing as such for the Muslims. The idea of truly secularized writing is, so they claim, unimaginable in an Islamic culture. We, we had here the Monty Python's *Life of Brian*. It would be difficult to imagine an Egypt movie called *Life of Muhammad* or whatever, something like that. But I think there is more in this than may appear. A carnivalesque mocking of divinity is part of European religious tradition, starting with ancient Greek ritualistic ridiculing of gods of Olympus. There is nothing subversive or atheistic in it. This is, I think, an inherent part of religious life itself. As to Christianity, it is clear that crucifixion itself is a mocking spectacle of blasphemy, making fun of Christ as a king, riding a donkey with a crown of thorns and so on and so on. There are moments of carnivalesque irony in Christ's parable, riddles, and so on and so on. And last but not least, what about the brutal, vulgar, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian caricatures that abound in the press and school textbooks in Muslim countries? Where is here the respect for other people and their religion that they demand from the West, and so on and so on? That would have been the liberal case. On the other hand, a no less convincing case can be made against the West. It soon became known that the same Danish newspaper which published the Muhammad caricatures, in a blatant display of its bias, previously rejected caricatures of Christ as too offensive. Furthermore, prior to resorting to public manifestations, the Danish Muslims did, as we later learned, for months try the European path of dialogue, asking for reception with government authorities and so on, and they were ruthlessly rejected, ignored. The reality behind all this is the sad fact of the rising xenophobia in Denmark, signaling the end of the myth of Scandinavian tolerance. And last but not least, what about our own prohibitions and limitations of the freedom of the press? Is Holocaust effectively not our sacred untouchable fact? You probably know this fact noted by many, how at the very moment when the Muslim protests were raging and we were all full of how, ooh, our right to express opinion, even if—you know this cheap paraphrase of Voltaire, even if, this pseudo-dictum, "even if I am offended and disgusted at what you are saying, even if I totally disagree with you, I would still be ready to die for your right to say this," and so on and so on. But you know that David Irving, it's one of yours, I even remember so nice how times change, before he became David Irving he wrote books which were even translated in my country under Communism, his early books. What I want to say is that, you know that he was sitting in an Austrian prison for expressing his doubts about the Holocaust in an article published fifteen years earlier, and was then condemned to three years of prison. So he could have claimed, "Wait a minute, I didn't even offend everyone because if you look at this article it's just..." Okay, we can say it's ridiculous, but it has the form—and form matters here—it has the form of rational reasoning and, again, I'm the first to admit that it's the disgusting misuse of a form, but it's the form, a reasoning. It says, you know the standard reasoning, take how many corpses could have been burned there, it's not possible to, maximum is whatever. So they can point out, "Muslims, but wait a minute, this guy in at least formally non-offensive way doubted it, he was put to prison." To this, of course, as a counter-attack—let us play a little bit this game—a partisan of Western liberalism can again point out the irony which I already mentioned here, that probably percent of the thousands who felt offended and demonstrated against Muhammad caricatures had never even seen the caricatures. Now, to account for this, we are told that this fact, as well as the obvious overreaction to caricatures—this would have been now, I guess, you can correct me, interrupt me at any moment, the Muslim counterpoint—that this overreaction rising up to murderous violence, expanding to the whole of Europe or of the West, indicates that the protests were not really about caricatures but about humiliations and frustrations with Western post-colonialist, neo-imperialist, however you call it, attitude. Journalists effectively competed with each other enumerating these real reasons: Israeli occupation for Palestinians, dissatisfaction with the pro-American Musharraf regime in Pakistan, anti-Americanism reaction to American pressure in Iran, and so on and so on. But again, the defenders of European liberal approach have, I think, at least here—just to provoke you I mention it—what appears to me a credible counter-argument to this excuse. If it was not really about Jews, but a displaced protest about capitalist exploitation... Sorry, what I mean is that if it was not really about Muhammad caricatures but about other causes, so why did they then formulate it in this way? You know, one can say, "Wait a minute, in the same way you can excuse Nazi anti-Semitism." I mean, every idiot knows it wasn't really about the Jews, it was—I mean, I needn't even tell you the elementaries—frustration at the way the process of modernization undermined blah-blah-blah whatever. Everybody knows that Nazi anti-Semitism was not really about the Jews, but I hope we all accept that this in no way justifies it. So again, why do we accept this logic here? I mean, it reminds me a little bit of a typical marital conflict when a wife, for example, explodes at a husband and then she tells, "But wait a minute, you know, I'm just frustrated, it's not really about you." Then why, you know what I mean? So, some Muslim groups replied then to the Danish caricatures with their own offensive of caricatures. That's what I got from the media, probably I apologize in advance, it's not the whole story, like a Muslim group in Europe distributed on the net, on the web, drawings of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler. Then Iranian largest-selling newspaper announced it is holding a contest on cartoons about the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, and so on and so on. Now, I can get this strategy. It's to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression. The logic is: the Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say by also printing these Holocaust cartoons. But I have problems here. I think this exercise is self-defeating. Namely, if they really believe that the Danish caricatures of Muhammad were a sacrilegious crime that deserves the harshest punishment, will the Holocaust cartoons then not repeat the crime? The fact that they are doing it with the excuse "let us see how tolerant you are" in no way changes this fact. In short, this reaction is a proof that we are dealing not with religion but with another logic of recognition, respect, sense of humiliation, hurt pride, and so on, not religion. A further proof of this fact, I think, is the strange inconsistency in references to the Holocaust. For example, the Jordanian newspaper *Al-Dustour* published in October a cartoon depicting the railroad to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau with Israeli flags replacing the Nazi ones. The sign read: "Gaza Strip" or "the Israeli annihilation camp." This idea that Israel's policies towards the Palestinians have been comparable to Nazi actions towards Jews strangely contradicts the Holocaust denial. I think we are witnessing here another example of the joke evoked by Freud, you know the joke of this "borrowed kettle" joke: I never borrowed the kettle from you; I returned it to you unbroken; the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Here we have what? One: Holocaust did not happen. Two: it did happen but the Jews deserved it. Three: the Jews did not deserve it but they themselves have lost the right to complain about it by doing to Palestinians the same thing that Nazis did to them. It's kind of a strangely inconsistent counter-argumentation. And okay, let me go now to the end in these liberal accusations. Maybe you remember how, speaking in Mecca in December Ahmadinejad, Iranian President, implied that guilt for the Holocaust led European countries to support the establishment of the state of Israel. This his statement claiming that "Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem?" and so on and so on. I claim that this statement by Ahmadinejad is a mixture of disgusting things and correct insight. The disgusting part is, of course, not only Holocaust denial, but if you read it closely, I noticed he doesn't deny it, he doesn't explicitly say that there was no mass killing of the Jews. What he says is something much more precise, and at least some Iranian friends that I contacted told me that this ambiguity was noted. He says that no *innocent* Jews were killed, which can be read: no Jews were killed, or they were killed but they deserved it. Okay, this is another one thing. But I think on the opposite side, Ahmadinejad did remind us of our European hypocrisy. I mean, he simply is right that the solution after World War II to create a state of Israel was, to put it in very brutal terms, paradoxically the ultimate fulfillment of Hitler's plan, which was getting rid of Jews in Europe. No wonder that—I hope you know this, I quoted the document references in my last book on Iraq—did you know that Eichmann, that's the ultimate irony I like to repeat it, did you know that in '38 Eichmann tried to visit, he was already on the way to visit Tel Aviv? Why? To make a deal with Jews to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The then on account of a purely technical reason, because of some strike, railway strike, he had to meet with Haganah representatives and so on in Alexandria. According to Jewish historians, and not anti-Zionist even, they did make a limited deal because, you know, at that point the goal of the Nazis was not yet kill the Jews, just get them out of Europe. And so paradoxically their goal overlapped with the goal of the Zionists in Palestine who wanted as many Jews as possible there, especially rich, capable, educated European Jews. Now comes the ultimate irony: do you know that as part of this deal, if after '38 rich Jews wanted to leave Germany, things were getting—things were facilitated for them on condition that they—that is to say they were allowed to take some money with them or to use part of their wealth on one condition, that they spend it to buy German products. The ultimate irony being here that some of these products were even machine guns. So, isn't this a nice irony, when Haganah was doing fighting for independence '49 and so on, some of the guns there were directly bought from the Nazis as part of this exchange program? So that would be my ultimate irony when Eichmann came to, when it was, '61, to Jerusalem, no? He could have said, "Oh, where are my friends here? After nice meeting you after years, I was already here, no?" Now, to make it very clear here, I'm not making fun of the Jews. My God, they were cornered, you make pact with the devil. I not in the minimum I make fun of the Jews. It's European, the European side that I'm criticizing, the hypocrisy of getting rid of the problem and then sympathizing with Jews there. And here Ahmadinejad is right. My God, he's right. The only honorable thing for Europe would be to invite them back. Nobody even thought about it in '45, telling the Jews, "Please come back, all of you if you can, please we give you lunch special whatever, we give you—" yeah, lunch, why not? I mean part of Europe. I find quite attractive this Ahmadinejad, why not somewhere in between Bavaria or where with... So, okay. Now how to resolve this deadlock? What even radical leftists, I think, often avoid the deadlock and proposed a simplified solution. Here is a nice quote from Alain Badiou, his last book which provoked a great scandal, basically of course I agree with the book, I think it's a courageous book. This, at least one must admit it, he—this is part of the interview he gave to *Haaretz* when he visited Tel Aviv, when asked about: how does he, Badiou, judge the founding of the state of Israel? Here is the passage: "The founding of a Zionist state was a mixed, truly complex reality. On the one hand, it is an event which is part of a larger event, the rise of great revolutionary Communist and socialist projects, the idea to found an entirely new society. On the other hand, it is a counter-event which is part of a larger counter-event, colonialism, the brutal conquest by the people who came from Europe of the new land where other people, other peoples lived. This creation [of the state of Israel] is an extraordinary mixture of revolution and reaction, of emancipation and oppression. The Zionist state should become what it had in it of being just and new. It has to become the last, the least racial, the least religious, and the least nationalist of states, the most state, the most universal of them all." End of quote. Now there is truth in this insight. Cécile Winter, a young French Jewish social analyst who collaborates with Badiou, proposed along these lines a nice mental experiment which I think is fully justified. Imagine Israel as it is in its destiny of the last half century, ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatized by the signifier of the absolute victim and thus beyond moral reproach. I think this is what we should do. Forget—you have no right from the perspective of Middle East, Middle East, to admit as an argument which changes in any way the situation there what happened to the Jews in Europe. What you will get is a standard story of colonization. However, I think the problem remains. Can one really perceive these two aspects: on the one hand the universalist Jewish project, on the other hand the Zionist aspect as different, in the sense that it would be possible to have the Zionist state without its religious nationalist bias? Isn't this a little bit like the legendary "if" answer of an American politician—I read this, when in the era of prohibition, late 20s, I forgot whose name it is, he was asked: Do you support the prohibition of wine or not? You know what he answers? It's the famous "if" answer: "If by wine you mean the terrible drink which ruin thousands of families, making husbands a wreck who are beating wives and neglecting children, then I am fully for the prohibition. But if you mean by wine the noble drink with a wonderful taste which makes every meal such a pleasure, then I am against prohibition." The problem is that it's the same wine, no? And it's a little bit the same, I think, with this solution. But nonetheless, where I do agree with Badiou is that when we judge the Israeli politics towards Palestinians, we should abstract from the Holocaust. Why? Let me be precise here. Not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the Holocaust was an incomparably stronger crime. It is those who evoke Holocaust that I claim effectively manipulate it, instrumentalize it for today's political uses. The very need to evoke Holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts in the occupied territories implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump card of Holocaust can redeem them. So, what would have been then an act today for Arabs or for Israelis? I will now tell you something which is almost a common sense, a stupidity, but I'm often asked, "Okay, okay, it's easy for you to point out all these deadlocks, paradoxes, but what can be done?" Well, I don't know, but I have maybe two modest proposals. To do what—I always refer to this example—what Edward Norton does in *Fight Club*, to first, you know that famous scene where he beats himself? That is to say, first for the Arabs then for the Jews. For the Arabs: to stop putting all the blame on Jews, as if the Zionist expansion in Argentina is the origin and symbolic stand-in for all the Arab misfortunes, so that the victory over Israel is the sine qua non of Arab self-assertion. The Palestinians who claim that the liberation of their territory from the Israeli occupation will give an impetus to the democratization of the Arab world, I think they got it wrong. It is the other way around. One should start with openly confronting—that's the Edward Norton gesture—with openly confronting the corrupted cleric or military regimes from Syria to Saudi Arabia which use the Israeli occupation as a means to legitimize themselves. The paradox is thus that the very focus on Israel is the reason why the Arabs are losing the battle. And of course, what then would have been in a similar way an act for Israelis? I think something very simple. Even some of my Israeli friends who are not anti-Zionists admitted it. It would be finally to admit that they are there in that constellation not a victim with all this—or a threatened minority, but a strong, local, colonizing superpower. And to stop legitimizing their Middle East politics through the reference to Holocaust. All three main agents of the "war on terror" they share something: United States, Israel, Arabs. They perceive themselves as victims. The United States after September they are now even victims. They use their victimhood as the legitimization of their expansionist politics. There was effectively a way in which 11th of September came at the right moment to justify the US aggressive military expansionism. "Now that we are also victims, we can defend ourselves, strike back," and so on and so on. The superpower axis United States-Israel, this strange axis of the most religious developed nation in the world—with United States which insists on the separation of religion and state—and the most irreligious people in the world. I read somewhere that if you make a simple opinion call, Israelis are the most atheist, some proclaim themselves atheists, existing or insisting on the religious nature of their state, can thus present this axis as the axis of victims. So I think again that this would have been the first big ethical act for Israelis. Now you'll say this is nothing, an empty symbolic act. No, it would change I claim the entire perspective, to stop—to first to just admit who they are. They are a superpower there. They are simply the local superpower, not victims. For Arabs, I mean I claim the same. I claim that imagine, just imagine a kind of a democratized or whatever, with less corruption modernized Arab, Arab communities, and I claim that the whole problem would maybe not disappear but would appear in a new way. So again, I think that as long as we stick to this kind of approaching the problem, we are lost. That would be my first reflection. Let me go on with some other political reflections. Some people like Ernesto Laclau advocate as a means of fighting today's post-politics, reduction of politics to this administrative biopolitics, expert rule and so on, populism. I find this problematic, why? Although I can see the point like revival of populism in Latin America and so on. Why? My first observation: today's populism is I think different from the traditional—from its traditional version. What distinguishes today's populism is the opponent against which it mobilizes the people: the rise of post-politics, the growing reduction of politics proper to the rational administration of conflicting interests. So in the highly developed countries of the United States and Western Europe at least, populism is more and more emerging as the inherent shadowy double of the institutionalized post-politics. I'm even tempted to say as its supplement in the Derridean sense, as the arena in which political demands that do not fit institutionalized space can be articulated. So that would be again my basic approach, that it doesn't even hold that we have on the one hand this expert rule, on the other hand populism. I think that more and more populism is becoming a sort of a necessary constituent of administrative post-politics itself. Let's just take the example in Italy of Berlusconi. If there ever was pure administrative post-political administrator, it was Berlusconi. At the same time, we can see how all the time he is playing the populist card. I think this goes up to a point even for Bush and so on. So that would be my first problem, that I don't see the opposition. It may appear propos of French referendum, no, that there is an opposition. I don't think this is the real opposition. Furthermore, I still insist that there is, let's call it a constitutive mystification which pertains to populism. The basic gesture of populism is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete enemy figure. Like, today's European populism, the enemy can be from Brussels bureaucracy to illegal immigrants which threaten our way of life. Populism is, I claim by definition, a negative phenomenon, a phenomenon grounded in a refusal, even in an implicit admission of impotence. We all know the old joke about a guy looking for his lost key under the streetlight. When asked where did he lose it, he admits that it was in a dark corner behind. "So why are you looking for it here under the light?" "Because the visibility is much better here." There is something of this trick in populism. It's complex, why beat the Jews—well, who can analyze complex situation? It's easier to beat the Jews or Arabs or whatever. So not only is populism, I claim, not the arena which today's emancipatory projects should inscribe themselves into. I claim that with today's emancipatory politics, its life-and-death problem is to find a form of political mobilization which will avoid populist temptation. What do I mean by this? Now I hear from people, Laclau and others, "but populism stands for politics as such, for politicization." I want to deny this. I claim that especially today's form of populist politicization is exactly the opposite. That is to say, it is paradoxically at the same time, how should I put it, politicization but on a depoliticized background. What do I mean by this? The ambiguity of the middle class—in this sense, I think populism is a middle-class phenomenon. How we can detect it in how middle classes relate to politics. On the one hand, the middle class is against politicization. You know what's the basic middle-class motto? "We just want to sustain our way of life, to be left to work, to lead our life in peace." Which is why incidentally populists or middle classes always tend to support authoritarian coups which promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society so that everybody can return to his or her proper work. That's one motive, this "let us live in peace, we just want to do our work properly." On the other hand, the middle classes in the guise of the threatened patriotic hard-working moral majority are the main instigators of the grass-root mass mobilization in the guise of the rightist populism in France today and so on and so on. So you see the paradox? I think this is crucial for middle classes and this is what always distinguishes populism. It is a mass form of mobilization, even one can say in Western Europe and in United States the only space within politics where we still get a passionate political mobilization, confrontation, us versus them and so on and so on. But what I claim is that it's always sustained by a minimum of depoliticization. It's always "we just want to lead our lives in peace." The vision, the ultimate vision is always anti-political. So the problem is for me to go in this crucial step further than populism goes. Only in this way will we resolve the other dilemma which is: how is it that the our enemies of the right neo-populist are the only ones who are able to mobilize people? This is I think where George Lakoff, you know the American linguist, anti-Chomsky, who tried to formulate a new program for the American liberal left, claiming that the left should fill in its vision with more political passion, instead it will miserably fail. His idea is that the left should overcome what he calls rationalist-materialist paradigm (RAM he calls it). He claims people don't follow rational calculations about their self-interests, they think in subconscious narrative frames, organized around central metaphors. Their beliefs are sustained by such frames, not by rational argumentation. So Lakoff's conclusion is that instead of abhorring the passionate metaphorical language on behalf of rationalist argumentation or abstract moralizing, the left should accept the battle at this terrain and learn to offer more seductive metaphorical frames. So near the end of his bestseller *Don't Think of an Elephant!