Slavoj Žižek receives the Gold Medal (English, May 2018)
Talk · Ippolit Belinski ·
2018-05-07 · 1:44:03 · 11,309 words
ideologycapitalismsexuality-genderfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnesscinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisreligion-theologycommunism-socialismtechnology-ai-cyberspaceecology-climategeopolitics-warpolitics
Žižek argues that true provocation today is politeness, not vulgarity, and critiques the demand for academic 'usefulness.' He reinterprets Marx's 'opium of the people' as both chemical drugs (managing emotions) and populism (the people as fetish). He analyzes ideology as inherently inconsistent, using examples like smoking bans and military manuals. Finally, he critiques modern feminism and political correctness, contrasting the active sexual agency of the 1960s with today's commodified victimhood, while highlighting the role of corporate tech leaders in supporting progressive causes. Žižek analyzes the 'obscene immortality' or 'undeadness' characteristic of video games, cartoons, and modernity, contrasting it with noble immortality. He applies this logic to political subjectivity, critiquing the Left's search for a 'pure' proletarian subject in immigrants. He then explores sexuality through the lens of the 'virtual gaze' (Aztec paintings, viaducts) and hardcore pornography, arguing that the viewer identifies with the observed woman's enjoyment rather than the instrumental man. Finally, he uses Lacan's 'surplus enjoyment' (plus-de-jouir) to analyze a Lubitsch song and Thomas Aquinas's theology of Paradise/Hell, concluding with a dream of Hell as a performance for Heaven's gaze. Žižek addresses a Q&A session, first tackling the relationship between global capitalism and ecological collapse, arguing that capitalism neutralizes ecology by turning it into an investment field and advocating for extreme urban density. He then discusses the Srebrenica massacre, using a vulgar Bosnian joke to illustrate how trauma is processed through humor rather than dignified mourning. Finally, he critiques Yanis Varoufakis and the DiEM25 movement, arguing that Varoufakis underestimates the power of ideology and the 'common wisdom' of ordinary people, who often hold reactionary views, and concludes by noting the 'animistic' nature of modern economic discourse.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Leninist of the last years of Lenin's life”
Žižek's self-description, referencing Lenin's Testament which criticized Stalin for lack of 'good manners' rather than political error.
as “Opium and the people”
Žižek's paradoxical reinterpretation of Marx's formula, identifying 'opium' as chemical drugs managing emotions and 'the people' as the populist fetish.
The process by which drugs provide artificial excitement in private life, compensating for the lack of collective political engagement.
The use of the demonized fascist threat (e.g., Trump, Le Pen) to obfuscate basic social antagonisms and protect the establishment.
as “Ideological inconsistency”
The structure of ideology where explicit prohibitions are supplemented by implicit permissions (e.g., 'do it but discreetly').
The feminist strategy of women actively objectifying themselves to seduce, rather than being passive objects of the male gaze.
Tech leaders like Gates, Cook, and Zuckerberg who support progressive causes, allegedly to cover their immersion into global capitalism.
A state of 'obscene immortality' found in video games, cartoons, and Sade, where destruction is not definitive and one can always restart, implying a perverse multiplicity and floating subjectivity.
A modern form of immortality, distinct from Hegelian 'world spirit' survival, characterized by the inability to die properly or disintegrate, as seen in the repetitive logic of games and cartoons.
Used here to describe the structure of obscene immortality: a high goal, a downward movement, and a return to the start that is so stupid it prevents proper death or disintegration.
The process where art does not reproduce reality holistically but violently cuts it into pieces to reveal the 'essence' or hidden potentialities, making the painting itself an act of thinking.
as “materialist Platonist”
Žižek's self-description: believing in 'ideas' not as eternal sky forms, but as Deleuzian 'essences' or hidden potentialities revealed through the violent disfiguration of reality in art.
The humiliation in hardcore pornography where the woman is not just objectified but forced to act as a 'free subject' enjoying the act, imposing a fake subjectivity upon her.
as “virtual gaze”
The natural human predisposition to imagine being observed by an invisible, external gaze (God, the camera, the Other), which structures sexuality and art, as seen in Aztec ground paintings and Roman viaducts.
as “plus-de-jouir”
Lacan's term for 'surplus enjoyment' (derived from Marx's surplus value); the marginal, obscene detail or metaphor (like a dirty remark or a song) that provides the true enjoyment beyond the act itself.
as “paradox of belief”
The state of knowing something is true (e.g., climate data) but not acting on it as if it were, a form of fetishist disavowal ('Je sais bien, mais quand même').
The moment when one accepts suffering seriously; Žižek argues this is actually 'the worst' because it means the trauma is integrated, whereas denial/humor is a defense mechanism.
as “pure utopia”
Varoufakis's belief that two weeks of truly free debate would reveal the 'true' democratic will of the people, which Žižek dismisses as naive.
as “ideology is our daily life”
The idea that ideology is not a false consciousness we escape, but the very fabric of our social reality and daily interactions, which ordinary people live and reproduce.
as “economy as animism”
The view that modern economics treats abstract forces (like 'the market displaying anxiety') as real, magical entities with agency, to which we attribute more belief than to God.
Stories he reaches for 8
Cartoons like Tom and Jerry feature characters being run over or cut into pieces, only to reappear instantly in the next scene, demonstrating the same 'undead' logic as games.
“In one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces. Okay, catastrophe but hop in next scene it is here and so on.”
Thomas Aquinas asks if those in Paradise can see those in Hell. He argues they enjoy seeing the 'majesty of divine justice' in their suffering, not the suffering itself. Žižek calls this a 'cheap scholastic trick' and argues Paradise would be boring without the 'pleasure' of watching Hell (like TV news).
“He distinguishes between two types of enjoyment. He said it would be bad to enjoy directly when you see them burning whatever in Hell their suffering. But he said if you look as a good Christian at that suffering you are impressed by the majesty of divine justice”
A vulgar Bosnian joke about Mujo and Fata: after the Srebrenica massacre, they collect disfigured bodies, finding only penises. Fata rejects several as not belonging to Mujo, and one not even from Srebrenica, illustrating how trauma is processed through vulgarity and denial rather than serious mourning.
“They discover a grave... parts which are not disfigured are only penises... 'no this is not Mujo... this one is not even from Srebrenica'”
A magazine report titled 'The Greening of Greenland' celebrates melting ice as an opportunity for agriculture and cheaper shipping from China, treating a mega-catastrophe as a business opportunity.
“The title was 'The Greening of Greenland'. It's wonderful it's so hot they can now first time in hundreds of years grow vegetables there”
Žižek jokes that he will organize the Q&A in a 'proper Stalinist way' because 'free debates have to be especially well organized to avoid enemy provocations,' referencing an old communist's advice.
“I hope you and the director did it in a proper Stalinist way. No freedom to the questions, no good. I want it organized.”
Ancient Roman viaducts have small statues and reliefs on top, invisible to human gaze, which Žižek cites as another example of the 'virtual gaze' structure in art and sexuality.
“They have small statues and reliefs also on the top invisible to human gaze.”
Žižek praises this painting as 'thinking in art' because it does not reproduce reality holistically but violently cuts the woman into pieces (abstraction) to reveal her essence (fury, fragility), making it a 'monstrosity' that captures the essence more directly than realism.
“It's a monstrosity but somehow sorry for using this Platonic term somehow the essence of a woman throwing a stone is here in more directly than a realist painting.”
Wolfgang Schäuble offered Varoufakis a billion euros to implement his digital currency plan, revealing that Brussels secretly wanted Greece to leave (Grexit) to teach the left a lesson through chaos and hunger.
“Schäuble's answer? 'Fine, how much we can give you billion to do it'... Brussels was not aware of Grexit, secretly they looked for it.”
Works invoked 10
Brassed Off film
English working-class melodrama used to illustrate the eroticism of indirect sexual negotiation (the 'coffee' scene).
Summa Theologica book
Cited for Aquinas's paradoxical view on Paradise/Hell, which Žižek critiques and re-interprets.
Cited for a specific scene involving Miranda that illustrates 'surplus enjoyment'.
Lenin's Testament book
Referenced for Lenin's proposal to depose Stalin for lacking 'good manners' rather than political error.
Praised for its song which illustrates 'surplus enjoyment' through vulgar metaphor.
The Dark Man book
Arthur Koestler's work quoted for the idea that persecution corrupts victims.
DiEM25 other
Varoufakis's political movement, criticized for underestimating ideology and trusting in the 'common wisdom' of ordinary people.
A magazine report title used to illustrate how capitalism treats ecological catastrophe as an opportunity.
Newsweek journal
Cited as a media outlet that published a text critical of solar-powered houses, proving their environmental cost is high.
Cited as an example of ideological inconsistency, legally permitting and funding new political parties.
People invoked 46
Legendary characters in Bosnian folklore/jokes, used here to tell the Srebrenica penis joke.
Germaine Greer positive
Hero of first-generation feminism who argued for active sexual liberation without victimhood, contrasting with modern feminism.
Maurice Chevalier positive
Actor in Lubitsch's film who sings the 'rat-a-ta-ta' song.
Spanish Prime Minister mentioned in the context of potential political shifts in Spain.
Marquis de Sade positive
Cited as an early modern example of 'undeadness' where victims like Juliette reappear after torture, prefiguring video game logic.
Marine Le Pen negative
Demonized as a fascist threat; her rise is a reaction to the establishment Macron represents.
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
A linguist at Stanford collecting jokes from Srebrenica, illustrating how trauma is processed through vulgarity.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek identifies as a 'Leninist of the last years of Lenin's life,' praising Lenin's focus on Stalin's lack of manners over political critique.
Mentioned as the German finance minister who secretly encouraged Grexit and offered Varoufakis money for his banking plans.
White supremacist who split from Trump over tax reform, advocating for raising taxes on the rich, a left-wing economic position.
Great star in the film 'Brassed Off', featured in a clip illustrating sexual negotiation.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek relies heavily on Lacan's concepts (objet petit a, plus-de-jouir, the gaze) to analyze pornography, sexuality, and enjoyment.
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for the concept of 'essence' as hidden potentialities, which Žižek adopts in his 'materialist Platonism'.
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
Austrian Prime Minister used as an example of political vulgarity and media manipulation.
Donald Trump negative
Mentioned as the alternative vote for Sanders supporters; his rise is linked to the failure of liberal politics to address ordinary people's concerns.
Tim Cook negative
Cited as a 'corporate organic intellectual' who supports progressive causes to cover immersion in global capitalism.
Emmanuel Macron negative
Described as the anti-fascist candidate who stands for the establishment that gave birth to Marine Le Pen; criticism of him is dismissed as aiding Le Pen.
Podemos negative
Disparaged as 'more intelligent' than the traditional Left, implying the traditional Left is desperate and confused about the subject of revolution.
Laurent de Sutter positive
Young French philosopher cited for demonstrating how chemistry/drugs are part of daily life (opium).
George Orwell positive
Žižek states 'I don't like Orwell' personally, but uses his concept of 'common decency' to critique the disintegration of shared customs.
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
Bernie Sanders positive
Cited as having successfully mobilized people who might have voted for Trump, staying out of the election due to Hillary's brutal treatment of him.
Mentioned as having participated in a round table with Varoufakis via telepresence in London.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Cited as a 'corporate organic intellectual' who supports progressive causes to cover immersion in global capitalism.
Stephen King positive
Cited as a source for the concept of 'undeadness' in horror stories.
Yanis Varoufakis negative
Described as a 'very good friend' and respected for being 'onto something real' regarding Syriza and austerity, but criticized for underestimating the power of ideology and trusting in 'pure utopia' of free debate.
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for his work on surveillance and control; Žižek criticizes modern leftists for ignoring Foucault's warnings while using similar control mechanisms.
Described as a right-wing friend who is invited by companies to explain the world, illustrating the pressure for academic usefulness.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Praised for 'The Smiling Lieutenant' as providing 'condensed pleasure' through vulgar metaphor, illustrating surplus enjoyment.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as a 'corporate organic intellectual' who supports progressive causes to cover immersion in global capitalism.
Pablo Picasso positive
Praised for 'Woman Throwing a Stone' as an example of 'thinking in art' that reveals essence through violent abstraction.
Hillary Clinton negative
Described as having 'brutally disposed of' Sanders, which Žižek implies was a form of revenge that helped her win.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited as noting that Paradise must be boring and Hell interesting.
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
Hero of May '68 who faced backlash for describing childhood sexual games, illustrating the shift in attitudes toward sexuality.
Arthur Koestler positive
Anti-communist author quoted for the idea that persecution corrupts victims, used to discuss feminine manipulation.
Joseph Stalin negative
Cited by Lenin as too brutal and lacking good manners; represents the failure of political critique in favor of moral judgment.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as the origin of 'surplus value' (Mehrwert), which Lacan adapted into 'surplus enjoyment' (plus-de-jouir).
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the insight that repression is strongest in perversion, and that the 'thing itself' is not the act but the marginal addition.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Used to explain 'negation of negation' and the nature of portraiture (resembling the person more than the person itself through abstraction).
Listed among intellectuals who signed petitions decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1970s.
Thomas Aquinas negative
Criticized for his 'cheap scholastic' solution to the problem of Paradise/Hell, which Žižek re-reads Lacanianly.