*, Lakoff writes that conservatives have figured out their own values, principles, directions and have gotten them out in the public mind so effectively over the past years that they can evoke them all in a ten-word philosophy. This is the bad guys, right-wing: "Strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, family values." Then catastrophe comes. Lakoff proposes a similar ten-word philosophy for the liberal left—listen, listen and wonder how stupid they can be, that's my comment: "Stronger America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government, mutual responsibility." Now, if you are not a total idiot—and you are not—you see that this doesn't work. Why not? While the conservative formula presents what appears a clear choice, a choice that demands from us to adopt a strong and divisive position. "Strong defense" means something politically. It means to be opposed to those who thought, "too much arms, let's lower the budget for defense, give more to health care," whatever. "Free market" means something, although I'm not an idiot, I know that in effectively it means nothing. I mean, Bush advocacy of free market means that state exploded. I mean, he does the opposite of what... But nonetheless it appears to mean something. "Lower taxes" means something against tax-and-spend social programs and so on. But the liberal formula proposed by Lakoff consists of general feel-good phrases that nobody is against. "Stronger America"—who is against this? "Broad prosperity"—is the right-wing program, "no, that it should we should have poverty"? or "better future"—who advocates bad future? "Effective government"—who advocates ineffective government? "Mutual responsibility"—who advocates cruelty, ignorance? You see, it's totally inoperative. It's just shallow sentimental rhetoric. And it's really—there must be really some deeper ideological process at work here. I mean, this was not a stupid politician who said this. This was a guy who claims to be a specialist in how metaphors engage us, how they run our life, and he proposed this. And what is missing is simply politics in its proper sense of friend-enemy mobilization, and so on. I think that we should here accept the struggle. In what sense? There is another liberal cliché. When liberals are asked about this: how is it that the enemy has all the passion although our arguments are better? Then liberals became—get engaged in paraphrases of William Butler Yeats' *The Second Coming*. You know, "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It may appear that this is our situation today, they claim. The best—we, the best is always us, of course—are not able to fully engage ourselves, we are too liberal, cynical, rational, moralizing, while the worst engage in their racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. I think the way we should counter-attack here is again to undermine this very alternative. I don't think this is a correct description. I think that here we should introduce further distinctions. For example, when we are dealing with so-called fundamentalists, the way to deal with them is not to condemn them for being too fanatic, too convinced, too harsh, and so on and so on, but on the on the opposite: to demonstrate how, how should I put it, how they are already caught in the logic of resentment, envy, and so on. That they are—for me, the violence of today's fundamentalists, be it Muslim or or American Christian fundamentalist, is not a sign of their radical belief. It's the sign of their doubt, it's the sign of their envy, it's the sign that they already consider themselves inferior. I don't think, I think that the situation is totally misperceived when you claim that fundamentalists or think themselves as up stronger. No, they their problem is that—I'll put it in a radically crazy way—their problem is that they are not arrogant enough, really. It's they who lack this radical self-assertion. And again, maybe I already mentioned it, I will repeat it. Although I have no—I make all the time fun about Buddhism and so on, as you well remember—but nonetheless, when you meet an authentic Buddhist, you can immediately see how even if he or she is, and they are, true fundamentalists, precisely because they are true fundamentalists, they don't operate in this way of envy. You don't have this envious hatred—"oh my God, the decadent American lives," and you are fascinated, want to bomb it but at the same time fascinated by it, and so on. No, they simply observe it with a kind of a mocking irony, benevolently, you know. You know you have the truth, so what the hell do you give if others are—it's a totally different attitude. So again, the first thing to do is—this is the lesson I was trying to give you all the time in my confused way, or so I hope—to not to describe, sorry, not to accept the very way, the very description offered to us. To change the term. In the Middle East, with regard to fundamentalism and so on. Again, the problem with fundamentalism, to put it in Hegelian tautological way, is not that it is fundamentalism too fundamentalist. It's that it's not fundamentalist really. It's that full of self-hatred, self-doubt, envy, resentment and so on. Right-wing fundamentalism for me is the is the ultimate of liberal resentment. It's liberal resentment, resentment exploding. So, this is where in concrete way I see danger. For example, for the sympathizing left, liberal left, even human rights left, the problem I see is that it all too often falls into two traps: either the melodramatic sacrifice trap. What do I mean with this? I remember when I was very young I read an old—written, I think, around the turn of the last century, 1900—I forgot the title of the book, I only know that it's a Christian melodrama taking place—no, it must be in the 20s, after World War I in Germany—it's a German book where it's the story of a temporarily blinded (because of war wounds in the war) German ex-soldier who falls in love with the nurse who takes care of him. And he falls in love with her only knowing her voice and her charity, good acts, and so on. Fascinated by her goodness, so he forms in his mind an idealized image of her. Then, catastrophe is never far—that is to say his blindness is cured. It's temporary blindness, and he sees that in her bodily reality, to cut a long story short and put it in politically incorrect term, he is—she is ugly. Now, aware that his love would not survive this permanent contact with reality, and aware that the inner beauty of her good soul has a higher value than her external appearance, he intentionally blinds himself. He looks into the sun like to save her inner image to be able to love her more. And aren't we all liberals doing this whenever we have to confront—this is I think the true racism—when you confront a third-world society, country? We flee the problematic aspects, and I don't want to mention which are very suspicious for me, the standard example—that's another story—why clitoridectomy was so popular. But let us say whatever, family being or whatever. Don't we do the same? We as it were look into the sun, blind ourselves so that we can love them. But I think this is the utter refined racist patronizing, patronizing attitude. Another thing that the left, when it's pushed to radicalism, likes to do is something like—and this is really what I wanted to show you but it's not available on DVD now, not even on VHS—do you know from the British horror omnibus *Dead of Night*? It's an excellent film, five horror stories. The best one is towards the end, I think one before, where Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who becomes jealous of his dummy. He is full of suspicion that the dummy wants to leave him for a competing ventriloquist. So at the episode's end, he destroys the dummy by tensing its head and goes crazy, breaks down, is hospitalized. Then in the very last scene of this episode, friends visit him. First he is totally in a coma because they gave him sedatives. Then when he awakens, he moves his—like he distorts his face and starts to talk like the dummy. Like, identifying with the symptom, to put it in Lacanian terms, no? And this I think is another thing that the left all too well is likes to do. A further trap, not only of the left but of the right, is—especially of the new right—is the... which is why I always find suspicious is what, this trap? To fall into the super-ego sacrificial logic. What do I mean by this? It is as if, since—and I always found these descriptions suspicious—since our lives are hedonistic and so on and so on, that somehow it must hurt if you are to be moral, that you need—as if suffering in itself is a sign of inauthenticity. I think it's a thin line here which distinguishes a true heroic readiness to suffer for the good from—this is an imperceptible shift—from here to saying "suffering is in itself a necessary sign, a signal that you are ready, that what you are doing is good." And this can assume effectively disgusting forms. What forms? In her *Eichmann in Jerusalem*, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of the moral twist, distortion, which enabled the Nazi executioners to follow their orders, to or to endure the horrible acts they performed. Most of them, as Hannah Arendt points out, were not simply evil. They were well aware that they are doing things which bring humiliation, suffering, and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament, quote from Hannah Arendt, was that instead of saying "what horrible things I do to people," the murderers would be able to say, "what horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders." End of quote. So in this way they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation. The temptation to be resisted was the very temptation to succumb to the elementary pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, and their ethical effort was directed towards the task of resisting the temptation not to murder, torture, humiliate. My violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion was turned into the proof of my ethical grandeur, to do my duty, "Look, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain onto others." That's I think another quite serious ethical temptation today. But let me move, this is just a little bit, to more interesting temptation. We have time. You will get now your Foucault and then a little bit of crazy politics. Let me return briefly to Chesterton's formula, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, of this unity in the figure of God, unity of benevolent creator and rebel, the supreme criminal. I think that this enables us to resolve the dilemma, I want to move to a particular now, faced by many interpreters of *Frankenstein*, the novel. The dilemma which concerns the obvious parallel between Victor Frankenstein, the one who creates the monster, and God. So there is a parallel between Victor Frankenstein and God on the one hand; on the other hand, the parallel between the monster and Adam. In both cases, we are dealing with a single parent, if you want, who creates a male progeny in a non-sexual way. In both cases, this is followed by the creation of a bride, a female partner. Now, this parallel is clearly indicated by the novel's epigraph, you know Adam's complaint to God from Milton's *Paradise Lost*: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" Now, it is easy to note how problematic this parallel is. If Victor is associated with God, how can he also be the Promethean rebel against God? Recall the subtitle of the novel is *Or, the Modern Prometheus*. But I think from Chesterton's perspective the answer is simple. There is no problem here. Victor is like God precisely when he commits the ultimate criminal transgression and confronts the horror of its consequences. Since God is also the greatest rebel against himself ultimately. The king of the universe is the supreme criminal anarchist. Like Victor, in creating man, God committed the supreme crime of aiming too high, of creating a creature in his own image, precisely like scientists today who dream of creating an artificially intelligent living being in our own image. No wonder that his own creature ran out of his control and turned against him, against God. So I think the parallel is clear here. What we are—when we say that we want to be—when conservatives evoke this metaphor, "don't try to mess too much with creating artificial intelligence playing you try to be like God here," yeah, I accept this, but God did it, so God is a criminal. I mean, that's Chesterton's conclusion. Now, what this Chestertonian identity of the good Lord protector with the anarchist rebel enacts is the logic of social carnival brought to the extreme of self-reflection. Anarchist outburst is not a transgression of the law and order. In our societies, anarchism already is in power, wearing the mask of law and order. Our justice is the travesty of justice. The spectacle of law and order is an obscene carnival. And the ultimate irony, I think, is that this was made clear by what is, I hope we all agree here, the arguably for me greatest political poem in English, of course is by the husband, Percy Shelley, *The Mask of Anarchy*. You know, Mary's husband. And I really—I think this is one of the most disgusting examples of pseudo—of the abuse of feminism for conservative issues, this idea which is based on some facts that in writing *Frankenstein*, Mary Shelley was really drawing attention to this politico-scientific hubris and that of excesses of revolution and that her ultimate target there was her husband. I mean, there are some vulgar elements which support this thesis, like it's a well-known biographical fact, maybe you know it, that when she describes—it was found that when she, Mary Shelley, describes this crazy gaze of Victor Frankenstein, this obsession with—mad obsession with knowing creating new life and so on, that she used the same expression in a letter to a friend describing a gaze of Shelley, of her husband, no? So okay, okay. But my point is so much worse for her. That is to say, I think that if we really want to save feminism, one of the thing is to stop this feminist blackmail of: whenever you have a creative couple, the woman is automatically the good person and the man is either more male chauvinist penetrating logophallocentric or exploiting her. Like, my idea is that if you want to pursue this line, you know the line of "Ah, now we know James Joyce, stream of consciousness he really stole it from—from—from—from Nora, his wife, who wrote him letter in this way, blah blah blah." Why not go to the end in this direction? I would admire this kind of fake feminism if they were to be—now I'll be evil—why not rehabilitate Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, no? You know, the crazy sister who... do that if you dare to! Okay, but here is the point to go back to it. You know, and Shelley enumerates, as you know, describes the obscene parade or the figures of power: quote, "And many more destructions played in this ghastly masquerade, all disguised, even to the eyes, like bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies." Last came Anarchy. "He rode on a white horse, splashed with blood; he was pale even to the lips, like Death in the Apocalypse. And he wore a kingly crown, and in his grasp a scepter shone; on his brow this mark I saw: I am God, and King, and Law." All the Hegelian Chestertonian shift is here: from the criminal transgression of law and order, to law and order itself as the mask of the highest criminal transgression. And this holds especially for today's—in today's capitalism I claim this structure is universalized and, coming to Foucault, here I see the problem with Foucault. I think that Foucault still clings ultimately to the transgressive model. So, let me now go to Foucault, what I am promising you, where I see the limit of Foucauldian political engagement. It is as already hinted at here, it is uncannily similar to his Foucault's engagement for the Iranian Revolution, similar to Heidegger's Nazi engagement, and the same dilemma lurks behind in the readers of Foucault. Was it just a passing mistake of no theoretical significance, or was it grounded in his thought itself? Let me quote to make this clear a passage from this nice book, Janet Afary, Kevin Anderson, *Foucault and the Iranian Revolution*, recently published by University of Chicago Press. Quote: "Many scholars of Foucault view this—his writings on Iran—as aberrant or the product of a political mistake. We suggest that Foucault's writings on Iran were in fact closely related to his general theoretical writings on the discourse of power and the hazards of modernity. We also argue that Foucault's experience in Iran left a lasting impact on his subsequent oeuvre and that one cannot understand the sudden turn in Foucault's writings in the 1980s—turn towards care of the self, aesthetics of existence—without recognizing the significance of the Iranian episode and his more general preoccupations with the Orient." End of quote. Again, does that not evoke a striking parallel with Heidegger? In both cases, one should invert the standard narrative according to which the erroneous engagement awakened the thinker to the limitations of his previous theoretical passion and compelled him to radicalize his thought, to enact a turn that would prevent such mistakes to occur again (Heidegger's shift to releasement, *Gelassenheit*; Foucault's shift to the aesthetics of the self). I claim that rather Foucault's Iranian engagement, like Heidegger's Nazi engagement, was in itself, in its form, a proper gesture, the best thing he did. The only problem being that it was as to its content an engagement in the wrong—in the wrong direction. So, we should read Foucault's turn to Kant, Immanuel Kant, a couple of years later, after his Iranian engagement, I think as his response to this failed engagement. Foucault was interested in the notion of enthusiasm developed by Kant propos the French Revolution in his late writing *The Conflict of Faculties*. Its true significance according to Kant of the French Revolution did not reside in what actually went on in Paris. There horrible things were going on, outbursts of murderous passions and so on, but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of the sympathetic observers all around Europe. So, to put it in Lacanian terms, the real event, the dimension of the real was not in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to the observers, in the hopes awakened in the observers. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity. You got my point? The real is in this sublime image, the perception of the events in the gaze of the benevolent observers. I claim that Foucault maybe thereby proposed a kind of meta-theory of his own enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution in What matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheaval, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on, but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran gave rise to in the external Western observer, confirming his hope that a new form of spiritualized political collective is feasible, is possible. And to follow Foucault, why should we not—and I'm not ready to do this, but just to show you where this logic leads—why shouldn't we redeem in the same way not only the enthusiasm evoked by the Stalinist Russia in many Western intellectuals and artists in the 30s and 40s? You know, like you can always say—and many old Stalinist later critics are saying, "Oh, but we didn't know." No, it was the sublime image of the new man that we were that we were celebrating when we wrote odes to—to—to Stalin and so on and so on. Or why not even the enthusiasm evoked in those who were otherwise bitter critics of Stalinism by the Maoist Cultural Revolution? It's the same: who cares what went on there in China, destruction of cultural heritage and so on, it was the sublime image evoked in the Western observers. Even a step further—I'm really ready here to go to the end—do not miss my point, I'm not ready to do it, just to show where this logic leads. Why not even say that we can redeem those who admire Nazi Germany? We can always say, "But you know, don't confuse what their dream with what went on in Germany. Their dream was just how to bring a new social solidarity while avoiding the Communist trap," and so on and so on. And so it—I don't have time to go into it now, to go further into Heidegger, but it's really this formula of the argument of the borrowed kettle is really incredible how you find the same in different approaches to account for Heidegger's relation to Nazism. The claims are A: it—it's incredible how sometimes even the same authors give this borrowed kettle three arguments. The first one: Heidegger's Nazi engagement was just a contingent personal failure, nothing to do with his philosophy. B: you step one step back, Heidegger's Nazi engagement was a consequence of his thought, but precisely it was a sign that his thought till the early 30s was not radical enough, that it remained caught in European subjectivism, which is why as a reaction to it Heidegger was able to move further towards releasement, art, poetry, and so on and so on. And then the most interesting and to me frankly the most sympathetic, although I violently disagree with it, would be the third version. As far as I know it is—apart from some other marginals—only the German historian Ernst Nolte who advocates it, which is: Heidegger's engagement *was* grounded in his philosophy and he was right. Very simply, the idea being that at that point Nazism was something that could have been perceived as a justified reaction to the situation, how to get out of economic crisis without falling into Bolshevik terror, and so on and so on. Okay, so that's my first problem, that I find very suspicious the ultimate Western trap: this search for an ideal where you don't want really to be engaged but where you are just the benevolent observer. I think that this is a kind of a constitutive other scene of European progressives. And what I'm afraid of—this is why I like to be iconoclast here and say "screw Chávez" and so on with all my sympathies—is that now this Latin American new populism, no, is emerging as a little bit of this: "Oh my God, Morales, you saw he danced to the primordial maternal goddess" and so on, "isn't this nice?" and so on. Well, it's easy to have a dance for the maternal pre-Christian goddess, no? But how will he dance with relationship to international capitalism? That's more interesting. I would like to see *that* dance once. Okay. Yes, there's a very important difference you've left out, very fundamental difference between Foucault and Heidegger. Foucault's thing you might see as an eccentric idiosyncratic thing which has to be analyzed in that specific context. Heidegger's thing is a whole tradition in Germany of a modernizing conservative revolutionary thought going back to work of people like Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, and that is why essentially it was endorsed by a whole range of intellectuals including the *Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft* and they endorsed his leadership of the Führer... I agree with this point of view. Yes, there is a—again, I agree, there is a fundamental difference in the sense that Heidegger's engagement was not an idiosyncratic crazy thing the way Foucault was perceived, it was part of a general trend. I agree, but nonetheless I think that the parallel stands in this sense that both fully engaged and then very soon thereafter felt burned and as the result of this changed their changed their position. Where my point is that—okay, I will show, I will try to develop what my point is. The problem with this reading of Foucault, that he didn't really mean reality there but just in this Kantian way the sublime dimension that appears only to an observing gaze, is that in his interpretation of the Iranian events, Foucault rather says the exact opposite. He turns this perspective around and opposes the enthusiasm of those engaged in the events to the cold view of the external observer who discerns the larger causal context, the interplay of classes and their interests. Interestingly enough, in his last text on Iran from May "Is it useless to revolt?", Foucault proposes such a reading. He opposes again the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political transformation to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the cobweb of historical causality. Quote from Foucault: "The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history and its long series of reasons why, for a man really to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey." End of quote. Now one should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions. Revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of causality. In revolt, to put it in Kantian terms, the transnatural noumenal—the way things are in themselves—dimension transpires. The paradox, of course, is that this noumenal dimension coincides with its opposite, with the pure surface of a phenomenon. The noumenon appears. It appears precisely as this magic of being caught into a revolution. So here is how then Foucault goes—sorry, here is then how Foucault goes on. Another quote from Foucault: "The Iranian movement did not experience the law of revolutions that would some say make the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely lived part of the uprising touched in an unmediated fashion on an already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is fear, fear of what just happened last fall in Iran, something of which the world has not seen an example for a long time." End of quote. So again, we have the purity of the event, the surface, which is then manipulated by us Westerners who want to reduce it to socioeconomic calculation as well as by those Iranian clergy who use it to establish their power. Now then in a step further, now things get complicated. In a step further then, Foucault transposes this division into an internal division of the engaged individuals themselves. Quote: "Let's take the activist in some political group in Iran today," he meant in '79, '78. "When he was taking part in one of the demonstrations, he was doubled. He had his political calculation which was this or that, but at the same time, he was an individual caught up in a revolutionary movement, or rather that Iranian who has stood up against the king. And the two things did not come into contact. He did not rise up against the king because his party had made this or that calculation." End of quote. Now then for Foucault, the same division cuts across the entire social body. At the level of reality, there were of course multiple agents, complex interactions of classes, overdetermination of incompatible struggles, and so on. However, at the level of the revolutionary event proper, all this was sublimated into, quote from Foucault, "an absolutely collective will" which united the entire social body against the king and his clique. There was for Foucault no division within the social body, no class struggle. All, from poor farmers to students, from clergy to disappointed capitalists, wanted the same. Quote from Foucault: "The collective will is a political myth with which philosophers try to analyze or justify institutions. It's a theoretical tool. Nobody has ever seen the collective will, and personally I thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter. I don't know whether you agree with me, but we met in Tehran and throughout Iran the collective will of a people." End of quote. Foucault opposes here revolt and revolution. Revolution in the modern European sense for Foucault designates the reinscription of a revolt into the process of strategic political calculation. Revolution is a process by means of which the revolt is colonized by realpolitik. Another just two more quotes: "Revolution gave this uprising a legitimacy, sorted out their good and bad forms, defined their laws of development. Even the profession of revolutionary was defined. By thus repatriating revolution into the discourse of revolution, it was said the uprising would appear in all its truth." And so on and so on. So did you notice how again the Kantian background, how Foucault compares the appearing of a collective will with two of Kant's noumenal things? He mentions God, soul, which are precisely noumenal. You can't perceive them empirically for Kant. When the noumenal appears, it is—it has to be in the guise of ultimate horror. And Foucault is at least heroic enough to draw this conclusion: that we have this pure unity of the will, but to become actual it has to be horror or rather terror. Here is the final quote, crucial from Foucault: "At this stage of revolutionary enthusiasm, the most important and the most atrocious mingle. The extraordinary hope of remaking Islam into a great living civilization and various forms of virulent xenophobia as well as the global stakes and the regional rivalries and the problem of imperialisms and the subjugation of women and so on and so on. What has given the Iranian movement its intensity has been a double register: on the one hand, a collective will that has been very strongly expressed politically and on the other hand, the desire for a radical change in ordinary life. But this double affirmation can only be based on traditions, institutions that carry a charge of chauvinism, nationalism, exclusiveness, which have a very powerful attraction for individuals. To confront so fearsome an armed power, one mustn't feel alone, nor begin with nothing." Are you aware what Foucault is saying here? He withdraw totally. His point is that you need all that let's call it historical shit: antifeminism, racism and so on, because the enthusiasm has to be sustained in something. And that was the only thing that was at the disposal of people, of the Iranian people. So the picture thus gets complicated. Again, it's like this argument of the borrowed kettle. Did you notice how—okay you didn't, because I started too late—I mean but if you read Foucault, read it in the book his writings, he withdraws two times. He starts with the overall support of the Iranian revolt. He even mocks those who think "Oh, at the end it will finish either with Western technocracy or with clergy regime of the clergy." He says, "no, you don't see something totally new is emerging, an entirely different society breaking out of the space of European modernity and its deadlock." That was his first idea, that it's we Europeans who through our distorted perspective of modernization project this into Iran. We don't see that in this new collective spirituality a new mode is emerging. Then, so first he withdraw from this to asserting only the enthusiastic moment of revolt. Now the enemies were only the European liberals who wanted to discredit the Iranian revolt because it ended up in an oppressive regime of clergy. Foucault's claim now is that they move at the same level of this clergy itself which is reclaiming the revolt in order to justify its rule. The idea here
Will you give us the end of the book? Will you give us the final line, the punchline today or not? Yes, but it's kind of... it's kind of this empty gesture, like you know in the Book of Job when God appears at the end. His final line is kind of a fake answer which really says nothing, which is really, "who are you to complain?" and so on. Joak, something along those lines. But I'd like to hear from you that the questions will be organized. I hope you mean this in a good Stalinist way, that you will distribute the questions, give a wink, give a boom there, start a plot there or what, I hope that. It will be a Stalinist. I'll try my best impression of a Latin American dictator, don't worry. Okay, or a Stalinist with a Latino twist. A Latino twist. We have a distinctiveness. Okay, without further ado, Slavoj. Thank you very much. So, here we are and again, don't expect too much, but nonetheless, expect something. Okay, I will try—so many things I had to leave out—I will what I will try to do is to go into different political dimensions, a little bit maybe problematic for some of you and then nonetheless at the end provide some kind of a minimal link of why nonetheless that torturous, confused, maybe for some of you boring way through some Hegelian motives was important for this political aspect. Okay, let me first approach a problem which for some of you will be either boring or problematic in the way I approach it. I want to start with a reference to Kant, who as you know developed the notion of the Antinomies of Pure Reason. All reason, in its exercise, necessarily falls into self-contradiction when it attempts to go beyond our concrete sensible experience to address such questions as: Does the universe have a beginning in time? A limit in space? An initial cause? Or is it infinite? and so on. The antinomy arises because it is possible to construct valid arguments to argue for both sides of the question. We can, according to Kant, conclusively demonstrate that the universe is finite and that it is infinite, and so on and so on. Kant argues that if this conflict of reason is not resolved, humanity would lapse into hopeless skepticism which he called, beautiful term, the euthanasia of pure reason. What I claim, let me return to what was here in Europe a trauma, perceived as a trauma half a year ago—even a little bit more—that the reactions in Europe to the Muslim outrage at the Danish caricatures of Muhammad, I claim that they confront us with a similar antinomy of not pure but tolerant reason. Two opposite stories can be told about the caricatures, each of them convincing and well-argued for, without any mediation or reconciliation between the two. My point, of course, is not that we should resign ourselves to this euthanasia of tolerant reason, but that we should shift the entire field—that maybe to approach the problem as the one of tolerance, respect, etc., is in itself a wrong approach. So, let me go through, and just to provoke you, I hope you will find problematic some of my reasoning. Let me present first to you how I see the dilemma. On the one hand, for a Western liberal for whom the freedom of the press, of expression, expressing one's opinions and so on is one of the highest values, the case is clear. Even if we reject in disgust the caricatures, their publication in no way justifies murderous mob violence and the stigmatization of a whole country, Denmark in this case. I wonder if you know how some companies are already caught up with the new rules of the game, like Nestlé or Carrefour. Nestlé all of a sudden started to emphasize in their propaganda, publicity in Arab countries, that no milk of Danish cows is used in their products. The French chain Carrefour in Egypt informs their dear clients that out of solidarity with Islamic community they don't carry Danish products, and so on and so on. The horror is that they both accepted the stigmatization of a whole country. Going even a step further, I was really again ashamed to be Slovene, the Slovene president apologized to Muslims on behalf of European civilization. First, I call it a corrupted ex-Communist functionary who one of his last acts in the mid-80s—it was disclosed by right-wing dissidents but here I agree with them—was that he signed a secret, how do you call it, sorry I don't know the English term, that official publication of government where laws are published? [Inaudible comment] Statute? Yeah, you know they have to be published and when they are published there they become laws. Official Gazette? Statute? Yeah, yeah. Okay, he signed there a law allowing for—it was even a secret issue of this journal, it was a secret law. So we, we get involved here in these wonderful legalities how then we discovered that there was a public law which in a small footnote allowed for secret laws to be passed. This secret law allowed, to cut a long story short, for dissidents, problematic people to be without any court just to be isolated for a period of time, and this happened in the mid-80s. And the irony is that he defended this measure as "it's still better than shooting them," how should I put it, you know, as a liberal step or whatever. Okay, so let me go on. On the other hand, those—the European idea, liberal idea is that those offended by the caricatures should go to a court and prosecute the offender, not demand apologies from the state. According to this European liberal view, the Muslim reaction does display the blatant lack of understanding of the Western principle of an independent civil society. Now, what underlies this attitude—this would be the European liberal reasoning—is the sacred status of writing as such for the Muslims. The idea of truly secularized writing is, so they claim, unimaginable in an Islamic culture. We, we had here the Monty Python's *Life of Brian*. It would be difficult to imagine an Egypt movie called *Life of Muhammad* or whatever, something like that. But I think there is more in this than may appear. A carnivalesque mocking of divinity is part of European religious tradition, starting with ancient Greek ritualistic ridiculing of gods of Olympus. There is nothing subversive or atheistic in it. This is, I think, an inherent part of religious life itself. As to Christianity, it is clear that crucifixion itself is a mocking spectacle of blasphemy, making fun of Christ as a king, riding a donkey with a crown of thorns and so on and so on. There are moments of carnivalesque irony in Christ's parable, riddles, and so on and so on. And last but not least, what about the brutal, vulgar, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian caricatures that abound in the press and school textbooks in Muslim countries? Where is here the respect for other people and their religion that they demand from the West, and so on and so on? That would have been the liberal case. On the other hand, a no less convincing case can be made against the West. It soon became known that the same Danish newspaper which published the Muhammad caricatures, in a blatant display of its bias, previously rejected caricatures of Christ as too offensive. Furthermore, prior to resorting to public manifestations, the Danish Muslims did, as we later learned, for months try the European path of dialogue, asking for reception with government authorities and so on, and they were ruthlessly rejected, ignored. The reality behind all this is the sad fact of the rising xenophobia in Denmark, signaling the end of the myth of Scandinavian tolerance. And last but not least, what about our own prohibitions and limitations of the freedom of the press? Is Holocaust effectively not our sacred untouchable fact? You probably know this fact noted by many, how at the very moment when the Muslim protests were raging and we were all full of how, ooh, our right to express opinion, even if—you know this cheap paraphrase of Voltaire, even if, this pseudo-dictum, "even if I am offended and disgusted at what you are saying, even if I totally disagree with you, I would still be ready to die for your right to say this," and so on and so on. But you know that David Irving, it's one of yours, I even remember so nice how times change, before he became David Irving he wrote books which were even translated in my country under Communism, his early books. What I want to say is that, you know that he was sitting in an Austrian prison for expressing his doubts about the Holocaust in an article published fifteen years earlier, and was then condemned to three years of prison. So he could have claimed, "Wait a minute, I didn't even offend everyone because if you look at this article it's just..." Okay, we can say it's ridiculous, but it has the form—and form matters here—it has the form of rational reasoning and, again, I'm the first to admit that it's the disgusting misuse of a form, but it's the form, a reasoning. It says, you know the standard reasoning, take how many corpses could have been burned there, it's not possible to, maximum is whatever. So they can point out, "Muslims, but wait a minute, this guy in at least formally non-offensive way doubted it, he was put to prison." To this, of course, as a counter-attack—let us play a little bit this game—a partisan of Western liberalism can again point out the irony which I already mentioned here, that probably percent of the thousands who felt offended and demonstrated against Muhammad caricatures had never even seen the caricatures. Now, to account for this, we are told that this fact, as well as the obvious overreaction to caricatures—this would have been now, I guess, you can correct me, interrupt me at any moment, the Muslim counterpoint—that this overreaction rising up to murderous violence, expanding to the whole of Europe or of the West, indicates that the protests were not really about caricatures but about humiliations and frustrations with Western post-colonialist, neo-imperialist, however you call it, attitude. Journalists effectively competed with each other enumerating these real reasons: Israeli occupation for Palestinians, dissatisfaction with the pro-American Musharraf regime in Pakistan, anti-Americanism reaction to American pressure in Iran, and so on and so on. But again, the defenders of European liberal approach have, I think, at least here—just to provoke you I mention it—what appears to me a credible counter-argument to this excuse. If it was not really about Jews, but a displaced protest about capitalist exploitation... Sorry, what I mean is that if it was not really about Muhammad caricatures but about other causes, so why did they then formulate it in this way? You know, one can say, "Wait a minute, in the same way you can excuse Nazi anti-Semitism." I mean, every idiot knows it wasn't really about the Jews, it was—I mean, I needn't even tell you the elementaries—frustration at the way the process of modernization undermined blah-blah-blah whatever. Everybody knows that Nazi anti-Semitism was not really about the Jews, but I hope we all accept that this in no way justifies it. So again, why do we accept this logic here? I mean, it reminds me a little bit of a typical marital conflict when a wife, for example, explodes at a husband and then she tells, "But wait a minute, you know, I'm just frustrated, it's not really about you." Then why, you know what I mean? So, some Muslim groups replied then to the Danish caricatures with their own offensive of caricatures. That's what I got from the media, probably I apologize in advance, it's not the whole story, like a Muslim group in Europe distributed on the net, on the web, drawings of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler. Then Iranian largest-selling newspaper announced it is holding a contest on cartoons about the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, and so on and so on. Now, I can get this strategy. It's to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression. The logic is: the Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say by also printing these Holocaust cartoons. But I have problems here. I think this exercise is self-defeating. Namely, if they really believe that the Danish caricatures of Muhammad were a sacrilegious crime that deserves the harshest punishment, will the Holocaust cartoons then not repeat the crime? The fact that they are doing it with the excuse "let us see how tolerant you are" in no way changes this fact. In short, this reaction is a proof that we are dealing not with religion but with another logic of recognition, respect, sense of humiliation, hurt pride, and so on, not religion. A further proof of this fact, I think, is the strange inconsistency in references to the Holocaust. For example, the Jordanian newspaper *Al-Dustour* published in October a cartoon depicting the railroad to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau with Israeli flags replacing the Nazi ones. The sign read: "Gaza Strip" or "the Israeli annihilation camp." This idea that Israel's policies towards the Palestinians have been comparable to Nazi actions towards Jews strangely contradicts the Holocaust denial. I think we are witnessing here another example of the joke evoked by Freud, you know the joke of this "borrowed kettle" joke: I never borrowed the kettle from you; I returned it to you unbroken; the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Here we have what? One: Holocaust did not happen. Two: it did happen but the Jews deserved it. Three: the Jews did not deserve it but they themselves have lost the right to complain about it by doing to Palestinians the same thing that Nazis did to them. It's kind of a strangely inconsistent counter-argumentation. And okay, let me go now to the end in these liberal accusations. Maybe you remember how, speaking in Mecca in December Ahmadinejad, Iranian President, implied that guilt for the Holocaust led European countries to support the establishment of the state of Israel. This his statement claiming that "Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem?" and so on and so on. I claim that this statement by Ahmadinejad is a mixture of disgusting things and correct insight. The disgusting part is, of course, not only Holocaust denial, but if you read it closely, I noticed he doesn't deny it, he doesn't explicitly say that there was no mass killing of the Jews. What he says is something much more precise, and at least some Iranian friends that I contacted told me that this ambiguity was noted. He says that no *innocent* Jews were killed, which can be read: no Jews were killed, or they were killed but they deserved it. Okay, this is another one thing. But I think on the opposite side, Ahmadinejad did remind us of our European hypocrisy. I mean, he simply is right that the solution after World War II to create a state of Israel was, to put it in very brutal terms, paradoxically the ultimate fulfillment of Hitler's plan, which was getting rid of Jews in Europe. No wonder that—I hope you know this, I quoted the document references in my last book on Iraq—did you know that Eichmann, that's the ultimate irony I like to repeat it, did you know that in '38 Eichmann tried to visit, he was already on the way to visit Tel Aviv? Why? To make a deal with Jews to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The then on account of a purely technical reason, because of some strike, railway strike, he had to meet with Haganah representatives and so on in Alexandria. According to Jewish historians, and not anti-Zionist even, they did make a limited deal because, you know, at that point the goal of the Nazis was not yet kill the Jews, just get them out of Europe. And so paradoxically their goal overlapped with the goal of the Zionists in Palestine who wanted as many Jews as possible there, especially rich, capable, educated European Jews. Now comes the ultimate irony: do you know that as part of this deal, if after '38 rich Jews wanted to leave Germany, things were getting—things were facilitated for them on condition that they—that is to say they were allowed to take some money with them or to use part of their wealth on one condition, that they spend it to buy German products. The ultimate irony being here that some of these products were even machine guns. So, isn't this a nice irony, when Haganah was doing fighting for independence '49 and so on, some of the guns there were directly bought from the Nazis as part of this exchange program? So that would be my ultimate irony when Eichmann came to, when it was, '61, to Jerusalem, no? He could have said, "Oh, where are my friends here? After nice meeting you after years, I was already here, no?" Now, to make it very clear here, I'm not making fun of the Jews. My God, they were cornered, you make pact with the devil. I not in the minimum I make fun of the Jews. It's European, the European side that I'm criticizing, the hypocrisy of getting rid of the problem and then sympathizing with Jews there. And here Ahmadinejad is right. My God, he's right. The only honorable thing for Europe would be to invite them back. Nobody even thought about it in '45, telling the Jews, "Please come back, all of you if you can, please we give you lunch special whatever, we give you—" yeah, lunch, why not? I mean part of Europe. I find quite attractive this Ahmadinejad, why not somewhere in between Bavaria or where with... So, okay. Now how to resolve this deadlock? What even radical leftists, I think, often avoid the deadlock and proposed a simplified solution. Here is a nice quote from Alain Badiou, his last book which provoked a great scandal, basically of course I agree with the book, I think it's a courageous book. This, at least one must admit it, he—this is part of the interview he gave to *Haaretz* when he visited Tel Aviv, when asked about: how does he, Badiou, judge the founding of the state of Israel? Here is the passage: "The founding of a Zionist state was a mixed, truly complex reality. On the one hand, it is an event which is part of a larger event, the rise of great revolutionary Communist and socialist projects, the idea to found an entirely new society. On the other hand, it is a counter-event which is part of a larger counter-event, colonialism, the brutal conquest by the people who came from Europe of the new land where other people, other peoples lived. This creation [of the state of Israel] is an extraordinary mixture of revolution and reaction, of emancipation and oppression. The Zionist state should become what it had in it of being just and new. It has to become the last, the least racial, the least religious, and the least nationalist of states, the most state, the most universal of them all." End of quote. Now there is truth in this insight. Cécile Winter, a young French Jewish social analyst who collaborates with Badiou, proposed along these lines a nice mental experiment which I think is fully justified. Imagine Israel as it is in its destiny of the last half century, ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatized by the signifier of the absolute victim and thus beyond moral reproach. I think this is what we should do. Forget—you have no right from the perspective of Middle East, Middle East, to admit as an argument which changes in any way the situation there what happened to the Jews in Europe. What you will get is a standard story of colonization. However, I think the problem remains. Can one really perceive these two aspects: on the one hand the universalist Jewish project, on the other hand the Zionist aspect as different, in the sense that it would be possible to have the Zionist state without its religious nationalist bias? Isn't this a little bit like the legendary "if" answer of an American politician—I read this, when in the era of prohibition, late 20s, I forgot whose name it is, he was asked: Do you support the prohibition of wine or not? You know what he answers? It's the famous "if" answer: "If by wine you mean the terrible drink which ruin thousands of families, making husbands a wreck who are beating wives and neglecting children, then I am fully for the prohibition. But if you mean by wine the noble drink with a wonderful taste which makes every meal such a pleasure, then I am against prohibition." The problem is that it's the same wine, no? And it's a little bit the same, I think, with this solution. But nonetheless, where I do agree with Badiou is that when we judge the Israeli politics towards Palestinians, we should abstract from the Holocaust. Why? Let me be precise here. Not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the Holocaust was an incomparably stronger crime. It is those who evoke Holocaust that I claim effectively manipulate it, instrumentalize it for today's political uses. The very need to evoke Holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts in the occupied territories implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump card of Holocaust can redeem them. So, what would have been then an act today for Arabs or for Israelis? I will now tell you something which is almost a common