Transcript 26 turns
unknown
Buenas tardes, buenas tardes. Quiero agradecerles su presencia aquí en nombre del Círculo de Bellas Artes y del profesor Slavoj Žižek. Dober dan, Mr. Žižek. Círculo de Bellas Artes cree hoy reconocer la figura, la labor de un pensador como Slavoj Žižek que supone un caso entendemos muy singular en el campo del pensamiento contemporáneo de la filosofía. Porque pocas veces un filósofo de estas características ha conseguido generar la expectación que consigue Žižek. Porque llega directamente a los muy jóvenes y en algún caso a los muy mayores como es el mío. Su manera de proponer el pensamiento que nos recuerda algún otro amigo suyo contemporáneo como es el caso de Fredric Jameson, utiliza la filosofía conectándola, utilizándola como ejemplos con los temas de la cultura popular, el cine, las series. Solo hay que navegar por YouTube, por internet para encontrar tantas y tantas descargas de conferencias, de entrevistas a Slavoj Žižek. Pero es un discurso que no es exclusivamente de divertimento. Es un discurso que sí que se apoya en el humor, en la provocación, pero también procede de un pensamiento muy profundo. Que es sin duda lo que le da la clave de lo atractivo de sus conferencias. De hecho, muestra de ello tenemos aquí cuando nos visitó el pasado mes de junio o cuando nos visitó también en el año y que generó esta expectación que no es tampoco algo tan singular en la filosofía. Yo les quiero hacer una confesión. Me apasionó Slavoj Žižek cuando tuve el honor de presentarle también en una conferencia en la ciudad de Pamplona, era un congreso de arquitectura y que me encontré con una frase maravillosa. Según Slavoj Žižek, Norman Bates, recuerdan ustedes aquel desequilibrado protagonista de Psicosis, la obra maestra de Hitchcock, no habría necesitado asesinar a sus víctimas si el motel donde se desarrolla la acción hubiera sido proyectado por Frank Gehry. Y esto realmente me interesó mucho. Podríamos desarrollar un poco el argumento hablando del gap del qué, el paralaje, uno de sus libros que en mi caso especial mucho me han interesado más en el caso de Slavoj Žižek, Cuestión de paralaje. Slavoj Žižek nació en Eslovenia por eso le he deseado buen día o buenas tardes no hay en esloveno en dober dan puesto que es su lengua materna. Nació en es decir algo más joven que yo. Se graduó en filosofía en el instituto de filosofía y sociología de la universidad de Ljubljana en y durante muchos años estuvo trabajando allí como investigador. Se doctoró en filosofía también en en esa misma universidad y en psicoanálisis por la universidad de París VIII en Yo creo que de ahí provienen esas conjunciones tan fructíferas en el pensamiento de Žižek entre Marx, Hegel y Lacan. Posteriormente ha sido y ha tenido una trayectoria docente muy importante en el ámbito internacional, ha sido profesor invitado en numerosas universidades como Princeton o Columbia en los Estados Unidos que creo que son universidades que no regalan master y que posteriormente en el año ha sido director de un proyecto investigación importantísimo, Antimony of the Postmodern Reason en el Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut
Buenas tardes, buenas tardes. Quiero agradecerles su presencia aquí en nombre del Círculo de Bellas Artes y del profesor Slavoj Žižek. Dober dan, Mr. Žižek. Círculo de Bellas Artes cree hoy reconocer la figura, la labor de un pensador como Slavoj Žižek que supone un caso entendemos muy singular en el campo del pensamiento contemporáneo de la filosofía. Porque pocas veces un filósofo de estas características ha conseguido generar la expectación que consigue Žižek. Porque llega directamente a los muy jóvenes y en algún caso a los muy mayores como es el mío. Su manera de proponer el pensamiento que nos recuerda algún otro amigo suyo contemporáneo como es el caso de Fredric Jameson, utiliza la filosofía conectándola, utilizándola como ejemplos con los temas de la cultura popular, el cine, las series. Solo hay que navegar por YouTube, por internet para encontrar tantas y tantas descargas de conferencias, de entrevistas a Slavoj Žižek. Pero es un discurso que no es exclusivamente de divertimento. Es un discurso que sí que se apoya en el humor, en la provocación, pero también procede de un pensamiento muy profundo. Que es sin duda lo que le da la clave de lo atractivo de sus conferencias. De hecho, muestra de ello tenemos aquí cuando nos visitó el pasado mes de junio o cuando nos visitó también en el año y que generó esta expectación que no es tampoco algo tan singular en la filosofía. Yo les quiero hacer una confesión. Me apasionó Slavoj Žižek cuando tuve el honor de presentarle también en una conferencia en la ciudad de Pamplona, era un congreso de arquitectura y que me encontré con una frase maravillosa. Según Slavoj Žižek, Norman Bates, recuerdan ustedes aquel desequilibrado protagonista de Psicosis, la obra maestra de Hitchcock, no habría necesitado asesinar a sus víctimas si el motel donde se desarrolla la acción hubiera sido proyectado por Frank Gehry. Y esto realmente me interesó mucho. Podríamos desarrollar un poco el argumento hablando del gap del qué, el paralaje, uno de sus libros que en mi caso especial mucho me han interesado más en el caso de Slavoj Žižek, Cuestión de paralaje. Slavoj Žižek nació en Eslovenia por eso le he deseado buen día o buenas tardes no hay en esloveno en dober dan puesto que es su lengua materna. Nació en es decir algo más joven que yo. Se graduó en filosofía en el instituto de filosofía y sociología de la universidad de Ljubljana en y durante muchos años estuvo trabajando allí como investigador. Se doctoró en filosofía también en en esa misma universidad y en psicoanálisis por la universidad de París VIII en Yo creo que de ahí provienen esas conjunciones tan fructíferas en el pensamiento de Žižek entre Marx, Hegel y Lacan. Posteriormente ha sido y ha tenido una trayectoria docente muy importante en el ámbito internacional, ha sido profesor invitado en numerosas universidades como Princeton o Columbia en los Estados Unidos que creo que son universidades que no regalan master y que posteriormente en el año ha sido director de un proyecto investigación importantísimo, Antimony of the Postmodern Reason en el Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut
unknown
Essen. Ha sido fundador y presidente de la sociedad de psicoanálisis de Ljubljana, redactor de series de libros con el MIT Press, pero hay otro dato que me parece muy significativo. Ha sido en su actividad extra académica la acción le condujo a ser activista político en el movimiento alternativo de Eslovenia en los años ochenta y que donde fue candidato a la presidencia de la república en las primeras elecciones libres de y al mismo tiempo también embajador de las ciencias de la república en Sobre su bibliografía qué les voy a contar si será una lista desde ese fantástico libro interesantísimo El sublime objeto de la ideología hasta yo creo que una de las obras principales de Slavoj Žižek en que demuestra la seriedad de su pensamiento el conocimiento profundo de la filosofía de Hegel como Menos que nada, Hegel y la sombra del materialismo dialéctico. Por lo demás una de las facetas más apasionantes de Slavoj Žižek es sin duda la de conferenciante, lo vamos a poder comprobar después. Aclamado en numerosos numerosísimos simposium de filosofía, de pensamiento crítico, crítica cultural, psicoanálisis, ha viajado por todo el mundo que ha tenido o ha debido o ha querido escuchar precisamente todas esas teorías donde se confluyen entre otra serie de pensadores, insisto, el tema de la revisión del marxismo, la consideración en lo que es un gran experto en el pensamiento de Hegel y por supuesto en Lacan. Si la escuela crítica frankfurtiana era la que podríamos llamar freudomarxista, hoy podríamos decir que Žižek es el ejemplo básico de lo que llamaríamos lacaniano marxista o marxista lacaniano. En la última visita que tuvimos aquí en este círculo dentro del proyecto de nuestra programación El Gran Río, resistencia, rebeldía, rebelión y revolución, nos obsequió con una conferencia como siempre provocadora pidiendo una burocracia para la izquierda y el socialismo. Hoy después de la entrega de la medalla de oro Slavoj Žižek lo vamos a escuchar en una conferencia que es una conferencia auspiciada por la Cátedra Acciona de la Escuela Sur, nuestra escuela con la universidad Carlos III de profesiones artísticas que se va a titular y ya les anticipo que es un título sugestivo: Ernst Lubitsch, cinismo, humor y compromiso. Today Slavoj Žižek is awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes for deepening his knowledge of our society, for incorporating new generations into critical thinking, for stirring up and provoking a world that may have fallen asleep. All of this without renouncing to a complex and profound thought that coexist with a popular culture. For all these reason, Mr. Žižek please. Muchas gracias a todas las camaradas y los camaradas. And for a brief moment I thought I will be lucky. You know what was my dream? That you would forget the medal and we would say let's skip it and then a poor cleaning lady would find it tomorrow morning and said oh what should I do with this and so on, you know. I'm really honored to be here. Usually I cannot even stand this type of
Essen. Ha sido fundador y presidente de la sociedad de psicoanálisis de Ljubljana, redactor de series de libros con el MIT Press, pero hay otro dato que me parece muy significativo. Ha sido en su actividad extra académica la acción le condujo a ser activista político en el movimiento alternativo de Eslovenia en los años ochenta y que donde fue candidato a la presidencia de la república en las primeras elecciones libres de y al mismo tiempo también embajador de las ciencias de la república en Sobre su bibliografía qué les voy a contar si será una lista desde ese fantástico libro interesantísimo El sublime objeto de la ideología hasta yo creo que una de las obras principales de Slavoj Žižek en que demuestra la seriedad de su pensamiento el conocimiento profundo de la filosofía de Hegel como Menos que nada, Hegel y la sombra del materialismo dialéctico. Por lo demás una de las facetas más apasionantes de Slavoj Žižek es sin duda la de conferenciante, lo vamos a poder comprobar después. Aclamado en numerosos numerosísimos simposium de filosofía, de pensamiento crítico, crítica cultural, psicoanálisis, ha viajado por todo el mundo que ha tenido o ha debido o ha querido escuchar precisamente todas esas teorías donde se confluyen entre otra serie de pensadores, insisto, el tema de la revisión del marxismo, la consideración en lo que es un gran experto en el pensamiento de Hegel y por supuesto en Lacan. Si la escuela crítica frankfurtiana era la que podríamos llamar freudomarxista, hoy podríamos decir que Žižek es el ejemplo básico de lo que llamaríamos lacaniano marxista o marxista lacaniano. En la última visita que tuvimos aquí en este círculo dentro del proyecto de nuestra programación El Gran Río, resistencia, rebeldía, rebelión y revolución, nos obsequió con una conferencia como siempre provocadora pidiendo una burocracia para la izquierda y el socialismo. Hoy después de la entrega de la medalla de oro Slavoj Žižek lo vamos a escuchar en una conferencia que es una conferencia auspiciada por la Cátedra Acciona de la Escuela Sur, nuestra escuela con la universidad Carlos III de profesiones artísticas que se va a titular y ya les anticipo que es un título sugestivo: Ernst Lubitsch, cinismo, humor y compromiso. Today Slavoj Žižek is awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes for deepening his knowledge of our society, for incorporating new generations into critical thinking, for stirring up and provoking a world that may have fallen asleep. All of this without renouncing to a complex and profound thought that coexist with a popular culture. For all these reason, Mr. Žižek please. Muchas gracias a todas las camaradas y los camaradas. And for a brief moment I thought I will be lucky. You know what was my dream? That you would forget the medal and we would say let's skip it and then a poor cleaning lady would find it tomorrow morning and said oh what should I do with this and so on, you know. I'm really honored to be here. Usually I cannot even stand this type of
unknown
rituals
rituals
Slavoj Žižek
but I think today they are so important because you know I should abandon this attitude of vulgar provocations because as we learned from the new alt-right Trump and so on, those in power are vulgar enough today. And the true provocation today is simply to be kind and polite here. You know when people ask me how can you still be a Leninist? I tell them I'm a Leninist of the last years of Lenin's life. It's incredible how we missed this. You remember the famous so-called testament of Lenin where Lenin proposes that they should fire, depose Stalin. You know what is so interesting? There is no political critique there. Lenin doesn't say Stalin had a wrong politics this, that. He just said Stalin is too brutal, basically he doesn't have good manners and so on. Second thing, today as we all know our university life, official academic life is under terrible pressure. Even in philosophy I learned they want us to be more useful you know, like my friend although he is a right-winger, Peter Sloterdijk told me that they like to invite him to some big company managers that he explains to them how is the world today and so on. Everything must be useful, either in a conservative sense or useful for technology, useful even to help women's struggle whatever, I have nothing against them, but I'm afraid of this tendency that it must be of some direct use. I think that if you look at the history all great inventions even scientific breakthroughs come from what at the beginning it was just a totally useless reflection and that is unfortunately more and more difficult to do it in official academic settings. That's why our hope are institutions like your Círculo de Bellas Artes, no? It's not only arts, it's simply one of the few remaining places of thinking because against those idiots who claim that we philosophers or scientists think but artists they just feel, express their feelings, no, maybe good artists think even more than us philosophers. That's why I'm honored to be here, thank you. You know I hope that there is in it some electric machine and that there is some sensor there if I say something stupid they press a button and I will [unintelligible]. Okay you have the button there, okay yeah. So let's begin. I would like to begin with Marx's well-known formula of religion as the opium of the people. I think we should rethink this formula today. It is true that today radical Islam but also Christian fundamentalism are functional like opium of the people. A false confrontation with capitalist modernity which allows us to dwell in our ideological dream. But I hope that today in our Western world two other versions of the opium of the people are much more actual and you may have guessed my paradox, these two are opium and the people. Opium as a young French philosopher Laurent de Sutter demonstrated, chemistry in its scientific version is becoming part of us, of our daily lives. Large aspects of our lives are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs from everyday use of sleeping pills and antidepressants. And this is not marginal. I read a statistic in Estados Unidos United States, over percent of all academics, professors and so on are on something like Xanax or whatever, use drugs. So from everyday life to of course hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers, our very emotions are outsourced to chemical stimulation. The stakes of this chemical intervention is contradictory. We use drugs first to keep external excitement, shocks, anxieties, violence under control. That is to say to desensitize us. Yeah no you are too shocked, too excited you take a drug to calm you down and then we again use drugs to generate artificial excitement like if you are too depressed and lack desire you again take drugs. Drugs thus react to two opposed threats to our daily lives: overexcitement and depression. And it's crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the couple of private and public. In the developed Western countries our public lives more and more lack collective excitement provided by a genuine political engagement. From time to time it happens, Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders in Estados Unidos but politics is not exciting today while drugs provide excitement but in the private sphere. So drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitement in our private lives. Second opium: the rise of populism demonstrates that the opium of the people can also be the people itself. Why? It's clear in the case of populism like people is like kind of a big fetish we are all united in it, when you refer to the people somehow antagonisms disappear. But now comes the trouble, I like to provoke with theses which are not popular. I think that the latest in this series of opium is anti-fascism. A new spectre is haunting liberal progressive politics in Europe: the spectre of fascism. Trump in the United States, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary they are all demonized as the new evil towards which we should unite all our forces. Every minimal doubt and reserve are immediately proclaimed a sign of secret collaboration with fascism. Now to avoid any doubt, I think they really are a threat. What I'm saying is that often this demonizing image of a fascist threat serves as a new political fetish obfuscating the basic social antagonism. I remember when was it half a year ago before the presidential elections in France when Macron was the anti-fascist candidate. How every even tiny criticism of Macron was dismissed as ah, I was proclaimed objectively working for Marine Le Pen. Some of my French ex-friends even coined the term 'Le Pen-Trotskyist'. You pretend to be a leftist Trotskyist but by criticizing the moderate center you objectively, in the best Stalinist way, work for Marine Le Pen. Now I respect the choice of saying in this desperate situation Marine Le Pen is the danger so let's vote for Macron. Nothing against this. But we should nonetheless be aware all the time that Macron stands for that establishment, financial and so on, which gave birth to Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen reacted to that establishment. So again this is why this anti-new-right anti-fascism is dangerous. It renders us blind for the fact of how many motifs which were once motifs of the left are appropriated by populist right. Look in the United States, I was told that Steve Bannon is now in Spain giving advice to right-wing parties. But you know why Steve Bannon really split with Trump? He opposed Trump's tax reform and he said 'No, we should raise the taxes for the rich up to percent, we need big public works and so on.' Bannon is a white supremacist, racist but it's very sad that only he dares to advocate things that no liberal leftist even dares to mention. Now my next step. In this new condition of new opium of the people, how does ideology work? My premise here is that in order to be operative every ideology has to be inconsistent. Its explicit norms have to be supplemented by implicit norms telling us how to deal with explicit norms. You know that's the mystery of ideology. Often things are explicitly prohibited but the message between the lines is 'do it but discreetly'. Or vice versa. The whole Stalinism functioned like this. In Soviet Constitution of '36 it says 'if a group of citizens wants to establish a new political party,' Soviet Union, 'not only you have the right to do it but the state has to give you financial support for your newspaper and offices and so on.' Now try to do it you know. So this inconsistency was always here of ideology. But today it works in a much more radical way. How? I'm sorry if you know this story, it's so beautiful that I like to repeat it. I was about two years ago in a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia and my wife is a heavy smoker so we asked do you have smoking rooms? And we got a wonderful answer from the guy at the reception. He said 'no sorry, he said sorry it's the law, smoking is prohibited but it's not a problem, you have ashtrays in all the rooms.' And then we entered the room and I was so shocked please this one, look what we found in the room. Literally the ashtray which had as an aesthetic supplement the sign for prohibiting smoking. I think this is a very good metaphor of our ideological predicament today. I remembered then a similar experience from my military life. My God how much I learned in the army because the army was full of these inconsistencies. We had in the morning classes, one hour of this, one hour of that. One morning it was like a divine coincidence. The first class was some big topic international agreements, rules of war. And the officer explained us how in a combat, even today this is the international Geneva Convention law, when parachuters attack you, you are not allowed to shoot at them while they are in the air. No, you must wait that they touch ground. Okay. Then in a divine coincidence next hour was one in the series of how you use your gun. The topic of the day I'm not kidding was how to hit a parachuter in the air. You know you have to judge the velocity of the wind, the direction and so on. And then I said I was stupid, I said to the officer but comrade isn't there a slight inconsistency between what you are telling us now and what you were telling us half an hour ago? And he answered me correctly, he said 'aren't you some kind of intellectual, how can you be so stupid then not to understand that?' And it's very similar, it's pretty similar I claim today things like that happen all the time. For example if you were to ask an American intelligence officer do you torture? He would say of course not it prohibited by the law but here you have a book about waterboarding no, how you do it. It's more or less exactly the same. So let's go on. I want nonetheless to focus on today's problems. How does this new ideological constellation reflect itself in a particular domain of struggle for emancipation in feminism. I remember first we should become aware because now we also celebrate these days literally half a century of May '68. You can learn a lot about our predicament by simply comparing today's emancipatory struggles and the struggle of '68. In the aftermath of '68 the French progressive press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of pedophilia. Claiming that the artificial and oppressive cultural oppressive frontier that separates the sexual life of small children from adults should be abolished and the right to freely dispose with one's body should be extended also to children and they explicitly meant children from four five six years from this early sexualization and their parents. The motto was prohibiting incest is sorry is the last barrier of reactionary Catholic forces and so on and so on. Now you think okay I'm exaggerating this was some marginal petition of lunatics. Maybe but let me give you a list of the lunatics who signed this petition: Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Lyotard and so on and so on. Today however pedophilia is perceived as one of the worst crimes and instead of fighting for it in the name of anti-Catholic progress it is rather associated with the dark side of the Catholic Church. I remember the comic victim of this change was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of '68. You find everywhere in any history of May '68 his photos around Sorbonne on the barricades. A couple of years ago I remember he gave an interview where naively he described how in his young years he worked in a kindergarten and he said that he regularly played masturbatory games with young girls there. To his surprise he faced a brutal backlash they even some people wanted him to be removed from European Parliament and so on and so on. Now why this change? I'm not an old '68 guy, I was always pretty critical towards the legacy of '68 but we should try to understand why this shift. This shift can be nicely identified in a recent polemical exchange between Germaine Greer, the hero of that first generation feminist from the sixties, and some this second generation today's feminist. Germaine Greer made some critical remarks about MeToo movement and today's critics reacted very critically and rejected Greer's main thesis. Women should sexually liberate themselves from male domination and assume active sexual life without playing the game of victimhood. They today's critics claim that this point was valid in the sexual liberation movement of the sixties but today the situation is different. What happened in between is that sexual emancipation of women, their assuming social life as active sexual beings with full freedom of initiative was commodified. True women are no longer perceived as passive objects of male desire but their active sexuality now appears in the male eyes as their permanent availability, readiness to engage in sexual interaction at any point. I think there is a moment of truth in it. Why? Let me go on. This here is my principal position. In the West we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However we should bear in mind also the no less massive fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction with a clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract male gaze, when they if you want objectivize themselves to seduce them, they don't do it offering themselves as passive objects, they are the active agent of their own objectivization, manipulating men, playing ambiguous games including the full right of course to step out of the game at any moment. This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit because on TV they claim this resembles masturbating a man, it should be prohibited, from our own ordinary male chauvinists who explode in violence against a woman who first provokes them and then reject their advances. But what I want to say here is that this term I reject it often this term often used by feminists 'male gaze objectivizes me. I don't want to be objectivized.' Well I am for objectivization mutual. Sorry but objectivization simply means I want to be sexually attractive, I offer myself and the rule should not be in this way you somehow humiliate yourself, no. This is maybe the greatest achievement in sexual liberation that women have the right not to be objectivized by men but to objectivize themselves. The problem is only that they should control the game. Furthermore I at a more general level I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the politically correct cultural left is getting so fanatic in advocating progress, in fighting new and new battles against cultural and sexist apartheid that they are doing it to cover up their own immersion into global capitalism. You know where when my bells started to ring. When there was the first moment of LGBT plus transgender movement and so on. Did you notice how it was immediately supported by all the big names of popular digital industry? These new I call them corporate organic intellectuals. Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and so on. How did we come to this? As many conservatives noticed and they are right here, our time is marked by the progressive disintegration of a shared network of customs which ground what George Orwell referred to as common decency. Such standards are dismissed as a yoke that subordinates individual freedom to some proto-fascist organic social form. In such a situation liberal permissivity reverts to an explosion of legal and moral rules into an endless process of legalization and moralization called the fight against all forms of discrimination. I am quite shocked here how many of the leftists who knew very well Michel Foucault's work on surveillance, control, classification and so on, all that, now they mobilize extreme forms of control, classification like names for gender identities, this form of harassment, that form of harassment. I agree with all this. What I don't agree with is that you can in this way by imposing explicit rules that you can control that you can control sexuality in this way. Let's do it now I would prefer. Go to please the short one yes. But before you do it, you know which dimension is missed here. Sexuality works always through innuendos, double games, you say something expecting something else. I will show you now a scene a very short clip ten seconds but I love it from an English working class melodrama Brassed Off where two people one of them you will notice is Ewan McGregor the great star flirt he accompanies the girl home and then when they are in front of her building they have this short dialogue, very short. Please do that one is this yes, just put it. 'Do you want to come up for a coffee?' 'I don't drink coffee.' 'I haven't got any.' STOP. This is sexuality. It's not just that it's obvious as to the content that basically she is telling him come up and f--k me. But you know what's so beautiful? That if she were to say this directly there would have been nothing liberating in it. Not just that in this way she is more polite but this very form of making a gesture which is meaning this very form eroticizes the situation. Again if she were to say I need sex you want to come up, yes first fine let's go up. Everything would have been lost. This is sexuality. This is what you cannot regulate. My last more pessimistic point here. One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles, also its victims. I would like to quote here Arthur Koestler the big anti-communist. He says 'if power corrupts, the reverse is also true, persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.' End of quote. Consequently one should also talk about feminine manipulation and emotional brutality, ultimately a desperate reply to male domination of course. Women fight back and they should anyway they can. And one should admit that in many parts of our society in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure so the proper strategy would be, that's what I would have done if I were to be a feminist which I am but a woman feminist, to to make it clear how and this does not in any way legitimate male domination and violence but how many forms of today's male violence are a desperate reaction basically of impotence. I mean social, economic and so on impotence. The clearest case here is I think South Africa. Friends there told me South Africa is now breaks all the world record in record in rape. Rape happens there statistically every four five seconds. They even have a special subspecies of rapes every day around two of them happen they even have I forgot it a term for them where man is killing a woman while raping her. Strangling her, cutting her with a knife or whatever. But I think you cannot understand this without the desperate situation in South Africa, the disappointment of the black majority, poverty is now practically the same as under apartheid but there is much more crime, insecurity and so on and so on. I would aim at this if I were to be a radical feminist. Next point that we should understand I'm returning now to my basic line what is happening today in our ideology that it functions in this strange way. We should not be afraid to look at popular culture. I think even people who deal with popular culture like me and many others we still underestimate the extreme importance and ideological power of the universe of video games. Are you aware that more money is for already for a couple of years turned around with video games than with cinema and TV series together. It's almost to use the old-fashioned Marxist term the basic state ideological apparatus today. Now what I find interesting in video games is how a new mode of subjectivity is emerging there. How the subjectivity which is in some sense pre-oedipal. You are not fixed to your finitude, you are freely floating in a kind of a perverse multiplicity state. That is to say what video games impose on you is a kind of a undeadness precisely in the sense of Stephen King and horror stories, an obscene immortality. When you are immersed into a game you dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive since after every destruction you can return to the beginning and start the game again. We should notice how this is not something new but it appeared already in with modernity itself as Jacques Lacan noted in De Sade universe of Marquis de Sade. You have in victims Juliette for example this same undeadness. Juliette is tortured in all possible ways but magically in the next scene she is already there again there as beautiful as ever. Another domain of this undeadness is the universe of cartoons, Tom and Jerry and so on. You know it has this same undeadness. In one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces. Okay, catastrophe but hop in next scene it is here and so on. And as some theorist of hardcore pornography noticed you have the same logic in hardcore pornography. You see ejaculation but then I'm not advising you to see they are extremely boring. The only use of hardcore pornography for me is if somebody is obsessed with sex, show him a very bad vulgar hardcore pornography he will be cured. But what even I noticed is how you see ejaculation and then they don't even need Kleenexes to wipe it off. Simply the game