sense, a stupidity, but I'm often asked, "Okay, okay, it's easy for you to point out all these deadlocks, paradoxes, but what can be done?" Well, I don't know, but I have maybe two modest proposals. To do what—I always refer to this example—what Edward Norton does in *Fight Club*, to first, you know that famous scene where he beats himself? That is to say, first for the Arabs then for the Jews. For the Arabs: to stop putting all the blame on Jews, as if the Zionist expansion in Argentina is the origin and symbolic stand-in for all the Arab misfortunes, so that the victory over Israel is the sine qua non of Arab self-assertion. The Palestinians who claim that the liberation of their territory from the Israeli occupation will give an impetus to the democratization of the Arab world, I think they got it wrong. It is the other way around. One should start with openly confronting—that's the Edward Norton gesture—with openly confronting the corrupted cleric or military regimes from Syria to Saudi Arabia which use the Israeli occupation as a means to legitimize themselves. The paradox is thus that the very focus on Israel is the reason why the Arabs are losing the battle. And of course, what then would have been in a similar way an act for Israelis? I think something very simple. Even some of my Israeli friends who are not anti-Zionists admitted it. It would be finally to admit that they are there in that constellation not a victim with all this—or a threatened minority, but a strong, local, colonizing superpower. And to stop legitimizing their Middle East politics through the reference to Holocaust. All three main agents of the "war on terror" they share something: United States, Israel, Arabs. They perceive themselves as victims. The United States after September they are now even victims. They use their victimhood as the legitimization of their expansionist politics. There was effectively a way in which 11th of September came at the right moment to justify the US aggressive military expansionism. "Now that we are also victims, we can defend ourselves, strike back," and so on and so on. The superpower axis United States-Israel, this strange axis of the most religious developed nation in the world—with United States which insists on the separation of religion and state—and the most irreligious people in the world. I read somewhere that if you make a simple opinion call, Israelis are the most atheist, some proclaim themselves atheists, existing or insisting on the religious nature of their state, can thus present this axis as the axis of victims. So I think again that this would have been the first big ethical act for Israelis. Now you'll say this is nothing, an empty symbolic act. No, it would change I claim the entire perspective, to stop—to first to just admit who they are. They are a superpower there. They are simply the local superpower, not victims. For Arabs, I mean I claim the same. I claim that imagine, just imagine a kind of a democratized or whatever, with less corruption modernized Arab, Arab communities, and I claim that the whole problem would maybe not disappear but would appear in a new way. So again, I think that as long as we stick to this kind of approaching the problem, we are lost. That would be my first reflection. Let me go on with some other political reflections. Some people like Ernesto Laclau advocate as a means of fighting today's post-politics, reduction of politics to this administrative biopolitics, expert rule and so on, populism. I find this problematic, why? Although I can see the point like revival of populism in Latin America and so on. Why? My first observation: today's populism is I think different from the traditional—from its traditional version. What distinguishes today's populism is the opponent against which it mobilizes the people: the rise of post-politics, the growing reduction of politics proper to the rational administration of conflicting interests. So in the highly developed countries of the United States and Western Europe at least, populism is more and more emerging as the inherent shadowy double of the institutionalized post-politics. I'm even tempted to say as its supplement in the Derridean sense, as the arena in which political demands that do not fit institutionalized space can be articulated. So that would be again my basic approach, that it doesn't even hold that we have on the one hand this expert rule, on the other hand populism. I think that more and more populism is becoming a sort of a necessary constituent of administrative post-politics itself. Let's just take the example in Italy of Berlusconi. If there ever was pure administrative post-political administrator, it was Berlusconi. At the same time, we can see how all the time he is playing the populist card. I think this goes up to a point even for Bush and so on. So that would be my first problem, that I don't see the opposition. It may appear propos of French referendum, no, that there is an opposition. I don't think this is the real opposition. Furthermore, I still insist that there is, let's call it a constitutive mystification which pertains to populism. The basic gesture of populism is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete enemy figure. Like, today's European populism, the enemy can be from Brussels bureaucracy to illegal immigrants which threaten our way of life. Populism is, I claim by definition, a negative phenomenon, a phenomenon grounded in a refusal, even in an implicit admission of impotence. We all know the old joke about a guy looking for his lost key under the streetlight. When asked where did he lose it, he admits that it was in a dark corner behind. "So why are you looking for it here under the light?" "Because the visibility is much better here." There is something of this trick in populism. It's complex, why beat the Jews—well, who can analyze complex situation? It's easier to beat the Jews or Arabs or whatever. So not only is populism, I claim, not the arena which today's emancipatory projects should inscribe themselves into. I claim that with today's emancipatory politics, its life-and-death problem is to find a form of political mobilization which will avoid populist temptation. What do I mean by this? Now I hear from people, Laclau and others, "but populism stands for politics as such, for politicization." I want to deny this. I claim that especially today's form of populist politicization is exactly the opposite. That is to say, it is paradoxically at the same time, how should I put it, politicization but on a depoliticized background. What do I mean by this? The ambiguity of the middle class—in this sense, I think populism is a middle-class phenomenon. How we can detect it in how middle classes relate to politics. On the one hand, the middle class is against politicization. You know what's the basic middle-class motto? "We just want to sustain our way of life, to be left to work, to lead our life in peace." Which is why incidentally populists or middle classes always tend to support authoritarian coups which promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society so that everybody can return to his or her proper work. That's one motive, this "let us live in peace, we just want to do our work properly." On the other hand, the middle classes in the guise of the threatened patriotic hard-working moral majority are the main instigators of the grass-root mass mobilization in the guise of the rightist populism in France today and so on and so on. So you see the paradox? I think this is crucial for middle classes and this is what always distinguishes populism. It is a mass form of mobilization, even one can say in Western Europe and in United States the only space within politics where we still get a passionate political mobilization, confrontation, us versus them and so on and so on. But what I claim is that it's always sustained by a minimum of depoliticization. It's always "we just want to lead our lives in peace." The vision, the ultimate vision is always anti-political. So the problem is for me to go in this crucial step further than populism goes. Only in this way will we resolve the other dilemma which is: how is it that the our enemies of the right neo-populist are the only ones who are able to mobilize people? This is I think where George Lakoff, you know the American linguist, anti-Chomsky, who tried to formulate a new program for the American liberal left, claiming that the left should fill in its vision with more political passion, instead it will miserably fail. His idea is that the left should overcome what he calls rationalist-materialist paradigm (RAM he calls it). He claims people don't follow rational calculations about their self-interests, they think in subconscious narrative frames, organized around central metaphors. Their beliefs are sustained by such frames, not by rational argumentation. So Lakoff's conclusion is that instead of abhorring the passionate metaphorical language on behalf of rationalist argumentation or abstract moralizing, the left should accept the battle at this terrain and learn to offer more seductive metaphorical frames. So near the end of his bestseller *Don't Think of an Elephant!*, Lakoff writes that conservatives have figured out their own values, principles, directions and have gotten them out in the public mind so effectively over the past years that they can evoke them all in a ten-word philosophy. This is the bad guys, right-wing: "Strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, family values." Then catastrophe comes. Lakoff proposes a similar ten-word philosophy for the liberal left—listen, listen and wonder how stupid they can be, that's my comment: "Stronger America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government, mutual responsibility." Now, if you are not a total idiot—and you are not—you see that this doesn't work. Why not? While the conservative formula presents what appears a clear choice, a choice that demands from us to adopt a strong and divisive position. "Strong defense" means something politically. It means to be opposed to those who thought, "too much arms, let's lower the budget for defense, give more to health care," whatever. "Free market" means something, although I'm not an idiot, I know that in effectively it means nothing. I mean, Bush advocacy of free market means that state exploded. I mean, he does the opposite of what... But nonetheless it appears to mean something. "Lower taxes" means something against tax-and-spend social programs and so on. But the liberal formula proposed by Lakoff consists of general feel-good phrases that nobody is against. "Stronger America"—who is against this? "Broad prosperity"—is the right-wing program, "no, that it should we should have poverty"? or "better future"—who advocates bad future? "Effective government"—who advocates ineffective government? "Mutual responsibility"—who advocates cruelty, ignorance? You see, it's totally inoperative. It's just shallow sentimental rhetoric. And it's really—there must be really some deeper ideological process at work here. I mean, this was not a stupid politician who said this. This was a guy who claims to be a specialist in how metaphors engage us, how they run our life, and he proposed this. And what is missing is simply politics in its proper sense of friend-enemy mobilization, and so on. I think that we should here accept the struggle. In what sense? There is another liberal cliché. When liberals are asked about this: how is it that the enemy has all the passion although our arguments are better? Then liberals became—get engaged in paraphrases of William Butler Yeats' *The Second Coming*. You know, "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It may appear that this is our situation today, they claim. The best—we, the best is always us, of course—are not able to fully engage ourselves, we are too liberal, cynical, rational, moralizing, while the worst engage in their racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. I think the way we should counter-attack here is again to undermine this very alternative. I don't think this is a correct description. I think that here we should introduce further distinctions. For example, when we are dealing with so-called fundamentalists, the way to deal with them is not to condemn them for being too fanatic, too convinced, too harsh, and so on and so on, but on the on the opposite: to demonstrate how, how should I put it, how they are already caught in the logic of resentment, envy, and so on. That they are—for me, the violence of today's fundamentalists, be it Muslim or or American Christian fundamentalist, is not a sign of their radical belief. It's the sign of their doubt, it's the sign of their envy, it's the sign that they already consider themselves inferior. I don't think, I think that the situation is totally misperceived when you claim that fundamentalists or think themselves as up stronger. No, they their problem is that—I'll put it in a radically crazy way—their problem is that they are not arrogant enough, really. It's they who lack this radical self-assertion. And again, maybe I already mentioned it, I will repeat it. Although I have no—I make all the time fun about Buddhism and so on, as you well remember—but nonetheless, when you meet an authentic Buddhist, you can immediately see how even if he or she is, and they are, true fundamentalists, precisely because they are true fundamentalists, they don't operate in this way of envy. You don't have this envious hatred—"oh my God, the decadent American lives," and you are fascinated, want to bomb it but at the same time fascinated by it, and so on. No, they simply observe it with a kind of a mocking irony, benevolently, you know. You know you have the truth, so what the hell do you give if others are—it's a totally different attitude. So again, the first thing to do is—this is the lesson I was trying to give you all the time in my confused way, or so I hope—to not to describe, sorry, not to accept the very way, the very description offered to us. To change the term. In the Middle East, with regard to fundamentalism and so on. Again, the problem with fundamentalism, to put it in Hegelian tautological way, is not that it is fundamentalism too fundamentalist. It's that it's not fundamentalist really. It's that full of self-hatred, self-doubt, envy, resentment and so on. Right-wing fundamentalism for me is the is the ultimate of liberal resentment. It's liberal resentment, resentment exploding. So, this is where in concrete way I see danger. For example, for the sympathizing left, liberal left, even human rights left, the problem I see is that it all too often falls into two traps: either the melodramatic sacrifice trap. What do I mean with this? I remember when I was very young I read an old—written, I think, around the turn of the last century, 1900—I forgot the title of the book, I only know that it's a Christian melodrama taking place—no, it must be in the 20s, after World War I in Germany—it's a German book where it's the story of a temporarily blinded (because of war wounds in the war) German ex-soldier who falls in love with the nurse who takes care of him. And he falls in love with her only knowing her voice and her charity, good acts, and so on. Fascinated by her goodness, so he forms in his mind an idealized image of her. Then, catastrophe is never far—that is to say his blindness is cured. It's temporary blindness, and he sees that in her bodily reality, to cut a long story short and put it in politically incorrect term, he is—she is ugly. Now, aware that his love would not survive this permanent contact with reality, and aware that the inner beauty of her good soul has a higher value than her external appearance, he intentionally blinds himself. He looks into the sun like to save her inner image to be able to love her more. And aren't we all liberals doing this whenever we have to confront—this is I think the true racism—when you confront a third-world society, country? We flee the problematic aspects, and I don't want to mention which are very suspicious for me, the standard example—that's another story—why clitoridectomy was so popular. But let us say whatever, family being or whatever. Don't we do the same? We as it were look into the sun, blind ourselves so that we can love them. But I think this is the utter refined racist patronizing, patronizing attitude. Another thing that the left, when it's pushed to radicalism, likes to do is something like—and this is really what I wanted to show you but it's not available on DVD now, not even on VHS—do you know from the British horror omnibus *Dead of Night*? It's an excellent film, five horror stories. The best one is towards the end, I think one before, where Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who becomes jealous of his dummy. He is full of suspicion that the dummy wants to leave him for a competing ventriloquist. So at the episode's end, he destroys the dummy by tensing its head and goes crazy, breaks down, is hospitalized. Then in the very last scene of this episode, friends visit him. First he is totally in a coma because they gave him sedatives. Then when he awakens, he moves his—like he distorts his face and starts to talk like the dummy. Like, identifying with the symptom, to put it in Lacanian terms, no? And this I think is another thing that the left all too well is likes to do. A further trap, not only of the left but of the right, is—especially of the new right—is the... which is why I always find suspicious is what, this trap? To fall into the super-ego sacrificial logic. What do I mean by this? It is as if, since—and I always found these descriptions suspicious—since our lives are hedonistic and so on and so on, that somehow it must hurt if you are to be moral, that you need—as if suffering in itself is a sign of inauthenticity. I think it's a thin line here which distinguishes a true heroic readiness to suffer for the good from—this is an imperceptible shift—from here to saying "suffering is in itself a necessary sign, a signal that you are ready, that what you are doing is good." And this can assume effectively disgusting forms. What forms? In her *Eichmann in Jerusalem*, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of the moral twist, distortion, which enabled the Nazi executioners to follow their orders, to or to endure the horrible acts they performed. Most of them, as Hannah Arendt points out, were not simply evil. They were well aware that they are doing things which bring humiliation, suffering, and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament, quote from Hannah Arendt, was that instead of saying "what horrible things I do to people," the murderers would be able to say, "what horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders." End of quote. So in this way they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation. The temptation to be resisted was the very temptation to succumb to the elementary pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, and their ethical effort was directed towards the task of resisting the temptation not to murder, torture, humiliate. My violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion was turned into the proof of my ethical grandeur, to do my duty, "Look, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain onto others." That's I think another quite serious ethical temptation today. But let me move, this is just a little bit, to more interesting temptation. We have time. You will get now your Foucault and then a little bit of crazy politics. Let me return briefly to Chesterton's formula, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, of this unity in the figure of God, unity of benevolent creator and rebel, the supreme criminal. I think that this enables us to resolve the dilemma, I want to move to a particular now, faced by many interpreters of *Frankenstein*, the novel. The dilemma which concerns the obvious parallel between Victor Frankenstein, the one who creates the monster, and God. So there is a parallel between Victor Frankenstein and God on the one hand; on the other hand, the parallel between the monster and Adam. In both cases, we are dealing with a single parent, if you want, who creates a male progeny in a non-sexual way. In both cases, this is followed by the creation of a bride, a female partner. Now, this parallel is clearly indicated by the novel's epigraph, you know Adam's complaint to God from Milton's *Paradise Lost*: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" Now, it is easy to note how problematic this parallel is. If Victor is associated with God, how can he also be the Promethean rebel against God? Recall the subtitle of the novel is *Or, the Modern Prometheus*. But I think from Chesterton's perspective the answer is simple. There is no problem here. Victor is like God precisely when he commits the ultimate criminal transgression and confronts the horror of its consequences. Since God is also the greatest rebel against himself ultimately. The king of the universe is the supreme criminal anarchist. Like Victor, in creating man, God committed the supreme crime of aiming too high, of creating a creature in his own image, precisely like scientists today who dream of creating an artificially intelligent living being in our own image. No wonder that his own creature ran out of his control and turned against him, against God. So I think the parallel is clear here. What we are—when we say that we want to be—when conservatives evoke this metaphor, "don't try to mess too much with creating artificial intelligence playing you try to be like God here," yeah, I accept this, but God did it, so God is a criminal. I mean, that's Chesterton's conclusion. Now, what this Chestertonian identity of the good Lord protector with the anarchist rebel enacts is the logic of social carnival brought to the extreme of self-reflection. Anarchist outburst is not a transgression of the law and order. In our societies, anarchism already is in power, wearing the mask of law and order. Our justice is the travesty of justice. The spectacle of law and order is an obscene carnival. And the ultimate irony, I think, is that this was made clear by what is, I hope we all agree here, the arguably for me greatest political poem in English, of course is by the husband, Percy Shelley, *The Mask of Anarchy*. You know, Mary's husband. And I really—I think this is one of the most disgusting examples of pseudo—of the abuse of feminism for conservative issues, this idea which is based on some facts that in writing *Frankenstein*, Mary Shelley was really drawing attention to this politico-scientific hubris and that of excesses of revolution and that her ultimate target there was her husband. I mean, there are some vulgar elements which support this thesis, like it's a well-known biographical fact, maybe you know it, that when she describes—it was found that when she, Mary Shelley, describes this crazy gaze of Victor Frankenstein, this obsession with—mad obsession with knowing creating new life and so on, that she used the same expression in a letter to a friend describing a gaze of Shelley, of her husband, no? So okay, okay. But my point is so much worse for her. That is to say, I think that if we really want to save feminism, one of the thing is to stop this feminist blackmail of: whenever you have a creative couple, the woman is automatically the good person and the man is either more male chauvinist penetrating logophallocentric or exploiting her. Like, my idea is that if you want to pursue this line, you know the line of "Ah, now we know James Joyce, stream of consciousness he really stole it from—from—from—from Nora, his wife, who wrote him letter in this way, blah blah blah." Why not go to the end in this direction? I would admire this kind of fake feminism if they were to be—now I'll be evil—why not rehabilitate Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, no? You know, the crazy sister who... do that if you dare to! Okay, but here is the point to go back to it. You know, and Shelley enumerates, as you know, describes the obscene parade or the figures of power: quote, "And many more destructions played in this ghastly masquerade, all disguised, even to the eyes, like bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies." Last came Anarchy. "He rode on a white horse, splashed with blood; he was pale even to the lips, like Death in the Apocalypse. And he wore a kingly crown, and in his grasp a scepter shone; on his brow this mark I saw: I am God, and King, and Law." All the Hegelian Chestertonian shift is here: from the criminal transgression of law and order, to law and order itself as the mask of the highest criminal transgression. And this holds especially for today's—in today's capitalism I claim this structure is universalized and, coming to Foucault, here I see the problem with Foucault. I think that Foucault still clings ultimately to the transgressive model. So, let me now go to Foucault, what I am promising you, where I see the limit of Foucauldian political engagement. It is as already hinted at here, it is uncannily similar to his Foucault's engagement for the Iranian Revolution, similar to Heidegger's Nazi engagement, and the same dilemma lurks behind in the readers of Foucault. Was it just a passing mistake of no theoretical significance, or was it grounded in his thought itself? Let me quote to make this clear a passage from this nice book, Janet Afary, Kevin Anderson, *Foucault and the Iranian Revolution*, recently published by University of Chicago Press. Quote: "Many scholars of Foucault view this—his writings on Iran—as aberrant or the product of a political mistake. We suggest that Foucault's writings on Iran were in fact closely related to his general theoretical writings on the discourse of power and the hazards of modernity. We also argue that Foucault's experience in Iran left a lasting impact on his subsequent oeuvre and that one cannot understand the sudden turn in Foucault's writings in the 1980s—turn towards care of the self, aesthetics of existence—without recognizing the significance of the Iranian episode and his more general preoccupations with the Orient." End of quote. Again, does that not evoke a striking parallel with Heidegger? In both cases, one should invert the standard narrative according to which the erroneous engagement awakened the thinker to the limitations of his previous theoretical passion and compelled him to radicalize his thought, to enact a turn that would prevent such mistakes to occur again (Heidegger's shift to releasement, *Gelassenheit*; Foucault's shift to the aesthetics of the self). I claim that rather Foucault's Iranian engagement, like Heidegger's Nazi engagement, was in itself, in its form, a proper gesture, the best thing he did. The only problem being that it was as to its content an engagement in the wrong—in the wrong direction. So, we should read Foucault's turn to Kant, Immanuel Kant, a couple of years later, after his Iranian engagement, I think as his response to this failed engagement. Foucault was interested in the notion of enthusiasm developed by Kant propos the French Revolution in his late writing *The Conflict of Faculties*. Its true significance according to Kant of the French Revolution did not reside in what actually went on in Paris. There horrible things were going on, outbursts of murderous passions and so on, but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of the sympathetic observers all around Europe. So, to put it in Lacanian terms, the real event, the dimension of the real was not in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to the observers, in the hopes awakened in the observers. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity. You got my point? The real is in this sublime image, the perception of the events in the gaze of the benevolent observers. I claim that Foucault maybe thereby proposed a kind of meta-theory of his own enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution in What matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheaval, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on, but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran gave rise to in the external Western observer, confirming his hope that a new form of spiritualized political collective is feasible, is possible. And to follow Foucault, why should we not—and I'm not ready to do this, but just to show you where this logic leads—why shouldn't we redeem in the same way not only the enthusiasm evoked by the Stalinist Russia in many Western intellectuals and artists in the 30s and 40s? You know, like you can always say—and many old Stalinist later critics are saying, "Oh, but we didn't know." No, it was the sublime image of the new man that we were that we were celebrating when we wrote odes to—to—to Stalin and so on and so on. Or why not even the enthusiasm evoked in those who were otherwise bitter critics of Stalinism by the Maoist Cultural Revolution? It's the same: who cares what went on there in China, destruction of cultural heritage and so on, it was the sublime image evoked in the Western observers. Even a step further—I'm really ready here to go to the end—do not miss my point, I'm not ready to do it, just to show where this logic leads. Why not even say that we can redeem those who admire Nazi Germany? We can always say, "But you know, don't confuse what their dream with what went on in Germany. Their dream was just how to bring a new social solidarity while avoiding the Communist trap," and so on and so on. And so it—I don't have time to go into it now, to go further into Heidegger, but it's really this formula of the argument of the borrowed kettle is really incredible how you find the same in different approaches to account for Heidegger's relation to Nazism. The claims are A: it—it's incredible how sometimes even the same authors give this borrowed kettle three arguments. The first one: Heidegger's Nazi engagement was just a contingent personal failure, nothing to do with his philosophy. B: you step one step back, Heidegger's Nazi engagement was a consequence of his thought, but precisely it was a sign that his thought till the early 30s was not radical enough, that it remained caught in European subjectivism, which is why as a reaction to it Heidegger was able to move further towards releasement, art, poetry, and so on and so on. And then the most interesting and to me frankly the most sympathetic, although I violently disagree with it, would be the third version. As far as I know it is—apart from some other marginals—only the German historian Ernst Nolte who advocates it, which is: Heidegger's engagement *was* grounded in his philosophy and he was right. Very simply, the idea being that at that point Nazism was something that could have been perceived as a justified reaction to the situation, how to get out of economic crisis without falling into Bolshevik terror, and so on and so on. Okay, so that's my first problem, that I find very suspicious the ultimate Western trap: this search for an ideal where you don't want really to be engaged but where you are just the benevolent observer. I think that this is a kind of a constitutive other scene of European progressives. And what I'm afraid of—this is why I like to be iconoclast here and say "screw Chávez" and so on with all my sympathies—is that now this Latin American new populism, no, is emerging as a little bit of this: "Oh my God, Morales, you saw he danced to the primordial maternal goddess" and so on, "isn't this nice?" and so on. Well, it's easy to have a dance for the maternal pre-Christian goddess, no? But how will he dance with relationship to international capitalism? That's more interesting. I would like to see *that* dance once. Okay. Yes, there's a very important difference you've left out, very fundamental difference between Foucault and Heidegger. Foucault's thing you might see as an eccentric idiosyncratic thing which has to be analyzed in that specific context. Heidegger's thing is a whole tradition in Germany of a modernizing conservative revolutionary thought going back to work of people like Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, and that is why essentially it was endorsed by a whole range of intellectuals including the *Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft* and they endorsed his leadership of the Führer... I agree with this point of view. Yes, there is a—again, I agree, there is a fundamental difference in the sense that Heidegger's engagement was not an idiosyncratic crazy thing the way Foucault was perceived, it was part of a general trend. I agree, but nonetheless I think that the parallel stands in this sense that both fully engaged and then very soon thereafter felt burned and as the result of this changed their changed their position. Where my point is that—okay, I will show, I will try to develop what my point is. The problem with this reading of Foucault, that he didn't really mean reality there but just in this Kantian way the sublime dimension that appears only to an observing gaze, is that in his interpretation of the Iranian events, Foucault rather says the exact opposite. He turns this perspective around and opposes the enthusiasm of those engaged in the events to the cold view of the external observer who discerns the larger causal context, the interplay of classes and their interests. Interestingly enough, in his last text on Iran from May "Is it useless to revolt?", Foucault proposes such a reading. He opposes again the historical reality of a complex process of social, cultural, economic, political transformation to the magic event of the revolt which somehow suspends the cobweb of historical causality. Quote from Foucault: "The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history and its long series of reasons why, for a man really to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey." End of quote. Now one should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions. Revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of causality. In revolt, to put it in Kantian terms, the transnatural noumenal—the way things are in themselves—dimension transpires. The paradox, of course, is that this noumenal dimension coincides with its opposite, with the pure surface of a phenomenon. The noumenon appears. It appears precisely as this magic of being caught into a revolution. So here is how then Foucault goes—sorry, here is then how Foucault goes on. Another quote from Foucault: "The Iranian movement did not experience the law of revolutions that would some say make the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely lived part of the uprising touched in an unmediated fashion on an already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is fear, fear of what just happened last fall in Iran, something of which the world has not seen an example for a long time." End of quote. So again, we have the purity of the event, the surface, which is then manipulated by us Westerners who want to reduce it to socioeconomic calculation as well as by those Iranian clergy who use it to establish their power. Now then in a step further, now things get complicated. In a step further then, Foucault transposes this division into an internal division of the engaged individuals themselves. Quote: "Let's take the activist in some political group in Iran today," he meant in '79, '78. "When he was taking part in one of the demonstrations, he was doubled. He had his political calculation which was this or that, but at the same time, he was an individual caught up in a revolutionary movement, or rather that Iranian who has stood up against the king. And the two things did not come into contact. He did not rise up against the king because his party had made this or that calculation." End of quote. Now then for Foucault, the same division cuts across the entire social body. At the level of reality, there were of course multiple agents, complex interactions of classes, overdetermination of incompatible struggles, and so on. However, at the level of the revolutionary event proper, all this was sublimated into, quote from Foucault, "an absolutely collective will" which united the entire social body against the king and his clique. There was for Foucault no division within the social body, no class struggle. All, from poor farmers to students, from clergy to disappointed capitalists, wanted the same. Quote from Foucault: "The collective will is a political myth with which philosophers try to analyze or justify institutions. It's a theoretical tool. Nobody has ever seen the collective will, and personally I thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter. I don't know whether you agree with me, but we met in Tehran and throughout Iran the collective will of a people." End of quote. Foucault opposes here revolt and revolution. Revolution in the modern European sense for Foucault designates the reinscription of a revolt into the process of strategic political calculation. Revolution is a process by means of which the revolt is colonized by realpolitik. Another just two more quotes: "Revolution gave this uprising a legitimacy, sorted out their good and bad forms, defined their laws of development. Even the profession of revolutionary was defined. By thus repatriating revolution into the discourse of revolution, it was said the uprising would appear in all its truth." And so on and so on. So did you notice how again the Kantian background, how Foucault compares the appearing of a collective will with two of Kant's noumenal things? He mentions God, soul, which are precisely noumenal. You can't perceive them empirically for Kant. When the noumenal appears, it is—it has to be in the guise of ultimate horror. And Foucault is at least heroic enough to draw this conclusion: that we have this pure unity of the will, but to become actual it has to be horror or rather terror. Here is the final quote, crucial from Foucault: "At this stage of revolutionary enthusiasm, the most important and the most atrocious mingle. The extraordinary hope of remaking Islam into a great living civilization and various forms of virulent xenophobia as well as the global stakes and the regional rivalries and the problem of imperialisms and the subjugation of women and so on and so on. What has given the Iranian movement its intensity has been a double register: on the one hand, a collective will that has been very strongly expressed politically and on the other hand, the desire for a radical change in ordinary life. But this double affirmation can only be based on traditions, institutions that carry a charge of chauvinism, nationalism, exclusiveness, which have a very powerful attraction for individuals. To confront so fearsome an armed power, one mustn't feel alone, nor begin with nothing." Are you aware what Foucault is saying here? He withdraw totally. His point is that you need all that let's call it historical shit: antifeminism, racism and so on, because the enthusiasm has to be sustained in something. And that was the only thing that was at the disposal of people, of the Iranian people. So the picture thus gets complicated. Again, it's like this argument of the borrowed kettle. Did you notice how—okay you didn't, because I started too late—I mean but if you read Foucault, read it in the book his writings, he withdraws two times. He starts with the overall support of the Iranian revolt. He even mocks those who think "Oh, at the end it will finish either with Western technocracy or with clergy regime of the clergy." He says, "no, you don't see something totally new is emerging, an entirely different society breaking out of the space of European modernity and its deadlock." That was his first idea, that it's we Europeans who through our distorted perspective of modernization project this into Iran. We don't see that in this new collective spirituality a new mode is emerging. Then, so first he withdraw from this to asserting only the enthusiastic moment of revolt. Now the enemies were only the European liberals who wanted to discredit the Iranian revolt because it ended up in an oppressive regime of clergy. Foucault's claim now is that they move at the same level of this clergy itself which is reclaiming the revolt in order to justify its rule. The idea here
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is that there was a magic moment of the revolution which was then betrayed by those who organized it, steered it, regulated it, so that again it was not only that this realpolitik side of manipulation new power was projected by us into a pure spiritual upheaval, it was already a duality, duality between the sublime real and the pragmatic political reality of the events themselves. Then Foucault makes a further withdrawal, an ambiguity which cannot be reduced to the difference between pure revolt
is that there was a magic moment of the revolution which was then betrayed by those who organized it, steered it, regulated it, so that again it was not only that this realpolitik side of manipulation new power was projected by us into a pure spiritual upheaval, it was already a duality, duality between the sublime real and the pragmatic political reality of the events themselves. Then Foucault makes a further withdrawal, an ambiguity which cannot be reduced to the difference between pure revolt
Slavoj Žižek
and multiple political interplay. Chauvinism, virulent xenophobia, subjugation of women and so on, all these are not signs of the contamination of the event by socio-political reality, but as he puts it, "they are the only available inherent support of the event itself." The mobilization precisely of these motives—xenophobia, antifeminism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism as he concedes somewhere—gave the event the strength to oppose itself to the oppressive political regime and not only this, even to avoid the game of political calculations. So at the end Foucault has to concede that precisely what at least for us liberal Europeans was the worst in Iranian upheaval, this violent populist ideology of antifeminism, religious fundamentalism, was what sustained in the Iranian Revolution what went further than just another political instrumental pragmatic revolution. So the best was supported by the worst in—so that at the end it's no longer again, you got how the split Foucault has to admit a certain split between the pragmatic ruthless modernizing aspect, power struggle, realpolitik and the sublime revolutionary enthusiasm. How this split is gradually internalized. First it's "we perceive it as pragmatic realpolitik, Iranians do another thing." Then Iranians themselves are split, on the one hand enthusiasm on the other hand realpolitik. Finally the split as it were infects from within the enthusiasm itself, so that the only good thing is the pure form of enthusiasm, but in order for survive at the level of content this form has to mobilize precisely what is worst. And here I think that Foucault should be the target of the reproach which is usually leveled against Alain Badiou, namely this naive reproach: "if for Badiou an event is this breakthrough of the new blah-blah-blah, why wouldn't Nazism, fascism be also an event?" I think Badiou can answer it through a precise analysis of the place where an event intervenes. I think Foucault can't. Because if we—you get my point, if you accept what Foucault accepts, can't you then also say, which in a way is true that, my God, this description of a situation where you have social bodies undivided, collective will, all want the same and so on. And this collective magic will as it were sustained by precisely the lowest—antifeminism, chauvinism and so on. If this is not an aspect of ideological functioning of Nazism then I don't know what it is. Because again, if you read descriptions of people who were engaged in Nazi revolution, this is what was so fundamentally, Heidegger is even admitting this, this is what was so seductive in Nazism, precisely this moment of, however you call it, magic spiritual unity. So no wonder then that after his Iran experience Foucault withdraw to the topic of the care of self, aesthetics of existence and so on, and politically he started to support different human rights initiatives, which even today makes him in France a darling of the neoliberal humanitarian new philosophers, Bernard-Henri Lévy and so on and so on. Like, recently I read an essay by one of them, not Henri Lévy, one of his younger colleagues who claims—tries to play "good Foucault versus bad Deleuze." Deleuze: totalitarian, anti-Semitic; Foucault: the good guy, human rights and so on and so on. So what interests me again is how the last Foucault, who I think if you ask me perfectly fits this kind of transgressive logic of late capitalism—"we should go to the extreme, experiment, all forms of sexuality," whatever—simply fits. This is the fate of, this is I think the most tragic depressive fate of radical intellectuals that you can imagine. No wonder that the most consequent Foucauldian, it's—okay there is a split in the inner court, how should I put it, between François Ewald and—sorry I forgot his name, the other one who was his last lover who is a more romantic figure—but François Ewald, one of the two official Foucauldian inheritors, simply draw the consequences and turned into a kind of a right—even right-center liberal state functionary. Simply withdraw from politics, just his job for state and so on and so on. Because I think that what is for me so crucial for Foucault's withdrawal to the problematic of care of the self and so on and so on is that all of a sudden the all those motives of state discipline and so on are out—are no longer in focus. No longer in focus, which means they are there to be used. So after all these fiascos, where are we today? The lesson of the last decades, if there is one—let me be here very honest—is a kind of indestructibility of capitalism. I had a debate, public debate with Simon Critchley some time ago, okay. He attacked me, I attacked him in a very friendly way, and then finally I asked him in a kind of a primitive leftist way, "But okay, when you claim politics should be today outside state and so blah-blah-blah, so do you really think that capitalism can be overcome?" And honestly and the—he said, "No, I think that in a way capitalism is eternal, it always resuscitates." And I think that far from playing the stupid "oh you see, traitor, traitor," I think my God, we should concede that—okay, to put it in my specific terms, no? Of course he will get shot when we take over for this, but another story, no? What can we do, no? This is my version of that Aristotle, you know, "friend of Plato but greater friend of truth," no, like "I am your friend, bang-bang-bang, you are there," no? Okay. But what I want to say, but but let's be frank: there is a truth in it. When already Marx compared capitalism to vampire, I think we should today when we remember this, bear in mind this living dead aspect of vampires. You know, if you don't kill them in a proper way they rise up again after being stabbed to death. So isn't it something crazy, that even the most radical Maoist attempt in the Cultural Revolution to really wipe out the traces of capitalism ended up in its triumphant return? I mean, this is simply a fact that we have to think about. Why? My answer, of course there is a detailed—more detailed socio-economic analysis to be done, but at a more central level—abstract theoretical level—I think that precisely on behalf of our fidelity to Marx, we should discern some, let's say, mistake in Marx's analysis, Marxist analysis of capitalist dynamics. Marx perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism. As Marx put it, "the ultimate limit of capitalism is the capitalist himself," the capitalist development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions. What I find problematic, I think, is Marxist conclusion that if then we abolish the obstacle, that is to say the capitalist form of this dynamics, we will get the dynamics at its purest. The pure explosion of dynamic, even more radical development. You know, these are these unfortunate metaphors of form and content: then at a certain level the capitalist form first it propel development becomes some obstacle, we get rid of it, development explodes even more. But if there is a lesson to be learned from later history of capitalism, isn't it that the only social system where this dialectic of form—this primitive evolutionary dialectic of form and content where forces of production develop too much, they explode the form—where this dialectic was confirmed, isn't it ironically it was not in capitalism but precisely in really existing socialism? I mean, the case there is really a clear vulgar Marxist case. It's so clear that when from classical industrialization the world forces of production started to move to what, for a lack of better term, we usually call as post-industrial society or whatever, simply the really existing socialism couldn't cope with it. It exploded it. It couldn't accommodate itself to this new form of the forces of production. So then, okay, I will not go further in this analysis how Marx underestimated the extent to which what appears as obstacle is the very impetus. The very obstacle is what propels, what pushes the movement. But this is not the whole story, I claim. There is another no less surprising lesson of the last decades. The lesson not only of the Chinese Communists presiding over what is arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in the entire human history, but also the lesson of the West European Third Way social democracy. It is in short: "We can do it better." It is as if the logic of obstacle as a positive condition which underlined the failure of the socialist attempts to overcome capitalism is now returning with a vengeance in capitalism itself. That is to say, what if, in a way symmetrical to this logic, an obstacle to the free unencumbered reign of market capitalism can be its ultimate impetus? As many a perspicuous commentator observed, here in the United Kingdom, the Thatcher revolution was in itself chaotic, impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. And it was only the Third Way New Labour Blair regime which was able to institutionalize Thatcherism, to stabilize it into new institutional forms. Or to put it in Hegelian terms, to raise what first appeared as contingency, a historical accident, into necessity. In this sense I claim the Blair regime repeated Thatcherism, elevating it into a concept. In the same way that for Hegel, Augustus repeated Caesar, transforming a contingent personal name Caesar into a concept, Caesar as title. Thatcher was not Thatcherite, she was just herself, whatever this was, Frankenstein whatever. It was only Blair, more than John Major—I think that Blair is more a Thatcherite than John Major. Major was, I think, a—almost a return to how do you call them, the—the—the "wet Tories," no? This kind of soft Toryism—who truly formed Thatcherism as a notion. The dialectical