but I think today they are so important because you know I should abandon this attitude of vulgar provocations because as we learned from the new alt-right Trump and so on, those in power are vulgar enough today. And the true provocation today is simply to be kind and polite here. You know when people ask me how can you still be a Leninist? I tell them I'm a Leninist of the last years of Lenin's life. It's incredible how we missed this. You remember the famous so-called testament of Lenin where Lenin proposes that they should fire, depose Stalin. You know what is so interesting? There is no political critique there. Lenin doesn't say Stalin had a wrong politics this, that. He just said Stalin is too brutal, basically he doesn't have good manners and so on. Second thing, today as we all know our university life, official academic life is under terrible pressure. Even in philosophy I learned they want us to be more useful you know, like my friend although he is a right-winger, Peter Sloterdijk told me that they like to invite him to some big company managers that he explains to them how is the world today and so on. Everything must be useful, either in a conservative sense or useful for technology, useful even to help women's struggle whatever, I have nothing against them, but I'm afraid of this tendency that it must be of some direct use. I think that if you look at the history all great inventions even scientific breakthroughs come from what at the beginning it was just a totally useless reflection and that is unfortunately more and more difficult to do it in official academic settings. That's why our hope are institutions like your Círculo de Bellas Artes, no? It's not only arts, it's simply one of the few remaining places of thinking because against those idiots who claim that we philosophers or scientists think but artists they just feel, express their feelings, no, maybe good artists think even more than us philosophers. That's why I'm honored to be here, thank you. You know I hope that there is in it some electric machine and that there is some sensor there if I say something stupid they press a button and I will [unintelligible]. Okay you have the button there, okay yeah. So let's begin. I would like to begin with Marx's well-known formula of religion as the opium of the people. I think we should rethink this formula today. It is true that today radical Islam but also Christian fundamentalism are functional like opium of the people. A false confrontation with capitalist modernity which allows us to dwell in our ideological dream. But I hope that today in our Western world two other versions of the opium of the people are much more actual and you may have guessed my paradox, these two are opium and the people. Opium as a young French philosopher Laurent de Sutter demonstrated, chemistry in its scientific version is becoming part of us, of our daily lives. Large aspects of our lives are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs from everyday use of sleeping pills and antidepressants. And this is not marginal. I read a statistic in Estados Unidos United States, over percent of all academics, professors and so on are on something like Xanax or whatever, use drugs. So from everyday life to of course hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers, our very emotions are outsourced to chemical stimulation. The stakes of this chemical intervention is contradictory. We use drugs first to keep external excitement, shocks, anxieties, violence under control. That is to say to desensitize us. Yeah no you are too shocked, too excited you take a drug to calm you down and then we again use drugs to generate artificial excitement like if you are too depressed and lack desire you again take drugs. Drugs thus react to two opposed threats to our daily lives: overexcitement and depression. And it's crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the couple of private and public. In the developed Western countries our public lives more and more lack collective excitement provided by a genuine political engagement. From time to time it happens, Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders in Estados Unidos but politics is not exciting today while drugs provide excitement but in the private sphere. So drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitement in our private lives. Second opium: the rise of populism demonstrates that the opium of the people can also be the people itself. Why? It's clear in the case of populism like people is like kind of a big fetish we are all united in it, when you refer to the people somehow antagonisms disappear. But now comes the trouble, I like to provoke with theses which are not popular. I think that the latest in this series of opium is anti-fascism. A new spectre is haunting liberal progressive politics in Europe: the spectre of fascism. Trump in the United States, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary they are all demonized as the new evil towards which we should unite all our forces. Every minimal doubt and reserve are immediately proclaimed a sign of secret collaboration with fascism. Now to avoid any doubt, I think they really are a threat. What I'm saying is that often this demonizing image of a fascist threat serves as a new political fetish obfuscating the basic social antagonism. I remember when was it half a year ago before the presidential elections in France when Macron was the anti-fascist candidate. How every even tiny criticism of Macron was dismissed as ah, I was proclaimed objectively working for Marine Le Pen. Some of my French ex-friends even coined the term 'Le Pen-Trotskyist'. You pretend to be a leftist Trotskyist but by criticizing the moderate center you objectively, in the best Stalinist way, work for Marine Le Pen. Now I respect the choice of saying in this desperate situation Marine Le Pen is the danger so let's vote for Macron. Nothing against this. But we should nonetheless be aware all the time that Macron stands for that establishment, financial and so on, which gave birth to Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen reacted to that establishment. So again this is why this anti-new-right anti-fascism is dangerous. It renders us blind for the fact of how many motifs which were once motifs of the left are appropriated by populist right. Look in the United States, I was told that Steve Bannon is now in Spain giving advice to right-wing parties. But you know why Steve Bannon really split with Trump? He opposed Trump's tax reform and he said 'No, we should raise the taxes for the rich up to percent, we need big public works and so on.' Bannon is a white supremacist, racist but it's very sad that only he dares to advocate things that no liberal leftist even dares to mention. Now my next step. In this new condition of new opium of the people, how does ideology work? My premise here is that in order to be operative every ideology has to be inconsistent. Its explicit norms have to be supplemented by implicit norms telling us how to deal with explicit norms. You know that's the mystery of ideology. Often things are explicitly prohibited but the message between the lines is 'do it but discreetly'. Or vice versa. The whole Stalinism functioned like this. In Soviet Constitution of '36 it says 'if a group of citizens wants to establish a new political party,' Soviet Union, 'not only you have the right to do it but the state has to give you financial support for your newspaper and offices and so on.' Now try to do it you know. So this inconsistency was always here of ideology. But today it works in a much more radical way. How? I'm sorry if you know this story, it's so beautiful that I like to repeat it. I was about two years ago in a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia and my wife is a heavy smoker so we asked do you have smoking rooms? And we got a wonderful answer from the guy at the reception. He said 'no sorry, he said sorry it's the law, smoking is prohibited but it's not a problem, you have ashtrays in all the rooms.' And then we entered the room and I was so shocked please this one, look what we found in the room. Literally the ashtray which had as an aesthetic supplement the sign for prohibiting smoking. I think this is a very good metaphor of our ideological predicament today. I remembered then a similar experience from my military life. My God how much I learned in the army because the army was full of these inconsistencies. We had in the morning classes, one hour of this, one hour of that. One morning it was like a divine coincidence. The first class was some big topic international agreements, rules of war. And the officer explained us how in a combat, even today this is the international Geneva Convention law, when parachuters attack you, you are not allowed to shoot at them while they are in the air. No, you must wait that they touch ground. Okay. Then in a divine coincidence next hour was one in the series of how you use your gun. The topic of the day I'm not kidding was how to hit a parachuter in the air. You know you have to judge the velocity of the wind, the direction and so on. And then I said I was stupid, I said to the officer but comrade isn't there a slight inconsistency between what you are telling us now and what you were telling us half an hour ago? And he answered me correctly, he said 'aren't you some kind of intellectual, how can you be so stupid then not to understand that?' And it's very similar, it's pretty similar I claim today things like that happen all the time. For example if you were to ask an American intelligence officer do you torture? He would say of course not it prohibited by the law but here you have a book about waterboarding no, how you do it. It's more or less exactly the same. So let's go on. I want nonetheless to focus on today's problems. How does this new ideological constellation reflect itself in a particular domain of struggle for emancipation in feminism. I remember first we should become aware because now we also celebrate these days literally half a century of May '68. You can learn a lot about our predicament by simply comparing today's emancipatory struggles and the struggle of '68. In the aftermath of '68 the French progressive press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of pedophilia. Claiming that the artificial and oppressive cultural oppressive frontier that separates the sexual life of small children from adults should be abolished and the right to freely dispose with one's body should be extended also to children and they explicitly meant children from four five six years from this early sexualization and their parents. The motto was prohibiting incest is sorry is the last barrier of reactionary Catholic forces and so on and so on. Now you think okay I'm exaggerating this was some marginal petition of lunatics. Maybe but let me give you a list of the lunatics who signed this petition: Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Lyotard and so on and so on. Today however pedophilia is perceived as one of the worst crimes and instead of fighting for it in the name of anti-Catholic progress it is rather associated with the dark side of the Catholic Church. I remember the comic victim of this change was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of '68. You find everywhere in any history of May '68 his photos around Sorbonne on the barricades. A couple of years ago I remember he gave an interview where naively he described how in his young years he worked in a kindergarten and he said that he regularly played masturbatory games with young girls there. To his surprise he faced a brutal backlash they even some people wanted him to be removed from European Parliament and so on and so on. Now why this change? I'm not an old '68 guy, I was always pretty critical towards the legacy of '68 but we should try to understand why this shift. This shift can be nicely identified in a recent polemical exchange between Germaine Greer, the hero of that first generation feminist from the sixties, and some this second generation today's feminist. Germaine Greer made some critical remarks about MeToo movement and today's critics reacted very critically and rejected Greer's main thesis. Women should sexually liberate themselves from male domination and assume active sexual life without playing the game of victimhood. They today's critics claim that this point was valid in the sexual liberation movement of the sixties but today the situation is different. What happened in between is that sexual emancipation of women, their assuming social life as active sexual beings with full freedom of initiative was commodified. True women are no longer perceived as passive objects of male desire but their active sexuality now appears in the male eyes as their permanent availability, readiness to engage in sexual interaction at any point. I think there is a moment of truth in it. Why? Let me go on. This here is my principal position. In the West we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However we should bear in mind also the no less massive fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction with a clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract male gaze, when they if you want objectivize themselves to seduce them, they don't do it offering themselves as passive objects, they are the active agent of their own objectivization, manipulating men, playing ambiguous games including the full right of course to step out of the game at any moment. This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit because on TV they claim this resembles masturbating a man, it should be prohibited, from our own ordinary male chauvinists who explode in violence against a woman who first provokes them and then reject their advances. But what I want to say here is that this term I reject it often this term often used by feminists 'male gaze objectivizes me. I don't want to be objectivized.' Well I am for objectivization mutual. Sorry but objectivization simply means I want to be sexually attractive, I offer myself and the rule should not be in this way you somehow humiliate yourself, no. This is maybe the greatest achievement in sexual liberation that women have the right not to be objectivized by men but to objectivize themselves. The problem is only that they should control the game. Furthermore I at a more general level I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the politically correct cultural left is getting so fanatic in advocating progress, in fighting new and new battles against cultural and sexist apartheid that they are doing it to cover up their own immersion into global capitalism. You know where when my bells started to ring. When there was the first moment of LGBT plus transgender movement and so on. Did you notice how it was immediately supported by all the big names of popular digital industry? These new I call them corporate organic intellectuals. Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and so on. How did we come to this? As many conservatives noticed and they are right here, our time is marked by the progressive disintegration of a shared network of customs which ground what George Orwell referred to as common decency. Such standards are dismissed as a yoke that subordinates individual freedom to some proto-fascist organic social form. In such a situation liberal permissivity reverts to an explosion of legal and moral rules into an endless process of legalization and moralization called the fight against all forms of discrimination. I am quite shocked here how many of the leftists who knew very well Michel Foucault's work on surveillance, control, classification and so on, all that, now they mobilize extreme forms of control, classification like names for gender identities, this form of harassment, that form of harassment. I agree with all this. What I don't agree with is that you can in this way by imposing explicit rules that you can control that you can control sexuality in this way. Let's do it now I would prefer. Go to please the short one yes. But before you do it, you know which dimension is missed here. Sexuality works always through innuendos, double games, you say something expecting something else. I will show you now a scene a very short clip ten seconds but I love it from an English working class melodrama Brassed Off where two people one of them you will notice is Ewan McGregor the great star flirt he accompanies the girl home and then when they are in front of her building they have this short dialogue, very short. Please do that one is this yes, just put it. 'Do you want to come up for a coffee?' 'I don't drink coffee.' 'I haven't got any.' STOP. This is sexuality. It's not just that it's obvious as to the content that basically she is telling him come up and f--k me. But you know what's so beautiful? That if she were to say this directly there would have been nothing liberating in it. Not just that in this way she is more polite but this very form of making a gesture which is meaning this very form eroticizes the situation. Again if she were to say I need sex you want to come up, yes first fine let's go up. Everything would have been lost. This is sexuality. This is what you cannot regulate. My last more pessimistic point here. One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles, also its victims. I would like to quote here Arthur Koestler the big anti-communist. He says 'if power corrupts, the reverse is also true, persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.' End of quote. Consequently one should also talk about feminine manipulation and emotional brutality, ultimately a desperate reply to male domination of course. Women fight back and they should anyway they can. And one should admit that in many parts of our society in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure so the proper strategy would be, that's what I would have done if I were to be a feminist which I am but a woman feminist, to to make it clear how and this does not in any way legitimate male domination and violence but how many forms of today's male violence are a desperate reaction basically of impotence. I mean social, economic and so on impotence. The clearest case here is I think South Africa. Friends there told me South Africa is now breaks all the world record in record in rape. Rape happens there statistically every four five seconds. They even have a special subspecies of rapes every day around two of them happen they even have I forgot it a term for them where man is killing a woman while raping her. Strangling her, cutting her with a knife or whatever. But I think you cannot understand this without the desperate situation in South Africa, the disappointment of the black majority, poverty is now practically the same as under apartheid but there is much more crime, insecurity and so on and so on. I would aim at this if I were to be a radical feminist. Next point that we should understand I'm returning now to my basic line what is happening today in our ideology that it functions in this strange way. We should not be afraid to look at popular culture. I think even people who deal with popular culture like me and many others we still underestimate the extreme importance and ideological power of the universe of video games. Are you aware that more money is for already for a couple of years turned around with video games than with cinema and TV series together. It's almost to use the old-fashioned Marxist term the basic state ideological apparatus today. Now what I find interesting in video games is how a new mode of subjectivity is emerging there. How the subjectivity which is in some sense pre-oedipal. You are not fixed to your finitude, you are freely floating in a kind of a perverse multiplicity state. That is to say what video games impose on you is a kind of a undeadness precisely in the sense of Stephen King and horror stories, an obscene immortality. When you are immersed into a game you dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive since after every destruction you can return to the beginning and start the game again. We should notice how this is not something new but it appeared already in with modernity itself as Jacques Lacan noted in De Sade universe of Marquis de Sade. You have in victims Juliette for example this same undeadness. Juliette is tortured in all possible ways but magically in the next scene she is already there again there as beautiful as ever. Another domain of this undeadness is the universe of cartoons, Tom and Jerry and so on. You know it has this same undeadness. In one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces. Okay, catastrophe but hop in next scene it is here and so on. And as some theorist of hardcore pornography noticed you have the same logic in hardcore pornography. You see ejaculation but then I'm not advising you to see they are extremely boring. The only use of hardcore pornography for me is if somebody is obsessed with sex, show him a very bad vulgar hardcore pornography he will be cured. But what even I noticed is how you see ejaculation and then they don't even need Kleenexes to wipe it off. Simply the game
unknown
goes on and they can do it again and again and again. What happens
goes on and they can do it again and again and again. What happens
Slavoj Žižek
here? Now comes my pessimism. I think what emerged in modernity is and this is what is mobilized in video games is a new form of immortality which is not the noble immortality of I may die physically but in some world spirit or memory of others I will survive but an obscene immortality. I can put it like this in Hegelian, Hegel terms that it is a weird negation of negation. We have some high goal then we have a downward movement things go wrong but then the situation goes so stupid that you cannot even fall apart or disintegrate or die properly. For example the examples here would have been many good comic novels play on this. You are desperate and you kill yourself. Try to. But then something always fails. I read one marvelous short story where the guy takes pills to kill himself by mistake he takes a laxative he ends up just in the toilet whatever you know this logic or with happiness. You say my life is hell I will try to be as unhappy as possible. But then you find some small masochist pleasure even in that you cannot even go down go down properly. Now comes the really evil part. Isn't something of this at work for today's political left. The left the traditional left not your Podemos, Podemos is more intelligent, are looking for the true working class you know. From the twenties radical left has this problem, we have a good plan for the revolution, where is the subject? Working class. And then they are looking for ersatz working class. It's as if precisely proletarians don't want to be pure proletarians like 'oh you see I have only my chains to lose.' No, you don't have only your chains to lose. You have a credit, you have a car, you worry all ways something that prevents you to be radically a proletarian. And this is it's a very evil I warn you remark what I find in some of my leftist friends who celebrate immigrants in a wrong way. They secretly hope that okay we are here corrupted we all have small pleasures, not so bad. Maybe immigrants with nothing to lose will be finally the true proletarians you know. It's a pretty desperate situation, it doesn't work. Okay now comes the really evil part. No okay first I just want to conclude this part by emphasizing how what I am describing here in this false immortality in cartoons and so on video games it's not just fantasy. I read some investigation of our erotic lives where they say that more and more people act for example in real erotic interaction as if it's a as if it's a video game. I start with that lady or man it doesn't work no problem I withdraw I start again as if we are freely floating in some virtual space. This liberation and I'm not saying this is bad this is just ideology that we should accept our mortality and so on and so on. I think we should use this new logic of virtual space. We should use it also in order to see how we shouldn't be constrained by reality. We should relate to reality to our real life and this is what art is about as one of the possible virtual worlds and play with it to change it and so on. And now we come to your great guy I don't even generally like him but this painting that I will show always fascinated me: Picasso's Pablo Picasso's what the title the a woman throwing you can put it on like a woman throwing a stone. Why do I like it? Hegel said somewhere that a good portrait of a person resembles this person more than the person itself. A good painting of a woman does not reproduce her reality. First it must be a violent painting. In the violent in the sense that you have the object, the woman, you cut it into pieces, you do the work of abstraction. Hegel knew this that the greatness of human mind is not that precisely it's not holistic. You have a holistic image and you say let's pick this out let's pick that out and let's do a new weird monstrosity. This is what this is for me again a model painting. It's a monstrosity but somehow sorry for using this Platonic term somehow the essence of a woman throwing a stone is here in more directly than a realist painting. I'm very naively Platonic here. I believe in ideas, of course not in eternal sky ideas but ideas in the sense of every person has an essence, not Platonic essence but essence in the sense of Deleuzian essence more, of all the hidden potentialities and so on and so on and so on. This is what art is doing at its most elementary. Precisely cut into reality in a very brutal way to bring out I see in this all the potentials of the woman: the fury, the fragility and so on and so on and so on. This is for me a nice example of a nice example of of what I would call thinking in art. This painting is thinking. It's not an irrational impression of a woman. Forget about feelings. He is doing the thinking. Thinking means you have an image but you try to understand it, you cut it into parts, you violently dismember it and through this disfiguration the domain of thoughts, ideas, essences appear. In this sense I am a materialist Platonist. So again in this way we came to another topic the mixture of virtuality and reality which I think is crucial about sexual matters. Sexuality in sexuality we are never simply alone in the sense of me with my partner. There is always another dimension in it either another person's gaze we imagine a gaze observing us. I think you cannot understand sexuality without referring to that mythic past you remember there are two big examples. You remember they found I think in Mexico I don't know where some paintings on the flat ground by I think Aztecs but you know what's the mystery. You cannot see them from the ground that they are paintings, you must be very high up to see them. So for whom were the Aztecs doing this drawing this lines? Or the same everybody knows this ancient Roman viaducts. They have small statues and reliefs also on the top invisible to human gaze. Now wait a minute this is not for me a proof of God you know. I am a materialist. I'm just saying that it's our natural predisposition to imagine being observed by a virtual gaze. Now comes the obscene part. I'm sorry if some of you I'm sorry if if some of you will be offended by it but I will draw don't be afraid also again a feminist lesson from it. I debated with friends a very obscene debate. What would have been the fundamental archetype of hardcore pornography. And I think okay I don't have vast knowledge there they had better knowledge but they convinced me that the archetypal scene would be this one of for male chauvinist hardcore pornography. A woman on the bed, I'm sorry for this but you will see the important lesson, with her legs up a man penetrating her and you see clearly in front the penetration but now comes the crucial feature. Man is purely instrumentalized. In many of the short films that I've seen you don't even see the man's face. His duty is just bam bam to do it. But and they must suffer very much while they do this, between the woman's legs and then the man penetrating her there is some space always this happens where you see the woman's face looking at you at the camera and making some whatever I cannot do this sounds and so on. You see it's not immediacy. The way they stage sex is your gaze is included into it. And I claim at some basic level this happens always. Now what is the feminist lesson? It's not simply that woman is nonetheless not doing so bad because she is minimally subjectivized. I think it's much more sad and brutal for woman than for man. Man is just an instrument who cares about him. They are usually this always depresses me some anonymous sailors with cheap tattoos and so on I don't know how they get them. But the woman has to addresses directly the camera which you are not allowed to do it in usual fiction films and has to play the game of asserting her pleasure, all the moaning and so on sounds and so on. So I claim it's totally wrong to claim that I if as a male chauvinist I watch a hardcore movie of this type that I identify with the perpetrator. I imagine myself to be at the place of the guy who is doing it. No I he is pure instrument. I I'm a pure observer who is looking for a proof of woman's enjoyment. And I think this is a much worse humiliation for the woman. Much worse than being just an object of instrument is to be how should I call this, forcefully oppressively subjectivized. Everybody knows this is for me male chauvinism at its worst. We when we are at our worst we don't just exploit women. We want them to praise us, to enjoy it and so on and so on. So again don't just protest objectivization, protest even more where you have to act as a woman as a subject but as a as it were fake subject where your very subjectivity is imposed on you. And I know cases, a psychiatrist told me where a man her partner got furious because he was having sex with for example his wife but the wife say okay okay it's my marital duty but didn't participate enough in it and that made the man furious often a man beats a woman like this false you have even to play the game of being a free of being a free subject and enjoying it. Back to back to back to that idea of imaginary virtual gaze like in imagine when we make love we are like those Aztec statues or on the top of viaduct, you know we always imagine a gaze. That's the first thing sex is never immediate. The second thing maybe even more important is that it's not enough to play the game of getting rid of repression and being a pure perverse subject of showing it all and so on and so on. In sexuality what is Freud said something ingenious. He said that you know that the usual cliché here they were very male chauvinist in '68 when I was young the idea was women are hysterics, they provoke the master but they really want a master a better master while we men can be perverts. We go to the end we get rid of all prohibitions we we really do what hysterics only dream. Freud said something ingenious. He says that the that in perversion nowhere is repression, Verdrängung, stronger than in perversion. Why? Because what is repressed is not the thing itself in the sense of you have an artistic depiction of sex but then the real thing is just the act itself. As that example of hardcore porn of the gaze shows something must be added to it on the edge. For example I saw my wife was looking at it no I like a bad commercial TV series but I don't like Sex and the City but nonetheless one of them had an interesting turn where Miranda the ugly one but my favorite I hate all other three makes love with a guy and then the guy tells her why are you so cold, I would like you to talk while I'm making love to you all the dirty things that come to your mind. Okay she gets into it slowly with some effort and does tells all the dirty thoughts. But then at some point she says something that shouldn't have been mentioned you know. She says I noticed how satisfied you are when in the middle of lovemaking I stick my finger into your ass you know and then the guy totally collapses loses in you know I think with every abolition of prohibitions is like this. Yes we do whatever we want but there is something which is not even very radical some remark some gesture that is the true place of what Lacan called plus-de-jouir surplus enjoyment. And this is not there in the depth, it's something on the margin like here a small remark or whatever. This is why I don't trust people who play perverts. 'I don't have any obstacles I do whatever I want.' My answer would be okay but what is your version of sticking a finger up your ass you know. That's your and maybe we should nonetheless do it it's so amusing Lubitsch in his movie The Smiling Lieutenant did something like this. It's a Hollywood movie although just before we will show also although before Hays Code was imposed from I will not go into the story we don't have time just it's Maurice Chevalier when he was young plays a great seducer officer of Austrian army and he sings a song which if you ask me is embarrassing to listen. Not anything not anything directly pornographic. He the whole song is a comparison between making love penetrating the woman and shooting rat-a-ta-ta-ta-ta in the army. And it's all this very vulgar comparison 'we soldiers are always on our duty' and so on. But although it's just a vulgar metaphor, no pornography, if you ask me to watch this is for me worse than to watch a simple hardcore pornography do it now. It's just a very short song. 'A soldier's work is never done and though we never use a gun, we're still on active service though we're through with fighting. For when a lady takes the field she knows the guards will always yield and every man deserves a medal every night. To arms, to arms, we are used to night alarms, we're always facing powder. The girls divine we weaken but we win and march home feeling prouder. We're on a parade each evening in the park, we're not afraid to skirmish in the dark. We're famous near and far for our rat-a-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Toujours l'amour in the army, we give the girls a...' STOP. Okay but I think that this is in some sense this rat-a-ta-ta and so on is just a vulgar formula we know to what it refers but in a way it's much more condensed pleasure vulgar than let's call it real sex itself. And I even know I will tell you a private secret not from my life but from a friend and I'm not my best friend I'm not telling you my own best friend. He wanted to make love with his girlfriend and they watched this movie days before and she told him 'okay what about some rat-a-ta-ta?' and it was over. He was not able to do it you know. You see this is what Lacan called plus-de-jouir surplus enjoyment very important a notion Lacan elaborated with direct reference to Marx Mehrwert surplus value. That gaze in the pornographic scene or Aztec and so on drawings is the surplus enjoyment or rat-a-ta here. What makes sex obscene is precisely this apparent metaphors details which provide surplus enjoyment. And not to lose time I want to conclude just with a brief exercise into theology. We have a wonderful and I'm proud to do this in Spain which is Catholic country like my own in Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica. He there gets caught in these paradoxes because he is bothered by this problem. Do people who are in Paradise are they allowed to see to take a look at the people who suffer in Hell? The answer should be yes because by definition for his theology people in Paradise can know everything about reality so it shouldn't be prohibited. But there is a problem because in Paradise there is no suffering just enjoyment, pleasure. So isn't this a perversion, how can you enjoy seeing other people suffering burning there. And he avoids in a very cheap scholastic way this conclusion. He distinguishes between two types of enjoyment. He said it would be bad to enjoy directly when you see them burning whatever in Hell their suffering. But he said if you look as a good Christian at that suffering you are impressed by the majesty of divine justice and that's what you really enjoy. It's a trick, it doesn't work. But if we read this problem in a Lacanian way ah it appears in a totally new light. What if and every good Christian knows this even Kierkegaard mentioned this, the way it's usually described Paradise must be an extremely boring place you know. And people always have a suspicion that life in Hell has to be much more interesting you know. Orgies you drink, okay there is fire barbecue you dance whatever. So in Paradise the situation is this one: people get boring, okay permanent happiness but where is life where is passion. So from time to time some angel tells them 'ah you are bored here, ah take a look at the Hell and then you will prefer to stay here' you know. It's a little bit like in our societies which are still doing relatively well this view into Hell is provided by TV news where it's very perverse we secretly enjoy it you know on TV news. They usually I don't know how is it in Spain but in English language they usually say 'now we will show you some pictures of suffering in Somalia warning to sensitive viewers blah blah' which means here you get the pleasure look at it you know. It's exactly like. But then I have another dream with which I will conclude. I can imagine this would be the Hell I like. I imagine Hell where they have orgies all the time they drink they roast barbecue in the oil fire is there really for good food and so on. Just once a week some Hell administrator comes to them and says 'listen guys we have a good time but now for ten minutes we will be observed from Heaven so please play the game as if you suffer and so on otherwise they may abolish Paradise.' So ah it's on okay