irony of history is that only a nominal ideological-political enemy can do this to you, can elevate you into a concept. The empirical instigator had to be knocked off (Julius Caesar had to be murdered, Thatcher had to be ignominiously deposed, and so on and so on). Another reference to Marx enables us to throw a new light on this strange necessity. The old example that I already evoked—I want to evoke it again here, of course, it's again I always circulate around the same examples—in his analysis of the French Revolution how Marx pointed out that the ruling party of the order, the Republican Party, was effectively the coalition of the two royalist wings (Legitimists and Orleanists). So that the only way for the two to rule was under the banner of anonymous kingdom of the Republic. And I think something similar is going on today. As we all know, capital is today split into two (okay, more complex, but in a first approximation) two big factions: traditional industrial capital and postmodern digital informational, however you call it, capital. And I claim that the only way for the two factions to find a common denominator is under the banner of the anonymous capitalism of Third Way Social Democracy. In the same way as for Marx, the only way to be a royalist in general is to be a Republican; today the only way to be a capitalist in general is to be a Third Way Social Democrat. This is how the opposition left-right works today. It is the new Third Way left which stands for the interest of capital as such in its totality, while today's right as a rule advocates the interest of some particular section of capital in contrast to other sections. And so and so I think that we should take this necessity very seriously, leaving behind all moralistic reproaches on how the Third Way social democracy betrayed its historical legacy. The reason it can do better—the reasons are precisely the inner antagonisms of global capitalism, which would explode, or at least give rise to tensions, without the Third Way minimal safety work on regulatory interventions. Orthodox neoliberals are here victims of the same illusion as the classic Marxists. When they see the new social democrats or Chinese communists successfully managing capitalist growth, their reaction is, "If they can do it, can you imagine how much more explosive the growth would have been under full conditions of liberal capitalism?" It is here that they are wrong, unable to perceive the positive role of what appears to them as obstacles. Like in the case of China, if Communists were to lose power, I claim we would get social chaos, probably even civil war. In this sense I claim from the interests of global capitalism, Tiananmen massacre was a blessing in disguise. And I'm ready to go even further. Now comes the horrible message. Now you can shoot me for this, but I spoke with some Chinese friends and some Western students who were there. And to avoid a misunderstanding, they are not pro-regime, they are not even pro-regime. They just told me some interesting things that the Tiananmen protests were not as innocent as they appeared. What triggered them—they started, maybe you remember—no, some of you too young, but yeah—with a student, a student protest. But, and I heard this story from three people who were there, who even were in danger of being then arrested and so on sympathizing, you know what immediately triggered these protests? It was a directly racist cause. The first item was the complaint of the Chinese students that those visiting students from third-world countries, especially from Africa, black students, were enjoying giving too much food, too much money, whatever. It was this purely nationalist racist explosion, "Why are foreigners treated better than us?" and so on and so on. So okay, to go on: the Third Way Social Democracy from Blair to Clinton is thus a genuine option. Not for me, of course, that's not the end, don't be afraid. Not only a desperate compromise attempt at finding a balance between the inherent demands of capitalism and the demands of the welfare state. They can genuinely claim that their model ultimately works better for capitalism itself. And it is the highest irony of the 20th century history that this outcome was outlined first maybe by none other than Lenin himself, who two years before his death, when it become clear that there will be no all-European revolution and that the idea of building socialism in one country is nonsense, he already envisaged a similar option. Quote from Lenin: "What if the complete hopelessness of our situation, by stimulating our efforts, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?" End of quote. So one should take note of how Lenin uses here a class-neutral term: "to create the fundamental requisites of civilization," which then as the continuation indicates, even smacks of what today some call "alternative modernity." No wonder his vision in his last years was simply that of a more efficient modernizing state capitalism. This I think realistically would have—is what would have happened if the old Trotskyite dream—if Lenin were to stay alive and operative for a couple of years more: a society somewhere in the middle between the Third Way UK and today's China, I claim. And there is nothing dishonorable in this task. I think that in a way Blair and those like him are—this is our only hope as radical leftists: to admit that they are doing us a favor in the sense as, how should I put it, presenting the furthest, the best the existing system can do. And this confronts us with a true dilemma. Does this solution work in the long term? Can in this way the antagonisms be helped, be kept under control? Here enters my—here enters my pessimism and that's the task today. And here I—you will not get now the big formula what to do. Now you will say but the last time I finished with "dictatorship of the proletariat." Well there is no big secret there. What I mean is something pretty obvious: dictatorship of the proletariat—forget all about this party rule models and so on. Dictatorship means for me simply a—how to put it—as opposed to, dictatorship means for me a non-representative functioning of politics. I think that today the limit of democracy is precisely its representational functioning, which is turning into a post-political mode. That is to say, politics as the space of negotiation of particular interests, their mediation through compromises. We have this representational model. For me this is the limit of how democracy today function. And when I say dictatorship, let me be very clear here. I am not saying we should against democracy be for dictatorship. The movement is here always as it were Hegelian retroactive. It is to see how—this is for me the true meaning of the term dictatorship—just to admit that in practice this opens even more space for what naively I am still maybe ready to call "authentic democracy." The where democracy cheats, I claim institutional democracy, is as I already tried to develop is how, how should I put it, it in its apparent image of democratic rule of power responsible to the people and so on, it covers up its own, let's call it, aspect of dictatorship, in the sense of which I already mentioned here that a power in order to function has to have this unconditional aspect. Without this unconditional aspect, it doesn't function. So I am not saying here, let me be very clear here, now improvising, it's difficult for me, I haven't yet formulated. When I say the dictatorship aspect of democracy, I am not giving you the old boring leftist mantra on how, you know, bourgeois democracy that we enjoy is a scam, a mask, in reality there is somewhere, I don't know, in today's Britain it would be somewhere where Tony Blair flies to Murdoch and some other and then they they really decide everything and if we will not vote them in they will make even coup d'etat or whatever. It's not that. Democracy can be really functioning in this sense of elections and so on and so on. What I'm claiming is that nonetheless the form of state authority and so on has this irreducible dictatorial element, which I claim is even not—I'm even ready to go a step further and to claim that it's not even a bad thing. And what happens in a crucial revolution is that this—this is for me, in this sense for me the true shift has to be the conflict, the struggle between two dictatorships if you want, the dictatorship bourgeois or not in the sense of as Stalinist put it when they praised the rise to power of Hitler, when they said, "Oh, it's even better now, masks have fallen, now it's one brutal force against the other." What I mean is that the level at which the electoral game does is not sufficient is that it leaves untouched this basic functioning of power, which appears representational power only in acts, our interest, we voted in, but again there is always, as it was clear to Marx, this absolute excess to power. And I think especially today when we are fed with this story about how the state is disappearing and so on and so on, if anything this unconditional regulating disciplinary, however you put it, exercise of state power is stronger than ever. And I'm here very realist. My dream is not an anarchic one—"Oh, we should abolish all this." All I'm saying is that we should at least bear it in mind. And again, I repeat it to avoid a misunderstanding, it's not this simple personification: "they are really dictators" and so on and so on. It is just that how should I put it, this dictatorial excess is an excess which comes with it, which is as it were inscribed into the very functioning of state apparatuses. And whatever you think about Lenin, and how it went wrong afterwards—for me this is the mega-tragedy of Lenin—it was clear at least in the first couple of years that his problem was: is it possible, and I am the first to admit the utter failure of it, is it possible to change (this is for me the problem of dictatorship of the proletariat), it's not who will win elections. It is: is it possible to change something in this fundamental functioning of the state apparatus? This is what I mean by dictatorship. And it doesn't mean a narrow group will take over. It means only that when we fight, we do not fight simply as one group against the other within a defined space of political rules. We fight for much more. We fight for how—for these rules themselves. Not only explicit democratic rules, but all the how should I put it, implicit institutional baggage, luggage that comes with them. And that this is why, in spite of all my mocking remarks about for example Chávez and so on, for example when the coup d'etat failed in Venezuela, this is what interested me: this self-organization which I don't idealize but you know how in these moments of social tension everybody knew that the or even in the referendum for Chávez, you remember with which he won. The problem was not just who has the majority. The problem was a more radical one. The problem was the question of the entire new political logic, power structure, and so on and so on. This is what I mean by dictatorship. By dictatorship I simply mean that this more radical struggle which is not just the struggle for power within the state, but the struggle for the very frame, what is the state? And what I mean by proletariat is, I am definitely not a naive Marxist who claims in old naive notion of the working class (although if you ask me I wouldn't write off too quickly the working class). By proletariat I simply mean a code word for what people like Badiou, Rancière and others in France what they formulated as that "part of no part," that part which precisely by being excluded stands for universality. So I think that what is still operative today is the logic of this logic of universalist mobilization against the post-political logic of your interests, my interests, and so on and so on. It's this—this is all I am saying, that and this is the content I'm trying to give to this term that I like to use for obvious provocative reasons "dictatorship of the proletariat," that it's not enough to remain within the space of liberal-democratic power struggle and so on and so on. We have to—we have to—how should I put it, we have to move a step further. I think that the questions which were forgotten, repressed in the last years, the questions which concern the very functioning of state power and so on and so on for a whole variety of reasons from crime, social security, to ecological reasons and so on and so on, they will have to be raised again. And again the question for me is not in this old anarchist terms how to abolish the state, but again I'm not afraid to use the term of a new form of progressive dictatorship. By again—but let me be careful here—by dictatorship I don't mean minority will decide and so on, but that it's a clash of universal visions. That's my point. It's a question—it's not a question of clashing particular wills, clashing within a universal space. It's a how should I put it, in order for—this is for me the formula of what I mean by dictatorship—that in order to win partially at the more radical level, the winner has to take it all. Formally, I mean. Has to define the entire space. This is what we are. In the same way that you get my point, we should do what Thatcher did: what even if she lost empirically, by through Blair she won formally because as who was it, Peter Mandelson who said that "economically we are all Thatcherites today," blah blah blah. So this is—this is—this is the level at which we should—we should fight. And... [Audience member interrupts] Excuse me, will you give me—? Yeah, although okay, maybe better to do it tomorrow, but you can now, yes. Is there going to be any time for discussion today? Sorry, any—? Is there going to be any time for discussion today? Maybe now, because tomorrow the—the debate is meant to take place and here I was just obeying orders of my benevolent masters, whom I love and so on, without irony. The no, I love this, didn't you notice how all the great revolutionaries always— [Audience member interrupts again] Yes. Okay, I give—okay, I'll put it in this way, in a Wittgensteinian way: since this obviously means that you have a question, I give you now the time to ask the question. One second, please. Let me ask Slavoj: have you finished or not yet? I haven't yet finished but since I want to take some more time to clarify the ideas, I prefer to—to fake with a fake to claim that oh, I was deprived of finishing. I want you so that I can claim, so that I can cover up that I am not able to finish at the level that I intended to. [Host] How long would you—how long do you think you will need in order to round up your argument? Tomorrow I will need five minutes. Today I want to be deprived of—of the word, that's my message. [Host] But let's—I mean if you need five minutes... No I don't need, I want you to tell me, "Sorry you spoke too long." No, I'll tell you what to do. No, I'll give you five more minutes and then Lynn, you start with that first. No but I would nonetheless, okay, now you force me to come into the open like this Hegelian cunning of reason. I'm too confused to finish it, please save me with the question. Okay, go ahead, Lynn. Well, we all like to be iconoclastic, and so I would like to be a little iconoclastic about Žižekian politics and where I see them be, because the ultimate irony might be that you, who represent what you call this passionate middle-class amalgam of objection to everything and you have entertained us for almost two hours now objecting to everything, that most of the left has been today, but you haven't clearly yet, although perhaps you might in your last five minutes, really given us anything that I can recognize as a strategy or vehicles for change or structures that will take us there. And I would like to say that in terms of your criticisms of the politics you've covered, I'd say you were more misleading than not in every comment you made, beginning with Israel-Palestine, with the left, with fundamentalism. I'm sure I would have thought that about feminism and racism as you developed that strategically. So I'll just comment on Israel-Palestine and the left and a word on fundamentalism. On Israel-Palestine, you said the way you saw moving forward there would be to tell Israel that they had to stop feeling like victims. Israel did not come into being because Zionists felt like victims. In fact, Israel came into being because they knew they didn't want to be victims, they didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, they weren't interested in those people who'd been victims of the Holocaust until it was the case with Eichmann and anti-Zionism in the Arab world that it became to serve the state interest in terms of justifying the continuing colonial infiltration into what remained of Palestine. So what I would suggest is happening there is, in fact, the idea of threats is used as justification by Bush, by Blair, and so on for ongoing expansion into another people's territory. So I think you're wrong on that. I think you're wrong in terms of your account of the left, which the left as I understand it, and you're saying its words for Blair, the left is born, I don't know if anyone in Britain would call Blair the left. The left in the groups of people who've had some form of organizational work, what's more, numbers of the left remain within social-democratic institutions or anywhere else as the grass roots and can try and find ways of intervening either at the national or... The point is clear, Lynn. Let's find... on fundamentalism again you said the same thing... [cross-talk] wait, wait, wait, why? I think the point is clear. Let's allow Slavoj to reply, otherwise he won't have time. No but you know what's really my prob—first I don't, you know in what sense I don't bluff. I my God whenever I hear this "but you didn't propose any positive program," but I didn't claim that I proposed it. I claim that the left hasn't even finished its self-criticism. What I reject of today's left is this pressure that you are not allowed to tell the bad story if you don't point out the light at the end of the tunnel. So for example when you say "I hope trade unions," I also hope but show me some signs which support this hope, my God. Show me how this will work. You are a for—of course if somebody were to show me that trade unions are doing something not just basically a defensive attitude, I mean show me, I'm the first to accept it. I just think that we—I'm not afraid to insist in this if you want negative attitude and so on. Because whenever people tell me you don't give a positive image, okay, okay I will be now very vulgar: show me a political force in today's England which can serve this famous positive revival of the left or whatever. Show it to me. Who is it? Is it trade unions? Is it Socialist Workers Party or whatever? Show me one who can do anything serious. Whatever is done is done, the only mass movements are these abstract movements which I think are deeply ambiguous although I support all their claims, like what were the only true mobilizations: anti-war, a little bit of ecology. And even there I support them not how should I put it. But where, I mean, you know what I mean? I just see that the problem is really a problem, and I'm not afraid to insist. So don't reproach me for you don't have a problem because my point is not that I should have a problem, but my point is show me yours. But you're the one who's ridiculing everybody else. I claim that I am ridiculing them in an immanent way. That is to say I'm claiming that I am ridiculing them by measuring them not by mine but by they their own standards. For example, for me the absolute figure of the ridicule is these moralistic old leftists who and I have all the hatred that you want me to give to against Blair, but who make fun of "Blair they betrayed legacy" and so on and so on. What do they have to offer? If you read them, it is as if everything would have been okay if the Labour Party were to remain faithful to the old welfare state program. I mean, I claim that you see, I see a problem. I only see a problem here and my God, I'm desperate to accept any solution. Just don't—now okay I'll put it in this way. Aren't you doing exactly the same thing as you are reproaching me when you are reproaching me for not giving a positive program without you making clear what is this program? You are just repeating the same gesture of "oh..." No, not me! Sorry, any—? [Inaudible comment] Yeah, but okay, but I think that my duty today as an intellectual first—okay, let me be very clear here. First, I don't think that my duty as a philosopher is to give you a program. My all I can do as a philosopher (here I am in a way transcendental if you want) is to show you where the way the problems are—the mystification in the way the problems are perceived. That's, I think, all I can do. Just to show the way and I think that this is the first thing to seriously to do. To see how the way we perceive problems are part of the problem in a way. For example, and I here I was more critical even than towards the left to the media, like to perceive today as the fight I don't know of democracy tolerance versus liberalism or whatever. This was my point of what I was saying already at the beginning I think about ecology and so on. That's, I think, all I can do and okay, then I'll give you another re—I would go even further and I would say: what you are reproaching me with, I'm tempted to agree with it on one condition, that you become aware of how then the same reproach hits practically the entire radical left. Where do you have anything? Like okay, Adorno Frankfurt School. When finally asked, I quote him, "what to do," he said, "I don't have an idea, I don't know." And and so on and so on. Even let's go back to Marx. My God, what all you find in Marx are some so abstract indications. And Marx himself, who should have known, was as we all know, was the only feasible indication that he gave was when he was, as it were, surprised by the events themselves of Paris Commune, which as the ultimate irony was done as Marx was honest to admit by mostly non-Marxists, no? By we know who, Proudhonists and so on and so on. So you know what I mean? The problem that you draw attention to is a much more radical program. Like even now you will say "but there were people who knew what to do like Lenin." Yeah, but I claim if you analyze it closely, when they finally did something, they did something totally opposite of what they planned to do. You know what Lenin was writing in—in his *State and Revolution*? "Every that, how do you call it, kitchen, cuisine, my God, cooking lady, cook, whatever." Okay, should become, you know, should govern and so on. Well, what, just look at it what came on—out of that once they were once they were in power. That's that's all I'm saying and okay, now you can say but I am up here. But
and multiple political interplay. Chauvinism, virulent xenophobia, subjugation of women and so on, all these are not signs of the contamination of the event by socio-political reality, but as he puts it, "they are the only available inherent support of the event itself." The mobilization precisely of these motives—xenophobia, antifeminism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism as he concedes somewhere—gave the event the strength to oppose itself to the oppressive political regime and not only this, even to avoid the game of political calculations. So at the end Foucault has to concede that precisely what at least for us liberal Europeans was the worst in Iranian upheaval, this violent populist ideology of antifeminism, religious fundamentalism, was what sustained in the Iranian Revolution what went further than just another political instrumental pragmatic revolution. So the best was supported by the worst in—so that at the end it's no longer again, you got how the split Foucault has to admit a certain split between the pragmatic ruthless modernizing aspect, power struggle, realpolitik and the sublime revolutionary enthusiasm. How this split is gradually internalized. First it's "we perceive it as pragmatic realpolitik, Iranians do another thing." Then Iranians themselves are split, on the one hand enthusiasm on the other hand realpolitik. Finally the split as it were infects from within the enthusiasm itself, so that the only good thing is the pure form of enthusiasm, but in order for survive at the level of content this form has to mobilize precisely what is worst. And here I think that Foucault should be the target of the reproach which is usually leveled against Alain Badiou, namely this naive reproach: "if for Badiou an event is this breakthrough of the new blah-blah-blah, why wouldn't Nazism, fascism be also an event?" I think Badiou can answer it through a precise analysis of the place where an event intervenes. I think Foucault can't. Because if we—you get my point, if you accept what Foucault accepts, can't you then also say, which in a way is true that, my God, this description of a situation where you have social bodies undivided, collective will, all want the same and so on. And this collective magic will as it were sustained by precisely the lowest—antifeminism, chauvinism and so on. If this is not an aspect of ideological functioning of Nazism then I don't know what it is. Because again, if you read descriptions of people who were engaged in Nazi revolution, this is what was so fundamentally, Heidegger is even admitting this, this is what was so seductive in Nazism, precisely this moment of, however you call it, magic spiritual unity. So no wonder then that after his Iran experience Foucault withdraw to the topic of the care of self, aesthetics of existence and so on, and politically he started to support different human rights initiatives, which even today makes him in France a darling of the neoliberal humanitarian new philosophers, Bernard-Henri Lévy and so on and so on. Like, recently I read an essay by one of them, not Henri Lévy, one of his younger colleagues who claims—tries to play "good Foucault versus bad Deleuze." Deleuze: totalitarian, anti-Semitic; Foucault: the good guy, human rights and so on and so on. So what interests me again is how the last Foucault, who I think if you ask me perfectly fits this kind of transgressive logic of late capitalism—"we should go to the extreme, experiment, all forms of sexuality," whatever—simply fits. This is the fate of, this is I think the most tragic depressive fate of radical intellectuals that you can imagine. No wonder that the most consequent Foucauldian, it's—okay there is a split in the inner court, how should I put it, between François Ewald and—sorry I forgot his name, the other one who was his last lover who is a more romantic figure—but François Ewald, one of the two official Foucauldian inheritors, simply draw the consequences and turned into a kind of a right—even right-center liberal state functionary. Simply withdraw from politics, just his job for state and so on and so on. Because I think that what is for me so crucial for Foucault's withdrawal to the problematic of care of the self and so on and so on is that all of a sudden the all those motives of state discipline and so on are out—are no longer in focus. No longer in focus, which means they are there to be used. So after all these fiascos, where are we today? The lesson of the last decades, if there is one—let me be here very honest—is a kind of indestructibility of capitalism. I had a debate, public debate with Simon Critchley some time ago, okay. He attacked me, I attacked him in a very friendly way, and then finally I asked him in a kind of a primitive leftist way, "But okay, when you claim politics should be today outside state and so blah-blah-blah, so do you really think that capitalism can be overcome?" And honestly and the—he said, "No, I think that in a way capitalism is eternal, it always resuscitates." And I think that far from playing the stupid "oh you see, traitor, traitor," I think my God, we should concede that—okay, to put it in my specific terms, no? Of course he will get shot when we take over for this, but another story, no? What can we do, no? This is my version of that Aristotle, you know, "friend of Plato but greater friend of truth," no, like "I am your friend, bang-bang-bang, you are there," no? Okay. But what I want to say, but but let's be frank: there is a truth in it. When already Marx compared capitalism to vampire, I think we should today when we remember this, bear in mind this living dead aspect of vampires. You know, if you don't kill them in a proper way they rise up again after being stabbed to death. So isn't it something crazy, that even the most radical Maoist attempt in the Cultural Revolution to really wipe out the traces of capitalism ended up in its triumphant return? I mean, this is simply a fact that we have to think about. Why? My answer, of course there is a detailed—more detailed socio-economic analysis to be done, but at a more central level—abstract theoretical level—I think that precisely on behalf of our fidelity to Marx, we should discern some, let's say, mistake in Marx's analysis, Marxist analysis of capitalist dynamics. Marx perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism. As Marx put it, "the ultimate limit of capitalism is the capitalist himself," the capitalist development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions. What I find problematic, I think, is Marxist conclusion that if then we abolish the obstacle, that is to say the capitalist form of this dynamics, we will get the dynamics at its purest. The pure explosion of dynamic, even more radical development. You know, these are these unfortunate metaphors of form and content: then at a certain level the capitalist form first it propel development becomes some obstacle, we get rid of it, development explodes even more. But if there is a lesson to be learned from later history of capitalism, isn't it that the only social system where this dialectic of form—this primitive evolutionary dialectic of form and content where forces of production develop too much, they explode the form—where this dialectic was confirmed, isn't it ironically it was not in capitalism but precisely in really existing socialism? I mean, the case there is really a clear vulgar Marxist case. It's so clear that when from classical industrialization the world forces of production started to move to what, for a lack of better term, we usually call as post-industrial society or whatever, simply the really existing socialism couldn't cope with it. It exploded it. It couldn't accommodate itself to this new form of the forces of production. So then, okay, I will not go further in this analysis how Marx underestimated the extent to which what appears as obstacle is the very impetus. The very obstacle is what propels, what pushes the movement. But this is not the whole story, I claim. There is another no less surprising lesson of the last decades. The lesson not only of the Chinese Communists presiding over what is arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in the entire human history, but also the lesson of the West European Third Way social democracy. It is in short: "We can do it better." It is as if the logic of obstacle as a positive condition which underlined the failure of the socialist attempts to overcome capitalism is now returning with a vengeance in capitalism itself. That is to say, what if, in a way symmetrical to this logic, an obstacle to the free unencumbered reign of market capitalism can be its ultimate impetus? As many a perspicuous commentator observed, here in the United Kingdom, the Thatcher revolution was in itself chaotic, impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. And it was only the Third Way New Labour Blair regime which was able to institutionalize Thatcherism, to stabilize it into new institutional forms. Or to put it in Hegelian terms, to raise what first appeared as contingency, a historical accident, into necessity. In this sense I claim the Blair regime repeated Thatcherism, elevating it into a concept. In the same way that for Hegel, Augustus repeated Caesar, transforming a contingent personal name Caesar into a concept, Caesar as title. Thatcher was not Thatcherite, she was just herself, whatever this was, Frankenstein whatever. It was only Blair, more than John Major—I think that Blair is more a Thatcherite than John Major. Major was, I think, a—almost a return to how do you call them, the—the—the "wet Tories," no? This kind of soft Toryism—who truly formed Thatcherism as a notion. The dialectical irony of history is that only a nominal ideological-political enemy can do this to you, can elevate you into a concept. The empirical instigator had to be knocked off (Julius Caesar had to be murdered, Thatcher had to be ignominiously deposed, and so on and so on). Another reference to Marx enables us to throw a new light on this strange necessity. The old example that I already evoked—I want to evoke it again here, of course, it's again I always circulate around the same examples—in his analysis of the French Revolution how Marx pointed out that the ruling party of the order, the Republican Party, was effectively the coalition of the two royalist wings (Legitimists and Orleanists). So that the only way for the two to rule was under the banner of anonymous kingdom of the Republic. And I think something similar is going on today. As we all know, capital is today split into two (okay, more complex, but in a first approximation) two big factions: traditional industrial capital and postmodern digital informational, however you call it, capital. And I claim that the only way for the two factions to find a common denominator is under the banner of the anonymous capitalism of Third Way Social Democracy. In the same way as for Marx, the only way to be a royalist in general is to be a Republican; today the only way to be a capitalist in general is to be a Third Way Social Democrat. This is how the opposition left-right works today. It is the new Third Way left which stands for the interest of capital as such in its totality, while today's right as a rule advocates the interest of some particular section of capital in contrast to other sections. And so and so I think that we should take this necessity very seriously, leaving behind all moralistic reproaches on how the Third Way social democracy betrayed its historical legacy. The reason it can do better—the reasons are precisely the inner antagonisms of global capitalism, which would explode, or at least give rise to tensions, without the Third Way minimal safety work on regulatory interventions. Orthodox neoliberals are here victims of the same illusion as the classic Marxists. When they see the new social democrats or Chinese communists successfully managing capitalist growth, their reaction is, "If they can do it, can you imagine how much more explosive the growth would have been under full conditions of liberal capitalism?" It is here that they are wrong, unable to perceive the positive role of what appears to them as obstacles. Like in the case of China, if Communists were to lose power, I claim we would get social chaos, probably even civil war. In this sense I claim from the interests of global capitalism, Tiananmen massacre was a blessing in disguise. And I'm ready to go even further. Now comes the horrible message. Now you can shoot me for this, but I spoke with some Chinese friends and some Western students who were there. And to avoid a misunderstanding, they are not pro-regime, they are not even pro-regime. They just told me some interesting things that the Tiananmen protests were not as innocent as they appeared. What triggered them—they started, maybe you remember—no, some of you too young, but yeah—with a student, a student protest. But, and I heard this story from three people who were there, who even were in danger of being then arrested and so on sympathizing, you know what immediately triggered these protests? It was a directly racist cause. The first item was the complaint of the Chinese students that those visiting students from third-world countries, especially from Africa, black students, were enjoying giving too much food, too much money, whatever. It was this purely nationalist racist explosion, "Why are foreigners treated better than us?" and so on and so on. So okay, to go on: the Third Way Social Democracy from Blair to Clinton is thus a genuine option. Not for me, of course, that's not the end, don't be afraid. Not only a desperate compromise attempt at finding a balance between the inherent demands of capitalism and the demands of the welfare state. They can genuinely claim that their model ultimately works better for capitalism itself. And it is the highest irony of the 20th century history that this outcome was outlined first maybe by none other than Lenin himself, who two years before his death, when it become clear that there will be no all-European revolution and that the idea of building socialism in one country is nonsense, he already envisaged a similar option. Quote from Lenin: "What if the complete hopelessness of our situation, by stimulating our efforts, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?" End of quote. So one should take note of how Lenin uses here a class-neutral term: "to create the fundamental requisites of civilization," which then as the continuation indicates, even smacks of what today some call "alternative modernity." No wonder his vision in his last years was simply that of a more efficient modernizing state capitalism. This I think realistically would have—is what would have happened if the old Trotskyite dream—if Lenin were to stay alive and operative for a couple of years more: a society somewhere in the middle between the Third Way UK and today's China, I claim. And there is nothing dishonorable in this task. I think that in a way Blair and those like him are—this is our only hope as radical leftists: to admit that they are doing us a favor in the sense as, how should I put it, presenting the furthest, the best the existing system can do. And this confronts us with a true dilemma. Does this solution work in the long term? Can in this way the antagonisms be helped, be kept under control? Here enters my—here enters my pessimism and that's the task today. And here I—you will not get now the big formula what to do. Now you will say but the last time I finished with "dictatorship of the proletariat." Well there is no big secret there. What I mean is something pretty obvious: dictatorship of the proletariat—forget all about this party rule models and so on. Dictatorship means for me simply a—how to put it—as opposed to, dictatorship means for me a non-representative functioning of politics. I think that today the limit of democracy is precisely its representational functioning, which is turning into a post-political mode. That is to say, politics as the space of negotiation of particular interests, their mediation through compromises. We have this representational model. For me this is the limit of how democracy today function. And when I say dictatorship, let me be very clear here. I am not saying we should against democracy be for dictatorship. The movement is here always as it were Hegelian retroactive. It is to see how—this is for me the true meaning of the term dictatorship—just to admit that in practice this opens even more space for what naively I am still maybe ready to call "authentic democracy." The where democracy cheats, I claim institutional democracy, is as I already tried to develop is how, how should I put it, it in its apparent image of democratic rule of power responsible to the people and so on, it covers up its own, let's call it, aspect of dictatorship, in the sense of which I already mentioned here that a power in order to function has to have this unconditional aspect. Without this unconditional aspect, it doesn't function. So I am not saying here, let me be very clear here, now improvising, it's difficult for me, I haven't yet formulated. When I say the dictatorship aspect of democracy, I am not giving you the old boring leftist mantra on how, you know, bourgeois democracy that we enjoy is a scam, a mask, in reality there is somewhere, I don't know, in today's Britain it would be somewhere where Tony Blair flies to Murdoch and some other and then they they really decide everything and if we will not vote them in they will make even coup d'etat or whatever. It's not that. Democracy can be really functioning in this sense of elections and so on and so on. What I'm claiming is that nonetheless the form of state authority and so on has this irreducible dictatorial element, which I claim is even not—I'm even ready to go a step further and to claim that it's not even a bad thing. And what happens in a crucial revolution is that this—this is for me, in this sense for me the true shift has to be the conflict, the struggle between two dictatorships if you want, the dictatorship bourgeois or not in the sense of as Stalinist put it when they praised the rise to power of Hitler, when they said, "Oh, it's even better now, masks have fallen, now it's one brutal force against the other." What I mean is that the level at which the electoral game does is not sufficient is that it leaves untouched this basic functioning of power, which appears representational power only in acts, our interest, we voted in, but again there is always, as it was clear to Marx, this absolute excess to power. And I think especially today when we are fed with this story about how the state is disappearing and so on and so on, if anything this unconditional regulating disciplinary, however you put it, exercise of state power is stronger than ever. And I'm here very realist. My dream is not an anarchic one—"Oh, we should abolish all this." All I'm saying is that we should at least bear it in mind. And again, I repeat it to avoid a misunderstanding, it's not this simple personification: "they are really dictators" and so on and so on. It is just that how should I put it, this dictatorial excess is an excess which comes with it, which is as it were inscribed into the very functioning of state apparatuses. And whatever you think about Lenin, and how it went wrong afterwards—for me this is the mega-tragedy of Lenin—it was clear at least in the first couple of years that his problem was: is it possible, and I am the first to admit the utter failure of it, is it possible to change (this is for me the problem of dictatorship of the proletariat), it's not who will win elections. It is: is it possible to change something in this fundamental functioning of the state apparatus? This is what I mean by dictatorship. And it doesn't mean a narrow group will take over. It means only that when we fight, we do not fight simply as one group against the other within a defined space of political rules. We fight for much more. We fight for how—for these rules themselves. Not only explicit democratic rules, but all the how should I put it, implicit institutional baggage, luggage that comes with them. And that this is why, in spite of all my mocking remarks about for example Chávez and so on, for example when the coup d'etat failed in Venezuela, this is what interested me: this self-organization which I don't idealize but you know how in these moments of social tension everybody knew that the or even in the referendum for Chávez, you remember with which he won. The problem was not just who has the majority. The problem was a more radical one. The problem was the question of the entire new political logic, power structure, and so on and so on. This is what I mean by dictatorship. By dictatorship I simply mean that this more radical struggle which is not just the struggle for power within the state, but the struggle for the very frame, what is the state? And what I mean by proletariat is, I am definitely not a naive Marxist who claims in old naive notion of the working class (although if you ask me I wouldn't write off too quickly the working class). By proletariat I simply mean a code word for what people like Badiou, Rancière and others in France what they formulated as that "part of no part," that part which precisely by being excluded stands for universality. So I think that what is still operative today is the logic of this logic of universalist mobilization against the post-political logic of your interests, my interests, and so on and so on. It's this—this is all I am saying, that and this is the content I'm trying to give to this term that I like to use for obvious provocative reasons "dictatorship of the proletariat," that it's not enough to remain within the space of liberal-democratic power struggle and so on and so on. We have to—we have to—how should I put it, we have to move a step further. I think that the questions which were forgotten, repressed in the last years, the questions which concern the very functioning of state power and so on and so on for a whole variety of reasons from crime, social security, to ecological reasons and so on and so on, they will have to be raised again. And again the question for me is not in this old anarchist terms how to abolish the state, but again I'm not afraid to use the term of a new form of progressive dictatorship. By again—but let me be careful here—by dictatorship I don't mean minority will decide and so on, but that it's a clash of universal visions. That's my point. It's a question—it's not a question of clashing particular wills, clashing within a universal space. It's a how should I put it, in order for—this is for me the formula of what I mean by dictatorship—that in order to win partially at the more radical level, the winner has to take it all. Formally, I mean. Has to define the entire space. This is what we are. In the same way that you get my point, we should do what Thatcher did: what even if she lost empirically, by through Blair she won formally because as who was it, Peter Mandelson who said that "economically we are all Thatcherites today," blah blah blah. So this is—this is—this is the level at which we should—we should fight. And... [Audience member interrupts] Excuse me, will you give me—? Yeah, although okay, maybe better to do it tomorrow, but you can now, yes. Is there going to be any time for discussion today? Sorry, any—? Is there going to be any time for discussion today? Maybe now, because tomorrow the—the debate is meant to take place and here I was just obeying orders of my benevolent masters, whom I love and so on, without irony. The no, I love this, didn't you notice how all the great revolutionaries always— [Audience member interrupts again] Yes. Okay, I give—okay, I'll put it in this way, in a Wittgensteinian way: since this obviously means that you have a question, I give you now the time to ask the question. One second, please. Let me ask Slavoj: have you finished or not yet? I haven't yet finished but since I want to take some more time to clarify the ideas, I prefer to—to fake with a fake to claim that oh, I was deprived of finishing. I want you so that I can claim, so that I can cover up that I am not able to finish at the level that I intended to. [Host] How long would you—how long do you think you will need in order to round up your argument? Tomorrow I will need five minutes. Today I want to be deprived of—of the word, that's my message. [Host] But let's—I mean if you need five minutes... No I don't need, I want you to tell me, "Sorry you spoke too long." No, I'll tell you what to do. No, I'll give you five more minutes and then Lynn, you start with that first. No but I would nonetheless, okay, now you force me to come into the open like this Hegelian cunning of reason. I'm too confused to finish it, please save me with the question. Okay, go ahead, Lynn. Well, we all like to be iconoclastic, and so I would like to be a little iconoclastic about Žižekian politics and where I see them be, because the ultimate irony might be that you, who represent what you call this passionate middle-class amalgam of objection to everything and you have entertained us for almost two hours now objecting to everything, that most of the left has been today, but you haven't clearly yet, although perhaps you might in your last five minutes, really given us anything that I can recognize as a strategy or vehicles for change or structures that will take us there. And I would like to say that in terms of your criticisms of the politics you've covered, I'd say you were more misleading than not in every comment you made, beginning with Israel-Palestine, with the left, with fundamentalism. I'm sure I would have thought that about feminism and racism as you developed that strategically. So I'll just comment on Israel-Palestine and the left and a word on fundamentalism. On Israel-Palestine, you said the way you saw moving forward there would be to tell Israel that they had to stop feeling like victims. Israel did not come into being because Zionists felt like victims. In fact, Israel came into being because they knew they didn't want to be victims, they didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, they weren't interested in those people who'd been victims of the Holocaust until it was the case with Eichmann and anti-Zionism in the Arab world that it became to serve the state interest in terms of justifying the continuing colonial infiltration into what remained of Palestine. So what I would suggest is happening there is, in fact, the idea of threats is used as justification by Bush, by Blair, and so on for ongoing expansion into another people's territory. So I think you're wrong on that. I think you're wrong in terms of your account of the left, which the left as I understand it, and you're saying its words for Blair, the left is born, I don't know if anyone in Britain would call Blair the left. The left in the groups of people who've had some form of organizational work, what's more, numbers of the left remain within social-democratic institutions or anywhere else as the grass roots and can try and find ways of intervening either at the national or... The point is clear, Lynn. Let's find... on fundamentalism again you said the same thing... [cross-talk] wait, wait, wait, why? I think the point is clear. Let's allow Slavoj to reply, otherwise he won't have time. No but you know what's really my prob—first I don't, you know in what sense I don't bluff. I my God whenever I hear this "but you didn't propose any positive program," but I didn't claim that I proposed it. I claim that the left hasn't even finished its self-criticism. What I reject of today's left is this pressure that you are not allowed to tell the bad story if you don't point out the light at the end of the tunnel. So for example when you say "I hope trade unions," I also hope but show me some signs which support this hope, my God. Show me how this will work. You are a for—of course if somebody were to show me that trade unions are doing something not just basically a defensive attitude, I mean show me, I'm the first to accept it. I just think that we—I'm not afraid to insist in this if you want negative