here? Now comes my pessimism. I think what emerged in modernity is and this is what is mobilized in video games is a new form of immortality which is not the noble immortality of I may die physically but in some world spirit or memory of others I will survive but an obscene immortality. I can put it like this in Hegelian, Hegel terms that it is a weird negation of negation. We have some high goal then we have a downward movement things go wrong but then the situation goes so stupid that you cannot even fall apart or disintegrate or die properly. For example the examples here would have been many good comic novels play on this. You are desperate and you kill yourself. Try to. But then something always fails. I read one marvelous short story where the guy takes pills to kill himself by mistake he takes a laxative he ends up just in the toilet whatever you know this logic or with happiness. You say my life is hell I will try to be as unhappy as possible. But then you find some small masochist pleasure even in that you cannot even go down go down properly. Now comes the really evil part. Isn't something of this at work for today's political left. The left the traditional left not your Podemos, Podemos is more intelligent, are looking for the true working class you know. From the twenties radical left has this problem, we have a good plan for the revolution, where is the subject? Working class. And then they are looking for ersatz working class. It's as if precisely proletarians don't want to be pure proletarians like 'oh you see I have only my chains to lose.' No, you don't have only your chains to lose. You have a credit, you have a car, you worry all ways something that prevents you to be radically a proletarian. And this is it's a very evil I warn you remark what I find in some of my leftist friends who celebrate immigrants in a wrong way. They secretly hope that okay we are here corrupted we all have small pleasures, not so bad. Maybe immigrants with nothing to lose will be finally the true proletarians you know. It's a pretty desperate situation, it doesn't work. Okay now comes the really evil part. No okay first I just want to conclude this part by emphasizing how what I am describing here in this false immortality in cartoons and so on video games it's not just fantasy. I read some investigation of our erotic lives where they say that more and more people act for example in real erotic interaction as if it's a as if it's a video game. I start with that lady or man it doesn't work no problem I withdraw I start again as if we are freely floating in some virtual space. This liberation and I'm not saying this is bad this is just ideology that we should accept our mortality and so on and so on. I think we should use this new logic of virtual space. We should use it also in order to see how we shouldn't be constrained by reality. We should relate to reality to our real life and this is what art is about as one of the possible virtual worlds and play with it to change it and so on. And now we come to your great guy I don't even generally like him but this painting that I will show always fascinated me: Picasso's Pablo Picasso's what the title the a woman throwing you can put it on like a woman throwing a stone. Why do I like it? Hegel said somewhere that a good portrait of a person resembles this person more than the person itself. A good painting of a woman does not reproduce her reality. First it must be a violent painting. In the violent in the sense that you have the object, the woman, you cut it into pieces, you do the work of abstraction. Hegel knew this that the greatness of human mind is not that precisely it's not holistic. You have a holistic image and you say let's pick this out let's pick that out and let's do a new weird monstrosity. This is what this is for me again a model painting. It's a monstrosity but somehow sorry for using this Platonic term somehow the essence of a woman throwing a stone is here in more directly than a realist painting. I'm very naively Platonic here. I believe in ideas, of course not in eternal sky ideas but ideas in the sense of every person has an essence, not Platonic essence but essence in the sense of Deleuzian essence more, of all the hidden potentialities and so on and so on and so on. This is what art is doing at its most elementary. Precisely cut into reality in a very brutal way to bring out I see in this all the potentials of the woman: the fury, the fragility and so on and so on and so on. This is for me a nice example of a nice example of of what I would call thinking in art. This painting is thinking. It's not an irrational impression of a woman. Forget about feelings. He is doing the thinking. Thinking means you have an image but you try to understand it, you cut it into parts, you violently dismember it and through this disfiguration the domain of thoughts, ideas, essences appear. In this sense I am a materialist Platonist. So again in this way we came to another topic the mixture of virtuality and reality which I think is crucial about sexual matters. Sexuality in sexuality we are never simply alone in the sense of me with my partner. There is always another dimension in it either another person's gaze we imagine a gaze observing us. I think you cannot understand sexuality without referring to that mythic past you remember there are two big examples. You remember they found I think in Mexico I don't know where some paintings on the flat ground by I think Aztecs but you know what's the mystery. You cannot see them from the ground that they are paintings, you must be very high up to see them. So for whom were the Aztecs doing this drawing this lines? Or the same everybody knows this ancient Roman viaducts. They have small statues and reliefs also on the top invisible to human gaze. Now wait a minute this is not for me a proof of God you know. I am a materialist. I'm just saying that it's our natural predisposition to imagine being observed by a virtual gaze. Now comes the obscene part. I'm sorry if some of you I'm sorry if if some of you will be offended by it but I will draw don't be afraid also again a feminist lesson from it. I debated with friends a very obscene debate. What would have been the fundamental archetype of hardcore pornography. And I think okay I don't have vast knowledge there they had better knowledge but they convinced me that the archetypal scene would be this one of for male chauvinist hardcore pornography. A woman on the bed, I'm sorry for this but you will see the important lesson, with her legs up a man penetrating her and you see clearly in front the penetration but now comes the crucial feature. Man is purely instrumentalized. In many of the short films that I've seen you don't even see the man's face. His duty is just bam bam to do it. But and they must suffer very much while they do this, between the woman's legs and then the man penetrating her there is some space always this happens where you see the woman's face looking at you at the camera and making some whatever I cannot do this sounds and so on. You see it's not immediacy. The way they stage sex is your gaze is included into it. And I claim at some basic level this happens always. Now what is the feminist lesson? It's not simply that woman is nonetheless not doing so bad because she is minimally subjectivized. I think it's much more sad and brutal for woman than for man. Man is just an instrument who cares about him. They are usually this always depresses me some anonymous sailors with cheap tattoos and so on I don't know how they get them. But the woman has to addresses directly the camera which you are not allowed to do it in usual fiction films and has to play the game of asserting her pleasure, all the moaning and so on sounds and so on. So I claim it's totally wrong to claim that I if as a male chauvinist I watch a hardcore movie of this type that I identify with the perpetrator. I imagine myself to be at the place of the guy who is doing it. No I he is pure instrument. I I'm a pure observer who is looking for a proof of woman's enjoyment. And I think this is a much worse humiliation for the woman. Much worse than being just an object of instrument is to be how should I call this, forcefully oppressively subjectivized. Everybody knows this is for me male chauvinism at its worst. We when we are at our worst we don't just exploit women. We want them to praise us, to enjoy it and so on and so on. So again don't just protest objectivization, protest even more where you have to act as a woman as a subject but as a as it were fake subject where your very subjectivity is imposed on you. And I know cases, a psychiatrist told me where a man her partner got furious because he was having sex with for example his wife but the wife say okay okay it's my marital duty but didn't participate enough in it and that made the man furious often a man beats a woman like this false you have even to play the game of being a free of being a free subject and enjoying it. Back to back to back to that idea of imaginary virtual gaze like in imagine when we make love we are like those Aztec statues or on the top of viaduct, you know we always imagine a gaze. That's the first thing sex is never immediate. The second thing maybe even more important is that it's not enough to play the game of getting rid of repression and being a pure perverse subject of showing it all and so on and so on. In sexuality what is Freud said something ingenious. He said that you know that the usual cliché here they were very male chauvinist in '68 when I was young the idea was women are hysterics, they provoke the master but they really want a master a better master while we men can be perverts. We go to the end we get rid of all prohibitions we we really do what hysterics only dream. Freud said something ingenious. He says that the that in perversion nowhere is repression, Verdrängung, stronger than in perversion. Why? Because what is repressed is not the thing itself in the sense of you have an artistic depiction of sex but then the real thing is just the act itself. As that example of hardcore porn of the gaze shows something must be added to it on the edge. For example I saw my wife was looking at it no I like a bad commercial TV series but I don't like Sex and the City but nonetheless one of them had an interesting turn where Miranda the ugly one but my favorite I hate all other three makes love with a guy and then the guy tells her why are you so cold, I would like you to talk while I'm making love to you all the dirty things that come to your mind. Okay she gets into it slowly with some effort and does tells all the dirty thoughts. But then at some point she says something that shouldn't have been mentioned you know. She says I noticed how satisfied you are when in the middle of lovemaking I stick my finger into your ass you know and then the guy totally collapses loses in you know I think with every abolition of prohibitions is like this. Yes we do whatever we want but there is something which is not even very radical some remark some gesture that is the true place of what Lacan called plus-de-jouir surplus enjoyment. And this is not there in the depth, it's something on the margin like here a small remark or whatever. This is why I don't trust people who play perverts. 'I don't have any obstacles I do whatever I want.' My answer would be okay but what is your version of sticking a finger up your ass you know. That's your and maybe we should nonetheless do it it's so amusing Lubitsch in his movie The Smiling Lieutenant did something like this. It's a Hollywood movie although just before we will show also although before Hays Code was imposed from I will not go into the story we don't have time just it's Maurice Chevalier when he was young plays a great seducer officer of Austrian army and he sings a song which if you ask me is embarrassing to listen. Not anything not anything directly pornographic. He the whole song is a comparison between making love penetrating the woman and shooting rat-a-ta-ta-ta-ta in the army. And it's all this very vulgar comparison 'we soldiers are always on our duty' and so on. But although it's just a vulgar metaphor, no pornography, if you ask me to watch this is for me worse than to watch a simple hardcore pornography do it now. It's just a very short song. 'A soldier's work is never done and though we never use a gun, we're still on active service though we're through with fighting. For when a lady takes the field she knows the guards will always yield and every man deserves a medal every night. To arms, to arms, we are used to night alarms, we're always facing powder. The girls divine we weaken but we win and march home feeling prouder. We're on a parade each evening in the park, we're not afraid to skirmish in the dark. We're famous near and far for our rat-a-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Toujours l'amour in the army, we give the girls a...' STOP. Okay but I think that this is in some sense this rat-a-ta-ta and so on is just a vulgar formula we know to what it refers but in a way it's much more condensed pleasure vulgar than let's call it real sex itself. And I even know I will tell you a private secret not from my life but from a friend and I'm not my best friend I'm not telling you my own best friend. He wanted to make love with his girlfriend and they watched this movie days before and she told him 'okay what about some rat-a-ta-ta?' and it was over. He was not able to do it you know. You see this is what Lacan called plus-de-jouir surplus enjoyment very important a notion Lacan elaborated with direct reference to Marx Mehrwert surplus value. That gaze in the pornographic scene or Aztec and so on drawings is the surplus enjoyment or rat-a-ta here. What makes sex obscene is precisely this apparent metaphors details which provide surplus enjoyment. And not to lose time I want to conclude just with a brief exercise into theology. We have a wonderful and I'm proud to do this in Spain which is Catholic country like my own in Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica. He there gets caught in these paradoxes because he is bothered by this problem. Do people who are in Paradise are they allowed to see to take a look at the people who suffer in Hell? The answer should be yes because by definition for his theology people in Paradise can know everything about reality so it shouldn't be prohibited. But there is a problem because in Paradise there is no suffering just enjoyment, pleasure. So isn't this a perversion, how can you enjoy seeing other people suffering burning there. And he avoids in a very cheap scholastic way this conclusion. He distinguishes between two types of enjoyment. He said it would be bad to enjoy directly when you see them burning whatever in Hell their suffering. But he said if you look as a good Christian at that suffering you are impressed by the majesty of divine justice and that's what you really enjoy. It's a trick, it doesn't work. But if we read this problem in a Lacanian way ah it appears in a totally new light. What if and every good Christian knows this even Kierkegaard mentioned this, the way it's usually described Paradise must be an extremely boring place you know. And people always have a suspicion that life in Hell has to be much more interesting you know. Orgies you drink, okay there is fire barbecue you dance whatever. So in Paradise the situation is this one: people get boring, okay permanent happiness but where is life where is passion. So from time to time some angel tells them 'ah you are bored here, ah take a look at the Hell and then you will prefer to stay here' you know. It's a little bit like in our societies which are still doing relatively well this view into Hell is provided by TV news where it's very perverse we secretly enjoy it you know on TV news. They usually I don't know how is it in Spain but in English language they usually say 'now we will show you some pictures of suffering in Somalia warning to sensitive viewers blah blah' which means here you get the pleasure look at it you know. It's exactly like. But then I have another dream with which I will conclude. I can imagine this would be the Hell I like. I imagine Hell where they have orgies all the time they drink they roast barbecue in the oil fire is there really for good food and so on. Just once a week some Hell administrator comes to them and says 'listen guys we have a good time but now for ten minutes we will be observed from Heaven so please play the game as if you suffer and so on otherwise they may abolish Paradise.' So ah it's on okay
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oh oh oh and then okay back to the orgy and so on. Maybe this should be the ideal world we should strive for to quote the Ernst Lubitsch title Heaven Can Wait. Let's create Communism is not Heaven on Earth, Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment. Thank you very much. Muchísimas gracias Slavoj. Yo creo que ha puesto en marcha muchas de las características
oh oh oh and then okay back to the orgy and so on. Maybe this should be the ideal world we should strive for to quote the Ernst Lubitsch title Heaven Can Wait. Let's create Communism is not Heaven on Earth, Communism is a better Hell, a Hell full of enjoyment. Thank you very much. Muchísimas gracias Slavoj. Yo creo que ha puesto en marcha muchas de las características
Slavoj Žižek
que mencionaba el
que mencionaba el
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presidente de esta institución cuando le otorgaba la medalla de oro. Ha puesto, bueno, ha puesto en funcionamiento, ¿no?, el papel vigente que aún tiene la ideología. Ha hablado de Hegel, ha usado a Hegel, a Marx y
presidente de esta institución cuando le otorgaba la medalla de oro. Ha puesto, bueno, ha puesto en funcionamiento, ¿no?, el papel vigente que aún tiene la ideología. Ha hablado de Hegel, ha usado a Hegel, a Marx y
Slavoj Žižek
a Lacan para analizar de manera crítica nuestro presente, también con agudeza y de un modo provocador. Y también se ha visto a lo largo de su intervención algo que no se ha mencionado pero que es muy conocido y sigue siendo eficaz, que es su su gran sentido del humor. Tenemos algo de tiempo para unas preguntas si les parece bien. Si levantan la mano y me miran a mí o a la persona que tiene el micrófono, así él les puede... I hope this is my standard joke but I like it. I hope you and the director did it in a proper Stalinist way. No freedom to the questions, no good. I want it organized. You know an old communist told me this. He told me, I reproached him in the last years of communism like 'but you communists cannot tolerate free debates.' He told me, 'we love free debates, just free debates has to be especially well organized to avoid enemy provocations' you know. Let's do it please. Hey. So I was going to ask in English. That's fine. Perfect, thank you. Well what you were saying about immortality and sort of this idea sort of something just respawning. I was thinking sort of of plastics and sort of pollution in the environment. How well we can use a million plastic bags and we just assume that it will just keep coming. And the idea that you know the collapse of the environment is sort of an inevitability. I think we're all pretty much aware that climate collapse is a huge problem that we have to confront at some point. But I also think that it's sort of an inevitability that global capital will at some point collapse. And I was wondering what your thoughts on were your thoughts on were sort of if it was a race between the two so to say between global capital collapsing and the environment collapsing and which one you think would win if it was a race between the two. And what you think we should focus on if you think there's one or the other together what your thoughts on that one. Very good question. I am afraid that the global capitalism will win by and it's already doing pretty successfully by appropriating the very ecological things. I read recently in a big media was it even Newsweek I don't know where a very good text which explodes critically against you know these fashionable new houses self-sustained with solar energy and it proves that the production building of such houses does so much hurts so much environment and so on that is the worst thing. I think the only intelligent thing is to follow Japan here. You know what Japan did? They concentrated all the population in percent of their land, the Osaka region, the Tokyo region and they keep percent out. Just some farmers can live there and so on but. And this is why a German ecologist told me this, it's a wonderful vision. The best solution for ecology that we can do now is 'ecology says why are you so crowded in cities?' That's our solution: pack as many people as you want in big cities where where pollution is they basically pollute each other I mean. And it's much better for nature to keep them majority out than to than to disperse them. So again my fear is that is that in this tricky ways capitalism will re-appropriate ecology struggle as simply a new field of investment. Because that's what capitalism always knows how to do it. You think this is a catastrophe? No it turns it just into another field of another field of investment. Because as you maybe also know, I've written about it, ecology is one of the big domains of this paradox of belief, this fetishist disavowal. Je sais bien, mais quand même. Yes we have all the data we know but we don't really
a Lacan para analizar de manera crítica nuestro presente, también con agudeza y de un modo provocador. Y también se ha visto a lo largo de su intervención algo que no se ha mencionado pero que es muy conocido y sigue siendo eficaz, que es su su gran sentido del humor. Tenemos algo de tiempo para unas preguntas si les parece bien. Si levantan la mano y me miran a mí o a la persona que tiene el micrófono, así él les puede... I hope this is my standard joke but I like it. I hope you and the director did it in a proper Stalinist way. No freedom to the questions, no good. I want it organized. You know an old communist told me this. He told me, I reproached him in the last years of communism like 'but you communists cannot tolerate free debates.' He told me, 'we love free debates, just free debates has to be especially well organized to avoid enemy provocations' you know. Let's do it please. Hey. So I was going to ask in English. That's fine. Perfect, thank you. Well what you were saying about immortality and sort of this idea sort of something just respawning. I was thinking sort of of plastics and sort of pollution in the environment. How well we can use a million plastic bags and we just assume that it will just keep coming. And the idea that you know the collapse of the environment is sort of an inevitability. I think we're all pretty much aware that climate collapse is a huge problem that we have to confront at some point. But I also think that it's sort of an inevitability that global capital will at some point collapse. And I was wondering what your thoughts on were your thoughts on were sort of if it was a race between the two so to say between global capital collapsing and the environment collapsing and which one you think would win if it was a race between the two. And what you think we should focus on if you think there's one or the other together what your thoughts on that one. Very good question. I am afraid that the global capitalism will win by and it's already doing pretty successfully by appropriating the very ecological things. I read recently in a big media was it even Newsweek I don't know where a very good text which explodes critically against you know these fashionable new houses self-sustained with solar energy and it proves that the production building of such houses does so much hurts so much environment and so on that is the worst thing. I think the only intelligent thing is to follow Japan here. You know what Japan did? They concentrated all the population in percent of their land, the Osaka region, the Tokyo region and they keep percent out. Just some farmers can live there and so on but. And this is why a German ecologist told me this, it's a wonderful vision. The best solution for ecology that we can do now is 'ecology says why are you so crowded in cities?' That's our solution: pack as many people as you want in big cities where where pollution is they basically pollute each other I mean. And it's much better for nature to keep them majority out than to than to disperse them. So again my fear is that is that in this tricky ways capitalism will re-appropriate ecology struggle as simply a new field of investment. Because that's what capitalism always knows how to do it. You think this is a catastrophe? No it turns it just into another field of another field of investment. Because as you maybe also know, I've written about it, ecology is one of the big domains of this paradox of belief, this fetishist disavowal. Je sais bien, mais quand même. Yes we have all the data we know but we don't really
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believe it. In our guts, in our daily life we don't really accept it. And I don't want to be a direct pessimist but this is horrible to say because it's not in my nature, in my the tendency of my thinking but maybe we would need some kind of a at least let's hope controllable catastrophe to awaken us a little bit. Because I think that as long as possible people will simply not react. It's the same as it's very interesting to read history of Europe the twenty years before World War I. Everybody knew a big European war is in
believe it. In our guts, in our daily life we don't really accept it. And I don't want to be a direct pessimist but this is horrible to say because it's not in my nature, in my the tendency of my thinking but maybe we would need some kind of a at least let's hope controllable catastrophe to awaken us a little bit. Because I think that as long as possible people will simply not react. It's the same as it's very interesting to read history of Europe the twenty years before World War I. Everybody knew a big European war is in
Slavoj Žižek
preparation. And everybody was talking about it but still when the war exploded was a mega shock. People knew it but didn't really believe in it. And I will not repeat my old lines here just that this paradox of belief, how you can believe something without really
preparation. And everybody was talking about it but still when the war exploded was a mega shock. People knew it but didn't really believe in it. And I will not repeat my old lines here just that this paradox of belief, how you can believe something without really
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believing in it and all that are absolutely crucial for how things function today. We have today beliefs which are operative even if people explicitly do not believe in them. Like a Jewish friend of mine and don't take this in any way in an anti-Semitic way I mean he was making fun of himself as my friend told me that and I like this about Israel. You know that Israel is or Jews in Israel are probably the most atheist nation in the world. According to some statistics around even more percent of Jews in Israel don't believe. But as that friend told me 'I don't believe there is we Jews here don't believe in God but we nonetheless believe that God gave us the land of Israel' you know and so on. You have all these paradoxes which are the stuff of ideology today. That's why when people accuse
believing in it and all that are absolutely crucial for how things function today. We have today beliefs which are operative even if people explicitly do not believe in them. Like a Jewish friend of mine and don't take this in any way in an anti-Semitic way I mean he was making fun of himself as my friend told me that and I like this about Israel. You know that Israel is or Jews in Israel are probably the most atheist nation in the world. According to some statistics around even more percent of Jews in Israel don't believe. But as that friend told me 'I don't believe there is we Jews here don't believe in God but we nonetheless believe that God gave us the land of Israel' you know and so on. You have all these paradoxes which are the stuff of ideology today. That's why when people accuse
Slavoj Žižek
Trump of being a hypocrite and so on that's not the point, that's how it functions today ideology. Sorry I don't have more time but I would love to go into it because it's again ecology is the big field of how capital can neutralize it. Or even for example maybe even mentioned it a year ago here, I was shocked two years ago I read I don't know in which magazine a report report on Greenland and the title was 'The Greening of Greenland'. It's wonderful it's so hot they can now first time in hundreds of years grow vegetables there and now with the melting of the North Pole soon transport will be much cheaper, ships will bring all the bullshit mass-produced directly from China to United States. You see it's a mega catastrophe but you know they treat it like this. No never underestimate the capacity of people not to take seriously, not to believe what they know in some sense that it's true. Do you think that my answer was so serious that now you don't dare to ask another frivolous question? No frivolity is the only is one of the important things. What is absolutely fake is to take things seriously. Sorry I'm improvising a little bit in a wrong way. I recently I trigger warning as they say in politically correct times. Another vulgarity from me but it's so important to get this lesson. You remember if you are old enough years ago a little bit more the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia. I met recently now a linguist who is now has a scholarship in Stanford, Damir Arsenijević, who is collecting jokes from Srebrenica. They are incredibly vulgar but they told me it's not disrespect. It's that people are so still traumatized there that the only way to survive is to make fun of it. Which again is not disrespect but it's kind of a desperate admission it's still too traumatic to look it into the eye in a serious way. And the jokes are undescribable vulgar that's why I cannot resist the temptation to tell you one. It's about a Bosnian couple their legendary staff of jokes Mujo and Fata. Mujo husband Fata his wife. And they discover a grave in Srebrenica many disfigured men's bodies. Because the the parts which are not disfigured are only penises. So they collect just the penises and since they suspect that Mujo was also killed they call Fata his wife to see if she recognizes Mujo's penis. Vulgarity I know but that's how real people deal with traumas. And then she takes one penis 'no this is not Mujo, no this is not Mujo' then with another penis 'this one is not even from Srebrenica' you know. That's how my God this is how you deal with real traumas. The moment you say yes we suffer terribly in unbearable way I don't believe it because when you you know it's like with small children when I had a son I discovered this when he was small. If the child has a traumatic experience or falls down is hurt, the moment the child starts to cry it means it's over. It's okay. Real trauma is if you can just this cannot even you know crying is already a relief. In the same sense this dignified mourning means the worst is over. I even now answered a question which I wasn't asked so it's a blessing. Please. Hi. So I had a question related to Yanis Varoufakis. Ah yeah. Yeah I suppose in two parts, like first of all a lot of what he says regarding Europe of course regarding Brussels is somewhat unbelievable and should we believe him percent on his accounts? You mean what he reports at the factual level in his book. Yes. Yeah and secondly I wondered if you could perhaps talk a bit about his movement, well the movement, DiEM25, whether or not you think it's realistic and where. It's DiEM24 sorry to interrupt you immediately give you back. Is it Or is it I think it's I hope I'm wrong because it would have been. You're a member you know you should you know. Oh okay okay sorry. Okay yeah. No yeah nothing else. You know first the reason I respect Varoufakis is that with regard to Syriza I don't know I say this about him as my very good friend I told him this face to face. I don't know how realistic was his proposal when he was finance minister but I think he was onto something real. One small item is did you notice that after the crisis was over and Syriza became the biggest executor of austerity, he Varoufakis was the only one put to court. Okay the case was dismissed but why? Because you remember he has some solution with some kind of digital ersatz currency or what and they he told me it was horrible. He wanted to take control to get some bank data about Greek financial structures and they prevented him as finance minister to do it.