attitude and so on. Because whenever people tell me you don't give a positive image, okay, okay I will be now very vulgar: show me a political force in today's England which can serve this famous positive revival of the left or whatever. Show it to me. Who is it? Is it trade unions? Is it Socialist Workers Party or whatever? Show me one who can do anything serious. Whatever is done is done, the only mass movements are these abstract movements which I think are deeply ambiguous although I support all their claims, like what were the only true mobilizations: anti-war, a little bit of ecology. And even there I support them not how should I put it. But where, I mean, you know what I mean? I just see that the problem is really a problem, and I'm not afraid to insist. So don't reproach me for you don't have a problem because my point is not that I should have a problem, but my point is show me yours. But you're the one who's ridiculing everybody else. I claim that I am ridiculing them in an immanent way. That is to say I'm claiming that I am ridiculing them by measuring them not by mine but by they their own standards. For example, for me the absolute figure of the ridicule is these moralistic old leftists who and I have all the hatred that you want me to give to against Blair, but who make fun of "Blair they betrayed legacy" and so on and so on. What do they have to offer? If you read them, it is as if everything would have been okay if the Labour Party were to remain faithful to the old welfare state program. I mean, I claim that you see, I see a problem. I only see a problem here and my God, I'm desperate to accept any solution. Just don't—now okay I'll put it in this way. Aren't you doing exactly the same thing as you are reproaching me when you are reproaching me for not giving a positive program without you making clear what is this program? You are just repeating the same gesture of "oh..." No, not me! Sorry, any—? [Inaudible comment] Yeah, but okay, but I think that my duty today as an intellectual first—okay, let me be very clear here. First, I don't think that my duty as a philosopher is to give you a program. My all I can do as a philosopher (here I am in a way transcendental if you want) is to show you where the way the problems are—the mystification in the way the problems are perceived. That's, I think, all I can do. Just to show the way and I think that this is the first thing to seriously to do. To see how the way we perceive problems are part of the problem in a way. For example, and I here I was more critical even than towards the left to the media, like to perceive today as the fight I don't know of democracy tolerance versus liberalism or whatever. This was my point of what I was saying already at the beginning I think about ecology and so on. That's, I think, all I can do and okay, then I'll give you another re—I would go even further and I would say: what you are reproaching me with, I'm tempted to agree with it on one condition, that you become aware of how then the same reproach hits practically the entire radical left. Where do you have anything? Like okay, Adorno Frankfurt School. When finally asked, I quote him, "what to do," he said, "I don't have an idea, I don't know." And and so on and so on. Even let's go back to Marx. My God, what all you find in Marx are some so abstract indications. And Marx himself, who should have known, was as we all know, was the only feasible indication that he gave was when he was, as it were, surprised by the events themselves of Paris Commune, which as the ultimate irony was done as Marx was honest to admit by mostly non-Marxists, no? By we know who, Proudhonists and so on and so on. So you know what I mean? The problem that you draw attention to is a much more radical program. Like even now you will say "but there were people who knew what to do like Lenin." Yeah, but I claim if you analyze it closely, when they finally did something, they did something totally opposite of what they planned to do. You know what Lenin was writing in—in his *State and Revolution*? "Every that, how do you call it, kitchen, cuisine, my God, cooking lady, cook, whatever." Okay, should become, you know, should govern and so on. Well, what, just look at it what came on—out of that once they were once they were in power. That's that's all I'm saying and okay, now you can say but I am up here. But
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again
again
Slavoj Žižek
I think so what our difference maybe amounts to is: do I have the right to try to see where I see your problems (of your, our), the way we
I think so what our difference maybe amounts to is: do I have the right to try to see where I see your problems (of your, our), the way we
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formulate
formulate
Slavoj Žižek
problems
problems
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in
in
Slavoj Žižek
a wrong way, without
a wrong way, without
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giving
giving
Slavoj Žižek
you a detailed new program and so on? Do I have the right? Obviously I think I have the right and for one
you a detailed new program and so on? Do I have the right? Obviously I think I have the right and for one
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specific
specific
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reason, because I think that this attitude of "don't criticize, don't mock everything if you don't have a positive program," that this precisely is the logic of power at its purest, implicitly. That you know like "Oh, but where do you have a positive approach?" We should risk, we should risk this step. That's possible. Okay, but this is then a factual debate of where did I get it wrong. I agree. No no, following on from what you were saying earlier, which I think was right about—that the the left is providing these slogans everyone agrees with, and you made a ludicrous spectacle of trying to make positive history, you know, as if even George Bush could agree with that. You know, so the problem is the left is not generating sufficient antagonism, surely. Second point, isn't it a problem with your model of the dictatorship of the proletariat? It's still representational. It's a representation of some—isn't it, could it not be seen in the way that Badiou's is or as it's not a question of taking over the state but subordination of the state to the interest of workers or— This maybe we can debate this tomorrow because the problem here I have some problems with Badiou as well as with all those who claim, to cut a long story short, authentic politics can only develop in a distance from the state. Why? No, no, I understand their argumentation why. But my problem is—and this is at the ultimate core of my problem with Simon Critchley, with whom to avoid a misunderstanding I had a very constructive debate without any irony and so on—what shocked me in his argumentation, and I'm mentioning him here because he is for me typical (in the good sense), representative of many in today's left: it is, let's face it, today it's utopian to try to abolish the state, the state is here to stay, capitalism especially is here to stay. So the conclusion is, so we should develop a space of politics, mobilizations and so on outside the state. My totally naive, stupid common
reason, because I think that this attitude of "don't criticize, don't mock everything if you don't have a positive program," that this precisely is the logic of power at its purest, implicitly. That you know like "Oh, but where do you have a positive approach?" We should risk, we should risk this step. That's possible. Okay, but this is then a factual debate of where did I get it wrong. I agree. No no, following on from what you were saying earlier, which I think was right about—that the the left is providing these slogans everyone agrees with, and you made a ludicrous spectacle of trying to make positive history, you know, as if even George Bush could agree with that. You know, so the problem is the left is not generating sufficient antagonism, surely. Second point, isn't it a problem with your model of the dictatorship of the proletariat? It's still representational. It's a representation of some—isn't it, could it not be seen in the way that Badiou's is or as it's not a question of taking over the state but subordination of the state to the interest of workers or— This maybe we can debate this tomorrow because the problem here I have some problems with Badiou as well as with all those who claim, to cut a long story short, authentic politics can only develop in a distance from the state. Why? No, no, I understand their argumentation why. But my problem is—and this is at the ultimate core of my problem with Simon Critchley, with whom to avoid a misunderstanding I had a very constructive debate without any irony and so on—what shocked me in his argumentation, and I'm mentioning him here because he is for me typical (in the good sense), representative of many in today's left: it is, let's face it, today it's utopian to try to abolish the state, the state is here to stay, capitalism especially is here to stay. So the conclusion is, so we should develop a space of politics, mobilizations and so on outside the state. My totally naive, stupid common
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sense counter-argument: if the state is here to stay, why outside state? Why not draw the opposite conclusion, then why not penetrate the state and so on? You know what I mean? Why this, what I also find in Badiou, why this idea that—and for Badiou this has
sense counter-argument: if the state is here to stay, why outside state? Why not draw the opposite conclusion, then why not penetrate the state and so on? You know what I mean? Why this, what I also find in Badiou, why this idea that—and for Badiou this has
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radical conclusions. For example, in his reading
radical conclusions. For example, in his reading
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of the October Revolution, the October Revolution its authentic eventual moment was over to cut a long story short with the October Revolution.
of the October Revolution, the October Revolution its authentic eventual moment was over to cut a long story short with the October Revolution.
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The
The
Slavoj Žižek
moment they took over it was another state logic and so on. Why for me the most interesting part is not all those confusion of but it is till '21, '22, where there was this incredible openness of, and of course it ended up in failure but let's—let's create a new new mode, new modalities of everyday life. So again I see your point here when you said... but I—I—I just doubt... But it's not about going outside the state, it's about instrumentalizing it for different things. If Simon Critchley is still "oh you know everyday life and all that," but that's not what Badiou's doing, is it? I mean it's about... so we can use the state but the goal is not to take over the state, the goal is for workers or— Okay, but look now I got the Badiou point. But now let me ask you, and now we are really debating in the sense that it's not this rhetorical question where you know, you ask a pupil but then you have the—but okay, let's not take over the state. A stupid question: why not? Because if we don't have it, then somebody else has the state. Why absolutely to exclude this? Why? Sorry, I'm going to stop you there because Slavoj wants to—no I'm sorry but as you see but I'm the good guy here, he's he's the bad guy, yeah. We'll have to answer tomorrow anyway. Latin American populist totalitarian, you want to be a dictator, you—you had a question over the back there. I just wanted to continue with what your first question said. I mean, she's reproaching you for not having a program, but it seems to me that it's—it's fair enough for you to describe the situation, very clearly sometimes with very good jokes, but but it's that the left has now been discredited by the 20th century, and so has the right for obvious reasons. And so it's now a situation where the intellectual is outside the situation, you know you were talking about post-modern. So it's actually a situation where the intellectual is now
moment they took over it was another state logic and so on. Why for me the most interesting part is not all those confusion of but it is till '21, '22, where there was this incredible openness of, and of course it ended up in failure but let's—let's create a new new mode, new modalities of everyday life. So again I see your point here when you said... but I—I—I just doubt... But it's not about going outside the state, it's about instrumentalizing it for different things. If Simon Critchley is still "oh you know everyday life and all that," but that's not what Badiou's doing, is it? I mean it's about... so we can use the state but the goal is not to take over the state, the goal is for workers or— Okay, but look now I got the Badiou point. But now let me ask you, and now we are really debating in the sense that it's not this rhetorical question where you know, you ask a pupil but then you have the—but okay, let's not take over the state. A stupid question: why not? Because if we don't have it, then somebody else has the state. Why absolutely to exclude this? Why? Sorry, I'm going to stop you there because Slavoj wants to—no I'm sorry but as you see but I'm the good guy here, he's he's the bad guy, yeah. We'll have to answer tomorrow anyway. Latin American populist totalitarian, you want to be a dictator, you—you had a question over the back there. I just wanted to continue with what your first question said. I mean, she's reproaching you for not having a program, but it seems to me that it's—it's fair enough for you to describe the situation, very clearly sometimes with very good jokes, but but it's that the left has now been discredited by the 20th century, and so has the right for obvious reasons. And so it's now a situation where the intellectual is outside the situation, you know you were talking about post-modern. So it's actually a situation where the intellectual is now
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going to storm
going to storm
Slavoj Žižek
the parliament again, I think. So is that actually a situation where the intellectual now needs to come up with a program now? Sorry, it is or it is not, I didn't get it. Are you—would you accept the challenge that the intellectual needs to come up with a program now? But you know what bothers me here, of course the way you pose the question, no? Of course I would be, my God, if somebody comes, what do you expect me now, somebody comes with a program, say "no, don't come with the program," or what? It's not a question of this, the question is a more radical one. Like the—okay I'll put it in this way. In order to answer you, I think we have first to analyze—we hear these calls for program, left should modernize itself, all these formulas. I mean what—okay let me put it in another way. What pisses me off really is to hear these postmodern leftists blame "the left failed because it remained traditional, metaphysical, phallogo- the left should reinvent itself in a—" But I think the left is desperate to do it, they are trying to do it desperately and somehow it doesn't work. Like if you read my good friend, etc., Ernesto Laclau is that you know "the left cannot reinvent itself, contingent subjectivities and so on too essentialist." I claim that no, the left is already playing for years the radical anti-essentialist card. And the tragic thing is that the only event of any weight in British politics in the last years that which really brought a little bit of antagonism, social, namely that when was it, I think it's a little bit over years, it was early 80s if I remember correctly, Thatcher, the miner strike. was precisely the old-fashioned antagonism and here I agree with Terry Eagleton essentially, that I found this a shame how the only serious social movement and all these fashionable postmodern leftists were somehow embarrassed by it, no? Nominally they supported but no it's too essentialist, but my God that was the only thing that happened. It was a tragic failure and so on, but— You've gone past the Poll Tax. Sorry? You've gone past the Poll Tax. I know about the Poll Tax. The problem is that— You were talking about serious social movement
the parliament again, I think. So is that actually a situation where the intellectual now needs to come up with a program now? Sorry, it is or it is not, I didn't get it. Are you—would you accept the challenge that the intellectual needs to come up with a program now? But you know what bothers me here, of course the way you pose the question, no? Of course I would be, my God, if somebody comes, what do you expect me now, somebody comes with a program, say "no, don't come with the program," or what? It's not a question of this, the question is a more radical one. Like the—okay I'll put it in this way. In order to answer you, I think we have first to analyze—we hear these calls for program, left should modernize itself, all these formulas. I mean what—okay let me put it in another way. What pisses me off really is to hear these postmodern leftists blame "the left failed because it remained traditional, metaphysical, phallogo- the left should reinvent itself in a—" But I think the left is desperate to do it, they are trying to do it desperately and somehow it doesn't work. Like if you read my good friend, etc., Ernesto Laclau is that you know "the left cannot reinvent itself, contingent subjectivities and so on too essentialist." I claim that no, the left is already playing for years the radical anti-essentialist card. And the tragic thing is that the only event of any weight in British politics in the last years that which really brought a little bit of antagonism, social, namely that when was it, I think it's a little bit over years, it was early 80s if I remember correctly, Thatcher, the miner strike. was precisely the old-fashioned antagonism and here I agree with Terry Eagleton essentially, that I found this a shame how the only serious social movement and all these fashionable postmodern leftists were somehow embarrassed by it, no? Nominally they supported but no it's too essentialist, but my God that was the only thing that happened. It was a tragic failure and so on, but— You've gone past the Poll Tax. Sorry? You've gone past the Poll Tax. I know about the Poll Tax. The problem is that— You were talking about serious social movement
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and
and
Slavoj Žižek
that's obviously like—the miner strike, that is the coal miners on
that's obviously like—the miner strike, that is the coal miners on
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strike, whereas the Poll Tax affected a rather larger number of people who had to confront in their everyday lives about whether to pay the Poll Tax or not, how to confront it, and effectively it brought Thatcher down. Whereas the miner strike, on the everyday basis, affected a minority of the people in the country. And so I think that the miner strike although it was very, very important, was important in a different way. It wasn't as part of much broader
strike, whereas the Poll Tax affected a rather larger number of people who had to confront in their everyday lives about whether to pay the Poll Tax or not, how to confront it, and effectively it brought Thatcher down. Whereas the miner strike, on the everyday basis, affected a minority of the people in the country. And so I think that the miner strike although it was very, very important, was important in a different way. It wasn't as part of much broader
Slavoj Žižek
significance than arguably the Poll Tax had, which showed a lot of people that you didn't have to lose, you could take the government on and you could win. No, I see your point here and I tend to agree with it. The only problem I see with this kind of Poll Tax initiatives and so on is that: okay, I accept it, but what do they really amount to? Do they amount to the fact that we should be paying less taxes or what? So how then do you reply to a right-winger who would say "Yeah, yeah, we support you but then less taxes, less—" You know what I mean, like I'm here I'm very traditional, I agree with you. What I was lacking in Poll—I mean of course I supported it but what it would be nice to have is to see the Poll Tax revolt, so-called, it's a journalistic term I use—something like some kind of a positive vision behind. Maybe there was and I don't know it. I know it was a kind of a frustration and so on, I support it, but what was the positive vision? Thatcher lost! [Inaudible comment] I'll point you to a book which is *Poll Tax Revolt* by Danny Burns, which
significance than arguably the Poll Tax had, which showed a lot of people that you didn't have to lose, you could take the government on and you could win. No, I see your point here and I tend to agree with it. The only problem I see with this kind of Poll Tax initiatives and so on is that: okay, I accept it, but what do they really amount to? Do they amount to the fact that we should be paying less taxes or what? So how then do you reply to a right-winger who would say "Yeah, yeah, we support you but then less taxes, less—" You know what I mean, like I'm here I'm very traditional, I agree with you. What I was lacking in Poll—I mean of course I supported it but what it would be nice to have is to see the Poll Tax revolt, so-called, it's a journalistic term I use—something like some kind of a positive vision behind. Maybe there was and I don't know it. I know it was a kind of a frustration and so on, I support it, but what was the positive vision? Thatcher lost! [Inaudible comment] I'll point you to a book which is *Poll Tax Revolt* by Danny Burns, which
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does cover some
does cover some
Slavoj Žižek
of the points that you've raised about the positive vision that came out of that. But I'd like just to say one other thing, which is that I didn't actually come here to hear a program, I came here to find out more about Kant,
of the points that you've raised about the positive vision that came out of that. But I'd like just to say one other thing, which is that I didn't actually come here to hear a program, I came here to find out more about Kant,
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which I've found out and I've greatly enjoyed. And rounding out about it,
which I've found out and I've greatly enjoyed. And rounding out about it,
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if I wanted to like find out a program I think I might have—but I'd rather hear Mr. Žižek about that at another time, or continued to talk that I didn't do about political violence, which is something I'd suggest the left
if I wanted to like find out a program I think I might have—but I'd rather hear Mr. Žižek about that at another time, or continued to talk that I didn't do about political violence, which is something I'd suggest the left
Slavoj Žižek
should confront
should confront
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a bit more than, like, instead of coming
a bit more than, like, instead of coming
Slavoj Žižek
along to find out more about psychoanalysis that we learn about some things that are going to have to happen, or how that is gradually going to change the view in this country, which I regret to say I don't think it is. Well, thanks very much for that. Okay, so nonetheless, so we go on tomorrow at two, no? Exactly at two. Okay, anyway, it's another place, no? B43 Goldsmiths. [Applause] I'm sorry, I no no no, I'm sorry. Why don't you do it nonetheless through the email maybe? [Inaudible comment] I'm sorry, but it's turning... No no no. Sorry, I... okay. [Applause] Like I love this, didn't you notice how all the great revolutionaries always— [Laughter] Okay, I give—okay, I'll put it in this way, in a
along to find out more about psychoanalysis that we learn about some things that are going to have to happen, or how that is gradually going to change the view in this country, which I regret to say I don't think it is. Well, thanks very much for that. Okay, so nonetheless, so we go on tomorrow at two, no? Exactly at two. Okay, anyway, it's another place, no? B43 Goldsmiths. [Applause] I'm sorry, I no no no, I'm sorry. Why don't you do it nonetheless through the email maybe? [Inaudible comment] I'm sorry, but it's turning... No no no. Sorry, I... okay. [Applause] Like I love this, didn't you notice how all the great revolutionaries always— [Laughter] Okay, I give—okay, I'll put it in this way, in a
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Wittgensteinian way: since this obviously means that you have a question, I give you now the time to ask the question. [Laughter] Okay, go ahead, Lynn. [Pause] No, but I would nonetheless... okay, now you force me to come into the open like this Hegelian cunning of reason. I'm too confused
Wittgensteinian way: since this obviously means that you have a question, I give you now the time to ask the question. [Laughter] Okay, go ahead, Lynn. [Pause] No, but I would nonetheless... okay, now you force me to come into the open like this Hegelian cunning of reason. I'm too confused
Slavoj Žižek
to finish it, please save me with the question.
to finish it, please save me with the question.
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[Laughter]
[Laughter]