Trump of being a hypocrite and so on that's not the point, that's how it functions today ideology. Sorry I don't have more time but I would love to go into it because it's again ecology is the big field of how capital can neutralize it. Or even for example maybe even mentioned it a year ago here, I was shocked two years ago I read I don't know in which magazine a report report on Greenland and the title was 'The Greening of Greenland'. It's wonderful it's so hot they can now first time in hundreds of years grow vegetables there and now with the melting of the North Pole soon transport will be much cheaper, ships will bring all the bullshit mass-produced directly from China to United States. You see it's a mega catastrophe but you know they treat it like this. No never underestimate the capacity of people not to take seriously, not to believe what they know in some sense that it's true. Do you think that my answer was so serious that now you don't dare to ask another frivolous question? No frivolity is the only is one of the important things. What is absolutely fake is to take things seriously. Sorry I'm improvising a little bit in a wrong way. I recently I trigger warning as they say in politically correct times. Another vulgarity from me but it's so important to get this lesson. You remember if you are old enough years ago a little bit more the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia. I met recently now a linguist who is now has a scholarship in Stanford, Damir Arsenijević, who is collecting jokes from Srebrenica. They are incredibly vulgar but they told me it's not disrespect. It's that people are so still traumatized there that the only way to survive is to make fun of it. Which again is not disrespect but it's kind of a desperate admission it's still too traumatic to look it into the eye in a serious way. And the jokes are undescribable vulgar that's why I cannot resist the temptation to tell you one. It's about a Bosnian couple their legendary staff of jokes Mujo and Fata. Mujo husband Fata his wife. And they discover a grave in Srebrenica many disfigured men's bodies. Because the the parts which are not disfigured are only penises. So they collect just the penises and since they suspect that Mujo was also killed they call Fata his wife to see if she recognizes Mujo's penis. Vulgarity I know but that's how real people deal with traumas. And then she takes one penis 'no this is not Mujo, no this is not Mujo' then with another penis 'this one is not even from Srebrenica' you know. That's how my God this is how you deal with real traumas. The moment you say yes we suffer terribly in unbearable way I don't believe it because when you you know it's like with small children when I had a son I discovered this when he was small. If the child has a traumatic experience or falls down is hurt, the moment the child starts to cry it means it's over. It's okay. Real trauma is if you can just this cannot even you know crying is already a relief. In the same sense this dignified mourning means the worst is over. I even now answered a question which I wasn't asked so it's a blessing. Please. Hi. So I had a question related to Yanis Varoufakis. Ah yeah. Yeah I suppose in two parts, like first of all a lot of what he says regarding Europe of course regarding Brussels is somewhat unbelievable and should we believe him percent on his accounts? You mean what he reports at the factual level in his book. Yes. Yeah and secondly I wondered if you could perhaps talk a bit about his movement, well the movement, DiEM25, whether or not you think it's realistic and where. It's DiEM24 sorry to interrupt you immediately give you back. Is it Or is it I think it's I hope I'm wrong because it would have been. You're a member you know you should you know. Oh okay okay sorry. Okay yeah. No yeah nothing else. You know first the reason I respect Varoufakis is that with regard to Syriza I don't know I say this about him as my very good friend I told him this face to face. I don't know how realistic was his proposal when he was finance minister but I think he was onto something real. One small item is did you notice that after the crisis was over and Syriza became the biggest executor of austerity, he Varoufakis was the only one put to court. Okay the case was dismissed but why? Because you remember he has some solution with some kind of digital ersatz currency or what and they he told me it was horrible. He wanted to take control to get some bank data about Greek financial structures and they prevented him as finance minister to do it.
unknown
Why was he such a thorn? Because he knew I think in this he was right that of course we should say no to Brussels pressure but at the same time now here we may respectfully
Why was he such a thorn? Because he knew I think in this he was right that of course we should say no to Brussels pressure but at the same time now here we may respectfully
Slavoj Žižek
disagree. I don't believe in
disagree. I don't believe in
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Grexit. I think it would have been a catastrophe. And this part of Varoufakis when he reports on how he visited
Grexit. I think it would have been a catastrophe. And this part of Varoufakis when he reports on how he visited
Slavoj Žižek
Schäuble and threatened him with 'if you don't give a give us a compromise here I will do the
Schäuble and threatened him with 'if you don't give a give us a compromise here I will do the
unknown
Grexit.'
Grexit.'
Slavoj Žižek
You know what was Schäuble's answer? 'Fine, how much we can give you billion to do it' and so on. Because how do I know it because I spoke with some other participants. Slovene finance minister at that time who all confirmed this to me. Brussels was not aware of Grexit, secretly they looked for it. Why? Because they wanted this 'okay let the idiot do it there will be hunger, chaos and the left will learn another lesson.' You know like intelligent conservatives like a more radical left to be in power every years and then there is economic catastrophe whatever okay people learn the lesson and so on. So what Varoufakis tried to do again I don't know how realistic it was to find a third way: to remain in Europe but do the mess inside Europe with all his banking plans and so on. I think that the other two either austerity or Grexit would have been a catastrophe. My problem with him in a very friendly way is this will sound horrible what I will say now, he still underestimates the power of ideology. He thinks that if only the people would truly be asked or mobilized to say what they want, we would get a much more democratic, open, better Europe. And I ask him a simple question already at that round table that we had two three years ago with Assange in Assange only on telepresence of course in London. I ask him, but are you aware that if we were to ask by referendums people in some countries, key countries, what to do with immigrants, their stance would have been much harsher against immigrants than the official Brussels. For example and this is tragically true, a Slovene moderate left member of Brussels parliament told me that there in Brussels when they were debating immigrants against all he in closed meetings he always defended greater rights, financial help for immigrants but he was afraid to say this publicly because it would trigger hatred against him in Slovenia among ordinary people and so on. So I think and you know what was interesting Varoufakis's answer to me? It was 'yes because people are manipulated we would have won if only there would have been two weeks of truly free debate.' That's pure utopia. What would you have done, confiscate private media and do some public TV and don't underestimate but also don't overestimate ordinary people. I don't believe that there is some common wisdom and so on in ordinary people. We are all in the same shit confused. Nobody knows it. We intellectuals know very little but don't don't think that ordinary people we just have to listen to ordinary people and so on. You listen to ordinary people, of course it's also manipulation but then you have Orbán, you have now the new Austrian chancellor and so on and so on. So I don't share unfortunately his Varoufakis's trust in this let's call it true democracy. In the sense of let's just listen to real concerns of ordinary people. For quite many ordinary people for example in England, some leftists told me this, radical leftists but of course only in private, they told me 'I don't want to go public with this' that for example in some London suburbs ordinary white poor families are concerned, small conflicts with immigrants and so on and so on. Not refugees, they are better but either Muslims or even my ex-nations Serbs, Croats, their immigrants can be pretty tough and so on. What I'm just saying is that ideology is our daily life and ordinary people are in ideology, they live ideology. So don't underestimate this and especially don't mask it. The greatest mistake of the left-liberal press is when there are some problems now they are again with some Pakistani gangs raping white girls and Pakistanis are very wise that they always focus on white girls from poor workers' suburbs. They know who you mess with upper middle class no. But what I want to say is that the mistake is that they try to downplay this 'we will not report about it in the media, it would you know' and then then you have the catastrophe that we have. If it will go on like this you Spain are okay you have your how do you pronounce your Rajoy or what the okay but you can even get something much worse. Look now we have in Austria Kurz and this is for us a wonderful joke in Slovenia. Kurz in Austrian you know their prime minister now.
You know what was Schäuble's answer? 'Fine, how much we can give you billion to do it' and so on. Because how do I know it because I spoke with some other participants. Slovene finance minister at that time who all confirmed this to me. Brussels was not aware of Grexit, secretly they looked for it. Why? Because they wanted this 'okay let the idiot do it there will be hunger, chaos and the left will learn another lesson.' You know like intelligent conservatives like a more radical left to be in power every years and then there is economic catastrophe whatever okay people learn the lesson and so on. So what Varoufakis tried to do again I don't know how realistic it was to find a third way: to remain in Europe but do the mess inside Europe with all his banking plans and so on. I think that the other two either austerity or Grexit would have been a catastrophe. My problem with him in a very friendly way is this will sound horrible what I will say now, he still underestimates the power of ideology. He thinks that if only the people would truly be asked or mobilized to say what they want, we would get a much more democratic, open, better Europe. And I ask him a simple question already at that round table that we had two three years ago with Assange in Assange only on telepresence of course in London. I ask him, but are you aware that if we were to ask by referendums people in some countries, key countries, what to do with immigrants, their stance would have been much harsher against immigrants than the official Brussels. For example and this is tragically true, a Slovene moderate left member of Brussels parliament told me that there in Brussels when they were debating immigrants against all he in closed meetings he always defended greater rights, financial help for immigrants but he was afraid to say this publicly because it would trigger hatred against him in Slovenia among ordinary people and so on. So I think and you know what was interesting Varoufakis's answer to me? It was 'yes because people are manipulated we would have won if only there would have been two weeks of truly free debate.' That's pure utopia. What would you have done, confiscate private media and do some public TV and don't underestimate but also don't overestimate ordinary people. I don't believe that there is some common wisdom and so on in ordinary people. We are all in the same shit confused. Nobody knows it. We intellectuals know very little but don't don't think that ordinary people we just have to listen to ordinary people and so on. You listen to ordinary people, of course it's also manipulation but then you have Orbán, you have now the new Austrian chancellor and so on and so on. So I don't share unfortunately his Varoufakis's trust in this let's call it true democracy. In the sense of let's just listen to real concerns of ordinary people. For quite many ordinary people for example in England, some leftists told me this, radical leftists but of course only in private, they told me 'I don't want to go public with this' that for example in some London suburbs ordinary white poor families are concerned, small conflicts with immigrants and so on and so on. Not refugees, they are better but either Muslims or even my ex-nations Serbs, Croats, their immigrants can be pretty tough and so on. What I'm just saying is that ideology is our daily life and ordinary people are in ideology, they live ideology. So don't underestimate this and especially don't mask it. The greatest mistake of the left-liberal press is when there are some problems now they are again with some Pakistani gangs raping white girls and Pakistanis are very wise that they always focus on white girls from poor workers' suburbs. They know who you mess with upper middle class no. But what I want to say is that the mistake is that they try to downplay this 'we will not report about it in the media, it would you know' and then then you have the catastrophe that we have. If it will go on like this you Spain are okay you have your how do you pronounce your Rajoy or what the okay but you can even get something much worse. Look now we have in Austria Kurz and this is for us a wonderful joke in Slovenia. Kurz in Austrian you know their prime minister now.
unknown
In Slovene 'Kurc' is an
In Slovene 'Kurc' is an
Slavoj Žižek
extremely vulgar word for penis, like in it's much more than picha or ponga or what yeah and so you know our our our newspapers played wonderfully with this like 'Kurz will lead us into bright future' and so on. No but what I want to say is that that's why movement like Podemos or in America in United States Bernie Sanders, their miracle is that they did succeed to mobilizing people who otherwise would have voted like everybody knows that many of Bernie Sanders' voters would have otherwise voted for Trump. And it is because Sanders was so brutally was so brutally out-maneuvered by Hillary that no they didn't return to Trump they just they just stayed out. And one can argue some statistics do show this that it's precisely in this way that the way she brutally disposed of Sanders that Hillary won, this
extremely vulgar word for penis, like in it's much more than picha or ponga or what yeah and so you know our our our newspapers played wonderfully with this like 'Kurz will lead us into bright future' and so on. No but what I want to say is that that's why movement like Podemos or in America in United States Bernie Sanders, their miracle is that they did succeed to mobilizing people who otherwise would have voted like everybody knows that many of Bernie Sanders' voters would have otherwise voted for Trump. And it is because Sanders was so brutally was so brutally out-maneuvered by Hillary that no they didn't return to Trump they just they just stayed out. And one can argue some statistics do show this that it's precisely in this way that the way she brutally disposed of Sanders that Hillary won, this
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was
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Slavoj Žižek
a revenge. So I'm
a revenge. So I'm
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sorry I got lost a little bit but your point. That's my about economy I don't know enough to judge to what extent his proposals are serious but I basically do take them seriously. I think he is not totally bluffing as economist. And especially
sorry I got lost a little bit but your point. That's my about economy I don't know enough to judge to what extent his proposals are serious but I basically do take them seriously. I think he is not totally bluffing as economist. And especially
Slavoj Žižek
something that Varoufakis learned me, I think that the official economists are bluffing much more how should I put it. You how it's Varoufakis always repeats this, economy today is a new form of magic thinking you know, they really know so little. Look at the financial crisis of it came out of nowhere. Where where where were all those big economists and so on and so on. Economy is today I developed this in my book I forgot which one too many that how economy is a new form of animism today you know we like our how do our newspapers report on it? 'The market displayed anxiety,' you know my God we have now new animistic forces in which we believe much more than in Christian God you know. Ya lo tenemos que dejar aquí, muchísimas gracias a todos por venir. Sí quería pedir un aplauso para para Slavoj por su generosidad. Thank you very much, thank you very much. I am really glad to be here for very racist reasons for you. When first as a child I heard about Spain I thought, now this will be a very strange remark from you, I thought 'oh a Latin country, dirty and so on.' And then at least in Madrid and Barcelona I was surprised how you really seem to join the best of both worlds. The least the Latin liveliness but at the same time cities are efficient, clear, much more efficient and clean than some middle and northern European cities I can tell you. And you know we all we want to cheat, we want to have a cake and eat it, we want a city which is lively and so on but at the same time clean, efficient. And you are not doing so bad here. Thank you.
something that Varoufakis learned me, I think that the official economists are bluffing much more how should I put it. You how it's Varoufakis always repeats this, economy today is a new form of magic thinking you know, they really know so little. Look at the financial crisis of it came out of nowhere. Where where where were all those big economists and so on and so on. Economy is today I developed this in my book I forgot which one too many that how economy is a new form of animism today you know we like our how do our newspapers report on it? 'The market displayed anxiety,' you know my God we have now new animistic forces in which we believe much more than in Christian God you know. Ya lo tenemos que dejar aquí, muchísimas gracias a todos por venir. Sí quería pedir un aplauso para para Slavoj por su generosidad. Thank you very much, thank you very much. I am really glad to be here for very racist reasons for you. When first as a child I heard about Spain I thought, now this will be a very strange remark from you, I thought 'oh a Latin country, dirty and so on.' And then at least in Madrid and Barcelona I was surprised how you really seem to join the best of both worlds. The least the Latin liveliness but at the same time cities are efficient, clear, much more efficient and clean than some middle and northern European cities I can tell you. And you know we all we want to cheat, we want to have a cake and eat it, we want a city which is lively and so on but at the same time clean, efficient. And you are not doing so bad here. Thank you.